Heard About the Hipster Librarians?

With a July 8 article in the New York Times's trendy Sunday Styles section headlined (ouch) “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers,” a group of young librarians in Brooklyn, NY, who formed the group Desk Set (from the fave 1957 Tracy/Hepburn movie), has tongues wagging—and not always approvingly.

“Librarians are cool, not because of how we dress, what we drink, or who we associate with,” wrote Nicole Scherer of the Fairfield Public Library, CT, on Huffington Post. “Librarians are cool because our job is cool.”

Noted OCLC's George Needham on the It's All Good blog, “I don't understand [the fuss]. We get furious when the media offer images of us as repressed spinsters and/or prissy confirmed bachelors. We get furious when they write about us as young hipsters.” Desk Set might have gotten a bit of a bad rap; at their last party, they offered a free drink to those who brought a book to donate to an organization serving prisoners.