Pushcart 2026 L: Stephen Akey, “The Department of Everything” (non-fiction) from The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2024

THR illustration: a reference desk in a Michigan library, 1980s, AADL.org. How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however — not all that long ago — when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way — by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me. From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. I wish I’d known such a job existed back when it would have mattered. As I was reading this essay, I recalled that at some point in the past fifteen years (the…