1) The library finally having hit the tipping point, I've now organized the files into a handful of folders. If anything isn't where it should be or you don't have access to it, let me know.
Fanworks are still at the top, but if we accumulate enough of them, they'll get a designated folder too. :)
2) his trashy tell all memoirs. Which, [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard, yes, I'd like to have in the library. I mean, sadly due to grandson censorship they're missing the vital years of 1730 to 1732, and thus can't tell us among other things how Uncle George first reacted when he heard what went down in Prussia with FW and Fritz, but maybe there are other useful quotes in them, and they do sound very entertaining.
Bowdlerized memoirs in the library, with obligatory 19th century editorial disclaimer that it was perfectly acceptable to be coarse then, so much so that he wishes he could have bowdlerized *more*, but the memoirs wouldn't make sense with entire passages suppressed, so he contented himself with some lacunae and rewriting. Sigh. Someone bring him his smelling salts.
If I find a more complete copy, I'll let you know, but for now, this is what we have. There appears to be a more modern (but still 1960s) edition, that's severely abridged down to less than 300 pages.
3) Lady Hervey's letters are also in the library, in the correspondence folder.
Also, any time you want anything, whether it be Lord Hervey's memoirs or an English or German translation of Voltaire on short notice, let me know, and I'll see what I can do! It's not like I hesitate to ask you to read things for us. ;)
4) And because I couldn't resist, also the memoirs of Princess Dashkova. We haven't talked about her, but she was Catherine's BFF, helped put her on the throne, headed the Russian academy of sciences, and seems generally cool. And in keeping with our Enlightenment theme!
1) As you've no doubt seen, I'm getting our fic endeavors transferred over to rheinsberg. A handful more ficlets/discussions/prompts to go, and a handful more emoji sets. I'll let you know when I'm done, and then you can point out anything I missed. Shorter prompts and discussions are especially hard to remember/find, so I'm sure there are plenty more out there I've forgotten that you can tell me about.
I haven't tagged for characters yet, because this is tedious enough already. I'm sure they'll get tagged someday, either by me, or...I think you can tag posts other people have made in the community, even if you can't edit them, so if anyone wanted to help out, I wouldn't say no. ;)
selenak: do you want me to do Rococo babysitting, Voltaire to the rescue, and handsome hussar, or hold off? I know you're seriously thinking about turning these into fics, so I'm waiting for your approval. Though Rococo babysitting, both in the original and in emoji, is worthy of being a work of art on its own. Like the VSD of Fredersdorf that got turned into fics, but that I still put up, because it's *awesome*.
The other two are mostly plot hashing out, so if you've got plans for these, maybe we don't need to post them separately? I'll let you decide.
2) The Google doc is being drafted already and will be shared shortly, this weekend if I don't have time to finish this week. Just in time for nominations!
do you want me to do Rococo babysitting, Voltaire to the rescue, and handsome hussar?
Go ahead. If I manage to turn any of them into a proper tale, it won't harm there being an outline at our community, and if someone else should feel inspired, I'll be as delighted as I was when the three of us managed to come up with the Christmas of '32 simultanously! And yes, group them thematically, i.e. the Rococo babysitting can go together in both versions, etc.. ;)
All ficlets, prompts, discussions, and emojis that I can remember off the top of my head are now in the library! If you think of one I missed, either add it, or let me know (with a link to the discussion if possible, otherwise, I'll do my best).
Finishing and sharing the Google doc with prompts is next on my todo list.
Added a couple more items to rheinsberg, and put the prompt organization list in the library in Google. You should be able to see and edit it, but if not, let me know.
A list of prompts we've come up with is at the top. Feel free to add whatever I've missed.
Below that are our individual lists of favorite prompts we'd be happy to receive as gifts, in alphabetical order by name: cahn, mildred, selena. As you can see, I've started with my top 50, but don't be surprised if I think of more. :P
The entries in the table of contents are clickable and linkable: you can navigate to yours, and you can link to it if you want to point someone else to it.
Add yours!
ETA: Oh, mine is in no particular order. I'd be happy to get any all of them.
* cahn, having finished Wives and as part of my quest to follow in the footsteps of the great selenak, I'm getting ready to run Oster's Wilhelmine bio through the translator. Are you going to be doing it with me?
If so, I can make the paragraphs shorter with maybe half an hour of not-especially-tedious work, and I'm happy to do it if it helps your German practice. If not, I'll just translate it as-is, and I won't bother uploading the interleaved file (though I will generate one just in case you want it someday--the algorithm already generates it, so no extra work, yay automation).
* With the help of some Google-fu, Lady Mary's complete letters can be acquired at the present time for $67, including shipping: $54 for volumes 1 and 2, sold as a set, and $13 for volume 3. For 3 thick volumes, that's not a bad deal.
We could cross-reference with Wilhelmine's Italy travels and figure out when and where they could have met, and what they were up to around that time!
I'm up for contributing $40 and doing the scanning and uploading, if either of you are in a position to contribute the remaining $27, either individually or in combination. Otherwise, we can wait for selenak to see if she can get library copies when she's back in Munich next month.
Sure, I'll read it with you! I think with the caveat that I'm not necessarily going to be up for writing detailed comments (I WILL finish commenting on Wives, though) but I think I can commit to keeping up with your reading in English and responding to your comments :)
Interleaved would be great because I think it really does help even when I just look at it sporadically, although I am temporarily abandoning attempts to even quasi-seriously try to read anything right now and just doubling down on Duolingo, as I'm realizing I need a baseline syntax and vocab that I don't have yet. (I am, however, reading Le Petit Prince very slowly in French, but that's another story.)
I can contribute the remaining $27, though I will reserve the right to ask for a translation favor in return :) (I don't have one right now, but I'm sure I will at some point :P )
Yay! Tbh, I might not be up for detailed comments either, especially as my reading speeds up and Yuletide starts to happen.
Would shorter paragraphs help? I won't count that as your translation favor, or only a small percentage of it. ;)
I can contribute the remaining $27, though I will reserve the right to ask for a translation favor in return :) (I don't have one right now, but I'm sure I will at some point :P )
Also yay! Translation favors for books is the best barter system. :D ETA: Plus of course the reading and summarizing of said books!
just doubling down on Duolingo, as I'm realizing I need a baseline syntax and vocab that I don't have yet.
This all sounds great and makes perfect sense. I'm happy that you're studying German!
Random insertion of paragraph breaks has concluded; tomorrow, I'll run the file through the translator and upload the results to the library.
Tomorrow I'm also going to finish the last few pages of volume 1 of Wilhelmine's memoirs: go me! I'm 10 pages from the end and going to try to do a few more before bed.
(I am, however, reading Le Petit Prince very slowly in French, but that's another story.)
Zomg. I'm going to have to work hard to catch up when the time comes!
Go you indeed! Since you're already familiar with the English translation of Wilhelmine's memoirs, I'm curious: does the tone strike you as different due to the language, or the same?
This is where I admit my German is still at the stage where a lot of this happens:
A word: *is German* Me: I know that's a compliment. Which compliment, I forget, but that's good enough. Moving on!
That kind of plowing ahead when it's "good enough" is why my German is progressing so quickly: I trust that my future self will know the things my present self doesn't, and so far that's working out as planned. But it does mean things like tone are a little harder to pick up on at this stage.
Also, the tone of the English translation is partly masked by the translator's choice to render it in English that is not only a hundred years old now, but was an artificially lofty, learned style even then: the English of a great many Classical translations that were trying to be as stilted as possible (some much worse than the Wilhelmine edition I'm using) and that the modern-day Classics student gets stuck with, because they're public domain and easily accessible.
"Contributed to render me acquainted with the usages of society" is not how anyone talks now, not even my dissertation advisor, who has the most Latinate English of anyone I've ever known, and if you read other stuff from a hundred years ago, you can tell the man on the street wasn't talking like that back then, either. You had to learn to write like that.
So unfortunately I have to make a conscious effort to see past it and perceive a tone other than "sounds really stilted to the modern ear."
I can tell you the sarcasm comes through in both translations! Yesterday I got to the Wusterhausen part, and it was full of complimentary words, immediately after a description of just how terrible it was. "Such was the delightful place we were staying at. This is what the glamorous front hall looked like." That sort of thing. :D
Zomg. I'm going to have to work hard to catch up when the time comes!
This totally made me laugh, because reading Le Petit Prince is actually a reaction to knowing I'm going to have to work to catch up with you when you start French :P I figure if I read one page a day, that in fifty days... I'll be approximating what you do in one day :PP
(My French is solid enough, and Prince has simple enough grammar and vocabulary, that even when I was in school I would have been able to read it -- I think it is pretty standard reading curriculum for high school French, and I would have read it in high school had I not moved schools at that point. It's a step down from e.g. Voigt, although I should possibly get a Voigt in French to compare.)
I figure if I read one page a day, that in fifty days... I'll be approximating what you do in one day :PP
Heee. Well, I do have a lot of *time* on my hands, and I'm more committed to making this happen now, it's true. :)
I just know there's a good chance I'll never be this motivated to study French or German again, and if I get my reading skills to a reasonable place now, then I can hopefully *maintain* them such that I can use them for other things. Like especially in Classics, there's a bunch of stuff I want to read in German, but not badly enough to study German for. But with reading group, and gossip, and so forth, now's the time!
I think it is pretty standard reading curriculum for high school French
So I gather, but as you know, I went to an unacademic high school, and after I took all the French that was offered, we still weren't reading anything. We were still just doing textbook exercises consisting of individual sentences, Duolingo-style.
We did The Little Prince in eleventh-grade *English*. Not that we weren't also doing more complicated English prose, but we certainly were not in a position to read that in French. To the extent that I can make heads or tails of French for Frederician purposes, it's because I'm generally good at languages and picked some things up here and there since then, not because my high school French got me up to being able to read entire paragraphs. (Because why send your intellectually talented, ambitious, and frustrated daughter to decent schools, when you could tell her the quality of her education doesn't matter and send her to some of the lowest-ranked ones in two of the lowest-ranked states for education in the US. Though at least no one beat me for studying Latin! Poor Fritz.)
But now I have a method! And I have plans! But before then, I have a long reading list for German. Plus hopefully Yuletide. So you should have more than 50 days to practice. :)
Actually, what with Yuletide, I might actually not start French until next year. We'll see. I did tell Royal Patron we're not starting Greek as soon as I'd originally projected, what with me getting serious about German, then RMSE happening, possibly Yuletide, and hopefully French, lol.
We did The Little Prince in eleventh-grade *English*. Not that we weren't also doing more complicated English prose, but we certainly were not in a position to read that in French.
*blinks* Well, I'm glad you appended that note about doing more complicated English prose, because... what?? But still.
We were still just doing textbook exercises consisting of individual sentences, Duolingo-style.
Yeah, that's not right. My first high school had surprisingly good French, which meant that the second year when we walked in the teacher started talking to us in French and expecting us to respond in same, which we were all very upset by :) (But it turns out that this kind of on-the-fly practice is a really great way to force language learning!) My second high school had great everything except my history teacher, who was terrible (although there is evidence she used to be less bad and was going through some personal problems that year), and the French teacher wasn't nearly as good as my old one. We didn't read books in my third-year class (which first!French teacher would have made us do) but we did read paragraphs!
Now, what your class reminds me of is my Spanish class (at first high school). I don't think I have mentioned before that I took a year of Spanish, which is because I learned and retain next to zero from that class. My parents really wanted me to take Spanish, as it's such a useful language to know in the US, and as an adult living in SoCal I don't disagree with their assessment -- it would certainly be a practical language to know. (Though French was definitely the right choice in terms of life happiness -- useful in a wide range of literary, historical, and musical contexts! :D )
We spent every class, every day, doing the exercises from the book (which are much more repetitive than Duolingo) -- you know, I have this vague memory that we didn't even do them ourselves; I think the teacher told us the answer and we wrote it down -- and then we would be tested on exactly those exercises. This meant that it was much easier to memorize the exercises that one would be tested on than it was to actually learn the language. So I'd dutifully memorize the exercises, and then promptly forget them, and so I know no Spanish. (Well, I mean, living in SoCal, and having done French and Italian, I know enough to pick out words and such, but I can't understand or read as much as I could after even a semester of, say, Italian.)
My cunning plan to get us the complete set of the Lady Mary correspondence has failed: I got a refund instead of a replacement from the bookseller. Since it was a used book, my guess is that the seller entered the wrong volume number when typing up the details for this book, and they don't actually have a copy of volume 3 to send me.
So, we have volumes 1-2 (not yet digitized), which cover the period up to 1751. Which is nice and all, but doesn't cover the period of Wilhelmine's visit!
I will keep my eye out for v. 3, but right now, the cheapest I can find it is $55, which, no.
Oh, cahn, since I got a refund, I will divide it proportionately with you, which means you have $5 in future book bribe credits, and $15 in future translation favors. ;)
[ETA: I'm an idiot. You gave me $27, which means you have $22 in translation favors after subtracting the $5 refund.]
Also, I can't believe I'd forgotten this, but I did actually work as a librarian's assistant in my high school library (for course credit, not for money). I helped with shelving, cataloguing (you won't be surprised I helped us go digital with our card catalogue back in 2000), and acquisition (you won't be surprised this was my favorite part :P). I wouldn't do it for a career as long as I had better options, but it's definitely up my alley as a hobby!
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timeasmymeasure
Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-15 04:35 pm (UTC)Fanworks are still at the top, but if we accumulate enough of them, they'll get a designated folder too. :)
2)
his trashy tell all memoirs. Which, [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard, yes, I'd like to have in the library. I mean, sadly due to grandson censorship they're missing the vital years of 1730 to 1732, and thus can't tell us among other things how Uncle George first reacted when he heard what went down in Prussia with FW and Fritz, but maybe there are other useful quotes in them, and they do sound very entertaining.
Bowdlerized memoirs in the library, with obligatory 19th century editorial disclaimer that it was perfectly acceptable to be coarse then, so much so that he wishes he could have bowdlerized *more*, but the memoirs wouldn't make sense with entire passages suppressed, so he contented himself with some lacunae and rewriting. Sigh. Someone bring him his smelling salts.
If I find a more complete copy, I'll let you know, but for now, this is what we have. There appears to be a more modern (but still 1960s) edition, that's severely abridged down to less than 300 pages.
3) Lady Hervey's letters are also in the library, in the correspondence folder.
Also, any time you want anything, whether it be Lord Hervey's memoirs or an English or German translation of Voltaire on short notice, let me know, and I'll see what I can do! It's not like I hesitate to ask you to read things for us. ;)
4) And because I couldn't resist, also the memoirs of Princess Dashkova. We haven't talked about her, but she was Catherine's BFF, helped put her on the throne, headed the Russian academy of sciences, and seems generally cool. And in keeping with our Enlightenment theme!
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-16 03:23 am (UTC)1) As you've no doubt seen, I'm getting our fic endeavors transferred over to
I haven't tagged for characters yet, because this is tedious enough already. I'm sure they'll get tagged someday, either by me, or...I think you can tag posts other people have made in the community, even if you can't edit them, so if anyone wanted to help out, I wouldn't say no. ;)
The other two are mostly plot hashing out, so if you've got plans for these, maybe we don't need to post them separately? I'll let you decide.
2) The Google doc is being drafted already and will be shared shortly, this weekend if I don't have time to finish this week. Just in time for nominations!
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-16 06:31 am (UTC)Go ahead. If I manage to turn any of them into a proper tale, it won't harm there being an outline at our community, and if someone else should feel inspired, I'll be as delighted as I was when the three of us managed to come up with the Christmas of '32 simultanously! And yes, group them thematically, i.e. the Rococo babysitting can go together in both versions, etc.. ;)
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-16 02:51 pm (UTC)Finishing and sharing the Google doc with prompts is next on my todo list.
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-16 08:20 pm (UTC)A list of prompts we've come up with is at the top. Feel free to add whatever I've missed.
Below that are our individual lists of favorite prompts we'd be happy to receive as gifts, in alphabetical order by name: cahn, mildred, selena. As you can see, I've started with my top 50, but don't be surprised if I think of more. :P
The entries in the table of contents are clickable and linkable: you can navigate to yours, and you can link to it if you want to point someone else to it.
Add yours!
ETA: Oh, mine is in no particular order. I'd be happy to get any all of them.
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-22 03:12 pm (UTC)If so, I can make the paragraphs shorter with maybe half an hour of not-especially-tedious work, and I'm happy to do it if it helps your German practice. If not, I'll just translate it as-is, and I won't bother uploading the interleaved file (though I will generate one just in case you want it someday--the algorithm already generates it, so no extra work, yay automation).
* With the help of some Google-fu, Lady Mary's complete letters can be acquired at the present time for $67, including shipping: $54 for volumes 1 and 2, sold as a set, and $13 for volume 3. For 3 thick volumes, that's not a bad deal.
We could cross-reference with Wilhelmine's Italy travels and figure out when and where they could have met, and what they were up to around that time!
I'm up for contributing $40 and doing the scanning and uploading, if either of you are in a position to contribute the remaining $27, either individually or in combination. Otherwise, we can wait for
Booooooooks. :D
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-22 04:41 pm (UTC)Interleaved would be great because I think it really does help even when I just look at it sporadically, although I am temporarily abandoning attempts to even quasi-seriously try to read anything right now and just doubling down on Duolingo, as I'm realizing I need a baseline syntax and vocab that I don't have yet. (I am, however, reading Le Petit Prince very slowly in French, but that's another story.)
I can contribute the remaining $27, though I will reserve the right to ask for a translation favor in return :) (I don't have one right now, but I'm sure I will at some point :P )
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-22 04:47 pm (UTC)Yay! Tbh, I might not be up for detailed comments either, especially as my reading speeds up and Yuletide starts to happen.
Would shorter paragraphs help? I won't count that as your translation favor, or only a small percentage of it. ;)
I can contribute the remaining $27, though I will reserve the right to ask for a translation favor in return :) (I don't have one right now, but I'm sure I will at some point :P )
Also yay! Translation favors for books is the best barter system. :D ETA: Plus of course the reading and summarizing of said books!
Daughter of ETA: Books have been ordered!
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-22 05:40 pm (UTC)I'll try to contribute tonight; if I don't, then send me a reminder, the organizational parts of my brain have been mush lately :)
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-23 02:57 am (UTC)This all sounds great and makes perfect sense. I'm happy that you're studying German!
Random insertion of paragraph breaks has concluded; tomorrow, I'll run the file through the translator and upload the results to the library.
Tomorrow I'm also going to finish the last few pages of volume 1 of Wilhelmine's memoirs: go me! I'm 10 pages from the end and going to try to do a few more before bed.
(I am, however, reading Le Petit Prince very slowly in French, but that's another story.)
Zomg. I'm going to have to work hard to catch up when the time comes!
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-23 02:17 pm (UTC)Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-24 01:05 am (UTC)A word: *is German*
Me: I know that's a compliment. Which compliment, I forget, but that's good enough. Moving on!
That kind of plowing ahead when it's "good enough" is why my German is progressing so quickly: I trust that my future self will know the things my present self doesn't, and so far that's working out as planned. But it does mean things like tone are a little harder to pick up on at this stage.
Also, the tone of the English translation is partly masked by the translator's choice to render it in English that is not only a hundred years old now, but was an artificially lofty, learned style even then: the English of a great many Classical translations that were trying to be as stilted as possible (some much worse than the Wilhelmine edition I'm using) and that the modern-day Classics student gets stuck with, because they're public domain and easily accessible.
"Contributed to render me acquainted with the usages of society" is not how anyone talks now, not even my dissertation advisor, who has the most Latinate English of anyone I've ever known, and if you read other stuff from a hundred years ago, you can tell the man on the street wasn't talking like that back then, either. You had to learn to write like that.
So unfortunately I have to make a conscious effort to see past it and perceive a tone other than "sounds really stilted to the modern ear."
I can tell you the sarcasm comes through in both translations! Yesterday I got to the Wusterhausen part, and it was full of complimentary words, immediately after a description of just how terrible it was. "Such was the delightful place we were staying at. This is what the glamorous front hall looked like." That sort of thing. :D
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-23 03:18 pm (UTC)Zomg. I'm going to have to work hard to catch up when the time comes!
This totally made me laugh, because reading Le Petit Prince is actually a reaction to knowing I'm going to have to work to catch up with you when you start French :P I figure if I read one page a day, that in fifty days... I'll be approximating what you do in one day :PP
(My French is solid enough, and Prince has simple enough grammar and vocabulary, that even when I was in school I would have been able to read it -- I think it is pretty standard reading curriculum for high school French, and I would have read it in high school had I not moved schools at that point. It's a step down from e.g. Voigt, although I should possibly get a Voigt in French to compare.)
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-24 01:42 am (UTC)Heee. Well, I do have a lot of *time* on my hands, and I'm more committed to making this happen now, it's true. :)
I just know there's a good chance I'll never be this motivated to study French or German again, and if I get my reading skills to a reasonable place now, then I can hopefully *maintain* them such that I can use them for other things. Like especially in Classics, there's a bunch of stuff I want to read in German, but not badly enough to study German for. But with reading group, and gossip, and so forth, now's the time!
I think it is pretty standard reading curriculum for high school French
So I gather, but as you know, I went to an unacademic high school, and after I took all the French that was offered, we still weren't reading anything. We were still just doing textbook exercises consisting of individual sentences, Duolingo-style.
We did The Little Prince in eleventh-grade *English*. Not that we weren't also doing more complicated English prose, but we certainly were not in a position to read that in French. To the extent that I can make heads or tails of French for Frederician purposes, it's because I'm generally good at languages and picked some things up here and there since then, not because my high school French got me up to being able to read entire paragraphs. (Because why send your intellectually talented, ambitious, and frustrated daughter to decent schools, when you could tell her the quality of her education doesn't matter and send her to some of the lowest-ranked ones in two of the lowest-ranked states for education in the US. Though at least no one beat me for studying Latin! Poor Fritz.)
But now I have a method! And I have plans! But before then, I have a long reading list for German. Plus hopefully Yuletide. So you should have more than 50 days to practice. :)
Actually, what with Yuletide, I might actually not start French until next year. We'll see. I did tell Royal Patron we're not starting Greek as soon as I'd originally projected, what with me getting serious about German, then RMSE happening, possibly Yuletide, and hopefully French, lol.
Language classes
Date: 2020-09-27 04:08 am (UTC)*blinks* Well, I'm glad you appended that note about doing more complicated English prose, because... what?? But still.
We were still just doing textbook exercises consisting of individual sentences, Duolingo-style.
Yeah, that's not right. My first high school had surprisingly good French, which meant that the second year when we walked in the teacher started talking to us in French and expecting us to respond in same, which we were all very upset by :) (But it turns out that this kind of on-the-fly practice is a really great way to force language learning!) My second high school had great everything except my history teacher, who was terrible (although there is evidence she used to be less bad and was going through some personal problems that year), and the French teacher wasn't nearly as good as my old one. We didn't read books in my third-year class (which first!French teacher would have made us do) but we did read paragraphs!
Now, what your class reminds me of is my Spanish class (at first high school). I don't think I have mentioned before that I took a year of Spanish, which is because I learned and retain next to zero from that class. My parents really wanted me to take Spanish, as it's such a useful language to know in the US, and as an adult living in SoCal I don't disagree with their assessment -- it would certainly be a practical language to know. (Though French was definitely the right choice in terms of life happiness -- useful in a wide range of literary, historical, and musical contexts! :D )
We spent every class, every day, doing the exercises from the book (which are much more repetitive than Duolingo) -- you know, I have this vague memory that we didn't even do them ourselves; I think the teacher told us the answer and we wrote it down -- and then we would be tested on exactly those exercises. This meant that it was much easier to memorize the exercises that one would be tested on than it was to actually learn the language. So I'd dutifully memorize the exercises, and then promptly forget them, and so I know no Spanish. (Well, I mean, living in SoCal, and having done French and Italian, I know enough to pick out words and such, but I can't understand or read as much as I could after even a semester of, say, Italian.)
Re: Librarian update
Date: 2020-09-30 10:07 pm (UTC)So, we have volumes 1-2 (not yet digitized), which cover the period up to 1751. Which is nice and all, but doesn't cover the period of Wilhelmine's visit!
I will keep my eye out for v. 3, but right now, the cheapest I can find it is $55, which, no.
Oh,
[ETA: I'm an idiot. You gave me $27, which means you have $22 in translation favors after subtracting the $5 refund.]
Also, I can't believe I'd forgotten this, but I did actually work as a librarian's assistant in my high school library (for course credit, not for money). I helped with shelving, cataloguing (you won't be surprised I helped us go digital with our card catalogue back in 2000), and acquisition (you won't be surprised this was my favorite part :P). I wouldn't do it for a career as long as I had better options, but it's definitely up my alley as a hobby!