Librarians – Britain’s brainiest professionals?

But of course!

Vincent Price once said something in a movie that I think summed it up for librarians in general: “I don’t know a lot about anything, but I know a little about everything.” For the life of me, I can’t remember the movie’s title except to say that it wasn’t the typical Price film. It was more murder mystery than Hammer Horror.

It’s been my experience that many librarians have their little specialty areas of knowledge where they know a great deal, but they also have a good bit of info on tons of other topics as well. By high school I was well on my way to becoming a librarian, though I didn’t know it then. An English teacher put together a sort of fun quiz show to kinda generate interest in trivia and the like. The only stipulation was that you had teams of three and at least one person on the team had to be a teacher.

I had a reputation by then for reading anything I could get my hands on. So it didn’t surprise many when the choir/piano teacher and the orchestra teacher both approached me and asked if I would team up with them. The surprise came when we actually did the contest and I was the one ringing in most often and getting all the questions right even when the teachers weren’t sure or had no idea what the answer was. We kicked ass and I scored some big points with the piano/choir teacher who was, and still is, an incredible hottie. 🙂

The reigning Jeopardy champ, Ken Jennings, has a librarian mother as was previously reported here I believe. And besides, we tend to get a lot of similar questions about a diversity of topics. Sooner or later, you’re just going to pick up a bunch of little facts here and there that lend themselves well to trivia competitions.