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Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Mar. 16th, 2008 | 01:13 pm
Yesterday I went in to work because there was a rental using equipment that required supervision. It was a long event that took up most of the day, but I wasn’t on the clock the whole time – just a couple of hours, one at the beginning as I set up for them, and the other at the end when I break everything down. On weekends, with most of the tenants out and the Financial District practically empty, it’s very quiet and relaxing. I catch up on a little office work, use the Xerox machine, nod at the Chess players as they wander down the halls. Once it’s obvious that everything’s going all right for the renter, I usually either run some errands downtown or go down into the library to read and relax.
When you work in a library, you become familiar with the spines of certain books. They are landmarks, little bars of color, little rows of words that flash past -- “Travels in the Northern Tundra,” brown and long, “The Journal of Eugene Delacroix,” dark blue, frayed, and thick, “The Parades Gone By” shiny and pale… Every now and then, I stop and open one of them. Yesterday while in the library I picked out an appealingly fat book in an orange library binding I’d noticed on my to-ing and fro-ing while setting out flyers. Its title is "Characters of the Inquisition" by William Thomas Walsh, copyright 1940. The earliest return date I can find on the little slip in the back is 1976, but I can faintly make out “1941” stamped where some past librarian was in a hurry and missed the “Date Due” card (you can find these in just about every old book in the collection. The earliest one I ever encountered is, “1927” in a very old edition of "The Diary of Samuel Pepys.")
Mr. Walsh, a prominent Catholic historian, made it his business to straighten the world out about all the awful things people were saying about the Inquisition, which really, his book maintains, is just dreadfully misunderstood.
( Read more )
When you work in a library, you become familiar with the spines of certain books. They are landmarks, little bars of color, little rows of words that flash past -- “Travels in the Northern Tundra,” brown and long, “The Journal of Eugene Delacroix,” dark blue, frayed, and thick, “The Parades Gone By” shiny and pale… Every now and then, I stop and open one of them. Yesterday while in the library I picked out an appealingly fat book in an orange library binding I’d noticed on my to-ing and fro-ing while setting out flyers. Its title is "Characters of the Inquisition" by William Thomas Walsh, copyright 1940. The earliest return date I can find on the little slip in the back is 1976, but I can faintly make out “1941” stamped where some past librarian was in a hurry and missed the “Date Due” card (you can find these in just about every old book in the collection. The earliest one I ever encountered is, “1927” in a very old edition of "The Diary of Samuel Pepys.")
Mr. Walsh, a prominent Catholic historian, made it his business to straighten the world out about all the awful things people were saying about the Inquisition, which really, his book maintains, is just dreadfully misunderstood.
( Read more )