Getting rid of fall leaves is always a bit of an issue for the book elves as October gives way to November around the Cataloging Cave. It's one thing to wait until every leaf is off every tree, and quite another to wait and see if they all blow away in a freak New England November hurricane. When that didn't happen (again) this year, the Book Elves decided to try some more imaginative methods of leaf disposal.
The series of advertisements they posted in the local newspapers extolling their "Organic Free Range Limited Edition Collector's Leaves for Mulching" didn't draw any responses, so they decided to burn them, which is technically feasible but also technically illegal. "No problem", they decided, "we'll just burn them really quickly, so they're done before the Police or Fire Dept. shows up" (at last that's what they told the FBI later).
So the book elves raked all the leaves together into a pile the size of a dumptruck and, in the company of a half-dozen curious graduate chemistry students from UMass., stationed themselves at a small distance from the mountain of leaves, with a barrel of liquid oxygen the students had "borrowed", and a match on the end of a really, really, really long pole...
But before they set off an explosion which vaporized the leaves, a beech tree, two wheelbarrows and a lawn gnome, and was clearly visible to the astronauts on the Space Shuttle, they finished work on our latest catalog-
arts and antiques, and you can
browse it on our website.
