Book With the Blue Cover

This is a webpage designed almost a decade ago. The HTML needs dire edits and the images need to be reset and I'm not at all sure how this will link on this blogsite. But this is the original Book With the Blue Cover page, and damn it all I am going to fit it on here...


This is an obscure and possibly true fact.
Go to your nearest library. Go to the reference desk or the information desk. Ask the librarian sitting there.
Ask the librarian if he or she had ever gotten this question. A patron, asking for a book. The patron doesn't know the title. Doesn't know the author. Doesn't know what the book is about. All the patron knows is that a friend of theirs is reading it.
And that the cover of the book is blue.
The question will always be the same. And the color will always be the same.* Now, while there are a lot of books with blue-ish covers to them, there's also a lot of whites and greys and blacks and reds and greens and oranges and even mauves.
All the patrons know is that the cover of the book is blue.
Rumor has it the bookstores get the same question. And the same color.
This blue book, by the way, is not the used automobile price guide. That's the first thing librarians ask about when making sure just what it is the patron is asking for.**
So what exactly IS the Book With the Blue Cover?!
Most librarians will tell you it's a myth. A legend, told to children when their parents want them to grow up to be archivists. Even the occasional whisper overheard at an American Library Association convention gets dismissed out of hand.
Others, however, are not so sure...

continued...

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* A Google search for "Book With the Blue Cover" (include those quote marks!) as of Feb. 10, 2002 brings up 29 hits. Comparatively, "Book With the Red Cover" gets roughly 34 hits, "Book With the Green Cover" has 15 hits, and "Book With the Yellow Cover" secures 58 hits. Mauve doesn't bring up jack. This would seem to defeat the idea of the Book being Blue, but you'll see in the results most of the other colors tend to be sample sentences for some grammar tests. Those don't count! In terms of librarians doing a book search, "Blue Cover" gets 6 hits, "Red Cover" and "Green Cover" get only 1 hit each, and "Yellow Cover" brings up nada.

** The second question we ask the patrons is "What drugs are you on, and can we share?"