Ice-cream is gonna save the day

JA August 08

Well, it’s one way to start up awareness. Back in July, Burlington county librarian Andy Woodworth started up a group on facebook ‘People for a library-themed Ben & Jerry’s flavor!’. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but the idea was basically to lobby American ice-cream chain Ben & Jerry’s to create a library-inspired scoop in order to raise appreciation of public libraries ‘in the face of stagnant or slashed state, county, and municipal budgets’.

Why ice-cream? Well, who need a reason really, but the logic behind the facebook group was set out thus:

(1) Libraries are awesome; (2) Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream is tasty;

therefore:

(3) A library-themed Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream would be tasty awesome.

In the space of just over a month, the group had over 4000 members and received a fair share of media coverage. So much so that Ben & Jerry’s flavour guru Arnold Carbone said that a literary-inspired ice-cream would not be out of the question. He suggested a ‘Malt Whitman… a malt ice-cream, with chocolate alphabet letters and two decadent rivulets – one caramel and one fudge – as an ode to writer Walt Whitman’. Since then, bloggers have been coming up with their own bookish flavours. Here are a few, care of the New Yorker and Bookninja.

Author-inspired flavours
Joyce Carol Floats
Peanut Blyton
Almond Rushdie Slushie
Roald Dahlop
Swirls Dickens (Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More?)
Martin Anise
Almondaatje
Edgar Allen Dough
Franz Koffeeka

Book-inspired flavours
Eat Praline Love
Of Ice and M&M (M&Ms, Chocolate powder, Vanilla, Fresh bananas. It’s a good plan, but it never fully works)
The Bible (a scoop of apple ice-cream with a chocolate snake swirl on top)
Tequila mockingbird (a lime and tequila flavored sherbet)

Writing-inspired flavours
Writer’s Block (Coffee with fudge chunks and nicotine stains)

Library-inspired flavours
Due Dates and Figs
Gooey Decimal System (Dark fudge alphabet letters with caramel swirls in hazelnut ice cream)
Sh-sh-sh-Sherbet! (Key Lime or a Chocolate/Vanilla combination)
Li-Berry Pie (Lime sherbet mixed with raspberry sauce and pie crust crumbles)
Over Dew (mountain dew flavored scoop with the topping of your choice)

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre

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