Me in my cozy little library. Click on the pic for a higher resolution shot

Whenever I go to the public library, I wonder where it is that librarians get their notorious reputation. If you ask the typical guy, he’ll tell you it’s the whole “removing the spectacles and undoing the tight hair bun” fantasy. Somewhere underneath there is a wild child waiting to unleash. It sounds like something you would read in Maxim, FHM, or at the very least, Penthouse Forum.

No, I’ve always thought it was something more insidious. In order to appraise the full arsenal of all the weapons hiding behind the staid book covers – all within invocation with a few taps from her electronic card catalogue – surrounding the written word’s gatekeeper, all you need to look up is de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, Bret Easton Ellis, Shannon McKenna, crime fiction, Spillane, not to mention bodice rippers and nonconsensual romance novels, – because hey, if the assailant looks as hot as the guy on the front cover…it must be ok, right? Whatever!

Here’s my all time favorite evidence of just what librarians are really hiding behind that boring facade. Witness, Henry Miller’s classic Tropic of Capricorn. One paragraph here is worth its weight in a dozen truckload of adult magazines.

Valeska was generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curley made her do. He took pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You’d almost swear she didn’t own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for her highfalutin’ ways. He went at it coldbloodedly. “Fish it out!” he’d say, opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!” (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he’d do it dog fashion, and. while she groaned and squirmed he’d nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. “That, Miss Abercrombie,” he said, “is a sort of Doppelganger to my regular cock,” and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that’s how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there’s no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst.

I know the queen of the printed matter has her hand in deciding which title enters her castle. Oftentimes, I can’t help but picture her pronouncements on the donated books for the day: “The Mormon Bloggernacle’s Guide to Sick Skateboard Tricks, Lara Flynn Boyle’s Homecook Recipes Vol. 2, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers audiobook read by Sean Hannity all goes back on the For Sale table. Let’s keep at least three copies of Tropic of Capricorn around.”

And you know, she knows, what’s inside.