Harvard's Houghton Library has a new blog highlighting recent acquisitions to their Modern Books and Manuscripts division. Each post focuses on one item, with images as well as often-fascinating background and history. Personal faves so far include an Emily Dickinson manuscript, a telegram from the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, and a sort of 19th century version of The Dating Game:The set, which arrived in its original box, includes forty hand-colored cards depicting men and women. The twenty cards picturing men each contain a member of a different profession and a rhyming, nineteenth-century, pick-up line. The cards featuring women contain various polite...
Landscape with Books
Chris Engman. The Library, 2005Engman got the books "at a discounted rate from a used bookstore, where many of them had sat on shelves for more than a decade, unwanted, " and constructed The Library in the desert of eastern Washington State.Haunting in its barrenness yet the mere existence of this textual outpost offers a glimmer of hope.What did the last visitor take with them? What will the next one find? How much time is left before the desert wins?
Expand the Public Domain : Release the ‘Orphans’
UPDATE : May 20th - Lawrence Lessing has a must read op-ed on the issue in the New York Times titled "Little Orphan Artworks"**************************************************************************In the copyright world 'orphans' refer to all the books, films, pieces of art etc. that are banished to the storage rooms of museums and libraries across the country because their creators cannot be found.There are literally millions of items that go unprocessed because the places that house the material are afraid of being sued. With potential fines upward of $150,000 per item it is safe to say they will go unprocessed for a long time unless...
Author’s and Their Websites
Forget the act of writing, the pressure to create a web presence is becoming almost as intense for many authors. Jeff Barr, of Book Design blog fame, has launched a new website, Books Written By, which features authors and their websites. Each entry provides a screenshot of the author's homepage with a link to their site.The gallery gives us a glimpse into the wild west of website design and authors and seems poised to become a valuable resource for what to and what not to do when developing one's literary website. They make "no attempt to rate the quality of...
Jean Jullien
London based artist Jean Jullien has created some fantastic book themed posters. Above is one for the London night club Cliche, and below one of two new posters about the Fables of La Fontaine.Also, don't miss Jullien's compelling visual essay about social apathy and the culture of protestation." The piece is titled "don't protest." Jullien places colored flags with printed text in various settings around the house and around town. The flags are also collected in book form.Thanks to manystuff for the lead and also congratulations to manystuff, the blog has entered the print world with the release of the...