Tomes and Talismans was a super weird educational series about libraries in the 1980s and early 1990s. Am I the only one who remembers it?!
I don’t know if this is a post or just a simple cry for someone to validate me. Has anyone else heard of the educational library end-of-the-world series Tomes and Talismans? No? No one? That’s fair. In truth, I forgot about it for decades.
So here’s what happened: I was walking along (as one does) and thinking about a dystopian apocalypse (as one does) when, for no good reason, a random distant memory flashed in my brain. There were people trapped in an underground bunker, dressed in clothes from the 1980s, talking about a card catalog. (Before computers and easy-to-access online databases, the card catalog system gave you information about the book, including where to find it in the library.) I was a tiny child then, and the video seemed old even when I saw it. Was it something I made up in my head?! Fortunately, the internet knows all, and let’s face it, there aren’t that many apocalyptic-themed educational library videos about the Dewey decimal system. It wasn’t hard to find Tomes and Talismans.
The initial search was easy, but finding someone else who remembers this weird little series has been next to impossible! (T&T comes from Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so maybe there are more viewers down south?) I asked my peers who grew up around DC and were my age or older if they remembered the series… but they didn’t. It feels like no one remembers Tomes and Talismans except me! Do you remember watching it?!
Want to jog your memory or check out the insanity I’m referring to? Watch (remember, this is an old educational video):
