Seeing as there are a lot of new students coming to the University pretty soon, I thought I would take this opportunity to provide them with a much-needed tour of one of the most important buildings here on campus: The Knight Library and Health Spa. Actually it’s not a health spa. I have no idea why I wrote that, but anyway, let us enter this vast temple of learning so that we may become familiar with its hallowed walls and various but minor structural absurdities.
The front doors of the library are large, steel behemoths which were added as a first layer of defense after the National Literacy Awareness Week Riot of 1987. The original purpose of the doors has been mostly forgotten, though if you look closely, you can still see the remains of what was once a machine-gun nest up on the roof, which is all that is left to remind people of that dark day in our nation’s history.
The first thing one will see when entering the library is a desk where helpful assistants await questions
regarding library hours and checkout policies. Keep your hands and feet away from these people and do not offer them food. For those interested in the history of the University, there is a pleasant display of memorabilia concerning the activities of various alumni. Normal people can just keep walking. If you listen closely in this area you can hear what sounds like ambient music. This is actually an odd tonal dysfunction in the library PA system. It is suspected of causing up to five brain aneurysms a year and it is suggested that you do not enter this area without ear protection if you are suffering from any form of epilepsy.
The reference collection is the first section of the library in which you will be able to spot actual books, though these are well regulated. The actual purpose of the reference area is as a meat market for lonely single intellectuals. This hotbed of deviant sexual behavior also houses some of the library’s many computers, which are available for use to the city’s homeless population so that they can check their e-mail.
Near the back of this section there is a spiral staircase made of what might be marble. If you look closely at the stairs you can still see the bloodstains from when a family of French aristocrats was stabbed to death with pikestaffs by members of the political science department. Ascending upward to the second floor one will find two separate but equally noteworthy sections.
The first is the current-periodicals collection, which is where University President Dave Frohnmayer hides his manga stash. For those looking for back issues of Hustler, you’re out of luck. All pornographic material is kept in the John E. Jaqua Law Library, which incidentally also contains the largest collection of stag films this side of the Mississippi (the password is “wombat”). This section also contains the library’s card catalog, so for any of you looking to catalog some cards, this is the place (please God, kill me now).
The other half of the second
floor the Information Technologies Center, which is where losers who don’t own their own computers go to type papers (ha, ha! Stupid poor people). The books on this floor are organized in what is know as the Dewey Decimal Classification
system, which is a way of organizing books so that the first letters of each subject will spell out a dirty word. Complex Dewey Decimal organization is based on limericks. This floor is also the residence of the library trolls.
On the third floor you will find the second floor again. This is due to a phenomenon known as the Interlibrary Space/Time Continuum. If you leave an item on the second floor it is possible to locate it at the corresponding location on the third floor. Above this is the rarely visited fourth floor, which has been taken over by a roving pack of
bloodthirsty, sex-starved English lit majors who have gone insane
looking for the collected works of Horace Walpole.
Actually I’m kidding about that. English lit majors are rarely
sex-starved, and in fact get laid almost as often as the microbiology people (what do you think they spend all that grant money on?). On the fourth floor it is also possible to see a baseball President Frohnmayer lost on the roof and was too embarrassed to tell anyone about.

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