060: Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry M. Robert

060.42: Robert, Henry M. Robert’s Rules of Order Revised for Deliberative Assemblies. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1943. 307 pp.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer Science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 060: General organizations and museology
• 060.4: Special topics of general organizations
• 060.42: General rules of order

If you’re running even a halfway-serious meeting, assembly, or convention, you need some way of bringing order to the proceedings. Without common rules, deliberative assemblies devolve into chaos. First devised in 1876 by U.S. Army Colonel Henry Martyn Robert, these rules help to allow groups of peoples to understand what happens when, when people can speak, when and how motions can be voted on, and how to decide on many complicated matters.

073: The Captive Press in the Third Reich by Oron Hale

073: Hale, Oron J. The Captive Press in the Third Reich. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. 323 pp. ISBN 0-691-00770-5.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer Science, Information, and General Works
• 070: News media, journalism, and publishing
• 073: Newspapers in central Europe and Germany

One of the best ways to make sure everybody’s on the same page, is to make sure thtey’re all reading the same pages. Part of the Nazi propoganda machine was to fully subvert German newspaper companies and publishing houses. Through an intricate weaving of interviews, business documents, and military records, Oron Hale details this process in The Captive Press in the Third Reich. This book goes through how the Nazi party outright bought some newspapers, put members in key positions at others, and then choked out any opposing viewpoints in the remaining news media, thus ensuring universal saturation of their message and mandates.

059: The Women’s Awakening in Egypt by Beth Baron

059.927082: Baron, Beth. The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 194 pp. ISBN 0-300-07271-6.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer Science, Information, and General Works
• 050: Magazine, serials, and journals
• 059: General serial publications in Italic, Hellenic, or other languages
• 9: Other languages
• 92: Afro-Asiatic or Semitic langauges
• 927: Arabic and Maltese
• +082: Women

 

In the decades leading up to the 1919 Egyptian revolution, stirrings were taking place. Publications after publication were being churned out advocating for a voice from an often silent population: women. One after another, each one sought out a larger place in society for Egyptian women. Beth Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt shines a light on this unremembered and culturally rich movement. Her study shows that it was not just the men who were fighting for independence, and that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

032: Guinness World Records 2014

032: Guinness World Records 2014. New York: Bantam, 2014. 615 pp. ISBN 978-0-553-39055-1.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer science, knowledge, and general works
• 030: General encyclopedic works
• 032: General encyclopedic works in English

I remember when I was a kid and first read the Guinness Book of World Records. Seeing pictures of the person with the world’s longest fingernails and the largest dog and the oldest person on Earth was astounding. Here catalogued was the extremity of humanity. Back then, there were very few “zany” categories, but now people seem destined to hold records in very niche areas. In the 2014 edition, there are records for the fastest assembly a seven-layer chicken bucket pyramid (35.72 seconds), fastest downing of 200 mL of mustard (20.8 seconds), and most Rubik’s cubes solved while running a marathon (100).

011: The List of Books by Raphael and McLeish

011: Raphael, Frederic and Kenneth McLeish. The List of Books. New York: Harmony Books, 1981. 154 pp. ISBN 0-517-540177.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer science, Knowledge, and General Works
• 010: Bibliography
• 011: Bibliographies

Let us say you are building a private library. Let us also say that you want to read in a large variety of subjects but suffer from a crippling inability to either do a lot of research or make wise decisions. Well, Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, with their List of Books, can come to your rescue. In this slim volume, they collect what they believe to be the best and key books in various fields, summarize them briefly, and organize them for your collecting pleasure. With over 3,000 books in 35 different fields, you would be hard-pressed not to find something here that didn’t pique your interest.

088: As Others See Us by Goran Palm

088.7: Palm, Goran. As Others See Us. Translated by Verne Moberg. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968. 242 pp.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer science, information, and general works
• 080: General collections
• 088: General collections in Scandinavian languages
• 088.7: General collections in Swedish

Goran Palm may not be known to a lot of reader in the United States, but in Sweden, he has been ranked highly over the last four decades. He has won the Samfunder De Nio Grand Prize (1985), the Selma Lagerlof Prize (1998), and the Stig Dagerman Prize (2005) (just to name a few). His writings in Sweden have championed the causes of society equality, free speech, and literary activism. In As Others See Us, he forces the reader to view other countries at their level, almost taping your eyes open as a lowlight reel of social ills is projected in front of you.

074: Paris Herald by Al Laney

074: Laney, Al. Paris Herald: The Incredible Newspaper. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1947. 330 pp.

Dewey Breakdown:

• 000: Computer science, information, and general works
• 070: Documentary media, educational media, news media, journalism, and publishing
• 074: Journalism and newspapers in France and Monaco

James Gordon Bennett, Jr. had lost a duel and couldn’t bare the shame of living in New York any more. He was a rich socialite who had had several brushes with public and personal shame and so decided to sail his yacht to Europe. He was already the publisher of the New York Herald and when he got to Paris, he launched a newspaper in Paris for expatriates in 1887. He was a man of extreme whim and wild ambition. He had a habit of firing reporters and copyreaders and then forgetting about it the next day. In the end, his paper helped to transform the Paris reporting scene and bring new life to Americans living abroad.