Tag: books

Old School Daze Book Jackets Updated, Now Hip n’ Cool

Book City Jackets' Artist Series 2, groupRemember those plain Kraft brown paper dust jackets from grammar and junior high school? (Your memory may have to stretch back to the 1950s-1960s).Book City Jackets' Standards grouping: Fiction, Non-Fiction, FavoriteWe used to have fun doodling on them, drawing, writing notes, declarations of everlasting love, paeans to rotten teachers, doggerel, and all manner of personal expression.Book City Jackets "Fiction"They, alas, fell by the wayside, along with the mimeograph machine, replaced by DJs with school logo and branded characters. Glossy-coated, they were impossible to write on or customize.Customize to protect and serve!Book City Jackets, founded...

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When Did Walt Disney Write A Christmas Carol?

Disney's A Christmas CarolWalt Disney has gotten a bad rap.We now know that “The Great Homogenizer,” who, as master of The House that Mouse Built, rose to fame by smoothing out the difficult and potentially offensive edges to any story he came into contact with lest anyone's sensibilities be injured, led a double life.Recent advances in forensic bibliography, as reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Dubious Literary Scholarship, have definitively proven that Walt Disney was an honest-to-gosh litterateur.Walt Disney's Mary PoppinsLong thought to be a mere animator (though he, in reality, didn’t do much, if any, of...

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Michael Suarez, New Director of UV’s Rare Book School, Wows With Lecture on Plate-Subscription Books

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los AngelesMichael Suarez, S.J., new Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, presented the Fifth Annual Kenneth Karmiole Lecture on the History of the Book Trade at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 7th to an enraptured audience.One of the Reading Rooms at the Clark LibraryHis subject, Learned Book Illustrations, their Patrons, and the Vagaries of the Trade in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England, might, in the wrong hands, have held the potential to desiccate cortexes. But Michael Suarez, a Jesuit priest who received his doctorate...

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Ohio Library Uncovers "The Secret At Shadow Ranch"

KEENE, Carolyn [Mildred Wirt Benson]. The Secret At Shadow Ranch.NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931.The staff of the Toledo Lucas County Library is shedding some light on the shadowy side of super sleuth Nancy Drew. The library has purchased the painting created as cover art for the first edition of Carolyn Keene's The Secret At Shadow Ranch. Paintings used for the early Nancy Drew Mystery Stories book covers, by Russell H. Tandy, are exceedingly scarce. The vast majority of Tandy's original artwork was destroyed in a 1962 fire at his home.Tandy's painting will be added to the library's Robert L. and...

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The Great Art Deco-Designed Brooklyn Central Library In Vintage Photos

Mount Prospect Park, 1939.New [main branch of Brooklyn Public] Library is in [far right] background.Image courtesy of BPL.Brooklyn Public Library in New York City was established in 1896. Between 1901 and 1923, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $1.6 million toward the development of twenty one branches.January 13, 1941. Entrance, Brooklyn Public Library (Ingersoll Memorial),Prospect Park Plaza, New York. Acetate negative by Samuel H. Gottscho.Ground was broken for a Brooklyn central library on Prospect Park Plaza (Grand Army Plaza) in 1912. The design of the original architect, Cornell-educated and Beaux-Arts-trained Raymond Almirall, called for a domed, four-story Beaux Arts abomination. Spiraling cost...

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