Category Archives: Libraries

Literature in the Digital Age

Lit Drift is a website with the daunting mission of making literature fun and accessible in the digital age. Run by writers, the site offers free e-books, articles, recommendations, writing tools, games and a series of sixty-second video versions of … Continue reading

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Banned Books : the videos

This year to mark Banned Books Week more than 650 videos of people reading from notorious banned books were posted on YouTube. Between September 24 and October 1st, videos by authors, students, celebrities, bookstore staff and booklovers were recorded for the … Continue reading

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Occupy Wall Street

As the Occupy Wall Street protests continue to to grow and spread, in their down-time hundreds of demostrators are reading books donated to the protest’s official outdoor library. If you’d like to donate reading material to the library, here’s the … Continue reading

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Charles Dickens at 200

Charles Dickens fans should not miss the Morgan Library and Museum’s exciting bicentennial celebration of the author’s birth. With North America’s greatest permanent collection of Dickens manuscripts, books, letters and documents, the Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan is the perfect … Continue reading

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Mappamundi

The glorious Fra Mauro Mappamundi was created between 1458 and 1459 by the Venetian monk/cartographer/sailor/explorer/adventurer Fra Mauro. The map was commissioned by Portugal’s King Alfonso V and produced at the Camaldolese Monastery of Saint Michael on the Venetian lagoon island … Continue reading

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On The Beach

In this sad era of library closures and drastic funding cuts, one nation has found novel ways to reach out to library users. In the Netherlands, they’ve launched the world’s first airport library (at Amsterdam Schiphol) and now they’ve opened … Continue reading

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Awful Library Books

Hat-tip to our friends at Any Amount of Books, London for this suggestion: Michigan librarians Mary and Holly have been compiling their hilarious, and sometimes scary, blog of Awful Library Books for almost four years. I know that booklovers and … Continue reading

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A True Peake Experience

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) was a prolific and astonishingly original writer and artist, who touched at one time or another on almost every literary form. To celebrate the centenary of Peake’s birth, the British Library’s exhibition The Worlds of Mervyn Peake … Continue reading

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Libraries Without Borders

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is probably the only cultural institution that’s bisected by an international border. That’s because the US/Canadian border slices right through the library’s Kenneth Baldwin International Reading Room. You enter the imposing turn-of-the-century building … Continue reading

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Chicago Inaugurates the Library of the Future

Last week the University of Chicago opened the exciting new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. Looking much like a partially buried crystal egg, the Grand Reading Room of the facility is outfitted with Low-E glass that ensures plenty of daylight, … Continue reading

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