The Permanence of Print (1997)

As a reaffirmation of the enduring value of print--versus the transitory nature of electronic bits--I received answers for two quotation questions recently. Cheryl McBride, New Jersey Nightline (East Brunswick, New Jersey), responding to the Old Quotes Never Die section from Exchange of Spring 1997 sent some information about the supposed American Indian quotation which begins Do not stand at my grave and weep. According to a story that appeared in a Maryland newspaper in August 1984 (the photocopy supplied does not identify the title), the author of the poem was Mary Frye. The news story begins: Fifty-two years ago, Mary Frye sat at her kitchen table comforting a friend whose mother had died. The mother had lived in Germany, but because of Hitler's rise to power, she had urged her daughter not to come home.... The other woman said to Mary, What hurts the worst is that I never got to stand by my mother's grave & shed a tear. Mary then picked up a pen and wrote on a grocery bag the often-used poem. She began handing it out to friends and never signed her name. The poem made its way into sympathy greeting cards and funeral services, becoming of national interest in 1979 when actor Harold Gould read it during a TV movie, Better Late Than Never. The syndicated columnist Richard K. Schull contacted Mary Frye in 1983 and interviewed her regarding the authorship. If anything, the moral in this story is the importance of copyright. Had Ms. Frye applied for copyright originally, and even submitted her work for publication, generations of reference librarians might have been denied the frustration of searching for, and finding, variant attributions. Tony Shipps, Librarian Emeritus at the Indiana University Library (Bloomington), sent a poem that includes the lines appearing on a painting (RQ 36 [Spring 1997]: 342). I have not seen the painting, but apparentlythe artist chose to paint oaks rather than beeches, because this one word is the only difference from the original poem (and stroll among o'ershadowing woods of beech). The requested lines come from a poem titled, Beachy Head, by Charlotte Smith. Questions from Exchange are never closed until they are closed (as in the Fat Lady Singing). The Ugli Orange Case (RQ 31 [Winter 1991]: 148) finally has several verified bibliographic sources, courtesy of Stumpers-L (GSLIS, Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois). A description of this exercise appears in Group and Organization Management, December 1995, pp. 486+. The author is John K. Butler Jr. Full information on this case can be found in Lewicki et al., Experiences in Management and Organizational Behavior, according to a posting from Elsie de Bruijn, Woodward Biomedical Library, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). At the risk of completely boring readers, I am going to include just one more item about the gry riddle. There is a Web site that will tell you, in the words of the famous book review, more than you ever wanted to know about this subject. The URL is http:// clever.net/quinion/words/gry.htm. This is another item that appeared on the Stumpers-L listserv, posted by Jim Pate, Birmingham Public Library (Birmingham, Alabama). A (Slightly) New Direction for Exchange It seems perfectly appropriate, given a new journal editor, title, and format, that Exchange change also in a way that will retain the values expressed by readers in the Winter 1997 column. There have been suggestions that the column incorporate material from Stumpers-L, the listserv managed by graduate LS students at Rosary (soon to be Dominican University) College near Chicago. This listserv has been a wonderful boon to reference librarians across the country and, indeed, around the world. It is often responsive to very short deadlines. Stumpers-L extends the resources of the smallest library with electronic access to the collective mind of many librarians and others. …