The playboy of the Western World at age 16.Jane Sellers and Hugh Hefner, 1943.They dated each other’s best friend when they were in high school together in Chicago. When Jane Sellers moved to California in 1943 her sixteen year-old school pal, Hugh Hefner, began writing to her. Their friendship and correspondence endured for sixty years.July 2, 1943. "When I said I was a man of liesure(I still don't know whether I'm spelling this right)I wasn't kiddin." Many of Hef's letters toJane Sellers at this time were festoonedwith cartoons in the margins.“At 16, I knew he was destined to do amazing...
New Swiss Library Will Run Like Clockwork
A Bird's Eye View Of The Rolex Learning Center.(All Images Courtesy Of SANAA.)Viewed from above it looks like a flat, wavy rectangle full of randomly placed holes-- and it's Swiss. A cheesy description, perhaps, but one that fits a glorious modernist library which opened on February 22, 2010 in the city of Lausanne. The Japanese architectural firm known as SANAA has created a single-story, slice-like structure so sublimely constructed it seems to float above the ground.Lausanne's Floating Library.The Rolex Learning Center for the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a single fluid space that undulates like free-flowing waves over...
Obama Mesmerized by Book on Moses
Last evening, after enduring what seemed like 7 taxing hours at the health care summit, President Barack Obama returned to the White House to preside over the ceremony for the 20 recipients of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal.Winners included Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Frank Stella, architect Maya Lin and Elie Wiesel.Among the humanities honorees was historian Robert A. Caro who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In his remarks Obama mentioned that he had read Caro's book when he was 22...
Biblioburro: Bookmobile Hoofs Books to Rural Nooks
When hundreds of children in the "abandoned regions" of the Colombian state of Magdalena need reading material, a small fleet of bookmobiles makes an arduous trek to provide it. The bookmobiles in question are Alfa and Beto, two donkeys who stubbornly insist that illiteracy is a national enemy and that kids need books no matter how poor or remotely located their village.Luis Soriano, 38, is a primary school teacher living in La Gloria, Columbia. His personal glory is as mule-team driver, leading Alfa and Beto to their destinations in rural Columbia as they tote up to 120 books to children...
Joyce Carol Oates: A Love Letter to Libraries in Longhand
Author Joyce Carol Oates."I try to write in the morning very intensely,from 8:30 to 1 p.m...I hand write and then I type.I don't have a word processor. I write slowly."(By Landon Nordeman for Smithsonian Magazine.) Contrary to Thomas Wolfe's dictum You Can't Go Home Again, in an article in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, "Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again," the eponymous author begs to differ. Joyce Carol Oates regales readers with a reverie on things changed and unchanged in the town of her birth, and reacquaints herself with the landmarks and buildings of a place that has continued...