In 2001 Julia Child gave her kitchen to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.The kitchen, designed by her husband Paul, was where millions of Americans watched as Child worked her culinary magic on her incredibly popular public-television series. The kitchen bookshelfChristine Klepper, a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University, has been spending some time in the kitchen working with the books. Her recent post on the blog of the National Museum of American History, What's on Julia Child's bookshelf, recounts her experience:My assignment in the kitchen was to complete object condition reports on all 27 books on...
Oregon opens an investigation into those blue book donation boxes
Photo: Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian The Charitable Activities Section of the Oregon Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Reading Tree and Thrift Recycling Management, the two companies behind many of those blue 'Books for Charity' boxes that have been popping up all around the country. Close to 100 boxes have begun to infest the state of Oregon alone.In late May of 2009 we did a piece on Book Patrol, About Those Blue Book Donation Boxes, outlining the shady nature of these boxes. At the time of the post over 15,000 boxes where in place around the country.We discovered that:51%...
Computer Art meets Book Art
There are some books that just stay with you.The latest book to positively haunt me ever since we acquired it is Valerie Hollister's Seven Computer Landscapes. Published in 1993 the book "combines contemporary graphic art drawn on a computer with traditional letterpress printing.""In deliberate anachronism, the nineteenth-century process that has been used to print Seven Computer Landscapes gives each image deep, velvety blacks,...and a slight tactile impression on the page."The resulting almost dot matrix vibe of the drawings transform them into an almost woodcut-like appearance. And how did Hollister, who at the time was doing larger scale realistic paintings, get...
Comic Study
Scotland's Dundee University will be the first school in the United Kingdom to offer a masters degree in Comic Studies.Why Dundee? For starters it is the home of the publisher DC Thomson and Co. whose creations include Dennis the Menace, Desperate Dan and the Broons.The BroonsThe program will be lead by Dr. Chris Murray, a leading authority on comics, and editor of the Studies in Comics journal.Of the program Murray says: "Employability is an important consideration for any postgraduate programme, and it lies at the heart of what we aim to do with this course. "There will be practical advice...
Bob Dylan wants you to write a book
Did you know there are currently over 1000 books in the Bob Dylan cannon? One of the better ones and one that Dylan actually approved of, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton, was just re-released with a slew of other Dylan titles to coincide with Dylan's 70th birthday. The new edition, edited by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries, is 20,000 words longer than the original edition.So what does Dylan have to say about the plethora of material written about him? This is from a post on Dylan's website the week before his 70th...