MetaFilter posts tagged with books and libraries

Book of the Month

Kattullus — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:28:17 -0800

Book of the Month is a feature that the University of Glasgow Library has been running for over a decade now. The format is simple, a single book is selected from their collections, written up and accompanied by pictures, maps and photographs scanned from the books. With over a 100 books to select from, it's hard to know where to start, but anywhere is good because they're all lovely. Still, here are a few, Charles Darwin's The Expression of the emotions in man and animals, a beautiful 15th century illuminated copy of Livy's Roman history, Treatises on Engines and Weapons, Valentines and Dabbities, The Birds of Australia, Facts and Observations on the Sanitary State of Glasgow, Ibn Jazla's The arrangement of bodies for treatment and finally, The Curious Case of Mary Toft, MetaFilter superstar.

Biblioburros

The corpse in the library — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:27:22 -0800

Luis Soriano, with his donkeys Alfa and Beto, brings books to small villages in Colombia.

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket

donnagirl — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:53:46 -0800

Library Finds is seriously beautiful photography and explication of little-seen gems in the library stacks, from a self-confessed "techie, not a librarian, who is quite fortunate to be surrounded by books everyday". From the green to the teal and now to the blue.

Literary Voyeurism

NotMyselfRightNow — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:16:14 -0800

Writer's Rooms, portraits of the spaces where authors create: Martin Amis. Simon Armitage. Diana Athill. Jane Austen. Berly Bainbridge. JG Ballard. John Banville. Nicola Barker. Ronan Bennett. Alain de Botton. William Boyd. Raymond Briggs. Charlotte Bronte. Carmen Callil. Jung Chang. Roald Dahl. Charles Darwin. Margaret Drabble. Geoff Dyer. Anne Enright. Joshua Ferris. Jonathan Safran Foer. Margaret Forster. Antonia Fraser. Michael Frayn. Esther Freud. Simon Gray. Mark Haddon. David Hare. David Harsent. Seamus Heaney. Russell Hoban. Eric Hobsbawm. Michael Holroyd. Siri Hustvedt. AL Kennedy. Judith Kerr. Rudyard Kipling. Hanif Kureishi. Penelope Lively. David Lodge. Michael Longley. Hilary Mantel. Eamonn McCabe. Charlotte Mendelson. John Mortimer. Kate Mosse. Andrew Motion. Julie Myerson. Edna O'Brien. Andrew O'Hagan. Adam Phillips. Caryl Phillips. Craig Raine. Ian Rankin. John Richardson. Michael Rosen. Will Self. George Bernard Shaw. Alan Sillitow. Posy Simmonds. Helen Simpson. Ahdaf Soueif. Graham Swift. Adam Thirlwell. Colm Toibin. Claire Tomalin. Sue Townsend. Barbara Trapido. Rose Tremain. Sarah Waters. Jacqueline Wilson. Virginia Woolf. (Step into the reading room for a wee bit more...) ...or perhaps you're more interested in how they write: JG Ballard. Walter Benjamin. Ray Bradbury. Anthony Burgess. Truman Capote. Ethan Canan. David Chase. Bruce Chatwin. Tracy Chevalier. Don DeLillo. Cory Doctorow. Arthur Conan Doyle. Umberto Eco. Warren Ellis. Ralph Ellison. James Ellroy. Jeffrey Eugenides. Michel Faber. Jonathan Safran Foer. Gustave Flaubert. Stephen Fry. Neil Gaiman. Malcolm Gladwell. William Gibson. Dashiell Hammett. Gustav Hasford. John Irving. Henry James. Elmore Leonard. Sven Lindqvist. David Mitchell. Joseph Mitchell. Grant Morrison. Haruki Murakami. Philip Pullman. Ian Rankin. Arthur Rimbaud. Philip Roth. Raymond Roussel. Will Self. Robert Louis Stevenson. David Thomson. Anthony Trollope. Paul valery. Virginia Woolf. ...or maybe you just were wondering, "What books sat on the bookshelves of famous people?" John Adams. Susan B. Anthony. Marie Antoinette. W.H. Auden. Karen Blixen*. Daniel Garrison Brinton*. Willa Cather*. William Congreve*. e.e. cummings*. Leonardo da Vinci*. Charles Darwin*. Alfrer Deakin. John Dee*. Theodore Dreiser*. William Faulkner*. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Benjamin Franklin*. Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gerald Gardner*. Ernest Hemingway. Robert E. Howard*. Thomas Jefferson. Samuel Johnson. James Joyce*. Franz Kafka*. John F. Kennedy*. Danilo Kis. Charles Lamb*. Rose Wilder Lane*. T.E. Lawrence*. Basil Henry Liddell-Hart*. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis*. Eeva-Liisa Manner*. Mary, Queen of Scots*. Mather Family. Wolfgang Mozart. John Muir. Flannery O'Connor*. Walker Percy. Sylvia Plath. Ezra Pound. Joseph Priestley*. Rembrandt*. Samuel Roth. Carl Sandburg*. Sir Walter Scott*. Tupac Shakur. Joseph Smith. Adam Smith*. James Smithson. William Wilberforce*. W.B. Yeats*. (* denotes a library in progress) A nice post on the early days of "I See Dead People('s Books)" can be found here. Same for the very early days of "How We Work."

A cautionary tail

Horace Rumpole — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:04:02 -0800

The end of Moore’s influence came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight. Although librarians don't come out all that well in this story, archivists figure quite heroically in the author's sidebar on her research into the saga.

"Schools should continue to require library research so they can see how old folks used to Google stuff."

Kattullus — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:12:42 -0800

The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.

The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses: Defending the Library of Google, The Future in the Past and Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.

I See Dead People's Books

stbalbach — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:46:39 -0800

I See Dead People's Books (wiki) is an impromptu project by LibraryThing members to catalog the libraries of famous dead people, from Tupac Shakur to Ernest Hemingway to John Adams. Many more in the works, anyone is able to create a dead library with all the attendant features of LT.

From Abati to Zoppio: historic Italian texts

Rumple — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:56:08 -0800

OPAL Libri Antichi from the University of Turin offers over 3,000 books as free, open PDF files. Most of these date between AD 1500 and 1850 and most are in Italian, with many in French. They tend to be plain books with few illustrations. A few English titles are present, including David Hume's 1800 Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul; several texts by William Wycherley such as Love in a wood: or St. James's-Park (1735); and Richard Lassels 1686 work The voyage of Italy: or, a compleat journey through Italy with the characters of the peaple, and the description of the chief towns ... (volume 2) - an early travel guide. The PDFs are unsearchable plain scans. via this thread in the W4RF forum which contains hundreds of links to free online historical documents

Visit your friendly local zine archive!

ethel — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:07:59 -0800

Housing, preserving, and providing access to these small-scale, homemade rags that document some corner of [often do-it-yourself and punk rock] culture, zine archives can be found via independently operated centers in Georgia (physical library in construction), New Orleans (myspace link, www address out-of-commission), Florida, Minneapolis, Denver, Cambridge, Olympia, Chicago, Seattle and... University libraries' collections in New Orleans, Wisconsin, Chicago, NYC, San Diego, San Diego again, Durham; Public libraries in Maryland, Oregon, San Francisco, Tennessee. also on line*. You can submit work (pdf) to some of these, and there's even a book about building a zine collection in your repository! *via Prelinger Library (also collects zines) Blog, and previously.

Tomb of tomes

stbalbach — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:36:14 -0800

An obscure 1911 British law requires a copy of every published book, journal, newspaper, patent, sound recording, magazine etc.. to be permanently archived in at least one of five libraries around the country. The British Library has the most complete collection and is currently adding about 12.5km of new shelf space a year of mostly unheard of and unwanted stuff. A new state-of-the-art warehouse is being constructed with 262 linear kilometers of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen temperature controlled environment. It is not a library, it is a warehouse for "things that no one wants." BLDG Blog ponders on what it all means.

hot library smut

nuclear_soup — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 08:17:59 -0800

Sure, reading is great, but books are fun to look at, too

Enemies of Books!

carsonb — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:27:29 -0800

Librarians as Enemies of Books
via the delightfully uptight Steve Mauer at BookMine.

things found in books

madamjujujive — Wed, 09 May 2007 09:34:54 -0800

Librarians and book collectors have many tales about ephemera left in books. While the legend of the bacon bookmark may be among the more pervasive reports of strange finds, a smallpox sample is probably the most bizarre. There are blogs and discussion boards that record other makeshift markers. Some readers prefer designated over spontaneous markers. Mirage Bookmark has an extensive collection of bookmark ephemera, with Bookmark of the Week and Bookmark Collector also offering noteworthy collections.

Marlowe? Marlowe who?

caddis — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 11:07:03 -0800

Fairfax County Public Library system ditches the classics. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.... Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.

...515 to material with a homosexual theme or “promoting homosexuality,” ...

amberglow — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:52:44 -0800

Banned Books Week -- 25th anniversary year. How to deal with a challenge, what you can do generally, and of course, lists, and more lists. Captain Underpants is a more recent entry, i notice.

Which ones have happy endings?

geoff. — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:50:48 -0800

Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. Scanned photos of the insides of some of the world's hottest, youngest and dirtiest libraries. Some of the best from the book by Candida Hofer.

The Dewey Donation System

mathowie — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 11:42:08 -0800

The Dewey Donation System is site that helps re-stock libraries devastated by Katrina, by posting wishlists of Louisiana and Mississippi libraries and letting anyone buy books for them. Cool looking site, to boot. [via mefi projects]

Commonplace books

monju_bosatsu — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:00:49 -0800

The paper analogue of the blog is not the diary, but rather the commonplace book. With the availability of relatively cheap paper beginning as early as the 14th century, people began to collect knowledge in commonplace books. Bits of quotes, reference materials, summaries of arguments, all contained in a handy bound volume. This merchant's commonplace, for example, dates from 1312 and contains hand-drawn diagrams of Venetian ships and descriptions of Venice's merchant culture. An English commonplace dating to the 15th century, the Book of Brome, contains poems, notations on memorial law, lists of expenses, and diary entries. John Locke devised a method for keeping a commonplace. Thomas Jefferson kept both legal and literary commonplaces, and owned a copy of Sir John Randolph's legal commonplace, published in 1680.

Top 1000 Library Books

donnagirl — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:31:04 -0800

"Libraries are rich, deep, resources for preserving cultural heritage and indispensable resources for the communities they serve.” OCLC, a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization, has compiled a list of the top 1000 titles owned or licensed by its 50,000+ member libraries. There are sublists by subject, a cross listing with a banned books list, and some fun facts, including the supremely annoying one that the highest listed living author is Jim Davis of Garfield fame (#18).

Connolly 100 updated

Grod — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:43:36 -0800

100 key books “Cyril Connolly chose 100 key books from England, France and America first published between 1880 and 1950 to represent ‘The Modern Movement’.”

This site asks: “How does the list look now, in the first decade of the 21st Century?” “an additional list of key books is needed for 1950 to 2000. What should be included and why? Does Connolly's selection criteria need adjusting [just England (when so many of the books are from Ireland), France and America!] and if so how should this be done, remembering that Connolly was very precise in delineating the list as Key books, not best books?”

9/11, for the future

amberglow — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 16:38:39 -0800

The September Project -- On 9/11, libraries big and small will host events where citizens can participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the well-informed voice of the American citizenry. A Day of and for Democracy.

The Lens of Perception

ashbury — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 19:35:22 -0800

In the Psychedelic Library you can find the likes of Aldous Huxley, The Acid Queen by Robert Hunter, LSD, My Problem Child from Albert Hoffman, The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God by William Braden and Through The Lens Of Perception by Hal Zena Bennett is a fascinating account of a peyote experience in Mexico. The Psychedelic Library ultimately asks the question: can drugs, used in a positive and healthy way, truly guide us towards who we can become? No matter what you believe, it's an invaluable resource.

California is literally going to hell in a handbasket.

_sirmissalot_ — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:52:08 -0800

Libraries? Sports? Music Programs? Guidance Counselors? Not on my bill, buddy! That crap is for nerds and jocks. It's all good here in sunny California.

Marginalia and Other Crimes

chrisgregory — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 20:21:14 -0800

Marginalia and Other Crimes: I’ve always had an intense hatred for people that deface books, and if they're my books, the intensity is doubled. But imagine the atrocities the average librarian faces every day... Witness this display of damaged and defiled books from the Cambridge University library, with attached sarcastic commentary. The horror! Not for the squeamish.

Good books. Eat 'em up. Yum.

troutfishing — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 10:02:34 -0800

Rub the lucky Buddha and..... It dispenses - Darwin's Origin of Species, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Voltaire's Candide, Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey, Huxley's Doors of Perception, Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass , Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Age of Reason, Rights of Man, and Crisis #1, Buckminster Fuller's Grunch of Giants, Descartes' Discourse on method..., biographies of St. Francis and Joan of Arc, Twain's The Grateful Poodle, and more...