Saturday, April 26, 2014

Browsing...

Sometimes we will be asked if we have books on a particular subject, and given the extent of our collections, we generally find after looking in the catalog that we do. Often we will give the person the call number of a book on the subject, and suggest that they go to that area and "browse." In other words, just look about, and see what there is. A person can often discover all sorts of things that way! (Our shelves are a little neater than those of the second hand book shop pictured here. You can see floor plans of our collections to aid in your browsing.)

A good definition of the word to browse can be found in the OED, and there is this delightful example of the use of the word, from Lamb's Mackery End: "She was tumbled..into a spacious closet of good old English reading,..and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage."

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