The Questions People Asked Before Google Existed

Nowadays, if you wanted to know "how to kill a mouse", for example, you'd just do a quick search on Google and endless solutions of all kinds would appear before you. There would be no intermediaries, nor any shame for your ignorance (unless you later forget to clear your search history). But before, long before the internet became the monstrous thing it is today, who did people ask those things that required encyclopedic knowledge? And, most importantly, what did they ask?

Those questions were answered, and not necessarily by Google, some years ago when the archivists of the New York Public Library began to display all the cards with people's queries over the years, under a tag that became quite famous before languishing into oblivion: #letmelibrarianthatforyou.

"If today we didn't have the internet, and you were looking for information about the migration patterns of bluebirds, you couldn't go to a computer and ask it.", said Morgan Holzer, information architect at the New York Public Library about the tag. "You would have to find an encyclopedia, which are very expensive, so you could go to a library. And if you were in the library and didn't want to search for the right encyclopedia, there was a person standing right there that you could ask, because they have been trained either to give you an answer or to tell you where you could find it."

And that's what this gallery is about. About the questions people asked that librarian on duty, in the absence of Google. Nothing too different from what we ask the search engine today, omitting, of course, all those things that expose our darkest side. I don't think you'd have the nerve to ask a librarian "how to enlarge my penis".