Wednesday, August 18, 2010

shelved!

I shall be catalogued.
Apparently our library (the one where I work) collects the work of local authors, especially of on-campus authors. Well, I knew that. Usually professors would give us a copy of their work, and some books went to Special Collections as well as onto the open shelves.
But that's academic non-fiction, right? Considering that UVic's Creative Writing dep't is almost vehemently anti-genre, to the extent that they won't accept news or posters about sf/f writing workshops or classes, I've always figured that fiction, unless published by a university press, or possibly by a small and very worthy Canadian press (chapbooks, with woodcuts printed in ink made from salal berries) was not to be acquired without strong advocacy.
But no. When in the course of a discussion of ordering books from Lulu, I showed a co-worker my own book (previously mentioned in this blog) Threefold, she said that the library should order it.
It's self-published, I pointed out.
Doesn't matter, she said. We bought another staff member's self-published poetry.
Oh, I said, and ceased objecting.

So there's my little book, with its own entry in the online catalogue. How very odd.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yay! Get ready for the cataloguer to ask you how you want your authority record set up. ;)

Incidentally, I said the same thing when they bought my poetry book, "it's self-published, you know" -- but I was reminded just how much self-published material is in our collection already.

batgirl said...

It's true - I've had several odd requests from CREA that turned out to be from Lulu or 'author'. I suppose it counts as micro-press.

*waves at catalogue companion-to-be*

Terri-Lynne said...

Yay! That's so great!!! Now you have to stalk the shelves to see who takes it out. Mwhahahahaa!

batgirl said...

Probably no one, unless it ends up on a reading list (now that would be even more unbelievable).