The Emilie Loring Collection

B is for Biography

I visited my hometown of Tempe, Arizona last weekend and stopped in to visit Happy Landings at the local, public library.

Oh, how nice. The book was right where the card catalog said it would be, and it was turned outward to face browsing library patrons. Splendid.

But wait! On the way to its library location, I passed a whole section marked “BIOGRAPHY.” Shouldn’t Happy Landings be there? Where was it?

Now, that’s funny!

Emilie Loring’s biography was shelved under 818 in the Dewey Decimal System. A fellow named Jerry at the Answer Desk looked that up and asked, “Is it a book of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, riddles, tongue twisters, etc.? Is it a long form work of humor?”

“Not intentionally,” I replied.

I left my card, and Jerry promised to question the library’s catalogers.

Height matters

This followed on the heels of visiting the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor a few weeks before. The Jesup is one of the prettiest libraries I know, and their staff was the friendliest and most helpful of the places where I delivered book talks last year. Moreover, they shelved Happy Landings in their biography section where it belongs–B for Biography, LORING for the biography’s subject.

Even so, there was a wee problem…

Oh dear. Jesup’s shelves are of fixed height, and you can see on the adjacent shelf what that means for a book like mine that is built on a larger format. It is stuck in headfirst, no title, no spine showing.

I flipped Happy Landings around to let a browswer’s eye alight on the cover, but I have no illusions that this placement will last. If Emilie’s biography is to be found at the Jesup library, the reader will have to be looking for it by call number and be curious enough to pull out the non-conforming book in that place to see if that’s the one.

Maine Author

The Blue Hill Public Library shelved Happy Landings in their Blue Hill Reading Room, classified first for Maine, then B for Biography and LORING for the subject. Easily found, just right.

The Maine State Library in Augusta also classified the book with B for Biography: B L8735b 2023 , cross-listing the work in several biography subject areas.

Subject	Loring, Emilie Baker
	Women authors, American — Biography
	Novelists, American — Biography
	Loring, Emilie Baker
	Maine — Biography

Et tu, Lawrence?

I double-checked my local library in Lawrence to see where they placed Happy Landings. The Dewey Decimal System uses 920-928 for biographies, shelved by the subject’s last name. Accordingly, Happy Landings: Emilie Loring’s Life, Writing, and Wisdom might have been assigned “920 LORING.”

Let’s see how it was numbered… uh oh.

813.52 LORING E

“813.52” stands for American fiction produced in the first half of the twentieth century, and LORING E is the supposed author of this work. If this were Hilltops Clear, that would be the right classification. Other books numbered 813.52 in the Lawrence Public Library include The Great Gatsby, Charlotte’s Web, The Good Earth, and Goodnight Moon.

Fellow Boston Biographer Patti Hartigan’s book on August Wilson is just to the left of mine in this photo. Her biography is numbered 812.54 for American Drama, 1945-1999, with WILSON A as the figure in that field about whom the biography is written, and HARTIGAN as the author of the biography. By that system, we could have:

813.52
LORING E
BENDER

Trust the Bostonians

Primed for difficulty, I searched the Boston Athenaeum’s collection online and found:

Happy Landings: Emilie Loring’s Life, Writing and Wisdom, Patti Bender, Athenaeum copy signed by author.

Library of Congress classification: CT275.L665 B46 2023

It was just right. Why did I doubt?

Class “C” in the Library of Congress system is for “Auxiliary Sciences of History.” That’s a curious term, but it includes history of civilization, archaeology, and diplomatics, as well as numismatics, epigraphy (ancient inscriptions), heraldry, genealogy, and, finally, biography.

Each subtopic has its own two-letter designation. That for biography is “CT.” The numbers that follow further divide the category–in our case, “CT275” indicates a biography about an important person living in or associated with the United States.

Go to the Source: The Library of Congress

To underscore this latest result, I went straight to the source–the Library of Congress online catalog. What did I find?

PS3523.O645 Z35 2023

PS? Not CT? “PS” designates American Literature, 1900-1960. And “3523.O645” is Emilie Loring’s unique number, the same that is used on her novels. This may have been why the Lawrence library used a literature call number.

Why isn’t Emilie Loring’s biography classified CT? I have written to the Library of Congress asking for clarification or correction.

It’s hard enough to get an audience to read a new biography without hiding it in the wrong place. I’ll admit, however, that I’m not the expert here, and maybe I’m off base. It is the nation’s library, after all. I’ll let you know how they respond.

What’s in a number?

The call number we look up in a library’s catalog is an address, and it’s important to get it right. Once we have found our book, we can browse nearby shelves for more books in the same subject area that we might like to read. That which we call a biography, by any other number would … never be found.

After returning home, I checked online at the Tempe Public Library to see if there had been any change in the call number for Happy Landings: Emilie Loring’s Life, Writing, and Wisdom. There had! Good job, librarians, and thank you, Jerry at the Answer Desk, for pursuing it.

Emilie Loring’s biography is right where it belongs, ready to be discovered.

Happy Landings!