Librarian

Philip Larkin, whose reclusive life style and limited poetic output earned him the sobriquet "hermit of Hull," died Monday. He was 63 and his death was attributed to breathing difficulties after throat surgery. He died in Nuffield Hospital in Hull, a small northeast English town where he led a secluded life as a librarian living in a simple house darkened by drawn shades that protected his cherished books.

The Fullerton Public Library wants its overdue books back. And this time the librarians are serious. The city has hired the consulting firm of Weldon and Associates to help recover the overdue books. Delinquent accounts will now be turned over to a collection agency and borrowers will be charged a $10 fee for the collection agency's services in addition to overdue fines. If a book is lost, the borrower will be charged for its cost in addition to a replacement fee and the $10.

The White House drew plaudits from Internet advocacy groups Monday for supporting a petition to make cellphone unlocking legal. But consumers shouldn't get their hopes up about being free to use cheaper foreign SIM cards overseas or selling their unlocked used smartphones on EBay. The Obama administration had already taken a strong position in favor of cellphone unlocking, and it's not clear what, if anything, changed with Monday's action. At issue is the Librarian of Congress' decision last year on whether consumers should be allowed to circumvent the digital locks that tie their phones to a particular mobile network.

Beloved children's author Dr. Seuss is under attack by logging families in a rural upper Northern California town who want his 1971 classic, "The Lorax," chopped as required reading by their kids. A special committee of the Laytonville Unified School District met Wednesday to consider a complaint that the book "criminalizes" tree-cutting.

As one who has been in the forefront on the issue of pay equity, I found myself responding with mixed emotions to your report, which informed us that women still earn only 69 cents for every dollar earned by a man. On one hand, it's gratifying that there are enough women doctors, dentists, aerospace engineers and bartenders to even compare their salaries to those of male counterparts. Not very long ago, women's career aspirations were limited to becoming a teacher, nurse, librarian or secretary.

Clip-on earrings as clunk-tech artifacts? Possibly so. Pierced ears are becoming a cultural commonplace. "Babies everywhere are getting their ears pierced," said Mark Josephs, national sales manager of ear-piercing equipment for Eri Labs in Van Nuys. So, too, are men of all sexual persuasions and ages. "I do boys who are 9 and 10 years old. Their mothers bring them in," said Carla Kravet, manager of Jewelrymania at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. "And I get men up to 50 years old--gay and straight."

Gloria Walton, 5 feet, 10 1/2 inches tall, married a 6-foot-4 fellow member of the San Diego Tip Toppers Club in 1950, and, sure enough, they reared the tallest kids in the club. The librarian and social worker, with interests in literature and music, didn't imagine the hours in bleachers, doctors' offices and the kitchen that would accompany such auspicious growth. Gloria Walton was baking cookies and stirring Kool-Aid for a brood that included Bruce and Bill Walton.

Carrie Estelle Doheny's dream of assembling and preserving in California a leading collection of the rare works of Western Civilization will begin to fade Thursday in Tokyo. In the first of three globe-spanning stops, 60 books and manuscripts from the 15,000-volume Doheny Collection--including the Old Testament volume of a 15th-Century Gutenberg Bible, the first known book printed from movable type--will go on display at the offices of Christie's, the international auction house based in London.

Instant Karma, Mark Swartz, City Lights: 136 pp, $11.95 paper Welcome to the oddball world of David Felsenstein, a Chicago loner who's part Young Werther, part Travis Bickle and part post-adolescent Borges. David is a self-described "biblioclast" who roams the Harold Washington Public Library pondering the subtle differences between collecting and borrowing, and his flitting observations are ably presented by Mark Swartz as the first-person scrapbook of a disjointed mind: David's diary includes reflections -- quite amusing, mostly -- on everything from Sartre (only college boys read him)

Here's something I found in my teetering "in tray" when it fell on top of me last week: a list of funny doctors' names collected by medical librarians, and now kept and expanded (and verified for authenticity) by Mari Stoddard, health sciences librarian at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "The dentists--I feel very sorry for all the dentists," she says when asked about her personal favorites. (We're sure Dr. Harm, Dr. Hurter, Dr. Toothaker and Dr. Pain appreciate her solicitude.