Librarian is a librarian is a librarian

I have been thinking about names and titles lately, like when I took a look last week at librarians as title characters. And no surprise, almost all of those title characters are in the Class I and Class II categories, in which librarians are the protagonists or other major characters. But what about the librarians in the Class III and Class IV categories, films in which librarians play minor characters or blink-and-you’ll-miss-the-back-of-the-librarian’s-head kind of cameos?

A few of those roles do have character names (yay!) but the majority do not. At this point in my research, out of the 140 or so films listed in the Class III and Class IV categories:

• 61 roles (46 female, 15 male) are credited simply as “Librarian“
• Almost 30 more (19 female, 10 male) are uncredited, earning no name at all 😦
• A handful include “clerk” in the character names, such as:
  • “Library Clerk” (The Forgotten, 2004)
  • “Archives Clerk” (The Changeling, 1980)
• A few include gender-specific clues:
  • “Lady at Library” (Threesome, 1994)
  • “Library Lady” (2 Brothers and a Bride, 2003)
  • “Girl in Library” (Rollerball, 1975)
  • “Shushing Lady” (City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, 1994)
• A couple of films include the word “book” as a character descriptor:
  • “Book Man” (Ricochet, 1991)
  • Books #1 through #4 (Soylent Green, 1973)

And there are the less-so-flattering character titles, including (but most definitely not limited to):

• “Mousy Julie” (Abandon, 2002)
• “The Illiterate Librarian” (The Last Supper, 1995)

A librarian by any other name…