The Gothic Imagination invades the British Library

This is the  perfect time of year to get spooked out and The British Library is helping the cause with their latest exhibit, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination.   Comprised of two hundred objects spanning two hundred and fifty years of Gothic literature the exhibit "presents an intriguing glimpse of a fascinating and mysterious world." image Universal /The Kobal Collection Starting with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and ending with the current zombie craze: The show provides plenty of insight into novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, Dracula and Rebecca but it also explores, among many other themes, the...

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A visual tour of Halloween in America during the first half of the 20th century

Children dressed up in costumes for Halloween. from the Daily Reflector (Greenville, N.C.), 1950's What better way to wrap up  American Archives month then with a Halloween stroll through the Digital Public Library of America. From turn of the century Hallow'een postcards through photos from the 1950's we get a taste of Halloween in America during the first half of the 20th century. From the small town to the segregated South to the Japanese American internment camps of WWII Halloween offered an opportunity to shed the daily trials and tribulations and have some fun. Enjoy!  A little boy examines a Halloween display of two jack o'lanterns and...

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If Hemingway Wrote Javascript: Imagining the literary greats writing code

The tech world collides with the book world in If Hemingway Wrote Javascript, a new offering from No Starch Press. For writers as with computer programmers it is all about the language. It is the starting point for each discipline and to succeed at both one must master the craft while developing their own style. If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript is a book that "playfully bridges the worlds of programming and literature for the literary geek in all of us." Written by Angus Croll, a UI guru at Twitter and a leading authority on Javascript, the book is a compilation of imagined short Java...

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Adolf Hitler’s Personal Copy of Mein Kampf is up for auction

 Mein Kampf  (My Struggle) is the autobiographical manifesto of King Nazi, Adolf Hitler. It is where he outlined his political ideology and future plans for Germany. It was written following the failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 and first published in July 1925. The book offered here is a later edition published in 1932. "It's believed to be the only author-owned copy of the book known to exist" and if this auction is to be believed it is the biblio hi-spot in the Hitler cannon. The book was part of a group of Hitler's personal belongings taken from Hitler's Munich apartment in 1945 by US Army...

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