My friend David Lynn Cox took me to the Peabody Library in Baltimore many years ago, and I clearly remember the moment I stepped inside and my head tipped back, farther and farther, until I was looking up into the heavens. Happy to see it included in this piece on the most beautiful libraries.
Archive for the ‘Libraries’ Category
Beautiful Libraries
Posted in Libraries on January 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Bookshelf Porn
Posted in Libraries on January 9, 2012 | 1 Comment »
A wonderful site: Bookshelf Porn. Thanks to Marty Blake.
The Siege of Leningrad
Posted in Environment, Libraries, Literature, War on November 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Excerpts from Writing the Siege of Leningrad; Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (2002), collected and edited by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina: “G. Popov dropped in on us today and played the piano. He called me into the room and started to play Ravel’s ‘Promenade in auto.’ At the most bravura place he says: [...]
Emily Post
Posted in Libraries, Literature, Skaneateles, Tea, Whiskey on October 15, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Thanks to the “Swap Shop” at the dump in Skaneateles, N.Y., I was able to procure a tattered but serviceable copy of Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage by Emily Post. It’s the 1940 edition of the classic first published in 1922. I share some excerpts in the assurance that should you ever be [...]
The Gift Reformative
Posted in Libraries, Literature on September 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Upon my shelves I can find no sharper contrast than that between the gift-book and the book-gift, the latter being a volume selected because it represents the giver’s taste, or else what he thinks is my taste, or, still worse, what he thinks ought to be my taste if it isn’t… And should the book-gift [...]
Reading
Posted in Art, Libraries, Literature on July 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“Fairy Tales” by Mary L. Gow (1851-1929)
Read, Write, Color
Posted in Art, Libraries, Literature on July 18, 2011 | 1 Comment »
From the cover of Play School: We Learn to Read, Write, Color published by Merrill Co., from the collection of Laurie Reith Winship
Good Book
Posted in Art, Libraries, Literature on July 9, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve had this forever. Can anyone tell me who this illustrator is?
Ex Libris
Posted in Art, Libraries on May 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Two of my favorites from Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates (2011) edited and collected by Martin Hopkinson. These are both by Ferdinand Schmutzer; the stag is for an Austrian woman, Flora Berl, and was done in 1917; the etching of a woman reading while the ghost of Shakespeare hovers just outside the window is [...]
More Books
Posted in Art, Libraries, Literature on October 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
A 1919 poster for the American Library Association by Jessie Willcox Smith
