July 16th, 2014 Brian Herzog
A few years ago, I posted about a neat inscription in one of our Jack Kerouac books. Well, this past weekend, we found another interesting inscription.
One of my coworkers was doing the weeding list, pulling and deleting books that hadn't circulated in the last three years. One of the books on the list was The Bouviers : from Waterloo to the Kennedys and beyond, by John H. Davis.
Since we're in Massachusetts, I'm always a little reluctant to get rid of Kennedy-related items, but this one just didn't seem like it would be in demand anymore.
That is, until my coworker opened the cover and found this inscription:
Such a personal note from "Jacki Kennedy" - this copy must be priceless! It seems especially rare, too, since she took this single opportunity to sign her name differently than her normal signature.
Of course, we certainly don't encourage anyone to vandalize library materials - even First Ladies.
Tags: autograph, book, Books, inscription, jackie kennedy, Jacqueline, kennedy, libraries, Library, public, Random, signature
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May 16th, 2009 Brian Herzog
My goal for these weekly reference questions is to show something useful or interesting. This week's just show how exasperating reference can be.
A patron comes to the desk as says,
I have a painting that I think is by Max Bill. These suckers go for $300,000, so I want to compare the signature on it to his signature on the internet so I can unload it.
Okay, that seems reasonable. And after about ten minutes of searching, we had found some signed artwork [pdf]. But none of the signatures match the one on the patron's painting, and we couldn't find any record of the title of the patron's painting.
At this point I would have concluded it must not be an authentic painting, or that he'd need to contact a professional to make the determination. But the patron insisted on continuing, as he really, really wanted to find a matching signature.
After another 20 minutes with no results, I told him I had to help other patrons (a woman had just walked up behind him - no one else had come to the desk during this half hour). We looked up the number of a couple art appraisers, and I took his name and number in case I was able to find anything else.
He walks away, and the woman steps up and says,
I want to know the genealogy of Abraham Lincoln.
Huh. Well, this seemed to rule out biographies, and nothing else in our catalog looked applicable, so I tried the internet.
Pretty quickly we found Lincon's ancestry on Genealogy.com, which traces Lincoln's ancestors back thirteen generations. We looked at a couple generations, then the patron says,
No, no, I want it to go the other way. I want to prove that I'm related to him, because my grandmother says we are, and she's never wrong.
Oh, well, that's something entirely different. I search for lincoln descendants, and found a few websites that said there are no living descendants of Lincoln.
This of course doesn't rule out that she is related to him in some way, but probably not a blood-line direct descendant. She had that look in her eye like she was going to ask me to prepare her entire family genealogy for her to connect her family to Lincoln's, but other patrons were waiting so I had to cut it short. She checked out a couple of his biographies, and was going to go talk to her grandmother.
Sigh. I never like giving people bad news, but trying to answer a question by continually searching for information that might not exist is tough. Still, I enjoyed looking at the Max Bill art, and that was good Lincoln trivia I hadn't known.
Tags: abraham lincoln, autograph, descendants, family, genealogy, libraries, Library, lincoln, max bill, public, Reference Question, signature
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