The Clerk Manifesto

  Once upon a time here, in a Winter shortly before a trip with my dear wife to Venice, Italy, I made a little tour video of Venice. But the...

  No, this is not another Bob Dylan sketch.  I am here to say that, despite taking a few stabs at it, I did not turn out to be the voice of ...

  Okay, I'll admit it. John Constable, English painter, is not the only one around here obsessed with volcanoes. I have a thing for volc...

  A regular clerkmanifesto reader asks: After writing nearly 4,000 daily missives here do you ever find the well runs dry? No. Because whene...

  A librarian came to the front desk with an old man. They were looking for the room meeting schedule. The librarian said the man was lookin...

  A library regular patron teased me because I used a phrase with a woman I helped before him. The phrase was "Almost certainly", ...

You know the question posed by the Ship of Theseus? This is where one has a ship, and who doesn't have a ship! And one replaces a bit of...

We are living in the idealized nostalgia of the future. To someone fifty years from now we are experiencing the thrilling, unreproducible ch...

    Killer title, eh? The first picture today is, well, not great. And you are maybe thinking "What if you added a few more elements to...

  At what I take to be a combination Halloween/Birthday party, circa 1968, all judging from the footage taken of the day, there I am, dresse...

  I am working at the front desk of my library, and I am registering a new library card. It was running along pretty smoothly until we came ...

  It was an unpleasantly hot Labor Day morning and I was waiting for blog inspiration to come to me so I could write today's column. It ...

  Yesterday clerkmanifesto was taken over by an AI. Or was it?  We employed here a technique known as the "Kinks/Lola Technique". ...

  I got an email this morning instructing me to use Bard, the AI Google assistant that can simulate human writing to occasionally plausible ...

  A book I have slowly been reading and talking about here, Debt, The First 5,000 Years , by David Graeber, is full of anecdotes, stories, ...

  My feet hurt. My knee is aching. My wrist is starting to act up. I've over-shelved. Today at my library we were jampacked with carts o...

  I am learning a lot from the rich and erudite book written by the late David Graeber, entitled Debt: The First 5,000 Years . You might eve...

  There is a library regular who likes to tell me jokes. No, that is an understatement, he loves to tell me jokes. When I see him coming in ...

  I don't always mean to be nice to library patrons. It's just that sometimes I can't help it. Here's an example: A library ...

Today I have made ten improvements to a painting by John Constable. Can the John Constable scholars out there name all ten? There is a huge ...