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Jack be nimble, Jack be
quick, Jack going to be forced into oblivion at the hands of an evil
head librarian and his cohorts of supermodel, myoptic underling
librarians (also evil, but female). Jack
of Fables is the popular spin-off of the even more popular
Fables comic book series by Bill Willingham. Willingham and
Matthew Sturges's Jack stories deal with the continuing saga of the
fairy tale character who, during his misadventures, gets captured by a
Mr. Revise and his librarian underlings. Revise's
plan is to imprison all the fairy tale characters he can in order to
censor their tales to the point of banality to pave the way for their
eventual obscurity and irrelavence.
I suppose one should admire the accuracy of Willingham and Sturges's
characters. Most managerial librarians are men. And aren't all staff
librarians woman in glasses, with Playboy ideal bodies, and gorgeous
faces? |
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A
Series of Unfortunate Events was
the best selling YA series by Lemony Snicket (really Daniel Handler).
The 13 books deal with the three Baudelaire orphans who endure numerous
trails, usually at the hands of the evil Count Olaf. The middle
sibling, Klaus, is a librarian of sorts (he’s only 12-13 but
is an awkward looking child almost blind without his huge glasses).
To escape a situation, there is usually a library for him to research
in. Sometimes the libraries are extensive, other time they consist of
only three books or a scrap of paper left over from when a library
burnt down (and most of the libraries burn). Even without, Klaus will
recall some book from in his parent’s library (also burnt). Library
burnings are key to the series. We learn in the penultimate story that
libraries were once places to exchange ideas but now need to be secret.
This is said by Dewey Denouement who runs a hotel based on the Dewey
decimal system and has a library filled with vital facts, only it isn’t
accessible for fear of evil use. When Dewey is killed the Baudelaires
burn the hotel to stop it from falling into the wrong hands. In the
final novel we are given a definition of “library” as any source of
learning. Again librarians hide information for
the sake of the greater good and the implication in the final books is
that libraries are unnecessary, as the children have grown up and no
longer need a place to gain information from. |
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