“It is often not uncommon to see backlogs of anything from 6 months to 2 years in libraries, particularly academic libraries. Never mind whether the readers are waiting for the books, or if the funds will ever be available for cataloging them properly; standards must not be reduced.”

“One characteristic of the perfectionist is that in order to live with his own perfectionism, and knowing that he cannot attain it himself, he must find others who are also imperfect, preferably more imperfect than himself. Few things therefore so rejoice the librarian as when in stocktaking he comes across someone else’s mistake, be it large or small.”

“This persists in the ‘more voluminous than thou’ complex — the use, as a standard measure of comparison between libraries, of the number of volumes a library holds, as if bulk is somehow a measure of quality. With libraries, as with women, sheer bulk should be totally irrelevant as a measure of quality.”

Maurice B. Line, The search for the ideal (as Agnew Broome) (1974), collected in
Maurice B. Line, Lines of Thought : the Selected papers of Maurice B. Line (L. J. Anthony ed., 1988)