On the Job

To get rid of our budget surplus I contacted some of our reliable spendthrifts. N.P., our European history prof, is teaching a new course in the fall on food history and so requested about $1,000 worth of books in the field, including such appealing titles as The Primal Cheeseburger and Garlic and Oil. The music prof has promised to submit requests for scores and CDs. (We really need to beef up our jazz collection, by the way.) Mr. Poli Sci is going to go through some catalogs. And I've taken it upon myself to order some things of personal interest, most of it justifiably relevant to our mission (although I don't know about the H. P. Lovecraft anthology). I continue to be surprised at the gaps in our catalog: I noticed we don't have any Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, or Allan Ginsberg.