Library Idea of the Week
Cathy Belben, Librarian, Burlington-Edison High School
January 19, 2005

With the new semester approaching, it’s a great time to create New Student Packs for your library.   I put together large envelopes for new students that include:

ü       A brief list of library policies, services, and hours—including my name and my assistant’s name

ü       Instructions for getting a computer log-in

ü       Instructions for logging in to our computers

ü       An information sheet for them to fill out and give to us (name, previous school, books they’ve read and liked)

ü       A free book (usually an ARC)

ü       A bookmark

ü       A piece of candy

ü       A free pencil

I notified my counselors that such a pack had been created, and asked them to bring new students in if they had time to introduce them, or to at least tell students to stop by the library on their first day at our school to get added to our computer and to receive the freebie pack.

Book of the Week

This week’s recommendation may be one of the most bizarre books I’ve encountered—a book that (finally!) combines my love of crafts with my fascination for true crime and police investigation. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death was produced by photographer Corinne May Botz, who became fascinated by the work of Frances Lee Glessner, a wealthy Bostonian who, in the 1950’s, created a series of intricately detailed dollhouses that depicted scenes of suspicious death. Each dollhouse was a painstaking work of fastidious attention and skilled craftsmanship—and a macabre depiction of murder.

Glessner Lee’s dollhouses—which she named The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death—were adopted by Harvard and used to train criminologists. They are still in use today to train detectives to examine crime scenes scrupulously, and for that reason, the focus in the book is on careful analysis of the scenes, not on the solutions of the crimes—in fact, I think only one or two of the crimes is explained in the appendix.

Botz’s book offers numerous artisitic photos of the dollhouse scenes, with explanations of what you are looking at, intended to be clues for investigators to gather and analyze as they respond to the crimes. She also offers interpretations of the scenes and what they might suggest about Glessner Lee’s own personality and psyche. The book is a fascinating examination of a brilliant and highly unusual person. One of the strangest, and most interesting, books I’ve read in a long time.