Sailing

A Reference Librarian always knows what the patron really wants (and/or needs). An elderly gentleman came into the Reference Room wanting mortality rates for different decades. I pulled out historical statistics on population & the simple World Almanac list of longevity by year born. As I spoke to him he kept telling me that he had been born in the wrong era, and that he loved sailboats and he wanted to have been born in "the age of sail". He also told me his father was quite elderly when he had been born, and his father's brothers were all ten years older than his father. When he was a child he would listen to his uncles tell stories about the Civil War, and he again told me he felt he lived in the wrong age.

As he looked through the death statistics I pulled off the reference shelves two books: The Encyclopedia of Yacht Design by Lucia del Sol Knight and Art and the Seafarer; a historical survey of the arts and crafts of sailors and shipwrights edited by Hans Jürgen Hansen. I brought them over to him, put them down next to him as he poured through the  statistics, and said he might like to take a look at them. Sometime later I looked up and he was still turning the pages of the books on yachts and sea art. He stopped by as he left and said he would have to come back when he had more time to look at the Encyclopedia of Yacht Design. He was no longer talking about death or being born in the wrong age.