Parenthetical

Every year, my library has a Book Fair, where kids can buy their summer reading books and whatever else looks like fun. The books come from Big Corporate Bookstore, which is nice enough to give us a cut of the profits. It’s a pretty good deal for everyone. Anyway, Friday my boss and I went [...]

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This post on LibraryThing’s Thingology blog appeals to my nerdly love of maps and my nerdly love of books! The author shows maps of a few cities (including Cambridge, MA), with the libraries marked with blue dots and the bookstores marked with green. The ways they cluster, or don’t, is pretty interesting. A confounding factor [...]

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Since Kate D. tagged me here, I’ll do a geeky library-themed “6 Things You May Not Know About Me”: 1. When I was a kid, I used to dog-ear corners in books because I didn’t like messing with bookmarks. Yes, even library books. I know! 2. Even more shamefully: I had an obsession with Absolut [...]

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A comment on my last post, from ruthling: “young adult” and “SF/fantasy” books get the double whammy, since no author wants to be painted by the genre brush if they can get away with it at all (see Margaret Atwood, for example). It’s true, which I find perplexing. The stereotype is that the kids who [...]

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Dude! When I was in elementary school, we watched an educational series called Tomes and Talismans. It never occurred to me to look it up on YouTube until today, but here it is! I had forgotten what it was about, exactly, but according to the blurb by the person who posted it to YouTube: Post-apocalyptic [...]

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Thanks to a full-page ad in the book review journal Book Links, I now have a new favorite publishing company: Magination Press, “Self-Help Books for Kids…and the Adults in Their Lives.” Winning titles include (see if you can guess the theme): Clouds and Clocks: A Story for Children Who Soil. Sammy the Elephant and Mr. [...]

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I’m reclassifying all the Shakespeare (he’s the only author in Dewey who has a special set of sub-classification letters: B for Biography, D for Critical appraisal, a code for each play and criticism of that play, etc.), and came across Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. The front flap claims that Shakespeare [...]

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Ok, are these people crazy, or is there actual science backing this up? A librarian recently quit her job at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, “cit[ing] concerns about irradiation” and stating that she “believed that a Wi-Fi hub contributed to feelings of ill health she experienced.” She cited the Council on Wireless Technology Impacts (link [...]

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This morning’s email from my contact: “We are also looking into organising for you a one day workshop where you will teach some selected liberians here in Ho Municipality how to go about the practices here. So please when coming if you will need any materials for the teaching you can bring it along.” Assuming [...]

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Did you know there’s a picture book about the gay penguins? There sure is! (And now my library owns it. ) It’s called And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell and illustrated by Henry Cole, who also illustrated The Sissy Duckling and therefore has carved quite the “cute gay birds” niche for [...]

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