Just So Stories for little children
Rudyard Kipling
London Macmillan and Co Limited First Edition September 1902 – Reprinted October 1902
I was never a big Kipling fan as a child, but I vividly remember this particular book from the local library. Considered a classic of children’s literature, the book is among Kipling’s best known works. Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. These had to be told “just so” (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. The stories describe how one animal or another acquired its most distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots. For the book, Kipling illustrated the stories himself.
Starting this summer, the New York Public Library will be bringing books to residents of the Bronx, Staten Island, and Manhattan via a new fleet of brand new, strawberry red-colored vans.
These new NYPL bookmobiles are designed to help communities that don’t currently have easy access to libraries, or whose local libraries aren’t completely operational. The Bronx’s Grand Concourse Library, for example, is currently closed for the next year due to ongoing renovations.
The NYPL had a history of offering New Yorkers books through its mobile libraries, at times called bookwagons, for over a century, but it has been nearly four decades since regular bookmobile services.
Just beyond
yourself.
It’s where
you need
to be.
Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.
There is a road
always beckoning.
When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.
That’s how
you know
it’s where
you
have
to go.
That’s how
you know
you have
to go.
That’s
how you know.
Just beyond
yourself,
it’s
where you
need to be.
Not long ago, I posted a story about British -Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s book art project at the Cleveland Library called The American Library Project. Now his companion project called The British Library has found its way into Tate Modern’s permanent collection.
Composed of thousands of books bound in Dutch wax print, the installation is supported by a digital platform which allows readers to submit their own stories of the impact that migration has had on British culture, society, and history.
2,700 of the books have had their spines transformed, with the names of notable first and second generation immigrants to the UK printed in gold leaf, creating an onomastic overview of British history which takes in everyone from Kazuo Ishiguro to Dame Helen Mirren.
A statement on the installation’s website notes: “Whilst the project is a celebration of the ongoing contributions made to British society by people who have arrived here from other parts of the world or whose ancestors came to Britain as immigrants, it does not exclude the points of view of those who object to it.”
Karl Marx wrote that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” This reprint from the St.Louis Dispatch September 9, 1923, should be a reminder of the farce playing itself out across the United States and Europe today.
Librarians from the historic California State Library in Sacramento created the cartoon-style infographic below to celebrate National Library week and to explore the many roles that libraries can play in the 21st century. Established in 1850, the California State Library is the oldest continuously operated public library in the American West.
Over the years, I’ve been very lucky to have visited Utrecht many times, I even had the opportunity to stay for a week about 20 years ago. Sadly, most foreign visitors to the Netherlands overlook this wonderful university city with many of the very same attractions that makesAmsterdam a tourist magnet. Recently street artists Jan Is De Man and Deef Feed worked with local residents to create a marvelous book-themed mural.
They turned an apartment building into a trompe-l’oeil library of huge books. The residents of the building gave the two artists the references for their favorite books. The resulting painting highlights 49 books from 7 different languages. There are books in English,Polish, German, Turkish, Arabic, Dutch and French.
In a story right out of a librarian’s dream, a previously unknown volume incorporating thousands of summaries of books from over five centuries ago, many of which no longer exist, has been found in the University Copenhagen Library, where it has been untouched for more than 350 years.
The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript contains more than 2,000 pages of summaries from books that were once in the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the largest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. At an estimated 15,000 volumes, the library was created during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only about 25% of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Spain’s Seville Cathedral since 1552.
The long lost Libro de los Epitomes was rediscovered in the Arnamagæan Collection in Copenhagen.The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years. It was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first spotted the connection to Colón. The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Wilson-Lee and his co-author José María Pérez Fernández, of the University of Granada, for verification.
A digitized version of the Libro de los Epitomes will be available next year along with a book about Colon’s library.
The American Library Association recently released its annual Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books, included in the ALA’s State of America’s Libraries Report 2019, an annual summary of library trends “that outlines statistics and issues affecting all types of libraries. Never have our nation’s libraries played such a pivotal role in strengthening communities through education and lifelong learning.”
According to the ALA, libraries continue to face challenges,including the potential for censorship,to a wide variety of books, programs and materials. In 2018, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 347 challenges to library, school and university materials and services. Overall, 483 books were challenged or banned.
Usually the ALA releases a Top Ten List, but this year 11 books were selected, since two titles were tied for the final position, and both books were burned by a religious fanatic to protest a Pride event. The list also includes the satirical book Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. The most frequently challenged titles last year were:
Travel Between The Pages 