Small-town Michigan librarian "Ann Miketa" wrote a book about the batshit-crazy patrons she encountered at her job all day, called Library Diaries, and was promptly fired, reports the Chicago Tribune. But think for a minute how weird library patrons really are: these people obviously have nothing to do and nowhere to go. And everyone knows that they use the library's computers for porn—that's been a well-documented problem for years. First sign that this book is probably awesome: Miketa refers to her rural town as "Denialville."Sounds familiar! Maybe we went to highschool together. From the introduction:

There's a huge exhibit at the New York Public Library right now called "The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue," dedicated to the greatest examples of advertising ever. Funny that the public library is one of the few public spaces left that hasn't sold all its wall space to advertisers (we think-haven't been in a library since they invented the internet), but ads got in there through the back door anyhow! The educational back door. But we're going to save you the trip; after the jump, five classic ads from the exhibit that sum up everything the ad industry has ever taught us:

As someone who spends about 30 hours a week in the Brooklyn Public Library, I can say this: post-puberty, libraries are a weird scene. At the BK PL, I'm surrounded by the semi-homeless, the pseudo-studious and the fully religious. But over in England, it's a different situation. The British culture minister Margaret Hodge wants to make libraries hip places by putting in coffee bars and renting space at malls. Stuffy Brits who don't want to defile the respectability of their precious book temples just can't understand why public libraries are less popular than they were at their peak 1980. Um, it's called the internet, and it's destroying publishing. [Times of London]

Queens libraries have spent years lending "books" to risky borrowers at adjustable rates (from "free" to 25 cents a day!), and now that's coming back to haunt them. With literally millions of dollars lent out without hope of recovery, they are turning now to collections agencies to force their unreliable credit risks to pay up or risk becoming even riskier credit risks. Which means that the Judy Blume book you checked out from the young adult section in 1994 because it had dirty words in it and then lost will prevent you from ever buying a home.

[Late Library Books Can Take Toll on Credit Scores]