Fan Fiction, Fictional Archaeologists, and Libraries

 I love writing fan fiction.  The research for a story can lead me down the most interesting rabbit holes.

In this case, I read a Good Omens fan fic on AO3 called It's Not the Years, It's the Milage, by MovesLikeBucky.  The plot is basically the first Indiana Jones film, but with Aziraphale as Indy and Crowley as Marion, and I enjoyed it enormously.

But before Indiana Jones, there was Pimpernel Smith.

Leslie Howard played the first adventurous archaeologist - Professor Smith, who was in charge of a student dig in Germany just before the Second World War.  When he wasn't directing the students, he was smuggling intellectuals out of Germany before they were arrested by the Nazis.  The film was made in 1941, in black and white, and has a moment of terrible sexism where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students to make them walk out of the lecture hall, so he can invite only the young men on the student dig with him.  Apart from that, though, it is wonderful fun, with the Nazis puzzled by the tune used to signal to the escaping intellectuals, and a very funny conversation about Shakespeare at an Embassy party.

It occurred to me that Aziraphale would work far better as vague academic Professor Smith than as action hero Indiana Jones - but I didn't want to do a straight swap of the characters.  Aziraphale could go undercover in Germany as an antiquarian bookseller much more easily.

And this is where the research comes in.  I work in a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop, and I had recently been cataloguing some books about Germany.  I noticed that many of them were published in Leipzig.  So Aziraphale could have a bookselling contact in Leipzig he could write to.  I discovered that Leipzig was, indeed, a centre for book publishing - and that there had been a terrible air raid in 1943 which destroyed the booksellers' quarter (the Graphisches Viertel), including the oldest music publishing house in the world, along with an estimated 50 million books.  The German National Library was badly hit.  1,800 people also died in the RAF raid.

That happened after the period I wanted to set my story, though.

I wanted Aziraphale to buy a collection of occult books, possibly from a castle somewhere.  Thuringia sounded like an interesting location, not too far from Leipzig, so I started to look at local castles - and hit solid gold!

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is still housed in the Green Castle in Weimar.  In the 1930s it was known as the Ducal Library, and it had been a library since Duke Wilhelm Ernst started it in 1691.  Duchess Anna Amalia moved it to its present location in 1761.  It houses important collections of Shakespeare and Goethe, and a 16th century bible connected to Martin Luther.

Aziraphale would be in Paradise!

Even better, it looks like this:

It even has a book tower that reminded me of Aziraphale's shop:

There was a serious fire there in 2004, but it has been wonderfully restored, as the pictures show.

And now I want to visit Weimar....

WorldCon on Saturday 2 - Filk and Libraries

One of the fun things about dressing as the Jedi Librarian is that people come up to you and tell you cool things about the libraries they're involved in - which is how I got talking to a Canadian chap who told me about how he was involved in the IT set up for the libraries in his local school district, covering around 230 schools.
Later, I saw a fun t-shirt: "Do not meddle in the affairs of filkers, for they are not at all subtle, and people remember funny songs."

One of the events I was determined to get to was the 20 minute concert by TJ Burnside. Back in the distant past of the 1987 Brighton WorldCon, I had seen her on stage with the group she performed with, Technical Difficulties. The concert had been on at the same time as the Hugo Award Ceremony, which I hadn't been terribly interested in. I did buy the Technical Difficulties cassette tape, though, which I still have.
Technical Difficulties finally broke up when TJ moved to California - they were already living in three separate states, as one of their songs lamented, but California was even further away. Her husband is an actual rocket scientist, and she talked about a song he'd written where the third verse was just marked 'Classified'. She assumed it was a joke until he met up with another scientist and said "Now I can finally sing that third verse!" In the secure facility where no-one else could overhear them.
She also talked about a Con where he wandered into the filk room while people were singing one of the songs he wrote - he was formally dressed for a scientific conference at the time. One of the audience said to him: "This song was written by an actual rocket scientist, you know!" and he beamed and said "Yes - that would be me!"
She sang several songs, including Falling Down on New Jersey (to the tune of Old Maui) and one of the songs from that old cassette tape, which everyone joined in with - Lullaby for a Weary World.

I was going to go off and attend another panel, but I was getting too tired to move, so I stayed for Bill and Brenda Sutton's concert, which was enormous fun. I liked their Tea and Beer song, and Life is Better with Lots of Beer. There was a small child running round the room, and after the song about Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men ("Crivens!") they joked that they had their own Wee Free Man running round. The kid's father said that they were trying to make a deal with the fairies for him - "but it's all right. I've seen Labyrinth; I know how to get him back!"

After all that singing about beer, I headed for the bar, where another lady chatted to me about libraries, and her friend 'George' who had gone to college to find that she had been assigned to a male dorm. She obviously couldn't stay there, and the only room they could find for her at such short notice was actually in the library. So they asked her if she would like to be the Night Keeper of the Library, which was her idea of heaven!
And there was another lovely lady on a mobility scooter, who said she was 4th generation Bay Area. We shared a common love of Diane Duane and Good Omens.

Seshat, Egyptian Goddess of Writing

Why have I never heard of this goddess before?
I've been familiar with Thoth, her consort, since I read The Tales of Ancient Egypt by Roger Lancelyn Green (the classic Puffin edition) at junior school, but I don't recall ever coming across Seshat, with the odd seven pointed thing hovering over her head, before.
And she's really very interesting - her name means "she who is the scribe", and she is often depicted inscribing the years of a pharaoh's reign on a palm leaf rib. She was the goddess of wisdom, writing and mathematics, which also included astronomy, architecture and surveying, and building (for which accurate mathematics was required). Knowledge of history was another of her attributes. She recorded the spoils of war, and the speeches of the pharaohs, and was part of the ceremony of "stretching the cord", the surveying tool which was used for accurate measurement in building, and symbol of the power of the pharaoh. As a funerary goddess, she kept the memory of the dead alive by writing an account of their lives.
She was also known as Mistress of the House of Books - her priests oversaw the library, and she was supposed to look after the library of heaven. In Spell 10 of the Coffin Texts, it says: "Seshat opens the door of heaven for you." Sounds like a library to me! Though it could also refer to her astronomical attributes. Sadly, she doesn't seem to have a temple in her honour, though I suppose any library would fulfill that role.
She is usually shown wearing a leopard skin, or a dress spotted like a leopard skin - symbolic of the stars and night sky.

The House of Wisdom

I was reading tor.com today, and came across a piece about a comic called The 99, about a group of Muslim superheroes each of whom embodies the attributes of one of the 99 Names of Allah - and about the creator of the comic, Naif Al-Mutawa, who is at present on trial for heresy in Saudi Arabia.
Describing the background to the story in the comic, Naif Al-Mutawa talked about the Siege of Baghdad in 1258, by the Mongols, and the destruction of the Grand Library, or House of Wisdom. They said that so many books were thrown into the Tigris that it ran black with the ink, and red with the blood of the philosophers and scientists who were slaughtered.

Why had I never heard of this before?
Just about everybody (in the West, anyway) who loves books knows about the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, but this destruction seems to be on a similar scale and I'd never heard of it. Naif Al-Mutawa said that it was a well-known story to generations of Arabs, and a natural place for his story to start.

By the second half of the ninth century, according to Wikipedia, this Library had become one of the greatest hubs of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages, and the great scholars who were attracted to it established Baghdad as a major seat of learning. It was also linked to astronomical observatories and was a centre of translation of academic and scientific works, including many Ancient Greek texts. Mathemeticians there also developed algebra, and introduced the Hindu numerical system that we use today to the Western world.
Despite the great destruction of 1258 about 400,000 manuscripts were saved, by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and taken to Maragheh - but Baghdad, and Islamic scholarship and science, never really recovered.

Female Assistant Librarians

There's a lovely article in the blog The Cat's Meat Shop (at http://catsmeatshop.blotspot.co.uk) from 1888, about the suitability of a career as an assistant librarian for young ladies - as long as the objection of climbing ladders was taken away! It was posted on 21st February - and it's nice to see that Manchester was one of the most forward-looking cities of the time, with 42 female assistants, including a branch librarian with a salary of £75 a year!

Libraries

Herefordshire County Council have just announced massive cuts (75%!) to their library and museum services. The powers that be think that libraries, museums and other cultural activities are luxuries to be given up when they run out of money. The reasons why they have run out of money are not the point here - the point I want to make is that libraries are not a luxury. They are a necessity for a civilised country - and they are rather more than a random collection of books looked after by volunteers, which seems to be the model that the county councillors favour (if they favour anything at all).

I spent a large part of my childhood in libraries. I read far more books than my family could possibly have bought for me to read - and I watched every episode of Jackanory for years. In fact, I spent so much time in my local branch library that I became a volunteer there, at the age of eleven. I had my own coat hook in the staff cubby hole, got to stamp the books, and they even tried to teach me the Dewey decimal system! (Unsuccessfully, I fear).
We used to spend all the school holidays in a caravan by the sea, and I joined the local library there (we had to argue a bit - the librarian on duty said that I wouldn't make good use of my tickets, and I'd get bored of coming in, but I soon proved her wrong).
My ambition was to be a librarian, and my favourite places in all the world were full of books.

Then I discovered archaeology, and I never did get to do any librarianship training, but I have worked in a library.

When I was working on a dig in London, and having a fairly miserable time living in temporary accommodation, the local library there was a lifeline. I was living away from home, pretty much camping out for the duration of the dig, so I couldn't bring any of my own books with me.

When I was researching local history (a local group wrote a book for the Millennium called Nobody Had Heard of Hay), I used the local library.
When I was reading theology for fun, I used the local library.
When I was unemployed, and had time to kill before I caught the bus back from town, I used the local library.

These days, computers have moved into libraries. I have occasionally used a library computer (though that phrase always makes me think of Majel Barrett's voice giving information on the original Star Trek), but there are people who rely on the library for a connection to the internet - and use of the internet is essential now for so much, including claiming benefits and applying for jobs.

Libraries are not a luxury.

“A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead” - Caitlin Moran

“There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. ” ~Andrew Carnegie

“Libraries are our future – to close them would be a terrible, terrible mistake – it would be stealing from the future to pay for today which is what got us into the mess we’re in now.”
Neil Gaiman - winner of the Carngie Medal 2010