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Skeleton roams the library

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While libraries wait out the Covid-19 pandemic they remain eerily quiet. So quiet in fact, that at the Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas there has been a skeleton sighting! When school is in Mandy the Skeleton is on loan for students to prepare for their anatomy and physiology exams. While things are shut down Aaron Mayes, the curator for visual materials at UNLV’s Special Collections and Archives, has let Mandy have a run of the place. More images and story at Las Vegas Review-Journal: Meet the skeleton who is watching over the UNLV library

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RuPaul visits the library

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  RuPaul hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend and one of the skits featured him visiting the San Diego Public Library for a little reading time. He tackles such children's classics as Madeline, Corduroy, Eloise,  James and the Giant Peach and Harriet the Spy. Absolutely hilarious. I'm still laughing at his take on the dust jacket illustration for Madeline which he says "I have bad news child, the Eiffel Tower is not in the woods. You better draw France right, bitch."  Watch: [youtube]https://youtu.be/r1xA7B4SY6A[/youtube]

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A celebration of the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez

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photo by Maria Mendez In 2014 the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the archive of the Nobel Prize winning Latin American literary superstar Gabriel García Márquez. In 2015 the archive was opened to researchers and quickly became one of the Ransom Center's most accessed collections. Passport, 1955-1991 In 2017 an online archive of over 25,000 items from the collection was released into the world and now, for the first time, an exhibit of almost 300 items from the momentous archive, including some that have never been seen in public, are on display in the exhibition Gabriel...

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International flavor comes to America: Early Ethnic cookbooks

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Chinese-Japanese Cook Book by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna [pseud.], Chicago, Rand McNally [c1914]. First Edition The folks at Rare Books Digest have put together an informative list of first appearances of various ethnic cookbooks in America. From the 1828 first American publication of a French cookbook to the first Greek cookbook that, amazingly enough, wasn't published in this country until 1942! Here's a sampling.  El cocinero español by Encarnación Pinedo. San Francisco, 1898. This was not only the first Mexican-American cookbook published in America it was also the first written by a Hispanic in the US and to mention...

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An app for Chaucer with an assist from Monty Python’s Terry Jones

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An international team led by the University of Saskatchewan's Peter Robinson has created the first web and mobile phone app of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It features an audio performance of the General Prologue along with the digitized version of the original manuscript. While listening to the reading you can access supporting content such as a translation in modern English, commentary, notes and vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer. “We have become convinced, over many years, that the best way to read the Tales is to hear it performed—just as we imagine that Chaucer himself might have performed it...

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