Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers by The New York Public Library

Librarians answer questions - that's probably Job Two, right after "manage the flow of books." And the bigger the library, the more questions.

New York City has a particularly large and famous library system, which has answered a lot of questions over the past century or two. And, in 2019, they decided to get a book out of it.

But Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers isn't any of the obvious "answers to questions" books you might be thinking of now. It's not a compendium of the most common questions they got, over any period of time. It's not made up of the most difficult or interesting or relevant or any kind of metric that one could devise.

No, instead this book answers questions "selected from a cache of those written on file cards between the 1940s and the late 1980s, as far as we can tell from the dates on each card." (p. v) Even quirkier - and the preface does its best to obscure this fact - but it's clear that these questions were not answered at the time, or, at least, that the original answers are now lost.

So this book collects new, 2018-vintage, answers to some random questions originally asked between 1944 and 1983, giving reference information suitable to an asker in 2018. Which is weird, because it's not what the original asker would have wanted, since (I presume) none of them were time-travelers.

I mean, it does make the book more useful to modern readers, since a 1944-vintage answer to a 1944 question might have sent the querent to a reference source that's hugely outdated or just nonexistent today. But it does make the reader wonder if these questions were ever answered, or just carefully noted down in a box for future librarians to discover and marvel at.

The questions are generally odd and random, from "Can you give me the name of a book that dramatized bedbugs?" to "Do you have any books on 'Human Beings'?" The staff of the Ask NYPL then give short answers, occasionally giving the real facts but more often doing the librarian thing of listing several useful references or giving a Dewey number for us to look things up ourselves.

There is also a cover an occasional illustrations, of a whimsical nature, by Barry Blitt.

And the whole thing is pretty short, since it's designed as a POS book for impulse buying, to be read in quick moments in between doing other things.

They are peculiar questions. They are fairly practical answers. I can't fault the title or scope at all: it does what it says it will do. It's a smaller and less historic book than I expected, but that's mostly on me: this is just fine for what it is, and it says clearly what it is.