Cultural shifts

[ashnistrike]

Okay, it's time to do a pass for smoking, and for the minefield that is women's choices of hats (or no hats) in 1949.

Does anyone know:

...whether smoking would have been permitted in a library--in this case an ivy league academic library?

...in bookstores?

My instinct is what the hell are you thinking, but I can only just remember what it was like to have everyone smoking inside in the first place?  (It sucked, that's what I remember.  But people mostly got used to it.)

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

As late as 1967, Widener Library at Harvard allowed smoking in its principal reading rooms, for the comfort of addicted scholars: http://tinyurl.com/ku3uq7m. They couldn't work otherwise. Even in the 1980s and 90s, as I recall, the occasional entitled emeritus would light up in his study, as he'd always done--wasn't it his home?--to the wailing of sirens, and have to be at once censured and mollified. "Think of the books, sir!"

“'I remember this vague sense of smoke in the building all the time,' she said of Widener Library. 'It’s never really gone.'”: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/5/23/smoking-ban-college/?page=single.

Nine

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Gah. Think of the books, indeed!

Any idea about reading rooms for special collections? That is to say, does the Necronomicon smell like cigarette smoke? What about similar books that are valuable and rare, but not absolutely singular?

[erik]

Bookstores (especially used bookstores), yes certainly. I have many memories from even the 70s and 80s of bookstore owners with pipes.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thank you--that's helpful, and a pipe actually fits the character better than cigarettes.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

When I was partner in a used bookstore in Providence in 1980, our friendly competitors, the Sewards of Sewards Folly Used Books, smoked incessantly--cigarettes AND pipe. Every book in that store smelled like an ashtray (nothing more porous than an old book).

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Leaf through the Google Books archive of Life? Ads and fashion features for aspirational hats, news for the hats of the wealthy and powerful, alongside shots of more ordinary gatherings?

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's a good thought.

Alas, good visual references don't entirely help me pick the exact hat for the exceedingly careful social dances some of these characters are stuck with. Oh well, that's what artistic choice is for. And socially sensitive beta readers.

[savvyfan.livejournal.com]

Libraries, grocery stores, doctors' offices, hospitals, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

All the others, I remembered, but libraries, gah.