Yes, well, and what did they see in Little Lord Fauntleroy back in the 1890s, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s sickly sweet tale of a little boy with long curls who inherited an English castle? Whatever it was, it made the novel into a best-seller and then a hit play and a movie starring Mary Pickford (she already had the long curls), started a style of velvet suits, and became the bane of an earlier generation of little boys whose mothers inflicted lace collars, curlers, and the name Cedric on them and who would have been delighted to have only been named Ashley.

“What else is on the reserve list?”

“The new John Grisham, the new Stephen King, Angels from Above, Brushed by an Angel’s Wing, Heavenly Encounters of the Third Kind, Angels Beside You, Angels, Angels Everywhere, Putting Your Guardian Angel to Work for You, and Angels in the Boardroom.”

None of those counted. The Grisham and the Stephen King were only best-sellers, and the angel fad had been around for over a year.

“Do you want me to put you on the list for any of those?” Lorraine asked. “Angels in the Boardroom is great.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Nothing new, huh?”

She frowned. “I thought there was something…” She checked her computer screen. “The novelization of Little Women,” she said, “but that wasn’t it.”

I thanked her and went over to the stacks. I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like “How did the murderer get into the locked room?” instead of hard ones like “What causes trends?” and “What did I do to deserve Flip?” and then went over to the eight hundreds.

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be “responsive to their patrons.” This means having dozens of copies of The Bridges of Madison County and Danielle Steel, and a consequent shortage of shelf space, to cope with which librarians have taken to purging books that haven’t been checked out lately.