They bring me reference volumes for work in progress, allowing me to hold them open on the lectern itself.
My reference works are mostly big heavy volumes, very hard for my disabled hands to cope with at all. Lifting them is a problem in itself. Then I used to have a space on my worktable, in front of my tv, where they could lie open, right next to my computer’s keyboard, to the pages I needed. But that space had to be used as the phone center for my home office, so more complex measures were required. From an office supply company, lecterns on wheels.
Oh dear, now you’re entertaining fantasies of crazy-eyed mad professors zooming around dusty lecture halls, all jazzed up on their turbo-charged lecterns — bumper cars for the academic elite. Sadly, the excellent Interion mobile podium / lectern from Global Industrial (which mostly provides heavy-duty industrial office supplies) moves slowly but majestically; it was just what I wanted, and I needed two of them, one for each of two bookish rooms. They definitely required assembly by a professional — and even so consumed a fair chunk of time for the mechanic — during which I suffered sharp pangs of tool envy, an affliction I am prone to.
But it was done, and here’s the one from the main room of my apartment, with the most-often used reference works installed in convenient places:
MWDEU, AHD5, CGEL, and GDoS (NOAD I get on-line, and of course the OED); photo by Opal Armstrong Zwicky
Some other reference works are in the bookshelf to the left of this lectern. I look things up an awful lot. I have an extraordinary multi-faceted associative memory — many things are going around in my head all the time, clanging with one another and competing to — but it’s regrettably approximate, inclined to be gisty rather than exact, so I always need to check the details. (Yesterday a friend mentioned the Channel Islands, and I reflexively blurted out Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney. Then wondered why on earth I remembered this stuff. Then realized I had omitted Sark.)
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