Okay, if you've been following this blog of late you most certainly know that I'm loving my new place of employment. Working at the Widener Library is like being Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (hmmm. Charlie Brown, Charlie Bucket - did I mention that my middle name is Charles?), minus the Oompa Loompas, and substituting in stacks passes for Everlasting Gobstoppers, and steam tunnels under Harvard Yard to adjacent libraries instead of a river of molten chocolate. And of course, the fact that you can't or at least shouldn't eat the books.

But despite the fact that this is a dream job, I nevertheless fantasize about the ultimate library positions every once in a while. Believe it or not, there is a short list of places that would top working here in Harvard's flagship library. To wit:

1. The British Library. A no-brainer. The British Library is the library to end all libraries, with over 150 million items in its collection, including a world class Modern Greek collection. In my previous incarnation as an Interlibrary Borrower, I spent a lot of the Harvard Medical School's money on urgent requests from the British Library's Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa. No library in the States even came close to the level of service, professionalism, and obvious joy for one's work that the Brits at the DSC evinced day in and day out. Who wouldn't want to be among such people?

2. Biblioteca Berenson. The ultimate field promotion for a Harvard library employee, the Berenson Library, located in the Villa I Tatti in Florence, is the collection for the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Just the gardens of this place are enough to bowl you over.

3. Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The modern-day Library of Alexandria, which reopened to the public last year, after a millennium-and-a-half hiatus. The collection is small, but the facility is magnificent, and Alexandria seems to be rediscovering its sense of history again (although who knows what will happen, should Egypt's grass roots Islamic fundamentalist movement succeed in overthrowing the current government. It's a shame that such a place of multicultural intellectual ferment should have lapsed into an almost-forgotten backwater, although even after all these centuries Alexander's name still graces the city!).

4. The Joan Staats Library. This one's a guilty pleasure, as the Joan Staats Library serves the Jackson Laboratories, located in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. The library is actually surrounded by Acadia National Park on all sides!

5. The Library at The Greek Institute. There's no link, because this one doesn't exist yet. Helping make this library a reality is one of the reasons I'm so keen on going to library school, as the Institute is sitting on top of thousands of Greek titles that I'm sure are only owned by a handful of collections here in the States. This could be a small but extremely valuable collection for Greek scholars and philhellenes throughout the New England area, and I would love to be its librarian.