Romance in the Stacks

Friday Fiction 47 comments

Jinny Williams Library Assistant

 

Jinny Williams Library Assistant
Temkin and Hovell
1967

Can our young modern girl find love in her local library?  Our girl Jinny moves through the stacks looking for love in all the wrong places. Maybe it will be the cute guy downloading inappropriate material from the Internet. Maybe it will be that ultra sexy new librarian who keeps “checking her out.” Maybe she will get a couple of cats and head off to library school and get her MLS.  Grab this page turner and find out!

Mary

47 comments

  8. I wonder if she is friends with, “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse”. They could double date.

  9. The most amazing thing about this book is that it took two people to write it. I bet it’s like “Donna Parker On Her Own,” where Donna is so excited to eat something for lunch on Saturday besides soup and a sandwich.

    One of the few copies was near enough that I was able to request it through our consortium loan service, so I should have it in 5 business days! I can’t wait!

  10. Only one copy in all my System, and I just placed an ILL on it. Let’s see if there is a big ILL run on it now!

    1. There should be a Library Assassin book! Jinny Williams’s mission, should she choose to accept it, is to take out an underworld kingpin who happens to come in to the library every week …

  12. I just realized that one unintended (?) side effect of ALB is that as we all rush out to ILL spectacularly… interesting… titles, their circ stats spike.

    And the weeding librarian thinks: well, I suppose people still **want** the thing…

  14. Makes me wonder where the Library Technician would fit? Am I a wide-eyed and eager Library Assistant or a hot n’sexy Librarian?

  16. “Career-romance of a girl who begins as a page in a small public library and decides to become a full-time library assistant.”

    Searched MeLcat…one copy in all of MI and it’s already on hold!

  18. “Makes me wonder where the Library Technician would fit”…..Must…….avoid…..double……entendre……..gasp.

  19. I think a library is a place where you meet either a really great person, or a sociopath who will put your head in the fridge.

    2. When I was a page, some guy came by holding his coat “in front.” I had to hide out in the ladies’ room for a while!

  22. I would pay big bucks for a copy of this. There’s also a great one about two young women running a book mobile in the 1950s and finding eligible men. A friend gave it to me for my birthday!

  23. My coworker found a great romance in our library the other day with a similarly bad story/cover. To-the-neck buttom up, pencil skirt, the whole shebang. We weren’t sure where a sexually repressed librarian would find such a blouse these days. Copyright date: 2010.

  26. It’s too bad it’s career-romance and not career-mystery. Not only do old Nancy Drews and The Hardy Boys check out like mad, but there’s still some young kids whom enjoy Alfred Hitchcock And The Three Investigators. (And one adult library clerk. I decided if I ever find a man desperate enough to want to marry me, instead of an expensive ring, I was an inexpensive ring and all 60 editions of AH&TTI in readable condiction. That and he has to find a Rabbi who does Sammy Davis Jr impressions and can do the ceremony in Klingon.)

    No copies in my system, darn. I’ll have to see if I can do an ILL. Is this part of a series or just the one book, BTW?

  27. Ooooo…it’s in our system!!! I just put it on hold. We will all get a laugh out of it at work. Thanks for the great title.

  30. I found my husband in the library where I worked.
    He was a reader and I was a library assistant.
    also i have all the AH and TTI books in my loft.

  31. Maybe Mabel Maney could write an updated version “… a Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless mystery with the Hardly Boys”

  32. Mills & Boon romances here in the UK have ‘doctor’ and ‘Arab sheik’ themes, so I devised a ‘Public Library’ series. The first one is called ‘Trolleyful of dreams’…

    Most plots involve the young, sexy but naive Library Assistant falling for the mature, good-looking Chartered Librarian. The Library Assistants here said that that was wishful thinking on my part.

    Drat & double drat.

  33. When I was in library school, a classmate and I stumbled into a porn shop, just two young curious girls giggling – and then we found the book section!
    There was a whole range of work-related pocketbook titles, with cute-looking frontpages and alliteration in the titles. Of course we picked up
    The Lusty Librarian! Which turned out to very amusing, containing some hilarious stereotypings.
    The main character was an elderly spinster-type librarian of more than thirty years of age (!), who gets seduced by a fifteen year old boy with the hugest tool she’s ever dreamt of. Later he invites his younger brother (with an even larger manhood (or would it be boyhood?) to join them in the fun times.
    And they lived happily together ever after.

    I can’t remember whether the boys’ parents also were involved, I have a vague memory of a family picnic, I really want to reread this book now.
    But actually the story was very nicely done, and no more sleazy than may be found in modern romance novels anyway.

    1. Oh there’s all sorts of Librarian Porn out there. Like the 1976 Alice In Wonderland porno musical.

      There’s even websites that list the porno books-

      http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/library.html

      http://www.riverofdata.com/librariana/porn/

      Bet Jinny never had anything like that happen to her in the stacks!

      On a side note, I’m shocked how many guys online actually seem to believe that this is how librarians really are. I mention I work in a library and despite assuring them that I’m fat, and even posting pictures to show I am, they are absolutely convinced that I’m some hot super model type in a miniskirt and sky-high heels. (And that all male librarians are gay.) Man, I hate stereotypes.

      1. I’ll take the sexy librarian over the drab, lifeless librarian who has no sex drive and their only interest in life is reading to children. Nothing wrong with that but the first is far more exciting.

      2. It’s just the stereotyping that bugs me, Lyra. To me stereotyping is a form of bigotry. As a fat woman I get it a lot, that I’m “lazy” and “stupid.” Along with loads of other stereotypes. To have guys on the internet stereotyping me as a “hot, sexually repressed librarian who just needs to be f***ed like an animal but pretending to be a fat chick on the internet” really ticks me off. (And yes, I’ve had any number of guys assume this was the truth. It’s why I don’t do chat rooms anymore.) For one thing I’m not a librarian – I’m a clerk, and I don’t plan on spending my life in a library. And – well, loads of other things dealing with these stereotypes that bug the crap out of me.

        That being said, in the ILLs I have recieved Jinny! I’ve got to hurry up with my current book so I can read all about love in the stacks!

  34. Read it over the weekend, it’s going back to UIU tomorrow for those of you still waiting for it.

    It’s kind of amazing how much of the job has both changed and stayed the same. Our clerks still have to check journals in, though now there’s the slapping on the bar code and putting it into the system rather than recording everything on paper. And there’s always (at least) one librarian who gets her knickers in a twist when a mere assistant attempts some rudimentary reference work.

  35. I’m about halfway through. And I’ll tell you if Jinny stays with Joe, who obviously has a problem with his girlfriend being smarter then him, I shall be very mad!

    Also the librarians should’ve been more careful with the spine labels. They covered up Assistant in such a way that it reads “Jinny Williams Library Ass.”

  36. I read it over the weekend, too. I really enjoyed all of the descriptions of Jinny’s tasks, but I don’t think I would have married either guy if I had been her.

    I do think the explanations of the differences between professional and (what we would now call) paraprofessional work were very accurate and still relevant today.

    1. Yeah, Paul would’ve been good had she gone to college too. But Joe made it clear that he was threatened by the fact she was smarter then him.

      I know my mom always tells me how it was different for girls. In her own hometown in the 40s and 50s if you weren’t married by the time you were 19 you were seen as an old maid. Still, her best choice would’ve been to tell them both to take a hike.

      I’m very mad at Jinny. Fictional or not. I feel like she needs that Sassy Gay Friend from those YouTube videos – even if he does act more like a straight man doing a very bad stereotype of a gay man. But she needs someone to knock some sense into her!

      Heh. I think I need a romance of my own so I’d stop getting so wound up about the stupid choices of fictional character!

  37. Don’t laugh, I met my husband while working as a Library Technician in my local high school library. He is/was a teacher who offered to help us with the shelf reading and stock take at the end of the year. Needless to say we said yes please!

  38. I read it last night. It is a hoot, but there are some good parts in it as well. Joe is a class A dork and Paul is a rich boy. However, I like the way Jinny deals with the mayor’s son being disruptive in the building and how she manages to overcome her mistakes.

    I laughed long and hard over Jinny going to Paul’s house and how they served a “light supper”–salad and rolls. Jinny returns home starving and relates the so-called meal to her brother. he is astounded. They didn’t serve a main course! Oh no, the horror!

    IMHO, she should have told BOTH guys, “NO!” and gotten on with her career.

    The salary listing is a HOOT!

Comments are closed.