In the Stacks: Charles Darwin's Library

Charles Darwin had close to 1500 books in his library. Now, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, one can digitally peruse over 400 of the books contained therein, including over 300 of the most heavily annotated.

 The library of Charles Darwin. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library

The Charles Darwin’s Library project is "a digital edition and virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin."

 "a miserable book - all words, words, words." Annotation in Volume 1 of  Histoire naturelle générale des règnes organiques by Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, Isidore, 1854.

"The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”

"if this were true adios theory" Darwin's annotation in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, v. 2 (1837).

A transcription pane accompanies each annotated page providing a detailed accounting of the annotation. There is also a comprehensive search feature that allows you to search the books in Darwin's library as well as the annotations themselves.


 More:
Charles Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Public- National Endowment for the Humanities
Book of the Week: Celebrating Darwin's Library! - BHL blog

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online - the go-to online source for Darwin material

Previously on In the Stacks:
The National Archives

Columbia University, From Homer to Howl

Private Libraries at the Museum of the City of New York

Los Angeles Public Library

Boston Public Library

The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Debut Novel by Lorna Graham

Random House has released this preview of Lorna Graham's soon to be released debut novel on Scribd.

It includes a map of the writers and poets who appear in or inspired Lorna Graham's debut novel The Ghosts of Greenwich Village. The story centers around a young woman who moves to Manhattan only to find that her apartment is haunted by the ghost of a writer from the Beat Generation. The book is a trade paperback original published under the Ballantine Books imprint.

The preview also includes the cover image and the first chapter.

Keep the Kids Reading All Summer Long

About 1,000 volunteers gathered on the National Mall  in Washington, D.C. yesterday to ring in summer by preparing 50,000 "summer reading" backpacks for distribution to low income children.

The event was part of United Way's Day of Action. First Book, the non-profit organization dedicated to providing access to new books for children in need, donated 150,000 books for the event. Each backpack was filled with three new books, and a "reading kit" featuring tips, activities and bookmarks.

 Original flyer for the event:

 

Libraries across the country are offering Summer Reading programs for kids so no excuses. Keep the kids reading all summer long!

My kids are signed up here: 

Press release

Making Books in California: Five Contemporary Presses on View

"During the last 50 years, the conception and production of the book has evolved into an art form that exceeds all former standards for the book as object. Book arts have become a mature medium, and California artists and printers are leaders in the fine arts of the book," - Roberto G. Trujillo, head of Stanford Library's Department of Special Collections.

Currently on view at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is the exhibit, The Art of the Book in California: Five Contemporary Presses. Featuring nearly 50 books the exhibit highlights some of the amazing book art and fine press work emanating from the great book state of California.

The featured presses are:
Foolscap Press
Moving Parts Press
Ninja Press
Peter Koch Printers and
Turkey Press

 Moving Parts Press. Codex Espangliensis from Columbus to the Border Patrol, 1998

 Turkey Press. The Standard, 1997

Foolscap Press. Direction of the Road, 2007

Ninja Press. Burn Down the Zendo, 2004

 

Peter Koch Printer. Image from Zebra Noise an abcdarium and bestiary by Richard Wagener

The catalog for the exhibition features essays by Robert Bringhurst and Peter Koch and a detailed bibliographic entry for each book in the exhibit. Bringhurst has also put together a Chronology of Fine Printing in California that takes us from the birth of Agustín V. Zamorano, a provisional governor of Alta California and the state’s first printer, in 1798 through the 2007 launch of the Codex Foundation's first biennial international fine press book fair.

For those of you planning on being in Northern California this summer, the exhibit runs through August 28, 2011.

25 cent e-books: Unbridled success or just the nature of the Internet?

The numbers are in from Unbridled Books catchy 25 e-books for 25c promotion.

For those who missed this one it was a partnership between Unbridled Books and the ABA (American Booksellers Association) in which independent bookstores across the country that where set up for e-book commerce could offer a range of books from the publisher for 25 cents each.

During the three day event 145 independent bookstores sold a total of 15,807  e-books (this number does not include the e-books sold at Powells or other large shops that do not use the ABA e-commerce platform).

Though acknowledging that the model is indeed unsustainable ABA’s COO, Len Vlahos, proclaimed the promotion as an “unparalleled success,” He said “This experiment did demonstrate that consumers are interested in buying e-books from independent bookstores.”

Really?

Back in 1999, my brother, wife and I started an online clothing company called bargainclothing.com. It was becoming apparent that buying stuff over the internet was shaping up to be a budget conscious activity. Though the company didn't survive the burst of the dot-com bubble, it did have quite a nice run and was consistently ranked among the top 20 online destinations for apparel. Why?, the clothes were inexpensive. Buying things online was all about price point. We could offer the same clothing you would find in your local department store but for less money. Think Amazon, who at that time was billed as Earth's Biggest Bookstore.

So, it comes as no surprise that thousands of readers would flock to the websites of independent booksellers to partake in 25 cent e-books. Yes, there was an uptick in sales of other "regularly" priced e-books and some of those new customers will return in the future but I am not so sure how healthy a promotion this will turn out to be for the trade long term. It says a lot more about the nature of saving money online then buying independent. Essentially, these bookstores became penny-sellers for 3 days and one needs to look no further than how damaging the penny-selling  model has been to the non-new book business.

My head is still spinning trying to figure out how something that is completely unsustainable can by an unparallelled success.
Unbridled E-book Sale a Great Success - Publisher's Weekly

Booksellers read success in 25-cent e-book promotion - Puget Sound Business Journal

The Knowledge Taxis of Cairo

Egyptians on the whole are not big readers. So what's a bookstore to do to try and help shift the cultural attitudes toward books and get people reading?

 Last year the ALEF Bookstores in Cairo came up with a brilliant idea. Since the streets of Cairo are in an almost continuous state of gridlock why not put books in the back of taxis so people can pass the time reading.

The initiative, called “Taxi of Knowledge,” launched with 50 cabs, each carrying 5 books.

Here's how it works:

All the books for the program have been donated.

The bookstore lends each taxi driver 5 books which they choose and can exchange at any time."Alef has tried to keep the books short so as not to intimidate readers. Books range from women’s health, to philosophy and comedy books. Some books are even about the revolution – whatever best suits the taxi driver and his passengers’ taste."

Aleph places review cards in each taxi that allows the passengers to comment on  the book selection and the driver's knowledge of them. People can also comment on the taxi's cleanliness and other non-book related taxi issues. Each month the bookstore awards two drivers a prize based on the reviews.

The program has been an astounding success. The fleet of cabs driving around Cairo with books is now up to around 200. By the end of the year the program hopes to have 2000 cabs in the mix. There is also been some interest in creating a similar program for the city's buses.

 Hopefully, now that the Arab Spring is in full bloom, it won't be long for all 30,000 or so private taxis on the streets of Cairo to be book enabled.


Story at Almasry Alyoum, Taxi of Knowledge: Reading on the road
Dec 2010 piece from gulfnews.com, Cairo taxi libraries a boon for clients in traffic jams
Al Arabiya News Nov 2010, Egypt bookstore launches 'Taxi of Knowledge'
and for our Arabic speaking friends here is a link to a 3+ minute documentary on the project

James Joyce: Then and Now

 First Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce. Published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922

The beginning of Ulysses as it appeared on Twitter June, 16, 2011. In honor of Bloomsday, the novel is being tweeted in 140 character increments @11ysses

This is not the first time the paths of Twitter and Ulysses crossed. In 2007, before Twitter was a household name, the folks at Booktwo.org tweeted the entire novel. It took 257 days! See more at our piece from Dec. '07, The Twitter Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Leopold Bloom

The portrait of Leopold Bloom above is from Ulysses "Seen". A new adaptation of the novel  in comic book form by Robert Barry as a free app for the iPad.

And while we are dealing with adaptions of Joyce's work. It is hard to pass up some of the work of Australian artist Nicci Haynes:

Finnegans Wake Condensed to an A2 Print, 2009

226631 Wakewords. Content of Finnegan's Wake shredded and affixed to a plywood slab with slivers of text extending to the floor.

Finnegan's Wake Arranged for the Twenty-Note Paper-Strip Musical Movement, 2009. A translation of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake – into pianola roll style holes corresponding to musical notes.

Oh, by the way, in 2009 a copy of the 100 copy limited edition of Ulysses sold for £275,000 (about $440,000), which at the time was the highest price on record for a 20th century first edition.

Happy Bloomsday!

Book App Review: The Waste Land

Welcome to Book Patrol's inaugural Book App Review. Here we will sample and review apps created exclusively for books or book-related themes.

We kick off the series with a look at T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for the iPad, a joint production of Faber & Faber and Touch Press.

What is arguably the greatest poem of the 20th Century is now infused with the bells and whistles of what will or already has become one of the greatest technologies of the young 21st Century.

Think of it as a Wikipedia entry on interactive steroids and then some.

Not only do you get the poem persevered in its original typographic rendering but you can also view the original manuscript with Ezra Pound's hand-written edits.

You can listen to Eliot read the poem in 1933 and then again 15 years later in 1947. There are also readings by Sir Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and Viggo Mortensen and a filmed performance by actress Fiona Shaw of Harry Potter fame.

The entire poem is annotated and one can quickly and easily access and hide the feature as they read through the poem.

There are over 35 "video perspectives" on the poem including contributions from Seamus Heaney, Jeanette Winterson, Craig Raine and musician Frank Turner who sports a wrist tattoo featuring the poem's epigraph.

The videos run the gamut from the history of the poems publication to the influence of Eliot on Bob Dylan.

There were some minor things that could use a little tinkering,  the "video perspectives" do not pop out to full screen but remain in the upper corner of the sidebar and the gallery can be improved by adding book covers and designs of the various published editions, but all in all this is a hearty compliment to the poem.

The potential educational value of the app cannot be underestimated. The textual and contextual elements of the app would compliment any teaching of the poem and aside from offering a refreshing take on the poem for people familiar with it it will also increase the opportunity of it being discovered and appreciated by kids of today's wired generation.

The app sets a new standard for bringing a bound classic to the small screen.

Hours after its release last week it climbed to number 1 on the UK iTunes App Store book category. It was also the first poetry app in the US to become Apple’s official iPad App of the Week.


It is safe to say - The Waste Land has been enriched.

The app retails for for $13.99 (£7.99) from the App Store on iPad or at
http://www.itunes.com/appstore/.

The Books in Julia Child's Kitchen

 In 2001 Julia Child gave her kitchen to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The kitchen, designed by her husband Paul, was where millions of Americans watched as Child worked her culinary magic on her incredibly popular public-television series.

 The kitchen bookshelf

Christine Klepper, a Museum Studies graduate student at The George Washington University, has been spending some time in the kitchen working with the books. Her recent post on the blog of the National Museum of American History, What's on Julia Child's bookshelf, recounts her experience:

My assignment in the kitchen was to complete object condition reports on all 27 books on the kitchen bookshelf. My goal was to assess each book’s current condition, compare my observations with previous records, and, if its condition required, bring the book to the attention of a museum conservator. The bookshelf was located between Julia’s refrigerator and a glass view portal designed so visitors can see into the kitchen

Each book was labeled "Kitchen Copy" and interestingly enough none of the cookbooks had any edits in Child's hand to the recipes.

 

Dedication inscription to Julia and Paul from Marian Morash, author of The Victory Garden Cookbook

Here is a video tour of the kitchen:



Bon Appétit! Julia Child's Kitchen at the Smithsonian

Oregon opens an investigation into those blue book donation boxes

 Photo: Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian

The Charitable Activities Section of the Oregon Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Reading Tree and Thrift Recycling Management, the two companies behind many of those blue 'Books for Charity' boxes that have been popping up all around the country. Close to 100 boxes have begun to infest the state of Oregon alone.

In late May of 2009 we did a piece on Book Patrol, About Those Blue Book Donation Boxes, outlining the shady nature of these boxes. At the time of the post over 15,000 boxes where in place around the country.

We discovered that:

51% of books donated end up being pulped. Think revenue stream.

25% go to non-profit organizations committed to various literacy and book-related causes with only a tiny fraction of those books ever making it back to the community they came from and the remaining books are sold on the various online marketplaces.

We suggested that these boxes be painted red due to the inherent danger they pose to the communities they appear in with the biggest threat being to the local libraries where donations of books, which are eventually sold in library sales to support the library, have declined.

D.K. Row's piece in the Oregonian last month,  'Books for charity' bins around Oregon reveal blurry relationship between nonprofit and for-profit businesses, seems to have got the ball rolling. He talked with Ross Laybourn, the  former head of the charities division at the Oregon Department of Justice, who said:

"If you spend time looking at the bins, is it clear that it's being collected by a for-profit company?" Laybourn said. "It's like when a telemarketer calls for a contribution by telephone. They are supposed to make a disclosure that they are the professional fundraising firm calling on behalf of a charity."

Laybourn also thinks Thrift's close relationship to the nonprofit that manages its book distribution to charities, Reading Tree, might raise concerns.

"I always get a little nervous where you have this intertwining of a pro-profit and a nonprofit beneficiary," he said. "Are these two organizations totally dependent on each other?"

The piece was followed up less than a week later with word that one box had already been removed from a Portland-area shopping center.

The tide is turning.

Previously on Book Patrol:
Better or Not? Better World Books adds Donation Boxes, A Book Drive for Haiti and a Partnership with Powell's to the Mix

Penny-seller rakes in millions: Thrift Recycling gets hefty investment

ADDENDA - here will continue to add relevant links as the story unfolds.


Blue bins for books worry Palo Alto library advocates - San Jose Mercury News 6/14/2011
Controversy hits East Bay over used books - KGO-TV San Francisco 6/16/2011

Blue book donation bins come under fire - Contra Costa Times 6/17/2011
“Charity” book bins run by for-profit company - Berkeleyside 6/30/2011

Safeway removes some book donation bins after criticism - Contra Costa Times 7/13/2011

Computer Art meets Book Art

 There are some books that just stay with you.

The latest book to positively haunt me ever since we acquired it is Valerie Hollister's Seven Computer Landscapes. 

Published in 1993 the book "combines contemporary graphic art drawn on a computer with traditional letterpress printing."

"In deliberate anachronism, the nineteenth-century process that has been used to print Seven Computer Landscapes gives each image deep, velvety blacks,...and a slight tactile impression on the page."

The resulting almost dot matrix vibe of the drawings transform them into an almost woodcut-like appearance. 

And how did Hollister, who at the time was doing larger scale realistic paintings, get interested in drawing on the computer? From her twelve-year-old daughters "experiments with MacPaint."

 The book is bound in transparent lucite covers and is accordian-fold allowing you to see all the images simultaneously or in groups. It was published by Occasional Works in an edition of 35 signed and numbered copies and it appeared in our latest "Fresh Sheet"

Comic Study

 Scotland's Dundee University will be the first school in the United Kingdom to offer a masters degree in Comic Studies.

Why Dundee? For starters it is the home of the publisher DC Thomson and Co. whose creations include Dennis the Menace, Desperate Dan and the Broons.

The Broons

The program will be lead by Dr. Chris Murray, a leading authority on comics, and editor of the Studies in Comics journal.

Of the program Murray says:

"Employability is an important consideration for any postgraduate programme, and it lies at the heart of what we aim to do with this course. "There will be practical advice on publishing and developing a career as a comics scholar, writer or artist, and we hope to arrange work placements for students."

 Desperate Dan

In the US the University of Florida offers advanced degrees in Comic Studies through the Department of English.

Story at the BBC, Dundee University launches degree in comic books.
Gnashing Cow Pie on Bash Street, piece written by Murray on the comic heritage of Dundee.

Bob Dylan wants you to write a book

Did you know there are currently over 1000 books in the Bob Dylan cannon? 

One of the better ones and one that Dylan actually approved of,  No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton, was just re-released with a slew of other Dylan titles to coincide with Dylan's 70th birthday. The new edition, edited by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries, is 20,000 words longer than the original edition.

So what does Dylan have to say about the plethora of material written about him?
This is from a post on Dylan's website the week before his 70th birthday:

"Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them."

Now get to it.

And, in case you missed it, Democracy Now! had a fantastic 70th birthday tribute to Dylan featuring some rare interviews and songs from the Pacifica Radio Archives.



Review of the new edition of  No Direction Home at Publisher's Weekly.


Pile-Up of New Dylan Lit: Prize-worthy or Pulp?  at Crawdaddy Magazine

Improve Schools: Treat students like prisoners

Check out this letter to the editor that the Superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools in Michigan Nathan Bootz sent to the local paper. The letter is addressed to governor Rick Snyder and in it Bootz simply asks for the same provisions for his students that state supplies for its prisoners!

Bravo, Mr. Bootz.

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,

Nathan Bootz
Superintendent
Ithaca Public Schools

Thanks to the  American Library Association for the lead

Earth on View at the Library of Congress

The Dhofar Difference. Arabian Sea coast in the Dhofar region, 2000

For nearly 40 years we've been taken pictures of our planet from space in the name of science. "Key natural processes and human land use such as vegetation growth, deforestation, agriculture, coastal and river erosion, wildfire potential, snow accumulation, reservoir replenishment, and urbanization" are all monitored through satellite imagery.

Icelandic Tiger. Stretch of Iceland's northern coast, 1999

Now let's forget the science part of the equation. These images "were selected...based on their aesthetic appeal. Cloud formations, mountain ranges, islands, deltas, and glaciers seen from space take on patterns resembling abstract art with their striking textures and brilliant colors."

Belcher Islands meander across the deep blue of Canada's Hudson Bay, 2001 

 40 of these award-winning Landsat satellite images, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, are currently on view at the Library of Congress as part of the continuing "Earth as Art" project.

This the third installment of the project with all the images becoming part of the Library's permanent collection once the exhibit ends.

Ice Stars. chunks of sea ice drift through graceful swirls of grease ice in the frigid waters of Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, 2002

The Earth never looked so good, and I trust, like many of us, it looks better than it feels.

You can view all 40 images here

Press Releases

USGS

LOC

How Green is Your Library?

No matter what steps your library is taking to become greener it will be hard to beat The Grove Library Project in Western Australia. The entire project, designed by architects Cox Howlett + Bailey Woodland, utilized environmentally sustainable design from soup to nuts.

Features include:

climate-sensitive building design (e.g. thermal maze, in ground heat exchange, double glazing and use of natural lighting);
energy and water-efficient fixtures and fittings (e.g. dimmable lighting control and waterless urinals);
rainwater harvesting;
onsite treatment and reuse of wastewater;
renewable energy (solar panels and wind turbine); and stormwater treatment.

"The aim is not only to generate water and energy savings, but also to have an educational impact and tell a story about what is being achieved.

North exterior of The Grove Library, Peppermint Grove

The necessity of leaning green in these turbulent times is summed up nicely by William Yeoman in his piece, Ultra-modern Grove sets library standard, in The West Australian

 With dwindling natural resources and the future of public libraries hanging in the balance, so-called ESD (ecologically sustainable development) lighthouse projects such as the Grove, which extend the traditional brief of libraries by making the very building itself a living, evolving book as well as a depository of knowledge, are now essential.

 Outside the library sits Stuart Green’s Lotus sculpture which reveals its petals after a big rainfall

And here are 5 Eco online games for kids courtesy of The Grove