The Most Bizarre Thing I have ever Read: The Library

Bizarre Books From My Uni Days

By Fay Funk

QuailBellMagazine.com

In college I had a work-study job in the ILL department of the library. I worked in a small, quiet office surrounded by stacks and stacks of books. My job wasn’t to read any of them, just check them in, pack them up, and ship them out. But of course I read a few of them. And I read some weird stuff.

On multiple occasions I opened a book and was greeted by an erect penis. Some were science books, but most were just hardcore porn. The covers on these books were always blank, just plain black boards with no text about what was inside.  

The one I remember best was a book of 1950s style comic strips with graphic images of orgies and sodomy. The paperwork I needed was buried in a full page spread of a classic 1950s housewife on her knees between a two sailors. Most of the books that went through our department were for research, and I assume this book was for someone’s dissertation. I was curious about what they were researching, what so many people were researching that required such numerous and varied images of penises, but there was no way to find out. So I scanned the book and sent it on its way.

Sometimes I would come across books loaned out to one of my professors. None of them were looking at penises, but I still felt  dirty looking at their research materials. It felt like I was invading their minds, and none of them would ever know. I knew what about a reading my history teacher was going to assign a week before it happened. My Spanish teacher checked out books all the time. They were all in Spanish, which despite his best efforts I still couldn’t understand, so I felt a little less bad about flipping through them, though I lived in fear that someday he would come into the office and catch me furiously trying to decipher his Colombian history book.

The most absorbing thing I ever read was a dissertation on child abuse within Orthodox Judaism. I read the whole thing, checking over my shoulder to make sure my supervisor didn’t catch me. The PhD candidate interviewed about fifteen former Orthodox Jewish people. She detailed the ways in which the abuse was expertly kept secret, and the emotional and spiritual effect it had on those who finally left the community. It was a fascinating read, and I had a hard time adding it to the massive stack of books I needed to shelve.

There was so much weird and interesting stuff going through the library, and I could only read bits and pieces before sending the books on to the patron. One such book was A Confederacy of Dunces. I cracked up at just the title, so I had to read the foreword, about the bizarre publishing history of this ridiculous-sounding book. I wanted more, but it was the end of the day and the A Confederacy of Dunces is 500 pages long, so I had to wait. When summer break began, I checked out the book myself. Buried amidst the erect dicks and private PhD thoughts, I found a treasure. A book so wild and silly, it got me reading again.
#Library #Books #ReadingHabits #StrangeReads #Sodomy #ChildAbuse #Dicks #Cocks #OrthodoxJews

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