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...last June, an official at Houghton Library (and I know this is useless: everyone has a library story--preferably Widener--but this one was too good to resist) one day, last June, an official at Houghton noticed a pen left lying on a table. Now it is universally known that pens are prohibited in Houghton, to the point of extinction: paranoid librarians would claim that potentially destructive annotations scribbled in a book's margins can be far more damaging in ink, than in pencil...

Author: By John A. Spritz, | Title: Pranks and embarrassments | 5/27/1977 | See Source »

Hence the regulations. Hence that June day when the Houghton official saw that first pen. He walked over to pick it up, and saw out of the corner of his eye another pen, lying a few feet away. Picking up the second pen, he suddenly became aware that, through some bizarre biological mishap, a single Bic pen had reproduced itself a thousand times, throughout the library's reference room. Pens were stacked in piles on the shelves, magic-markers were falling out of wastebaskets, a bagfull of fine-points was spilled on the floor...

Author: By John A. Spritz, | Title: Pranks and embarrassments | 5/27/1977 | See Source »

While the librarians madly scrambled for these orphaned ink'guns, someone spotted an unusually fat student running towards the exit. An official shouted 'stop him!' the student was tackled, and the mystery was solved: as the corpulent criminal went flying, his coat flew open, and enough pens to staff the Pentagon came flying out, blissfully freed. Psychiatrists were summoned to the scene when it was proved that the fanatical pen-depositer was actually a crazed grad student, seeking revenge upon the institution on which he had fed in the only way he knew: sabotage...

Author: By John A. Spritz, | Title: Pranks and embarrassments | 5/27/1977 | See Source »

Pong's importance in history has not diminished since that day. For instance, the inventor of the pen, an avid pong player who employed the pen-holder grip, named his new invention after this grip when he realized a pen is held just like a ping pong paddle. More recently ping pong diplomacy has opened the door to improved relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China...

Author: By Gideon Gil, | Title: Underspin and Funding Trouble Ping Pong Team | 5/5/1977 | See Source »

...turns out that Mary was quite a prodigious writer herself, having taken pen to paper at every emotional juncture in her life. Various manuscripts of hers, that have immortalized women written in Latin, English, and French, were recently set to music by Priscilla Chapman '67 who will conduct the work as her own group, the Radcliffe Choral Society, performs them this Sunday night at St. Paul's. Subjects and styles range from an adolescent poem she wrote at 17 on the death of her first husband, to the passionate French sonnets that refute allegations that she killed another husband when...

Author: By Judy Kogan, | Title: Odd Notes | 4/21/1977 | See Source »

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