What is the Biblioholic Reading: Sports Edition

Well I have been talking a lot about how I became a biblioholic, but I have not mentioned what I'm currently reading. This is a dreadful oversight and I intend to correct immediately. Not all of my reading is in academia. I read things from many genres. I plan to post them separately so I can have a theme to each Post. Today's post is the "Sports Edition".

Recently I joined the Nacogdoches Rollergirls womens flat track roller derby (WFTDA) league as a referee. Our first public bout was on Feb. 25th and it was a huge albeit painful success. In order to prepare for the role of a Jammer Ref.,I spent a lot of time reading and memorizing the rules of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association. However, being the book junkie that I am I couldn't stop there. I started reading, Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track, this is an exciting inside look into the new roller derby revolution from the skater's point of view. It is a raw and unpolished book that gets a bit racy at times. It is obviously riding on the success of the A&E TV series "Rollergirls". The book successfully maintains the tone of the popular series. Another facet of its success comes from the dearth of current books about one of the fastest growing phenomenons in sports today. All the Roller Derby skaters and fan will read this book. They will get a straight forward in your face account of events a seen by the author. I don't know how many people outside of the Roller Derby world will enjoy it. Read it or not, everyone should attend at least one roller derby bout in their life. They won't forget it.

While Rollergirl: is entertaining, I also wanted to read a more serious treatment of my new obsession. I craved information on the more serious aspects of sports officiating. The rebirth of Roller Derby or Neo-Derby is still growing and working out the rules. As a result I drew on the vast amount of experience and knowledge of officials from all across the sports spectrum.

From the university library I checked out Psychology of Officiating. This is an excellent book. I highly recommend it to referees or officials of all sports, from t-ball to the NBA. Some of the most valuable information is found in the chapters on goals, communication, and burnout. The book covered a myriad of things I never would have thought of as part of officiating. I can not recommend the need for this book highly enough. After reading it I gained a new respect for sports officials and I now watch sporting events on TV for the first time just to see the officials (or "The Third Team") work.

From my public library I got a copy of Successful Sports Officiating. This to was an excellent book whose editors included staff from Referee Magazine. It talks about many things including: communication skills, keeping the game under control, developing your skills and developing your career. One of the many great aspects of this books is that it has pictures and quotes from model officials illustrating the principles discussed in the book. Successful Sports Officiating and Psychology of Officiating are both going to be added to my permanent library whether there is room or not.

If you are interested in sports, either as a player or as a fan I recommend Successful Sports Officiating Psychology of Officiating. After reading these books you will appreciate the game even more, and will understand the "Third Team" or "Third Player" and the game better. Ultimately it will result in enjoying the sport even more and may encourage you to become involved as a ref. for one of your local youth leagues. and/or

Be Good to Your Mother

Well my dear mother was not very happy with her portrayal as a hippie book addict. If you read the post you will see a comment from my brother confirming my side of the story.
Hi My Name is Phil and I'm a Biblioholic: Hi my name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic.

Something good has come from this though. My mom has finally begun to talk about her problem. She has decided to review the libraries in her life and face the stark reality of her situation. They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Let the healing begin.

The first library I remember was at Douglas Grade School in Springfield, Illinois. The school was named for Stephen A. Douglas and was built around the turn of the 20th century. Its time and place dictated that the bookcases would be of oak and have at least some of the prairie style influence. (This library was a room in the school reportedly designed by Frank LLoyd Wright)

It was a small room and the books were divided not by Dewey but by grade/reading level. There were rows of stiff wooden chairs and we were all lead, single file, from our classroom to the library. It was expected that each student would quickly select a book and spend the remainder of our weekly library period reading. By the end of my eight years, before what Phil calls the torture of middle school was invented, it was increasingly difficult for me to find a book I had not read. I would browse through the books in vain for nearly the entire period, drawing frowns from the teacher but no help.

I have come to believe that the entire library collection was purchased when the building was constructed and never upgraded. This had some interesting results for me.

I learned how to relate to other children by reading the Betsey-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. I grew up on a farm, isolated from other children and supervised by my Grandmother. The house had no central heat and no running water. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that I did not realize that Maud Hart Lovelace was writing of an earlier time. Her accounts of children who could find playmates next door, lived in a city and could go to the library on there own were wondrous to me. It wasn't until I visited the Minnesota Historical Society on my second honeymoon that I learned that she was from Mankato, Minnesota and that the stories were memories from her childhood.

As the location of the school influenced the library's physical appearance, the name of the school influenced the collection. While I do not remember meeting an actual librarian, the person who chose the books must have had a strong interest in the Civil War. That coupled with the fact that many of the Generals wrote and published their memoirs around the turn of the century resulted in a collection for the older grades that included Grant, Lee and Sherman's memoirs along with Mosby's account of the career of a partisan ranger.

The only other thing I remember from grade school was that the seventh and eighth grade teachers, both men, read the stories of Edgar Allen Poe to us on Friday afternoons. But the library brought a remarkable richness into my life. I've walked the streets of Warrenton, Virginia, seen Mosby's house and his beloved Shenandoah Valley, marveled at Grant's stoicism on the battlefield at Shiloh, and attended a re-enactment of Sherman's funeral in St. Louis. For ten years I worked as a Park Ranger at Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, spent quiet winter days volunteering at the Lincoln Tomb and walked the battlefield at Gettysburg alone on a beautiful spring morning. These experiences, and my love of history, I have been able to share and enjoy with my sons.

Today Douglas school is an alternative school. The library was turned into a media center in the 1960's.

Isn't it amazing how books and libraries can shape our lives. I wonder what kind of memories the Internet generation will write about and what will be the influences they remember.

Middle School

Middle School

After the heavy handed move by the ALA to put me directly under a library in some of my most impressionable and tender years I would eventually be thrown into that circle of Hell that Dante’s feared to even imagine let alone describe, middle school. I don’t know who the genius E.d.D. who thought it was a good idea to take all of the children at their most cruel and vulnerable ages 12, 13 and put them all together in one or two schools to fight it out but they should be taken out and shot. It is unfortunate that the educational establishment has continued the practice despite the prevalence of bullying and abuse heaped upon the children by their peers. If these groups were split up in a different manner the mitigating behavior and different situation would surely lead to a more hospitable environment for learning. The reason that students aren’t prepared for college is not the high schools but the middle schools, where ones survival as an individual and even as an uninjured person is constantly at risk.

Fortunately out of this crucible of arbitrary educational goals and constant social persecution there formed within me an entrepreneurial spirit that while influenced by the ALA cabal had the potential to save me from its sinister clutches. A lot of students I knew liked to read Mad Magazine books and Charlie Brown books, as well as other comic strip type books. My mom who’s addiction by this time grew from Russian Literature to garage sales and bags of grass clippings started taking me out early Saturday mornings with here to steal bags of grass and shop at garage sales. I began buying books filled with comic strips for between 10 cents and 25 cents. I would then read them and then carry them with me to school and sell them for 50 cents each. I would buy back from the other students any book I sold them or that they brought in for a quarter or trade two for one with them. As I did this my inventory grew. I soon had al my desks and my locker full of books for sale with my most recent acquisitions in my back pack. This went on for 3 or four months and I was clearing between 15$ to 20$ a week in profit. Then the school administration found out and we had to have a parent teacher conference with the assistant principal. It turns out that entrepreneurialship and reading are not part of the 7^th and 8^th grade curriculum. Capitalism, math as in accounting, inventory, planning, salesmanship and developing a business plan with room for growth and additional employees were all apparently not part of my intended education and were in fact a corrupting influence that was against the rules. I was told to stop and received detentions for this obviously deviant behavior. Surprisingly we did have a library at our middle school but for the two years I was there not a single class that I was in went to it.

Well 20$ a week is way to much for a 12 year old to give up on, so I stopped carrying my books around and kept them only in my locker. I then made an alphabetical shelf list with prices and costs in a blue ledger that I purchased and did all my business out of the ledger and then passed out my inventory at my locker. After a couple of months of this the authorities again discovered my subversive behavior and punished me severely enough that I gave up on the book selling business. Yes I could have been a part of Barne’s & Reynolds or Reynolds’ Amazon of books .com. But all of that was thwarted by the educational establishment and ultimately by the ALA through its extensive connections in the educational community.

One may wonder why the ALA would go through so much trouble to get to just one twelve year old. Open your eyes man! They aren’t after one they are after them all. They have Literacy programs and information literacy and constant ad campaigns and volunteer friends groups to snare young impressionable minds and warp them into what eventually becomes a librarians worldview where nothing is in place, nothing is organized and everything should be left to us to straighten out. This idea of librarians’ megalomaniacal impulse to straighten out and rule the world is not a new one. It began in Summer and moved to Egypt where the librarians were part of the Priestly Cast controlling the Eternal and earthly destinies of entire populations through their stranglehold on literacy. Then over 2000 years ago in China the head librarian for Zhou dynasty “Lao Tzu” would write the “Tao Te Ch’ing.” This tome attempts to explain the the way of change or the order of the cosmos. Later other librarians would follow. Carl Marx who worked in the library at the British Museum, would develop the communist manifesto that swept across the world, then Mao Ze Dong, who started his adult life as a librarian and finished it as the leader of the largest communist nation on earth followed. Finally Laura Bush the unassuming school librarian, who all Washington insiders know is the true power behind the throne of the last superpower on earth. These are not accidents of history, but the diabolical plans of a cultural elite who will one day rule the world.

Next High School

The 4th Grade

My grade school in Quincy Illinois had been built in the early seventies right next to the old brick school building which was practically an overgrown one room school house. The year I entered 4^th grade was the year that they finished renovations on the old school house and guess what they did with it? One half of the basement was an music, art and activity room, the other half of the basement was a fourth grade classroom. The entire upstairs was converted into, you guessed it a library. Guess which 4^th grade class I ended up in. That’s right the one underneath the library.

Some might think this is a coincidence. They probably also think it is a coincidence that the LC call number for the Bible starts out with BS. Again it was a conspiracy by those misanthropist ALA demons again controlling my life, carefully leading me down the path of addiction and then obsession. The library was of course staffed with this friendly young lady, who read to us and let us get our own books to look at and read. She had a stack of large wooden keys painted in bright colors. We would take one of the keys and when we found a book that we liked we would place the key by the book and turn it to spread the books open and then we could pull our book out. We needed to remember our color so that when we were done we could go back and turn the key again to spread the books open and place our book back where we got it. I of course was her “big helper” in collecting the keys and putting away books others had left out. To this day I can not walk into Hastings without forgetting to get a movie and just get lost in alphabetizing their videos. It drives me insane. Their military section has a whole stack of shelves labeled WWI and the shelves contain nothing but WWII books. I almost had a seizure. The WWI books were in a completely different stack. I hunted down a staff member and asked her what was wrong with this picture? (Turns out it was Cassies’ old boss who wants her back) Do you know what the reason was? Hastings labels their books with price tags combination barcodes and a topic. They do not have a WWI or WWII topic or subject heading, they just have World War as a topic. So they sent a bunch of WWII books and a bunch of WWI shelf labels. So the store has to put a bunch of books about D-day, the Nazis etc. under WWI shelf labels. Has the world gone insane? This might explain why when I go to a book store and ask for a book on a topic they can’t do a topic search on their computer they can only do title searches. I have to instead b lead to this section with a generic label like “Sports” and look to see if they have anything related to what I want? That would be like someone coming to the reference desk and asking for a book on Tai Chi Chuan and us telling them to go look in the GV section. What’s up with that? How did bookstores become so popular with that kind of service? I don’t even get people asking if I need help anymore (Maybe it’s the clothes; maybe it’s the torturing of the staff) but I think it might just boil down to displays and merchandising. Maybe we need one list of what’s new this week and another of what’s hot this week? (Besides me)

Anyway by the fourth grade any chance I ever had of enjoying a video or bookstore was gone. Linda and I two anniversaries ago after dinner and a movie in Lufkin ended up in their super Wal-Mart alphabetizing their discount video sales bin. Is that sick or what? I’ve got a monkey on my back and he has a digital dictionary and thesaurus he carries with him. I’d hate to think what it would be like if I knew more than one language. Unfortunately this story does not end in the fourth grade. It continues on into one of the levels of Hell that Dante feared to write about, Middle School.

My Name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic

Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

I answered my first 4:45 AM reference question of my career today. When did Gutenberg invent movable type? Unfortunately there does not appear to be a good answer for that question. I checked a couple of sources and Britannica Online seemed to summarize it the best. Sometime in 1436 Gutenberg borrowed money for some type of project he was working on. He was farther along and borrowed more in 1448 then by 1450 his press was farther along and by 1455 he had printed his famous Forty-Two-Line Bible. So Gutenberg’s movable type printing press was invented sometime between 1436 and 1455. That is a stinky answer, but pretty darn good standing at a table with someone else’s laptop at 4:45 AM. If we had instant messaging and we each had a laptop and an alarm we could provide that kind of service year round.

Kinda makes yah go hmmmmmmmmmm.



Only a few diehards left. I had to quiet some people down. Trying to pick my subject databases but the text keeps moving on the screen. Or maybe the desk is moving? I am sick of those little red and green squiggley lines in my email. I think I’ll just start adding words to my dictionary. How come Chaucer got away with writing the way he wrote, and I got hassled for it all through school? I think that maybe the public school system deprived the world of a 21st century Chaucer. Or maybe I should have just done my homework? Who Knows?

Hi my name is Phil and I am a Biblioholic.

I really had no choice. Yeah I know we all have a choice, but the odds were stacked against me from the beginning. My mother was already addicted when I was born. She's a real mess now. She doesn't just read Lincoln biographies, or three volume series' on the the Civil War anymore, she's gone on to harder stuff, like train spotting, bird watching, and even genealogy. We tried talking to her, getting her to see a doctor, even just to watch a little TV but none of it worked. We finally had an intervention, but she's going to have to hit bottom and start scrap booking before she can get the help she needs.

For me it started with my mom. I remember her taking me on my bike when I was five years old to the local Carnegie franchise. Yeah, "Free Public Library" the first hit is always free. They even had a special room down in the basement for kids. It had it's own full time pusher, reading to you, smiling, and being nice. How is a kid supposed to resist something like that that?

Then came school. They actually started teaching us to read?! What were they thinking? I remember Dick and Jane. Poor Dick and Jane, I wonder if they knew what they were being used for? Where are they now? Some dusty boiler room living out their last days all alone in the dark, or worse yet in a landfill with all rest of humanity's waste?

I can remember wanting to live like Dick and Jane. They were always having a good time, always happy, smiling, holding hands and running together, we never did see them the day after, when they crashed. I don't see Dick and Jane running and jumping anymore. I'm just glad that the authorities finally took this meth problem seriously.

But none of that is an excuse for me. Why do I have library of over 1000 books and a garage full of countless unknown others. Why can't I park my car in the garage like normal people instead of searching through boxes for my next book fix. I should never have picked up that first book, with its brightly colored cover and all those pictures on the pages. That seems so long ago now that I sit here 30 some odd years later, a Librarian.

Just give me a minute.

I need to get this out.

I need to tell the story of how a once happy innocent child who loved to ride his purple bike and once walked to the corner grocery totally naked and was sent home wearing a grocery sack, while his mother read Tolstoy. How I came from that innocent begging to now embody the plague that has spawned the billion dollar publishing industry and clogged our networks with pointless ramblings and blogs.

You've seen how the journey began, but can you follow it to its end?


My name is Phil and I am a biblioholic.

Don't get out of the boat!

Don’t get out of the boat. Or don’t get out of your office. Some had gotten out, way out. For them, their was no turning back. For me, well it would be a long week before I’d find out.

The air outside was thick and heavy with moisture the clouds pregnant with a storm they just couldn’t deliver. It was quiet. Yes to quiet. I could see faculty parking spot after parking spot full of student cars just like it was a normal workday. Slowly trudging through the darkness were misshapen forms of youth lost to hours of parties, carrying huge loads of books and then staying up into the depths of the night to fulfill the inevitable reckoning of assignments and tests that were due the next day. How could people who were once human turn to such a wretched existence?

I entered my sanctuary. It was a balmy 78 outside and a brisk 35 in my office. I gritted my teeth as the cold air bit into my face, but I knew it would keep me sharp and alert, and that a librarian needed, that extra edge, that extra hardness forged in adversity in order to survive.

It was time to leave the office.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw I doubt that I ever cold be. Everywhere their were students reading text books. Studying, and eating. Laptops sprouted on the tables like clumps of Jonquils in the spring. Their blackened tendrils creeping along the tables, floors, and into the walls, waiting to ensnare the foot of the unwary, waiting to trap and devour them, like some kind of monster from a cheesy sci fi novel.

The binary gods had smiled upon me that evening. My computer and monitors booted right up and connected to that sea of bits and bytes that had no meaning and yet has all meaning. My laptop reached through the air and negotiated with another of its kind. They would again agree to talk to each other. All of the shining idols on my pressed wood alter with their multitude of symbolic icons sprang to life once more. My sacrifice to the priests of the systems temple had once again been accepted.

Others did not have such luck, as I walked the floor I saw scenes of frustration. Scenes of people who could not figure out why when they "mashed the button", the network did not come on. Some, I could help. Others were left to continue in their suffering until the night had once again ended and those that could help rose again to tell them to check their cables.

Their were other scenes that will haunt me throughout my days and beyond. Things I dare not share for fear of harming the faint of heart. I saw students using government documents, and if that is not fearsome enough the documents were on microfiche.

I grow weary. I most look to other tasks now and steel myself for the time when I must again enter the breach.

R Philip Reynolds

Librarian