Month: October 2025

Greetings! This particular post is brought to you by the letter K (and about half of letter L). October is upon us –I’m already mad that the time change back to Standard time isn’t happening until the first week of November, as I can feel that it should be happening about now and it would be the least jarring for it to do so, but no, we have to wait until the first weekend in November because politics and candy lobbyists. Really, it just feels like adding insult to injury this year. There is too much argh happening, and the little bits I can do are not enough to fix any of it. If you feel similarly, you are not alone — keep at those little bits, though. Every tiny pebble helps build the mountain we need, no matter how small.

That being said, bibliography is comparatively a land of calm and sanity, unfazed by the cursed actions of tyrants and an impending lack of vitamin D. To our research we turn, therefore, as a welcome form of respite away from social media and the outside world. (Yes, my prose has gotten rather purple, but for this month at least we’re just going to work with it.) So, on to this month’s overview!

Things I learned from K:

• To no one’s great surprise, I’m sure, I will be spending a decent amount of time at both the Kislak Library at University of Pennsylvania and Kresge Library at Oakland University. The latter in particular has copies of Lennox’s first book, Poems on Several Occasions (pretty hard to find), and Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon, which is also fairly rare. Excited about both of those.
• Not that many libraries that start with K, so the letter was shorter than I’d realized. I’d initially thought I might get through both K and L this month, but I forgot about midterm grading and so that plan did not come to pass. No big deal, though.

I have about 75 entries left in L, including the big one at the Library of Congress. Shouldn’t be a problem to get it done for the next update. We shall see! Also, I’ve started entering libraries into my database more intentionally. I may not know exactly what I’m doing with the books yet, but the locations I can build out now.

Number of libraries confirmed: 307
Number of libraries entered into the database: 58
Number of extant copies confirmed: 1156