Readings — January 13, 2016, 11:28 am

Search History

HarpersWeb-Readings-2016-01-library

An illustration, first published in the December 1872 issue of Harper’s Magazine, of the interior of the Library of Congress

From queries submitted by telephone and in person to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989.

Do you have any books on human beings?

Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?

Why do eighteenth-century English paintings have so many squirrels in them?

Were Tsar Nicholas II and King Gustav of Sweden tattooed?

What is the life cycle of an eyebrow hair?

In what occupations may one be barefoot?

What is the natural enemy of a duck?

Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?

What percentage of all the bathtubs in the world are in the United States?

Who built the English Channel?

Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family?

Where can I get statistics on the sale of cadavers?

What is the nutritional value of human flesh?

Where can I rent a guillotine?

If the Empire State Building is the highest building in the world, what is the smallest?

Is there a law in N.Y.C. whereby a child can become unrelated to its parents if they don’t like each other?

Where can I find something on the comical aspects of pregnancy?

Is it proper to go alone to Reno to get a divorce?

What is the life span of an abandoned woman?

What country has the highest number of honorable women?

Do you have a list of buildings built in the shape of fruits or vegetables?

Do you have a list of historical characters who were in the right place at the right time?

Is this where I ask questions I can’t get answers to?

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Five years ago, Jean-Sebastien Hertsens Zune went looking for his parents. He already had one set, a Belgian church organist and his wife, who adopted him as a baby from Guatemala and later moved the family to France. But he wanted to find his birth mother and father. When Zune was a teenager, his Belgian parents gave him his adoption file, holding back only receipts showing how much the process had cost. Most people pay little attention to their birth certificates, but for adoptees, these documents, along with notes about their relinquishment, tell an often patchy origin story.

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Once, in an exuberant state, feeling filled with the muse, I told another writer: When I write, I know everything. Everything about the characters? she asked. No, I said, everything about the world, the universe. Every. Fucking. Thing. I was being preposterous, of course, but I was also trying to explain the feeling I got, deep inside writing a first draft, that I was listening and receiving, listening some more and receiving, from a place that was far enough away from my daily life, from all of my reading, from everything.

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All his life he lived on hatred.

He was a solitary man who hoarded gloom. At night a thick smell filled his bachelor’s room on the edge of the kibbutz. His sunken, severe eyes saw shapes in the dark. The hater and his hatred fed on each other. So it has ever been. A solitary, huddled man, if he does not shed tears or play the violin, if he does not fasten his claws in other people, experiences over the years a constantly mounting pressure, until he faces a choice between lunacy and suicide. And those who live around him breathe a sigh of relief.

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