It was quite the trek to the library on a hot Saturday afternoon. Yep, decided to bike there. It’s not that far, and although I’m in the city, it’s not that bad, if you just keep chuggin’ and pay no attention to the cars swerving and swearing.
I’d just finished reading the first of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke and Key graphic novel series. I wanted to get the next set of stories as quick as I could, so here I am at the library, sweaty and winded. I’d seen on the interwebs at home it was available at my local branch, so I’d just go return the first book and get the next. Easy right?
I pad my way over to the catalog computer, look up the title, and, huh, can’t for the life of me find the call number. Ya’ know that crazy Dewey decimal number or whatever. So I ask the librarian, do I just look up my book by author? I mean, usually, I’ll order it online, then they send an email, then I go fetch it under my name and check it out in self-checkout.
But today, there was no call number – wait, there was – “Graphic Novel Oversized Locke & Key v 2.” Really? Yep, that was the call number. Weirdness. That ain’t a number. Okay, so I go downstairs past periodicals to the graphic novels – where the librarian had directed me. But I’m in the teen section. It has YA in the “call number,” so I’m looking around, way too long, as these kids read their manga next to me, and finally, lucky for me a librarian comes by, so I ask. I’m in “Graphic Novel Oversized…” etc. No, she says, you need to go to adult.
Oh.
So I follow her to adult and she sees my ISBN, it was the only number I could find, so I wrote it down, so she thinks I’m looking for biographies, I say no, that’s the really weird call number – “Graphic Novel Oversized Locke & Key v 2.” She finds the book for me. I’m say thanks, sheepishly embarrassed.
I trot upstairs to check it out. I get upstairs with my book, and I’m grabbing my wallet out of my messenger bag, and this librarian asks if I need help checking out in the automated self-help system. I say uh, no, but mostly I’ve just used the one over there. I wasn’t sure if I should go to the librarian when I am actually checking out a book when it hasn’t been put on hold for me. So she painfully walks me through the self checkout system, clicking through for me, holding my card under the laser, like I’m a complete moron. Okay, so maybe I am, but the joke is still how many librarians does it take to check out a Graphic Novel? It would seem, three – the same number of licks it takes to get to the chewy chocolate center of a Tootsie Pop – three.
Locke and Key is a graphic novel series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez published by IDW.