“Librarians’ values are as sound as Girl Scouts’: truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they’re not trying to sell us anything.”
— Marilyn Johnson in This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (2010)
The Chess Match (1902) by Carl Probst (1854-1924)
The Chess Players (1929) by John Lavery (1856-1941)
My thanks again to Tableaux ayant pour sujet les échecs.
Bookmark by Charles Schulz, 1969, with thanks to Laurie Winship.
“Sky High” by Christopher Glanville, a watercolor, sent to me in 1982 by Antje Lemke.
A postcard I have treasured since it arrived in 1984, Carl Larsson’s “Karin Reading,” with thanks to Jessica Behrman.
“I really think, for a sensible person, my Cousin Milly here talks more nonsense than any twenty other girls.”
“A twenty-girl power! That’s an immense compliment. I’ve the greatest respect for nonsense, I owe it so much; and I really think if nonsense were banished, the earth would grow insupportable.”
— Lord Ilbury responds to Miss Ruthyn in Uncle Silas (1864) by Sheridan Le Fanu
Remember when Presidents had some gravitas, some girth, some heft to them? Hail to thee, William Howard Taft, just because. Photograph from the Lumiere Studio, Omaha, Nebraska. Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson and printed in The Century magazine, 1916.
What could be more perfect than a beer named for the postal service, and a coaster with a postal rider blowing his horn to announce the coming of the mail? What a happy marriage of interests.
Two bookmarks from The Scottish Widows’ Fund, with the back of the bookmarks shown in the second set of images, on the right. The top bookmark features the painting, “Off Valparaiso, after T. Somerscales” and the second “The Waefu’ Heart after Thomas Duncan, R.A.” These were so surprising and beautiful to me that I’ve never been able to use them. But it dawned on me this morning that I could share them.
Of all the things I have found in books, this is one of my absolute favorites, from Jens Moller, a bookseller in Helsingor, Denmark.
Read, Seen, Heard 