Many Rôles, Many Names

A brilliant scholar, the librarian at one of England's most venerated cathedral libraries, once confessed to me that he had at times been his own charwoman and scrubbed the ancient floors. Such extension of accomplishment may seem somewhat incongruous. Yet is it so foreign to our own experience? What librarian has not dusted and mended and plated the good, bad, and indifferent among his voluminous possessions? Which of us has not left important duties to reveal the sequence of the alphabet to bewildered patrons struggling with the encyclopaedia or handbook of manufactures?