Are You Prepared?

"Accidents involving dangerous substances. Are you ready?"

So reads the January-March Emergency Preparedness Digest. This headline overlaps a picture of a kneeling figure in a yellow-orange spacesuit, the kind sported by Dustin Hoffman in the recent film Outbreak. The suit on the cover has more of a bubble shaped helmet, though, like the little plastic helmets of Lego spacemen.

Emergency Preparedness specializes in disaster--it decries the lack of planned escape routes in case of fire, and details various accidents and their responses. Particularly charming is the "What If?" Section, which explores the potential horrors of accidents that didn't quite happen.

The Digest lurks on the bottom floor of Widener, near the military science division. On a nearby shelf lies Jane's Intelligence Review, which promises to survey the hot spots of emerging wars across the globe. Jane's has some charming features of its own, like a monthly record of all of the space launches in the world.

I was rooting about in the basement of Widener the other day, newly disappointed by a malfunction in the motorized shelves of Pusey, when I came upon these magazines for the first time. The find was just the pick-me-up I needed. Bounding up the stairs to the circulation desk. I began to wonder who actually subscribed to these magazines--fairly well-designed, professional looking publications, not the sort of thing one imagines lying around on the floor of the neighbors' backyard septic tank turned nuclear shelter.

A remarkable thing happened. I was photocopying several pages from the Emergency Preparedness Digest when I spotted a smallish demure woman copying Jane's Defense Weekly. In fact, she was copying issue after issue. I sauntered over to her copy machine and began to riffle through one of the issues she was done with. "I was wondering what the readership of this sort of magazine was like," I explained to the woman. She fixed me an odd look and replied that she was only doing research, she didn't know.

I fear that I came on too strong. She might have mistaken my questions as an advance of some kind, and I suppose one could read my question about readership in more than one way. It was clear the magazine meant more to her than research--she had too many copies of the same magazine, and her copying was too earnest. Then again, she might have mistaken me for a regular reader of the Digest, and decided there was nothing to talk about. Hey! I was only doing research.