"Look at my library!"

Dr Bey getting upset about the state of his prized collection of books

Welcome to the library.

As a librarian I have to make a comment about the library which we first see Evelyn working in. To be quite honest I don't think I would like her working in any library I was in charge of, but then I suppose the character has been written with her little accidents so Rachael Wiez couldn't do much else…..

Here's a bit of interesting information - that book which Evy was reading on the boat just before the encounter with O'Connell was called 'Dwellers of the Nile' by E.A. Wallis Budge and can be bought through Amazon.com.  It actually exists, although the designers must have mocked up the prop book she was reading as it doesn't seem to be the book I bought from Amazon..

Ah yes, what a lovely stack of books, we librarians can rhapsodize quite happily about them, sad aren't we? I do wonder where they film props people got these wonderful books from - they must have been made specially I think with the bindings put on polystyrene blocks or something. Making them with real pages in would have made them quite dangerous to fling about when the cases collapse. Books that size are heavy, I should know, I've had a few drop on me before! There are a few things wrong here though. First that the books seem to be plonked on the shelves in alphabetical order and no classification system is used. I called up the Egyptology department librarian at Cambridge and asked what system they use. This is either the Dewey Decimal System found in most public libraries (Egyptology would be in the 900s, I'm often there myself in libraries) or something the actual librarian made up themselves I'm told! Apparently before the nasty little sticky labels we type the numbers on now librarians used to paint them onto the book spine neatly in white paint. No sign of that here! I saw a few of these in the stacks in Manchester Public Library (it was built in Victorian times) when I was there in placement during my degree so I can attest that it happens.

I also wouldn't want Evy in my library if she did this - very dangerous, she shouldn't even have been up a ladder with lots of books to put back on shelves. If you notice this book which she is holding is very thin, it has pages yes, but it is no way the size of the other books on the shelves - she wouldn't be able to hang off like this holding one of those nasty big volumes. The shelves here are also rather tall and made of rather light thin wood - I would expect them to collapse very easily at that height - exactly what the filmmakers wanted. If you tried to knock over some of the ones Manchester Public Library or any other old library with these type of shelves you would have had a very hard job. I used to shelve in there and could practically climb up the shelves themselves to put the books back. We used Kick-steps - little metal stools which looked like Daleks and could be kicked in front of you as you went.

TreasurePage

Home

Choices Page