What are ketones?

One of our patrons had heard about ketones in relation to diabetes but wasn’t sure what exactly they were. We weren’t sure either, and while we’re not a substitute for the doctor’s office, we were able to look up some information with the resources available at the library.

Mosby’s Medical Dictionary was the first place we checked. It defines a ketone as a kind of organic chemical produced by “oxidation of secondary alcohols” and then went on to describe its structure. The Diabetes Sourcebook more accessibly defines ketones as “chemical[s] produced where there is a shortage in insulin in the blood and the body breaks down fat for energy.” An excess of ketones in the body can cause ketoacidosis, a dangerous and potentially fatal condition.

The American Diabetes Association Complete Guide to Diabetes provides more information on ketoacidosis. While it can happen at any time, it’s more likely to occur in times of stress, including sickness and pregnancy. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, fruity-smelling breath, and rapid breathing. Ketoacidosis is more of a problem for people with type 1 diabetes, who don’t produce insulin on their own, though it can also affect people with type 2 diabetes. Fortunately, there are tests that can be done at home to check for ketones.

We have several books on diabetes available for borrowing, such as Chris Smith’s Cooking with the Diabetic Chef, Theresa Garnero’s Your First Year with Diabetes, and The New Family Cookbook for People with Diabetes. 

Where can I buy morel mushrooms?

One of our patrons had a craving for morels but hadn’t been able to find any quality ones while foraging himself. He remembered that Giant Eagle used to sell them but he hadn’t been able to find them there. Rather than continuing to search the groceries – it’s possible that Whole Foods may have them, but their nearest store is in Chagrin – he came to the library to see if we could point him in the right direction.

As it turns out, there’s a thriving community of morel aficionados online. Morels.com includes a classifieds forum filled with people selling everything from the mushrooms themselves to hand-carved morel-shaped gifts, and many sellers have listed their mushrooms on eBay. However, our patron would rather purchase his morels in person.

A mushroom festival would be one place to find them. Unfortunately, some of the festivals had already passed by. The Shawnee Valley Campground Mushroom Festival in Chillicothe was held from April 30 to May 3, and the Mesick Mushroom Festival in Michigan had run from May 8 to May 10. (Their website already has a countdown to next year’s 57^th annual festival, which will run from May 6 to May 8, 2016.)

Eventually, we found the website of the Ohio Mushroom Society, which lists the contact information for all of its board members. Our patron decided to try and get in touch with them to see what information they could provide.

The Newton Falls Public Library has several field guides to help identify mushrooms, including Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the World, Peterson’s Field Guide to Mushrooms, and Edible Wild Plants and Useful Herbs. For information on morels alone, Michael Kuo’s Morels is available through CLEVNET. 

How long do bees live?

The answer depends on the bee, not only its species but the role it plays in the hive. Digger bee larvae will survive the winter, and carpenter and mason bees both have one generation a year. Queens bees overall tend to live the longest. The queen is the largest bee, and, after mating, she will spend all her time in the hive laying eggs and being tended by the other workers. According to the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders, young queen bumblebees are the only bumblebees that survive the winter. Queen honeybees can live up to six years, according to Roger A. Morse’s New Complete Guide to Beekeeping, but many beekeepers will replace their queen after a few seasons, with some requeening their colonies every year. A queen will slow down as she ages and start laying eggs erratically. When bees recognize that their queen is no longer laying enough to maintain a healthy colony, they’ll rear a new one from an egg. It takes her sixteen days to develop.

As to the worker bees’ lifespans, it depends on when they are born. A honeybee can live nearly six months in the winter since she’s staying in the warm confines of her hive. In the warmer months, though, when she’s spending most of her time foraging for food, she’ll only live four to six weeks. A worker bee only forages once her life is about half-over. She spends her first few weeks keeping the hive clean, attending to the queen and larva, making honey, building comb, and guarding the hive.

Drones, the only male bees in the colony, have the shortest lives. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen. If they succeed, they die in the act of mating. If they don’t succeed, they’re kicked out of the hive and left to starve when winter comes, as the worker bees see them as a waste of resources.

For more information on bees, Ross Conrad’s Natural Beekeeping, Howland Blackiston’s Beekeeping for Dummies, and the Firefly Encyclopedia of Insects and Spiders are all available for borrowing here at the Newton Falls Public Library.

How do I find old cookbooks on CLEVNET?

“Is there a way to search for books by publication date? I want to look at old cookbooks.”

The CLEVNET catalog offers a lot of different ways to narrow down your search. Once you’ve typed something in the search bar at the top, you can narrow your search by library, audience (adult, children, or teen), language, content (nonfiction, fiction, or undetermined), and more, including published date.

Different searches bring up different results. When searching for “cookbooks” as a subject and narrowing our search to show only items available at Newton Falls, the earliest publication date was 1972: The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas. However, searching “cookbook” as a keyword instead of a subject brought up Mary Emma Showalter’s Mennonite Community Cookbook, published twenty-two years earlier. The keyword “recipe” showed us an even older book: Marcelle Morphy’s Recipes of All Nations, published in 1935.

If you’re looking for old-fashioned recipes, they may not necessarily be in the oldest cookbooks. The Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker is a book of authentic frontier recipes published in 1979. Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen by Joanne Lamb Hayes, published in 2000, deals with World War II cooking and the recipes people developed to get around rationing. We even have The Thirteen Colonies Cookbook by Mary Donovan, published in 1975.

Can you help me find out how much my antique brass cash register is worth?

Looking in Kovels’ Antiques and Collectibles Price Guide 2015, we found a list of twenty-six antique cash registers, prices ranging from $69 to $6600. There were only a few listings for specifically brass cash registers, and those were valued between $480 and $1020. We went next to Price It!, our library database for valuing antiques, to see if we could find more information. Price It! pulls information from online sales, auction houses, and online auctions (such as eBay) to give users a price estimate. We found a few complete cash registers in the $345 to $1300 range, but mainly people were selling bits and pieces of their registers.

Finally, we found a few brass cash register collector websites. Dick and Joan’s Antiques provides an extensive chart of serial numbers and manufacture dates, allowing people to estimate the age of their registers. Brass National Cash Registers has pictures of different patterns and features the registers can have, with notes as to their rarity. (The fleur-de-lis pattern, for example, is fairly common, while the scrollwork that spells out “National Cash Register” is rare.) The site also provides tips on unjamming your machine. 

For more information, Brass National Cash Registers recommends the two out-of-print volumes of The Incorruptible Cashier. The first volume is available as a reference text in Cleveland Public Library’s business department. 

How do I look up a patent?

“I have an ashtray shaped like a frog and I want to know when it was patented. It has ‘U.S. Patent 364523’ stamped on the bottom.”

The United States Patent and Trademark Office website 

provides an option to search by patent number, but when we looked up 364523, it brought up an 1867 patent for “producing justified lines of type.” Clearly, that wasn’t what our patron had, so we took a different tack.

The site also gives an option to search for patents by class. Classes include everything from apparel to coin handling to bee culture. We selected the one that seemed most applicable – “tobacco and smokers’ supplies” – and then looked under the subheading “ash receiver, snuffer, or support therefor.” There were several different options to choose from there as well. We followed a trail of subheadings from “simulative” to “animate” to “aquatic” to find of a list of all the patented ashtrays bearing the likenesses of aquatic animals, thirty-five in all. Of those thirty-five, three were in the shape of frogs, and one was the one our patron was looking for. Invented by David Frishman, this particular frog-shaped ashtray was patented on November 16, 1920.

Why didn’t it come up when we searched by the patent number? As it turned out, 364523 wasn’t the patent number at all but the serial number, and the stamp on the bottom of the frog was misleading.

For information on filing your own patent, Patent It Yourself by David Pressman is available for borrowing at the Newton Falls Public Library.

Do you have any books on how colors affect people's moods?

The idea that colors have certain mood-altering connotations (for example, that blue is calming or that black evokes power and wealth) is part of the basis of color psychology. People have attempted to use this to their advantage. In the early 2000s, for instance, cities in Scotland and Japan found that installing blue streetlights led to a decrease in street crime and suicide attempts in areas lit by the lamps [source]. Psychologists have also done experiments to find the most alluring color, and they’ve found that people are approached more often and viewed as more attractive when they’re wearing red, even if nothing else is different about them [source].

Our patron was able to borrow Adam Alter’s Drunk Tank Pink from our library. The book takes its title from a bubblegum color, also known as Baker-Miller pink, which was found in the 1970s to calm aggressiveness in prisoners. Not everyone believes in its efficacy - Drs. James E. Gilliam and David Unruh found in their 1988 study that Baker-Miller pink did not directly affect their subjects – but the color still found popularity. The football coaches at Colorado State and the University of Iowa even painted their visitors’ locker rooms pink in the hopes of weakening opposing teams.

There are several other books on color psychology available through CLEVNET, such as Colour Hunting by Jeanne Tan, The Beginner’s Guide to Color Psychology by Angela Wright, and Color: The Secret Influence by Kenneth Fehrman.