After my first class of the spring semester, I went to the bookstore to get my book.
It’s amazing how much junk they sell in university bookstores nowadays. It takes fifteen minutes to slog through the aisles of flannel pajamas, dummies books, snow globes, stuffed animals, and every other piece of junk with the college logo on it to get to the book section.
They didn’t have the math book I needed.
“We don’t order that many here,” the manager said. “Because we can’t take the risk when students can get the books somewhere else.”
“Don’t you have any used copies?”
“No! We’d lose money if we did that.”
I had homework, so I thought I’d try the library just to copy the first few pages. On the way out, I saw this:
Of course, I didn’t see the ‘ent’ at the end of the poster at first.
At the library, the librarian helpfully searched for the book. “I doubt we have it,” she said. “We never carry copies of books used in classes.”
I asked her why not.
“Because if we did, ” and swept her hand in a grand gesture, “this would all be dead. We’d have a library of dead books.”
Jack Silbert, curator