My father’s father was born in Konjsko Brdo, Croatia in 1903; he left for Canada in 1926, and sometime after that my great-grandfather’s family relocated to Dišnik, in northeastern Croatia, a village just north of the city of Kutina.

This fact of my ancestry explains why I’ve visited this small town of some 20,000 people that you’ve never heard of. Twice.

The first time was in October 2004 when my father and I visited as part of a father-and-son exploration of our Croatian roots. At the time we didn’t know of our family’s pilgrimage from Konjsko Brdo, and we’d been led to the area on the off chance that we might locate my father’s cousin Regina Arace, who was rumoured to live there. We didn’t find Regina (although we found her house), but we did find my father’s last surviving aunt, Manda, and her husband Iva Baretic, living in a small house nearby. As I wrote at the time, this was a huge surprise, as we’d no idea that my grandfather had younger siblings:

By some miraculous series of events that involved a trip to a bookie, a trip to the police station (for information, not arrest), and about a dozen extremely helpful Croatians who sent us “up the hill, to the right, until where the pavement ends and you come to a vineyard,” at 4:00 p.m. we found ourselves driving our little Renault down a rough country lane towards a fedora-wearing man leaning on a fence. Dad asked, in his best Croatian, “can you direct us to Manda´s house?”

“This is Manda´s house!” was his response. We had found the house of my step-great-Aunt Manda and her husband Ivo. Manda’s father Stipe is my great-grandfather. We were invited into their humble farmhouse, fed a meal of cured ham and whisky (Dad drank the whisky — I was driving), and Dad pulled off an amazing facsimile of a native Croatian speaker to engage them in conversation about family connections, family history, and their life.

Here’s a photo of Manda, my father, and Ivo:

And here’s me and Manda and her dog:

The experience of discovering long-lost family is and will remain one of the highlights of my traveling life, and, I think, of my father’s as well.

That evening, eager to go back the next day for another visit, we booked a room at the Hotel Kutina, in the nearest town that had a hotel.

The next day we did, indeed, go back, bringing gifts and engaging in some more catch-up about the previous century. And then we were off south, where even more family discoveries awaited us.

Six years later, in December of 2010, I went back to Kutina, this time with Oliver and Catherine.

Our trip had started in Munich, continued to Basel, then Venice, Ljubljana and finally Croatia. We booked ourselves a room at the same Hotel Kutina; it was colder in December than it had been on the first visit in October, and the hotel, if memory serves, was either missing hot water or heat. Or maybe both. But at least there were blankets:

Here’s Oliver and Catherine in front of the hotel:

The next day we went in search of Manda and Ivo; I was eager to introduce Oliver to his great-great-Aunt and her husband, and for Catherine and Oliver to see something of rural Croatia.

To our dismay, while visiting the graveyard in Dišnik we found Ivo’s grave; there was no grave for Manda, however, and we were hopeful that she was still alive.

Through a rather miraculous and circuitous connection involving the Peruvian branch of the Rukavinas, we were able to find Manda in a Red Cross-Red Crescent nursing home nearby. Here’s a photo of Manda and Oliver:

It was a challenging visit: we spoke no Croatian, Manda spoke no English, and by this time she was in advanced stages of dementia. But we all tried our best, and I think the visit brought a little light into all of our lives.

Again bidding farewell to Manda and leaving greater Kutina, we too headed south for more family adventures.

This is all a very long-winded preamble to a brief note that Kutina achieved some small measure of fame in the latest telling of John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl.

In episode 3, Charlie, played by Florence Pugh, is driving a Mercedes from Greece to Austria, and stops in Kutina for the night. She stops at the Hotel Glavina, a hotel that, as far as I can determine, is fictional.

Here’s an (audioless) clip showing Charlie’s arrival in Kutina, and her meetup with an undercover agent:

They go on to play a short game of Scrabble by way of communicating secrets to each other.

One minute and twenty-one seconds of the episode are set in Kutina.

(If you liked this post, check out William Denton’s rigorous cataloging of the appearances of libraries in Archie comics).

The Guardian published a guest opinion piece I wrote on The Autism Secretariat Act, which received first reading in the Legislative Assembly this week.

This bill is a reasonable and straightforward call for the establishment of cabinet-level responsibility for autism; I believe that it’s a small step in the right direction toward coordinating programs and services for autistic Islanders.

It’s been an odd experience to be invested in the passage of a bill to this extent, and I’ve spent a lot of my time this week reaching out to MLAs to try to explain why I feel this way, and to ask them to support the bill.

It’s also odd, of course, to be supporting a bill or forward by a Progressive Conservative member when I’ve no affiliation with the party; but politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows, and I believe PC MLA Sidney MacEwen has put forward the bill for all the right reasons: he’s talked to constituents, distilled a problem from what they’ve told him, and is proposing a change to address the issue.

I think the plan is for the bill to receive second reading on Tuesday evening; I am hopeful that it will receive all-party support and move forward.

Every morning during the school year I drive Oliver from our house to Colonel Gray Senior High School, a distance of 1.74 km one-way.

Oliver sent me a link to Mission Emission this morning, a calculator for vehicle emissions, and I used it to determine the emissions from this daily school run, which it calculates are 537g of CO₂.

Doubling that–because I drive back home immediately afterward on the same route–gives me a figure of 1074g of CO₂ per day, or, over 180 school days, 193 kilograms of CO₂ per year.

If Oliver and I were to bicycle to school instead of driving, our daily impact would go from 1074g of CO₂ to 20g of CO₂, which is a dramatic decrease to 3.6 kilograms per year.

Walking to school would achieve a similar although slightly less impressive result, lowering our impact to 7.9 kilograms per year.

Of course, as with all discussions of emissions and climate change, the invisibility of CO₂ and the attendant difficulty in imagining what these numbers mean in real terms in our daily life is part of the challenge of behaviour modification: in this regard I found the recent IPCC report incredibly motivating, as it calls for net-zero by 2050, and net-zero emissions is something I can wrap my head around.

Moving from 193 kg of CO to 3.6 of kg is getting pretty close to net-zero: it’s a 98% reduction in emissions for our school run.

This documentary short tells the sad and yet somehow delightful story of the famous IKEA photograph of Amsterdam that appears on walls all around the world.

Filmmaker Tom Roes tracked down the brother of the late Fernando Bengoechea, who took the photograph, and learned the story of how the photo was taken, and how it came to be acquired by IKEA.

The intersection of private detective work, journalism,  film-making and YouTube can be a very interesting place indeed.

There’s a little more of the story in this blog post by Roes (and if you’re English-speaking, be sure to turn on subtitles when you watch the documentary).

It turns out that when Oliver and I were in Amsterdam in early September we came within a block of the location where the photo was taken; here’s my Google Location History for September 3, 2018, with a red star showing the location near the intersection of Brouwersgracht and Herengracht:

Because this autumn wasn’t already exciting enough, fates connived to cause our roof to start leaking last month. We got by with a temporary patch job and a fleet of buckets in the attic, but the fall rains got the best of us, and I feared a completely meltdown come midwinter or spring thaw.

Fortunately, by some miracle of scheduling and logistics, MacBeth Bros. were able to squeeze in our job last week. Their crew is dynamite: they threaded the needle of roofing through the rain and snow and sleet and they got it done: the front roof went up on Tuesday, the back roof on Thursday, and the vestibules on Friday.

We’ve got more infrastructure work ahead of us this fall, as the roof worked showed up some issues with our chimney, and we have a longstanding job to insulate the attic that we really need to attend to. But we’ve made a good start.

The aforementioned fates, seeing that we’d taken control of things, decided to up the ante and caused our upstairs toilet to leak, which damaged our kitchen ceiling; fortunately this was covered by our PEI Mutual insurance policy, so this work was quickly attended to and the paint went up on the kitchen ceiling on Friday.

In the grander scheme of things we have nothing to complain about: we can afford to pay the bills, we have food on our plates and hot water in our radiators, and we’re ready to take on the winter.

How did I not notice this URL before, an homage to one of the great television characters of all time.

O’Reilly Radar is now O’Reilly Ideas, which is way, way less fun.

In Political Studies class this week, Oliver is learning about the differences between the economics spectrum and the political spectrum. This post from Stephanie Booth was a good jumping off point for our own discussion about this:

Ce matin, dans un podcast un intervenant remarquait que l’on avait été tellement bien éduqués à être des consommateurs qu’on réagissait en consommateurs et non en citoyens aux problèmes politiques ou de gouvernement. Je pense que c’est une remarque très juste, et que c’est grave. On ne résout pas les problèmes politiques en agissant comme des consommateurs mécontents.

In 2014 when I presented, on behalf of PEI Home and School Federation, to the Standing Committee on Education, during in the question and answer period with MLAs afterwards, I said “The education system is not Walmart,” and it’s this “We do not solve political problems by acting as dissatisfied consumers” sentiment that I was trying to convey. We are not customers of the public school system, we are actors in it, co-conspirators in the process of educating ourselves, all of us, as citizens.

Oliver rambling about the roof of the Duomo in Milan when he was 7 years old. It was an ethereal autumn day: crisp, bright, and foggy. On a remarkable building.

Every Saturday afternoon Oliver and I drive out to Crapaud so that he can spend 90 minutes working with Jennifer Brown, his excellent art teacher.

As Crapaud is 35 minutes drive from our house, it doesn’t make any sense for me to drive home while he’s there, and so I find something to occupy myself in Greater Crapaud for an hour and a half.

Since late May this has, pleasantly, involved driving the short drive to Victoria-by-the-Sea and setting down at Island Chocolates for a Factory Coffee, an otherworldly delight that involves a chocolate-lined tumbler filled with coffee and topped with whipped cream; it is the single regular concession I make to living a sugarless life.

It doesn’t take 90 minutes to down a Factory Coffee, but they of Island Chocolates are very accommodating if I set myself up with my sketchbook at a remote table–on the deck in the summer, inside in the autumn–and while away my time interpreting Victoria with a pen. As a result, I have an unusual number of sketches of things that are in, around, and across the street therefrom:

As the autumn drew on, I realized that there would come a day when the chocolate shop, and Victoria itself, would close for winter.

Circumstances kept us away from Victoria for the past three weeks, so yesterday, as it happened, was that day: I arrived, faintly hopeful of some “maybe we should open” bug in the system to, alas, find the blinds drawn and the “closed” sign in the window, and Victoria silent as silent can be. With no Factory Coffee to occupy myself, I had to be content with taking Ethan for a snowy, cold walk in the (also closed, but penetrable) beachfront park and then hunkering down in my car at the main intersection in the village, sketching in the cold.

My sketch does not do justice to the delta between summertime beehive of activity and wintertime snug-in-a-bugness, perhaps because I’ve left out the barren trees and the foreboding clouds.

There are 26 weeks until the May 24th weekend when Victoria starts opening its doors again. A lot of cold and snowy sketches to come before my next coffee.

How many times can I sketch the lighthouse?

After seeing Laurie Brown’s live Pondercast in Wolfville in October, I became curious about whether she’d ever written a book, and this curiosity led me to her 1994 Success without College: Days and Nights in Rock & Roll TV. When a copy wasn’t available from my local library, I made an inter-library loan request, and it arrived to day, a copy from the Westmount Public Library in Quebec.

Both of my parents are retired professional classifiers-of-things: my mother a librarian, my father a geologist; it seems inevitable that some of this would rub off on me. Which is how I ended up taking a deep dive into the artefacts that the library applied to the book: the stamps, stickers, pockets and related classification numbers.

Let us begin.

First, here are the front and back cover of the book:

While the front cover is free from ornamentation, the back cover has several ornaments, and we will start there.

The Barcode Sticker

First, in the top-right corner is the barcode sticker. According to the Westmount Public Library’s history page, the library was automated in 1995, and I suspect this barcode came as part of that process.

There’s lots of interesting information on this sticker:

Dewey Decimal Number

This is the Dewey Decimal Classification System number for this book, which, as a non-fiction book, identifies its subject matter. The Dewey system, like the US ZIP code and Canadian Postal Code systems, moves, from left to right, to increased specificity:

700 - Arts & Recreation
  780 - Music
     781 - Genres & Theories
       781.6 - Genres
         781.66 - Rock

So the 781.66 tells us “this is a book about rock music.”

Other books in the Westmount Public Library’s collection with the same Dewey classification include Shake it up: great American writing on rock and pop from Elvis to Jay Z, The history of rock ‘n’ roll in ten songs, and We gotta get out of this place: the true, tough story of women in Rock. These books would appear on the same shelf in the Westmount Library as Laurie Brown’s book.

Cataloguing is as much art as science, so there’s no guarantee that any two libraries will use the same Dewey number for the same book; for example, the Toronto Public Library catalogues Success without College as Dewey 306.484, which is “Social Sciences > Social Sciences, Sociology, Anthropology > Culture and Institutions > Specific aspects of culture > Recreation and performing arts > Music, dance, theater.” Indeed it’s this Dewey number that appears printed as part of the “Canadian Cataloging in Public Data” inside the book, so Westmount decided to go its own way on this.

The order these Dewey 781.66-classified books would appear in on the shelf is determined by the second number, the B878, which is called the “Cutter-Sanborn Number,” used to assist in shelving books alphabetically by author’s name.

There’s an algorithm for converting the name of the author into an alphanumeric code; there’s a helpful website here that can be used to find the Cutter-Sanborn code for an author’s name, and, sure enough, the code for Brown, Laurie is B878. Before the advent of digital tools like this, a table of names and codes was used; here’s an excerpt from the book Explanation of the Cutter-Sanborn Author-marks (three-figure Tables), that served as a guide to using these tables:

Some persons are apprehensive that this decimal arrangement will be hard to use, or at least hard to teach to stupid assistants and (when the public are allowed to go to the shelves) to a public unwilling to take the trouble to comprehend. It may be so sometimes; I can only say that I have never had any difficulty with anyone, boy or girl, man or woman, when the arrangement was explained as it is above.

The Barcode

Under the Dewey number, and the title of the book, is the barcode itself, which looks like a UPC code that you see on products in a grocery store.

The barcode is nothing more than a scanner-readable encoding of the number that appears under it, 36997001387989, and that translation from encoding-to-number can be done by a barcode reader or, these days, by a barcode scanner app on a mobile phone.

Here, for example, is what I see when I scan the code with my Android phone:

Barcodes come in different flavours, and as you can see in the barcode reader screen shot, the flavour used by Westmount is CODABAR, a system developed in 1972 by Pitney-Bowes; it’s the same system used to encode, among many other things, FedEx airbills.

Accession Number

The number 9422322 appears in the top-right corner of the barcode sticker: this represents the book’s accession number.

The accession number is a unique ID for the particular copy of the book, and it’s generally assigned chronologically as new books arrive at a library. In this case the “94” represents the year the book was acquired (we’ll see this year show up below again, inside the book), and the 22322 is the unique number assigned to this copy (again, it appears inside too, in several places).

While all the copies of the same book in a library will share the same Dewey Classification Number, each copy will have a unique accession number to identify it; that’s why the number appears both on the book, and on all the stickers, labels and pockets attached to the book: it lets them all get matched up when and if they are separated.

Date Due Sticker

Libraries have used a variety of systems over the years to tell patrons when the materials they’ve borrowed are due. This book is old enough to have spanned three systems, and this is one of them: a rubber stamp was applied to the sticker each time it was borrowed to indicate when it was due.

In this case there are four borrowing periods reflected, with due dates of March 10, 1996, January 17, 2000, August 19, 2000 and April 3, 2004. It’s likely that the 2 years between 1994 and 1996 used an earlier system, and the years since used some sort of receipt system that didn’t imprint the due date on the book itself.

Bookplate

Moving inside the book now, on the first page there’s a Westmount Public Library bookplate, a piece of paper pasted onto the page:

City Crest

The bookplate begins with the crest of the City of Westmount, a coat of arms that’s described here in dense heraldic language:

Per fess enarched Or and Purpure, issuant from chief a demi-sun in his splendour Argent rayed Gules, in base a rose branch fesswise, slipped at each end and leaved proper bearing two roses Argent and pendant from the middle of the branch an escutcheon Argent charged with the raven of Saint Anthony volant and bringing bread all proper; Above the shield is placed a mural coronet of three towers proper.

The motto on the crest, barely visible on the bookplate, is the Latin Robur meum civium fides, in English My strength is the faithfulness of my citizens.

Opened 1899

Below the crest is “Opened 1899,” which undersells the historic position of the library as the first tax-supported public library in the province of Quebec.

The library building then and now, which is stunning, was constructed as project to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. From the book Polishing the Jewel, published in 1995, our man Cutter, he of the alphabetizing system, enters our story again:

Councillor J.H. Redfem visited libraries in the Boston area and the Westmount planners embraced the ideas he brought back. Most bore the typical features of architect Henry Hobson Richardson: an arched entrance topped by a gabled roof and peaked tower. One of five Richardson designs contained in a report by the Connecticut Public Library Committee of 1895 and 1896 was originally proposed for Westmount.

The final design would reflect the Richardson influence as well as Findlay’s neoclassical back- ground and the functional input of librarian Gould.

Interesting was a controversy surrounding the five Richardson designs. Librarians generally opposed his cozy reading rooms and alcoves, light chairs and small tables. Elizabeth Hanson, in Libraries and Culture (Spring 1988), says the dispute prompted renowned librarian Charles A. Cutter, of the Forbes Institute in Northampton, Mass., to declare: “I think from our experience of architects’ plans that we can safely say the architect is the natural enemy of the librarian.”

Accession Number and Date

Next on the bookplate is the first appearance on the inside of the 22322 accession number that we first saw on the barcode label and, below that, the June 1994 date the book was originally received.

Pencil Notation

At the top of the title page is a notation in the right corner: NH ¶ 991695:

This one had me stumped, so I sent an email to the Westmount Public Library, and a librarian there helpfully replied:

The number penciled in on the title page is an encoding of the following information: vendor, library, and cost. The vendor for this book was Nicholas Hoare. The library, Westmount Public Library, was encoded as 99. And the cost of the book at the time of purchase was $16.95.

Nicholas Hoare was a venerable Canadian bookseller with three branches, one each in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, the last of which closed in 2013. The Montreal store was on 2165 Madison Ave. in Montreal, a short 10 minute drive from the Westmount library.

Title Page

Accession Number

Turning the page, to the title page of the book, we first see another instance of the accession number, stamped at the top in lovely red numbers:

Dewey Classification Number

Under author Laurie Brown’s name on the title page, with “Brown” underlined in pencil, is the Dewey Classification Number again. I presume that “Brown” was underlined by the cataloguing librarian as a guide to what last name should be used in the calculation of the B878 Cutter number.

Library Address Rubber Stamp

At the bottom of the title page the name and address of the Westmount Public Library is rubber-stamped; the cheaper paper of the paperback book was not kind to the rubber stamping, and the address is smudged enough to be open to interpretation (it’s 4574 Sherbrooke St, Westmount, Que):

Back Page

Date Due Slip

There are a variety of artefacts on the back page of the book, starting with what appears to be the first of the three generations of date due indicators, an index-card-sized grided sheet of paper, pasted at the top and titled “Date Due.”

There’s only one stamp on the slip, November 21, 1994, and I assume that’s the first time that the book was borrowed after its June 1994 acquisition (the June 1994 date appears under the slip of paper, rubber stamped); the date due sticker on the back picks up after this with a March 1996 loan.

Card Pocket

Below this Date Due Slip there’s a card pocket with a card tucked inside it, with information typewritten on it:

At the top of the card pocket on the left is the 22322 accession number, and on the left is the Dewey number; below those appears the author Brown’s last name and the short form of the title of the book.

Below these is a blue sticker, in French, that reads:

Durée de prêt
14 Jours
seulement
Ne peut être renouvelé
à cause de la demande

In English this is “Loan duration: 14 Days only ¶ Can not be renewed due to demand.” The typical loan period, today, for a Westmount Public Library book is 21 days; it’s not clear whether the blue “X” marks over the sticker are for emphasis, or to strike out this restriction (I suspect the latter).

Card Inside Pocket

Inside the pocket is a card that contains much the same information as on the pocket:

The “16.95” below the Cutter number may be the price of the book ($16.99 appears printed on the back cover), or something else; the same digits appears in pencil on the title page in the top-right corner.

I’ve no idea what the handwritten-in-red 54479 represents; I assume that at one point, following the practice of other libraries, the card would have been used to record the due date for the book when it was borrowed, making it the third version of date due recording to appear on the book; it’s possible that the handwritten number was the ID of someone who borrowed the book.

Comparing the typewritten impressions on this card to those on the card pocket, it appears to have been typed at the same time on the same typewriter.

RFID Sticker

The final artefact on the book–and, I’m assuming, given the technology it represents, the most recently applied–is an RFID sticker on the inside back cover:

Because my Android phone is NFC-capable, and so can read RFID chips when placed near them, placing my phone against the book pops up the RFID serial number on the screen:

The chip embedded in the RFID sticker is of the type ICODE SLIX2, from the NXP company, a chip described the the maker as:

Contactless energy and data transfer

Whenever connected to a very simple and easy-to-produce type of antenna (as a result of the 13.56 MHz carrier frequency) made out of a few windings printed, winded, etched or punched coil, the ICODE SLIX2 IC can be operated without line of sight up to a distance of 1.5 m (gate width). No battery is needed. When the smart label is positioned in the field of an interrogator antenna, the high speed RF communication interface enables data to be transmitted up to 53 kbit/s.

The “easy to produce type antenna” is what you can see around the bounds of the sticker through the paper. The serial number that the chip communicates, the hex numbers 3B:9B:f8:03:08:01:04:E0, doesn’t appear to bear any relation to the accession number or the barcode number; if the library uses this as part of its circulation system, it’s possible that this serial number is keyed to the record in the library’s system somehow.

The RFID sticker may, instead or in addition to any role it has in circulation management, be used as part of the library’s security system or sorting systems: holding the cover up to a light I can see it’s made by Bibliotheca, which makes security systems, self-check systems, and sorting systems for libraries.

Success Without College

Laurie Brown’s book was published at a very interesting inflection point in the history of technology, both for its subject matter and the library accoutrements it carries.

Brown was a pioneering music journalist at the time when the heart of music journalism was television; from her introduction:

For many many years my career has been caught in that hard place, a place a bit dank, sweaty and infested, between the forces of rebellion (rock and roll) and the forces of capitalism (TV).

Almost a quarter century later, this dank place has moved on from television–do MTV and MuchMusic still even exist?–to the fragmented landscape of the Internet, and so there are now a million dank places, tucked away on YouTube channels, Facebook pages, Instagram posts and Spotify streams.

In the annals of history, that brief union of rock and roll and television may disappear into a forgotten blip; we’re lucky that Brown had the foresight to document it while still near the heyday.

The physical book and its library clothing, as I’ve tunneled into above, also tell a store of technological transformations of libraries; books today carry little of their circulation history on them, as this is squirreled away in digital systems, not stamped on the books themselves as we see here. And digital systems, constantly evolving and personalizing, contain none of this richness, as their history is measured in seconds, not decades.

That’s a shame, for a book that wears its history is a more interesting book. As Westmount automated in 1995, so did many public libraries, and as collections have evolved, there are fewer and fewer books like this one still on the shelves. I pity the literary culture anthropologists of the future.

Thanks to my mother (the librarian) both for the inspiration to be weird enough to find all this interesting, and for technical help putting this all together.