“typical of Seuss’ late-period”

August 9, 2014 4:19 PM

Check out the New York Public Library’s hilarious archive of librarians’ harsh children’s book reviews

Kittens: Not Recommended
An adventurous, suspenseful, moving, amusing, educational, and different tale of a boy and the US Army's Camel Corps
Angry book: not recommended
None of the excitement of logging
Who found America? Not Recommended.
A Laura Ingalls Wilder takedown
Madeline l'Engle: not as juvenile as it first appears
Judy Blume is not for teens.
And a handwritten card from 1907


more at #ReviewsOnTues, which culls from the NYPL Instagram

posted by the man of twists and turns (11 comments total)

They're not all negative, but they're definitely entertaining.

Also... MetaFilter: There's some decent information... but the style is poor, occasionally even ungrammatical, and the tone is painfully strained and patronizing.
posted by KGMoney at 5:16 PM on August 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

The Angry Book link is the same as the one above it.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 5:28 PM on August 9, 2014

MetaFilter: "One may not wholly believe the beings they meet along the way, but the [site] holds your interest and the characters are quite charming."
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:32 PM on August 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

KGMoney: "MetaFilter: There's some decent information... but the style is poor, occasionally even ungrammatical, and the tone is painfully strained and patronizing."

Bless your heart. That not true.
posted by brundlefly at 6:40 PM on August 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

These are fantastic, and full of danger adventure.
posted by Mchelly at 6:55 PM on August 9, 2014

I wish I was able to read and review half the books I buy for my library. When I get a shiny new pile of books in I get all excited but then I realize I only work part time and there's no time to read them before I put them out for the kids. Novels, that is. I can flip through picture books quickly.
Anyway, these are cool.
posted by Biblio at 7:26 PM on August 9, 2014

They're still using typewriters???
posted by jim in austin at 8:08 PM on August 9, 2014

Au contraire, cranky librarians of times past: kittens ARE recommended.
posted by Lardmitten at 11:20 PM on August 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

They're still using typewriters???

Typewriters are cool, and sometimes are more suited to the writing ethic, need and mood at hand. Still own two, and already this morning have used paper and pen, a MacBook Pro, and a typewriter.
posted by Wordshore at 3:42 AM on August 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Not to mention these are from the 70s. Typewriters were very much in use in most workplaces up through the end of the 80s, and even in the early 90s I had occasion to use the typewriter at the bank where I worked for certain things (cashiers checks, duplicate forms that were not yet computerized).
posted by spacewaitress at 8:06 AM on August 10, 2014

They're still using typewriters???

Yeah, we don't use typewriters anymore.
But we, like many libraries, do have a mind-numbingly large amount of amazing data that exists only on typewritten cards like these -- these reviews are just one example.

One of the long-term, back-burner projects my group is working on is figuring out a way to digitize and OCR this stuff in any kind of useful way.

Anybody with any experience on that front, let me know, because boy oh boy, could we do some cool things if we had all that information handy.
posted by Hadroed at 2:23 PM on August 10, 2014