Category Archives: Ephemera
The Royal Library of the Netherlands’ Word Problem
When it comes to digitizing older and orphan works, most of the copyright controversies I see cropping up have more to do with intellectual property issues than actual conflict. Which is about what you’d expect—any real litigation is going to be hammered out in court rather than in the public debate arena. But what happens [...]
On Edward Gorey, George Herriman, and Creative DNA
Eve Bowen’s recent NYRBlog article on collecting Edward Gorey is full of enough eclectic links and images to make any fan happy. It also reminded me that I only had a few more days to catch “Gorey Preserved” at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. RBML is my former employer, and I’d been seeing [...]
Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence
When he first published his novel The Museum of Innocence in 2008, Orhan Pamuk already had plans in the works for an actual embodiment of the title institution. The book revolves around themes of obsessive love and objectification—its protagonist, Kemal, devotedly collects artifacts of a short-lived affair with a shopgirl to make up his own [...]
Dear E-Reader Manufacturer…
… I think I see what you’re missing here. All this time you’ve been thinking small, portable, handheld, modular, when all along the general public has been yearning for a brocaded lampshade. The above book reader of the future comes from the April, 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics. And the folks at Boing [...]
Naked Nun Marginalia
Just when I thought I didn’t have anything tonight, Kat sent me this fabulous find from Got Medieval concerning naked nun marginalia. Yes, you got that right. Apparently the manuscript in question, the Rothschild Canticles, was written for a nun at the turn of the 14th century. But in addition to the usual devotional illuminations, [...]
A Month of Letters in February
The other day I was out walking the dog, sending a few quick texts, and I got to wondering how soon it would be before smartphones got good enough on the voice recognition to send messages that way… and then realized that what I was thinking of was a phone call. Sometimes, I guess, a [...]
Golden Doodles
I do a lot of different writing these days: academic work for school, copywriting for a buck, essays and reviews for Like Fire and other venues, and plain old chatty newsy posts like this. One of the more important tools of my trade is the lined notebook sitting on my desk, not for flashes of [...]
Snow It Goes
A great find from GalleyCat: this year’s holiday card from the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Vonnegut’s phrase, “So it goes”—also the title of a sharp new biography of the writer by Charles Shields, which I’ll report back on soon—had darker connotations in Slaughterhouse-Five. Here, though, it gently lends a little of his cockeyed fatalism to [...]
Stamp of Approval
How much longer until we start seeing “Save the Post Office” messages and petitions? I’m guessing within the year—there’s already a website by that name, devoted to “closures, consolidations, and suspensions.” When I was a kid we were constantly encouraged, both in and out of school, to find pen pals, and I can still remember [...]
Email to Snail Mail
The Snail Mail My Email project ends tomorrow, and while it certainly wouldn’t have been practical to keep up indefinitely—experience bears out the fact that you can only get people to work for free for so long, no matter how much fun it is—I would have loved to see it grow and morph over a [...]
