Observations from Under the Book Pile

Dog people don’t quite understand that well-cared for indoor cats regularly live into their late teens, some into their 20s. Also cats don’t tend to show visible signs of aging like dogs do. A 10-15 year old medium/large breed dog is usually visibly old and often slowing. Cats at that age who have good genetics and have received good care look completely like their younger selves and still have play drives and energy and their personalities. Not my cat though. She’s only 5 and she’s looked like roadkill since birth. People often think she’s a senior cat because her body type is weird and she doesn’t groom herself. This is because she is just a little weirdo.

I love her so much but that just doesn’t negate the fact she looks like the Pet Sematary reanimated evil version of someone’s beloved pet. She looks like she’s decomposed just enough for her skin to start slipping. She has cat dandruff. She never cleans under her claws so they’re often black. Her face is crusty and she tries to kill you if you clean it. She’s just built DIFFERENT.

nope! here are her baby pictures (from 2017)

she went through an almost normal cat phase around 3 months of age but reverted back to being yucky

yes she is the toe biter and also the little cat that messes up all the pillows

This is my boy, who is nine, with his grampa, who was 19

I like how Al began with a short psa about how indoor cats age like fine wine, unlike dogs, who age like milk on a warm summer evening. But then decided to dunk on poor little Tommy for daring to have some personality

Tbh I got halfway through the post about cats aging gracefully and remembered my cat was the scruggliest being on earth and I didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Beautiful coffin pendant with woven hair inside, England, 1703 (source).

Whalers medicine chest, c. 1835

This chest belonged to Robert Jillett, ashore Whaler stationed on Kāpiti Island, New Zealand, 1836-1845.

It was supplied by the Apothecary's Hall, London, and replenished at Hobart Town, Tasmania.

Stack maintenance at the New York Public Library, 1948

This Woodcut Wednesday, explore London’s Inns of Court in these intricate engravings by artist Hilary Paynter.

Legal London Engraved

Beautiful wood engravings by British printmaker Hilary Paynter from @riesenfeldcenter (Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center at the University of Minnesota Law School) in their copy of Legal London Engraved, printed in an edition of 135 copies by Sebastian Carter at his Rampant Lions Press for The Primrose Academy Ltd.

Ok, I've seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I've been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.

As a librarian, can confirm, please let us help you

Astronomical Clock 1540, Munster, Westfalen, Paulusdom Photographer: Groenling 

“Bouquetière” by Boué Soeurs, 1927-28

From Kerry Taylor Auctions

Anonymous photographer - Portrait of Three Women. N.d., 19th century

we irritating 😂 😂 😂

Wood Engraving Wednesday

HOWARD PHIPPS

British wood engraver Howard Phipps (b. 1954) began his artistic career as a painter. In 1976, after he began teaching, he discovered that wood engraving was ideal for long winter evenings. Phipps writes:

These prints were printed directly from the original blocks and included in Phipps’s article “A Painter’s Approach to Wood-engraving” in Matrix 8, Winter 1988, inserted as a separate 8-page signature between pages 80 and 81. The color wood engraving entitled “Ox Drove” serves as the frontispiece to Matrix 8. It is printed in four colors, with the key block printed in grey and the colors (yellow, orange, and blue), which overlap to create secondary colors, printed from linocuts.

Matrix was printed by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts from Matrix.

View other posts relating to the Whittington Press.

View more posts with wood engravings!

A visual explanation of why stars fall on Earth. Details of The Augsburg Book of Miracles, an illuminated manuscript made in Augsburg in Germany in the 16th century, anonymous author-ess.

Every month there’s a new tweet that’s like “I cannot BELIEVE libraries would just THROW OUT decades-old copies of popular books instead of investing money, labor, and space they don’t have to slowly donate each moldy copy of Brave New World to a child who’d want it” and every month librarians will write painstaking threads detailing why this practice occurs and why these well-meaning suggestions do not work, and every month nobody reads them and then this happens all over again

This is book burning in my opinion on a mass scale! 😢😭😠😤😡🤬

@vampiregrrl98​ It’s REALLY not, though, which is the point of this post. They’re not throwing out books anyone wants to read, or books anyone is trying to check out. Some of those books are damaged. And if they’re damaged because people have been checking it out so much, then they’ll probably get another copy that isn’t falling apart. Libraries don’t have room to keep everything. For example: when I worked in the school library in jr. high, we threw out a whole shelf of non-fiction books about other countries because they were 30-40 years out of date. They were better sources, some of them were about countries that didn’t technically exist anymore (because, in the interim, the cold war had ended, among other things), and a lot of them were kind of racist!

Another difference someone else pointed out is that book burning happens to destroy information. These books are being destroyed because they’re unwanted, the information still exists either in a better form or just in a newer wrapper. Books don’t last forever. I was shocked the first time I learned about weeding, but mum explained it to me. Libraries do often give away a lot of books for free or at low cost. They sell them at the library itself. If people don’t grab them what’s supposed to happen then? Do you know how many books are kept in the stacks? They pile up really quickly.

I really appreciate all the people who are kindly and patiently explaining the weeding process to those who are shocked by this practice because I need such people to counter my tired ass just telling them “Fuck you and fuck your books too I love pulping them actually, and fuck you, again”

I’m only upset that all those books are in the trash and not a recycling or compost bin.

You can’t recycle or compost books unless you remove the cover and binding material first (well, some recycling companies accept cardboard covers, but not all), which for many libraries would mean having to have a person do this by hand for every book

So @vampiregrrl98, you might want to actually read up about the Nazi book burnings and what they *actually* destroyed. The Nazis-sympathizers burned the books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the world’s largest library of information about trans and queer people in the world, along with books about Communism and Socialism.

In contrast public libraries are disposing of mass market books that are in bad condition, out of date, or no one checked out.

Is it really fair to compare the disposal of books with mold damage and biographies about ‘NSYNC from 2001 to the deliberate wholesale destruction of irreplaceable documents about trans history with the intent to erase that history?

There are academic libraries that collect copies of Amelia Bedelia and Captain Underpants. You too can order digitized copies or go see them yourself for free. Trust me, they’ve retained all of the incredibly racist children’s books and people continue to research and publish about them.

But it’s not your local library’s job to keep ahold of books that one day one or two people might find useful. Their job is to serve their communities and provide their patrons with the books and information they want right now. If the library is filled with dirty, useless, and irrelevant books, people don’t go. And since funding is determined by how many people go to the library and how many books they check out, keeping these books might mean that the branch closes entirely or they are forced to move to a smaller building and end up having to throw out the books anyway.

Weeding is an essential part of the life cycle of the library.

Not to mention, they need to do something with the 32nd donated copy of x book that doesn’t circulate.

And the space thing. Not to keep beating that horse but you have no idea how quickly we run out of space.

Space runs out SO FAST, my kingdom for the extra storage dimension so many think we have.

Decorative Sunday: Songs for Little People

This week we are turning to an item in our Historical Curriculum Collection the children’s book Songs for Little People by the poet Norman Gale published in Westminster by the Archibald Constable & Company in 1896. The book features lovely Art Nouveau style illustrations by British artist Helen Stratton, one of her first major successes as book illustrator.

Norman Gale wrote in the introduction for Songs for Little People:

I find the poem for the ”‘Logical Gardens” interesting. It is clearly referencing zoological gardens, which first became a popular public attraction in the 19th century.

The poem reads:

Keep reading

Codex Rotundus “266 almost perfectly circular pages of parchment have been bound together to build a block of 3cm height with a diameter of only 9cm.”

The initials of the metal clasps point us to Adolph of Cleves, Lord of Ravenstein (1425 - 1492) as the owner.

Can we please talk about how our history teacher sent a barbie to the smithsonian as proof of the presence of man two million years ago

pleas,e for the love of God read the whole letter, there are tears streamign down my face rn

Can we please talk about how your history teacher has done this sort of thing enough times that he has his own specimen shelf in the Smithsonian

“yours in science” tho

“B. Clams don’t have teeth” is the part where I lost it.

@zozi-writes

The letter says:

“Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have gien this specimen a careful and detailed examination and regret to inform you that we disagree with you theory that it represents ‘conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.’ Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the ‘Malibu Barbie’. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin:

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in it’s normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results. Sadly , we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation’s Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name ‘Australopithecus spiff-arino.’ Speaking personally, I for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard. We eagerly anticipate your trip to or nation’s capital that you proposed in you last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the ‘trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix’ that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe

Curator, Antiquities”

—————————————————————————————————-

(sorry if there are misspellings or wrong wordings. this was long and i was reading it off my phone)

“I for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.“

I love that that entire last paragraph can be boiled down to “keep it up, you mad bastard.”

That was a fucking trip.