Paperdolls

One morning--very early--walking through the stacks, I came across these abandoned little fellows. They struck me as kind of sad, given that they were just left lying there on the floor, on opposite sides of an aisle.

I often have some sort of guess as to the origins of the strange items I find in my work's way, but these guys kind of baffle me. Who cuts out little foamboard people and just leaves them in the aisle of the library? They aren't the strangest of the golems--as I've come to call the various humanoid constructs--I've discovered.

My best guess is that they were either a) part of a student project of some sort, discarded because they weren't quite up to par or, perhaps more likely, b) created out of boredom by students who were supposed to be doing something else entirely with their foamboard. Whatever the case, this was a fun way to start my morning.

There's a clacks in the tubes

One of the many perks of having outdated, clunky software with which to run your entire library is enduring the occasional techno temper tantrum. Just the other morning, I walked into work to find Horizon on the fritz, which wasn't entirely unusual. What did catch my eye was the particular error message generated when we foolishly attempted to scan a book:

Fatal Horizon (Internal) Error
LbSync.Destroy: invalid semaphore handle

After noting the oddity of the Horizon's wrathful message that it wanted to "destroy" something--not to mention wondering what on earth semaphore has to do with it all--we tried the usual method of rebooting our machine into submission. Of course, this didn't work (initially), and we were left to puzzle over what the little guys waving the flags in there were thinking. Whatever bad mood had originally possessed our check-in station seemed to dissipate by the afternoon. And they say machines will never be able to replicate the range of human emotion...

400 babies

Okay, the title of this post exaggerates a bit. I did not find 4,000 babies anywhere in the book stacks, much less in a book. My department did, however, find about 14 babies--babies that were cast in plaster and frequently deformed, like demonic, little Kewpie dolls.

They weren't all so incomplete as the example above. Some of them had all four limbs. Some of them had no limbs. And one of them was just a decapitated head--we never recovered the body.

They started appearing during the Spring Quarter of 2009, scattered throughout the book stacks on seemingly random shelves. We found them all in about a week. One of them almost killed one of our staff with a deadly blow to the head when it toppled from a row of compact shelving (shelving that moves).

I ran into a friend of a friend who claimed to have a roommate who knew why the plaster babies existed, which was ostensibly that they were part of an art project. Now, I've seen some pretty conceptual art (and appreciated a fraction of it), but I can't fathom what our artist(s) might be attempting to convey with these creeptastic creations. Unless their intent was just to give me the creeps. In which case:  job somewhat done. I'm mostly just confused.

After that one crazy week at the end of the school year, we appeared to have outlasted the plaster onslaught. Until the spring of this year. The same week. The same pint-sized horrors, and in roughly the same quantity. And I now have no clues as to who the perpetrators are or why. I'm somewhat anxious to see if the same deformed figurines will make an appearance for a third year running. We'll probably run out of storage space for them eventually.