Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The top 20 novels set in Toronto

by: Derek Flack

Here's a list of the top 20 novels set in Toronto that we put together via suggestions from our readers. When the question was first posed, the responses came in fast and furious — far more so than initially expected — and were quite varied. Along with CanLit giants like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Morley Callaghan and Timothy Findley, the list below shows off younger writers working in a wide range of genres. A rather well-known series of graphic novels and those written for young-adults are even represented (as they most definitely should be).


The criteria that informs the selection below isn't scientific, nor does it claim to rank novels solely based on their literary value. Rather, the point here is to put together a reading list based on the relative popularity of these novels against others set in Toronto. That's why no numeric ranking system is used. In general, emphasis has been placed on those that feature significant sections set in the city. But we are, of course, happy to hear more suggestions — so let us know what novels you'd nominate in the comments section.

Lastly, a note about the links: each novel links out to a site that offers either a review or additional information about the text, rather than strictly retail info (although in some cases that's there too). For more information about Toronto-based books, the Imagining Toronto website and the book of the same name are excellent resources.

The top 20 novels set in Toronto as suggested by blogTO's readers


■In the Skin of a Lion — Michael Ondaatje
■What We All Long For — Dionne Brand
■Consolation — Michael Redhill
■Headhunter — Timothy Findley
■The Robber Bride — Margaret Atwood
■The Edible Woman — Margaret Atwood
■Cat's Eye — Margaret Atwood
■The Scott Pilgrim series — Bryan Lee O'Malley
■Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — Cory Doctorow
■Old City Hall — Robert Rotenberg
■Fifth Business — Robertson Davies
■The Fionavar Tapestry — Guy Gavriel Kay
■Girls Fall Down — Maggie Helwig
■Self Condemned — Wyndham Lewis
■Cabbagetown — Hugh Garner
■Killing Circle — Andrew Pyper
■The Blood series — Tanya Huff
■Booky series —Bernice Hunter
■Girl Crazy — Russell Smith
■All My Friends Are Superheroes — Andrew Kaufman

from: BlogTO

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Digital music downloads at library a big hit

by: Bertram Rantin

The songs of Adele, James Taylor, Kenny Chesney, Janis Joplin and thousands more are among the free music titles now available through a new digital download service at the Richland County Public Library.

More than 13,000 music files have been downloaded since the library began offering its Freegal Music service in late June.

“We have been blown away by the response,” said Tony Tallent, the library’s director of literacy and learning. “It has just been incredible. We knew that it was something the public would go for, and they sure have.”

The music service is the latest addition to the library’s downloadable media inventory that also includes fiction and non-fiction eBooks and audiobooks, videos and games.

Library patrons now can download thousands of songs from more than 50 record labels within the Sony Music Entertainment catalog onto their PCs, Macs, iPods, iPads and other MP3-compatiable devices. Each cardholder can download up to three songs per week — 156 songs a year — and the files do not expire.

The library is paying for the service, allowing members to download the music legally without facing copyright issues. Lexington County and Kershaw County libraries don’t offer free music downloads yet, but both have other media available for download.

Melanie Parker of Forest Acres and her family have been taking advantage of the Freegal service since it launched.

“I’ve downloaded three songs weekly since it started,” said Parker, whose downloads have ranged from Bach, to Aaron Copeland to Charlotte Church. “Freegal is the icing on the library cake.”

Tallent said about 2,000 of the roughly 13,119 music files downloaded since the service started June 20 were in the first two weeks.

“We are seeing it really take off,” he said. “We circulate a lot of music CDs. But at the same time, we know that a lot of our music delivery has moved into the arena of downloadable music.”

And for many like Parker, the free music service has offered another cost saving option in an increasingly challenging economy.

“I love the library and try to take advantage of all it offers, especially online, which is available almost all of the time,” she said.

Tallent said digital downloads of all genres now make up about half of the transactions at the Main Library.

“The digital age has really changed not only the way we interact with each other but the way we seek out information,” he said.

The library has about 500,000 music tracks available, but Tallent said the inventory will expand considerably in the coming months.

“It’s kind of staggering,” Tallent said. “Our public loves music.”

from: The State

Monday, August 29, 2011

Berlin library returning books stolen by Nazis

BERLIN (AP) -- Berlin's Central and Regional Library says it will return books the Nazis stole from the Social Democratic Party, including an English-language copy of the Communist Manifesto.


The copy dates from 1883 and is believed to have belonged to Friedrich Engels, who penned the original German work with Karl Marx in 1848.

The library said Monday the work is one of some 70 to be returned to the party on Aug. 31.

The Social Democratic Party was banned in 1933 after Hitler came to power.

Activists from the party continued to oppose the Nazis. Many were persecuted or killed for their activities.

from: AP

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Bountiful Books: 13 Incredibly Intricate Historic Libraries

by: Steph

Dark wood, dazzling details, leaded glass windows and tier after towering tier of books – classic historic libraries are a bibliophile’s dream. These 13 (more) libraries, dating from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, represent some of the most astonishingly beautiful book repositories ever built.



Rijksmuseum Reading Room, Amsterdam

(images via: rijksmuseum.nl)
The largest public art history research library in the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Reading Room was formerly located in the stunning main Rijksmuseum building, established in 1800. It has since been mod to a new, separate building, but images of its tiers of books in a massive historic room continue to dazzle.


Trinity College Library, Dublin, Ireland

(images via: irish welcome tours)
At Ireland’s oldest university, home to the book of Kells, the ‘Old Library’ stuns with its dark wood, spiral staircases and seemingly endless aisles of books. It was built between 1712 and 1732 and renovated in 1860 to include a barrel ceiling for a second floor of book shelves.


Canadian Library of Parliament

(images via: wikimedia commons)
Canada’s LIbrary of Parliament was originally built in 1876 and is the only part of the Centre Block to remain untouched after a fire in 1916. Inspired by the British Museum Reading Room, this library features a massive main chamber with a vaulted ceiling. The walls and bookshelves are lined with intricately carved white pine paneling.


Strahov Monastery Library, Prague

(images via: claudia dias, architecture.artyx.ru)
Part of a monastery that was established in the year 1143, the Strahov Monastery Library has a 46-foot ceiling decorated with a 1794 fresco entitled ‘The Struggle of Mankind to Know Real Wisdom’. It contains a vast collection of books as well as ancient printing presses.


Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington

(images via: railgun)
Completed in 1926 in Collegiate Gothic style, the University of Washington’s Suzzallo LIbrary contains an incredible 250-foot long, 52-foot wide Graduate Reading Room featuring a timber-vaulted ceiling, leaded windows and cast-stone ashlar wall blocks.


Admont Abbey Library, Austria

(images via: wikimedia commons)
The largest monastic library in the world is located in Admont in Austria. Admont Abbey was founded in 1074 and settled by Benedictine monks, and the spectacular gold and white library was added in 1776. It survived a disastrous 1865 fire that destroyed the rest of the monastery.


Real Gabinete Portugues de Leitura, Rio de Janeiro

(images via: rbpdesigner, servuloh)
This dark and somber reading room contains an amazing 350,000 books. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura was built in the Manueline Portuguese style in 1837 and is four stories tall inside for maximum book storage without a cluttered, maze-like floor.


Iowa State Capitol Law Library

(images via: rata bibliotecaria, state library of iowa)
A lacy white banister flows along tier after tier of books and down a beautiful spiral staircase at the Iowa State Capitol Law Library, located in the Capitol building. The library provides Iowa lawmakers, lawyers, government employees and the public with a specialized legal collection of treatises and law books.


Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

(images via: the great geek manual, torontoist)
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is located at the University of Toronto, and is the largest publicly accessible collection of rare books and manuscripts in Canada. It contains Darwin’s proof copy of On the Origin of the Species among other notable works.


George Peabody Library, Baltimore

(images via: elibris.jhu.edu)
One of the most beautiful libraries in America is located in Baltimore. The George Peabody LIbrary opened in 1878 and contains five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies rising to the skylight 61 feet above the floor. It contains 300,000 titles, most dating from the 18th to early 20th centuries.


Reading Room at the British Museum

(images via: tony harrison, pragmatopian)
At the heart of the British Museum is the Reading Room, completed in 1857 and restored in 2000. Considered a masterpiece of mid-19th century technology when it was built, the reading room was inspired by the domed Pantheon in Rome and measures 140 feet in diameter. The original gold, blue and cream color scheme was reinstated during the restoration.


Abbey Library of St. Gallen, Switzerland

(images via: chippee)
The library at the Abbey St. Gall in Switzerland is the country’s oldest, and considered one of the most important monastic libraries in the world. Its 2,100 manuscripts date back to the 8th through 15th centuries, and it also contains 160,000 books. The library, along with the rest of the abbey, is now a World Heritage Site as an ideal example of a Carolingian monastery.


Stockholm Public Library

(images via: marcus hansson, smath)
Stockholm’s rotunda library building, designed by architect Gunnar Asplund, was completed in 1932 and is still considered one of the city’s most important buildings. It is primarily comprised of a round lending hall in a tall cylindrical shape and also contains interior reading rooms. Polished black stucco gives the entrance a dramatic flair, and the hanging chandelier captures lights from the high clerestory windows.


Handlingenkamer, Netherlands

(images via: tweedekamer.nl) 
The Old Library at the Dutch House of Representatives contains volume after volume of verbatim reports of parliament proceedings and debates. The roof was constructed as a leaded glass dome to allow daylight to filter down the four stories to the floor, which was necessary at the time it was built in the 19th century to avoid bringing combustibles like candles and gas lamps from setting the 100,000 volumes on fire.
from: WebUrbanist

Friday, August 26, 2011

Christopher Robin's Devon bookshop to close

by: Rob Hastings

Christopher Robin Milne, aged six, with his own Winnie the Pooh bear

The bookshop set up by the real Christopher Robin to escape a family feud and hide from the unwanted fame of his father's Winnie the Pooh stories is to close.

It was 60 years ago that Christopher Robin Milne left London for Dartmouth on the south coast of Devon to open the Harbour Bookshop, seeking refuge from a faltering writing career, bitterness at his father and his mother's disapproval at his choice of wife.

But while the store succeeded in allowing Milne to begin a new life, its current owners, Rowland and Caroline Abram, are now being forced to close it to make their own escape – both from rising rent and falling sales.

The sad end for the bookshop mirrors the emotions that led to its founding. Though his childhood as the son of author AA Milne had initially been happy, Christopher Robin Milne came to be teased and bullied for his innocent portrayal in his father's stories, and grew angry at newspaper articles about him.

Those frustrations eventually boiled over in his late twenties – later leading him to write he sometimes felt his dad "had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son".

from: Independent

Thursday, August 25, 2011

At This Library, Check Out the Tomatoes

by: Corey Kilgannon
Corey Kilgannon/The New York Times
Homegrown produce is in season at the City Island branch of the public library.

Robert Cox walked into the public library on City Island in the Bronx the other day to read the daily papers and to grab a handful of cherry tomatoes from a bowl of fresh produce next to the checkout counter.


“You better not spit them out – I grew them myself,” Gary Makufka, a library staff member, said as a rib.

Mr. Makufka was not kidding about growing them himself. Services at libraries can be vast and varied these days, but try finding a library whose staff grows fruit and vegetables for the patrons in a garden out back.

That’s the deal at this branch of the New York Public Library in an area often described as a little New England fishing village with a Bronx accent.

The City Island branch is one of the smallest in the city, but it has a backyard patio and small yard where patrons can read. In that yard lies the bountiful little garden patch that yields a bumper crop. The staff welcomes library users to pick their own or to help themselves from the bowl of freshly harvested produce near the door.
Gary Makufka

The library’s pumpkin patch was
 coming along nicely last week


“It wouldn’t be fair if we ate it all,” said Mr. Makufka, who when he is not helping patrons find books, can often be found watering and tending the garden, which is a bit smaller than a parking space and is bursting with lettuce and tomatoes, as well as wild mint, oregano, cabbage, cauliflower, squash, eggplant, hot peppers and strawberries.

Yolanda Cirulli, a library patron who helps care for the garden, was eating her lunch on the back patio. She had a sandwich and a selection of garden offerings: some tomatoes, oregano, basil and leeks.

“Not only does this library feed the mind, but it also feeds the body,” said Ms. Cirulli, who is also a volunteer with the Garden Club of City Island, which helped start and helps tend the garden.

The garden, now in its third year, began as a modest strip of plants and has grown each year, to include an additional section along the patio.

“We’re a community library and we thought it was a good idea,” said the branch manager, Vershell Wigfall.

There have been problems, though, with squirrels munching some produce and humans pilfering plants, as there are everywhere in the city.

“Someone reached over the fence and stole our sunflowers,” Ms. Wigfall said. “It’s not so bad. At least it’s staying in the community.”

Ms. Wigfall herself does not soil her hands in the garden.

“This is the way I garden,” she said with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘Go get that tomato for me.’”

Officials with the New York Public Library system said they knew of no other branch in the system with its own garden. But then, the City Island library has always been unique, since it opened across City Island Avenue 100 years ago. Despite its comparatively small collection, it has the largest collection of maritime books in the library system, with several hundred fiction and nonfiction works.

Also, the library has long served as a port for the many recreational sailors who wind up docking at City Island while journeying.

“They come in to use our computers to check the tides and the weather, or to get information if they’re going to go into the city at night,” Ms. Wigfall said. “We had this family that sailed down from Maine and got stranded on City Island — they came here for three days straight.”

Out back, Mr. Makufka explained that he had learned more from working in the garden than from the library’s books on the subject.

“Gardening books are too technical,” he said. “They can be very confusing sometimes. The best way to learn is by doing.”

from: NY Times

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

For kids or not for kids - that is the question

by: Carolyn Webb
Nicki Greenberg: the book is not aimed at 'a particular age, it's aimed at a general readership'. Photo: Wayne Taylor
THE winner of one of Australia's top children's book awards says her award-winning book, which depicts sex and incest, is not for young children.

The Children's Book Council of Australia today names Melbourne artist Nicki Greenberg's hardback graphic novel Hamlet as joint Picture Book of the Year.

Greenberg's Hamlet has the whimsical design of a children's storybook. The characters are drawn as inkblots with Dr Seuss-like creature faces. The narrative, of the Danish prince Hamlet exploring human nature as he avenges his father's murder, has an on-stage style backdrop of colourful, hand-drawn watch cogs, gardens, moonscapes and graveyards.

The text is William Shakespeare's, but Greenberg has added wordless side-scenes faithful to Hamlet themes in which the ''actors'' who play the characters go backstage.

The cartoon actor playing Hamlet is depicted having sex with the actor playing Ophelia, and later beds the actor playing his mother, Queen Gertrude.

Greenberg, a lawyer and mother of two, said it is a full ''staging'' of the play and and it wasn't dumbed down or meant to be a school primer. ''It's really for a general audience or teens, definitely not for young children,'' she said.

She is comfortable it's won this particular Children's Book Council award because it is for ''Picture Book'', and not ''Children's Picture Book'' of the Year.

But while it could now be sold with the Children's Book Council label, Greenberg said parents needed to check it out first. ''To say, because it's got the award sticker on it, does that mean you have no responsibility for it and you buy it for a three-year-old? That's just ridiculous.''

The other winner is Sydney author Jeannie Baker's wordless, collage-style book Mirror, the stories of two boys and their parents in Morocco and Sydney. Children's Book Council president Julie Wells said picture books were increasingly being written more for late teens and adults than the younger Very Hungry Caterpillar audience. The Council had created the 'Book of the Year: Early Childhood' category to include young children's picture books.

Wells had not realised Greenberg's book had sex scenes, but said a panel of eight librarians had ''judged this as suitable for the award''.

Wells said the awards' entry guidelines described picture books as: ''Intended for an audience ranging from birth to 18 years (some books may be for mature readers).''

from: Sunday Morning Herald

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Contest - My Library Matters to Me!

This is a pretty cool and original contest brought to you by the folks at Our Public Library. In order to raise awareness about what is happening at City Hall and TPL, they have enlisted some of Canada's best authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Susan Swan and others. They are asking for people to submit "Why My Library Matters to Me”. Each participating author will accompany a small group of contest winners to a Toronto literary site (such as a location in one of their books) followed by lunch with their group at one of the author's favourite Toronto restaurants. The contest opens August 25th...spread this far and wide. Check it out!


via: Dewey Divas

Monday, August 22, 2011

How to Expand Your Library in Tight-Fisted Toronto

by: Steve Kupferman
Toronto Public Library's Perth/Dupont branch. Photo by Harry Choi/Torontoist.
Talk of austerity and cutbacks in Toronto has been constant lately, but residents of the area in and around the Junction Triangle are trying something different. Tuesday night, they met to discuss the possibility of expanding their local library.


The Junction Triangle’s local branch is Perth/Dupont, one of TPL's littlest libraries, in terms of both square footage and usage. It's about the size of a small apartment, except rather than furniture and loneliness, it contains books and people. Maybe too many people.

"Anybody who goes into the Perth/Dupont library knows it's overcrowded," local councillor Ana Bailão (Ward 18, Davenport) told a few dozen attendees, who had gathered in a banquet hall on the ground floor of the nearby Sporting Clube Portugês de Toronto. An attempt earlier in the evening to hold the event in the meeting room on the second floor of the Perth/Dupont library had been thwarted when turnout exceeded the maximum occupancy allowable under the fire code, which is 33.

Bailão has a plan to make the library bigger without incurring the cold wrath of City Hall's new-found tight-fistedness. A developer is seeking City approval for two new condo towers at 830 Lansdowne Avenue, and will likely be paying the City what's known as Section 37 money. (Basically, a fee the City takes in exchange for granting a developer extra height or density on a building.)

Section 37 funds usually get spent on whatever neighbourhood improvements the local councillor wants them to be spent on—a community centre, for instance, or a public art installation—though city council has to give final approval. Bailão doesn't yet know the amount of money that will be generated by this particular deal, but seems convinced that it will be a lot. "I can guarantee that there's a substantial amount of money that's going to be coming to Perth/Dupont," she told the room.

TPL has financed other projects using money from development charges, one recent example being the forthcoming new branch at Fort York Boulevard, downtown.

Kevin Putnam, a seven-year Junction Triangle resident who is leading the effort to galvanize the community around the expansion plan, took the floor to explain that in his preliminary discussions with library staff, he’d been informed that building a new, bigger library on Perth/Dupont’s existing plot of land would cost $3 million, and that this could be accomplished in four or five years. Rather than rely on Section 37 funds entirely, Putnam suggested that the neighbourhood explore the possibility of raising money from private donors—a way of financing new construction that even TPL’s professional fundraisers have had difficulty with in the past.

One woman spoke up to say that her daughter had raised “hundreds of dollars” selling lollipops for another charitable cause. The amounts required in this case could be more on the order of hundreds of thousands, or millions.

“That’s a lot of lollipops,” said Putnam.

Other members of the crowd were worried that the whole meeting was a blind for a secret plot. “I believe that there is a hidden agenda, and the hidden agenda is that Perth/Dupont has been selected to be closed,” said one older man, who’d taken a seat near the front of the room.

The next step in the process of bringing the idea to fruition will be for the community to organize itself and produce a report outlining what it would want out of a renovated branch, so that if and when the money comes, they'll be ready to use it.

from: Torontoist

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Orlando Figes to give away royalties from next book

Historian promises he will donate to charity half his earnings from study of gulag internee's secret correspondence.
by: Michael MacLeod

Historian Orlando Figes has vowed to donate half of the takings from his next book to charity.


The professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, revealed his plans at the Edinburgh international book festival.

He said the book, yet to be named, was based on an archive of 1,500 letters smuggled between a Russian soldier and his wife while he was held in the Pechora gulag. Their correspondence spanned a decade from 1946. Figes described it as an "absolutely unique and uncensored account" from the labour camps.

The historian hit headlines in April last year when he admitted to being the author of anonymous Amazon reviews praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals. His comments angered fellow academics. Historian Robert Service described Figes as "contaminant slime" after his own work was branded "awful" in the Amazon posts. Happily for Figes, however, his festival audience chose not to raise the issue at his talk.

During his event, he explained his decision not to offer remuneration to the families who shared their stories for his previous book, The Whisperers, an oral history of Russia during the Stalin era.

"It's very difficult to work with that material and to feel responsible for all the families involved in it, some of whom I got to know," he said of his earlier work. "It's not something I would wish on any other historian, to work with that material ... I considered the question of proceeds very carefully. I felt that if there were any monetary remuneration offered to families volunteering their stories, that would pollute the process. I made some charitable donations after the book was finished but I didn't think it was appropriate to give money to families for telling their stories. Lots of people came forward wanting to sell their stories but they were rejected.

"With [this] story though, I've agreed to give half of the royalties to a charity nominated by the survivors of the family."


from: Guardian

Friday, August 19, 2011

Kindles make reading people harder

If you need another reason to worry about the death of print, think of the access to strangers' souls we'll lose when e-readers take over.
by: Sarah Crown
Do you need to know anything more about these people? Harry Potter fans from two generations at a bus stop. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Ah ha! I've finally put my finger on a concrete reason for my lingering, irrational, doubtless soon-to-be-jettisoned prejudice against e-readers. I had dinner last night with a few people at the Edinburgh festival, and eventually, inevitably, the subject of print vs ebooks came up. The pros and cons were duly trotted out for another airing, and the conversation followed the usual, now well-worn lines, until one member of the party made what seemed to me to be a killer point.


"The problem with Kindles," he said, "is that you can't tell what other people are reading on public transport."

Case closed. Spying on what everyone else on the bus is reading is my main source of entertainment on the way into work in the morning. Train journeys are enlivened by trying to sneak a look at the cover of the book the person opposite is buried in, without them spotting what I'm doing. One of my favourite internet destinations is the People Reading blog which posts pictures of the denizens of San Francisco, with their latest reading material; a prize, meanwhile, to anyone who can reunite me with a blog I used to visit a few years back written by a woman somewhere in north America, who used to clock not only the title but the page of books bypassers were reading, nip into the nearest bookshop, track down book and page and transcribe what she found there.

Rubberneckers of the world, unite: when ebooks take over, how will we form snap judgments about our fellow-travellers? Think about it.


from: Guardian

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Alan Bennett on libraries of a lifetime

As the debate intensifies over the closure of local libraries, Alan Bennett remembers the reading rooms of his youth – and argues that access to a book-lined haven is as important for a child today as it has ever been.
by: Alan Bennett
 Photo: REX
I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered. “All these books. I’ll never catch up,” wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out EM Forster with a big cigar. Orton notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.


The first library I did find my way into was the Armley Public Library in Leeds where a reader’s ticket cost tuppence in 1940; not tuppence a time or even tuppence a year but just tuppence; that was all you ever had to pay. It was rather a distinguished building, put up in 1901, the architect Percy Robinson, and amazingly for Leeds, which is and always has been demolition-crazy, it survives and is still used as a library, though whether it will survive the present troubles I don’t like to think.

We would be there as a family, my mother and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our regular weekly visits. I had learnt to read quite early when I was five or six by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy and the Beano, my brother, who was three years older, had graduated to the more text-based Hotspur and Wizard. Having finished my Dandy I would lie down on the carpet beside him and gaze at what he was reading, asking him questions about it and generally making a nuisance of myself. Then – and it seemed as instantaneous as this – one day his comic made sense and I could read. I’m sure it must have been more painstaking than this but not much more.

The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained glass which by 1941 was just beginning to buckle. Ahead was the Adults’ Library, lofty, airy and inviting; to the right was the Junior Library, a low dark room made darker by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy boards of black, brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds Public Libraries. This grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who had just begun to read, though more discouraging still was the huge and ill-tempered, walrus-moustached British Legion commissionaire who was permanently installed there. The image of General Hindenburg, who was pictured on the stamps in my brother’s album, he had lost one or other of his limbs in the trenches, but since he seldom moved from his chair and just shouted it was difficult to tell which.

The books I best remember reading there were the Dr Dolittle stories of Hugh Lofting, which were well represented and (an important consideration) of which there were always more. I think I knew even at six years old that a doctor who could talk to animals was fiction but at the same time I thought the setting of the stories, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, was a real place set in historical time with the doctor (and Lofting’s own illustrations of the doctor) having some foundation in fact. Shreds of this belief clung on because when, years later, having recorded some of Lofting’s stories for the BBC, I met his son, I found I still had the feeling that his father had been not quite an ordinary mortal.

In 1944, believing, as people in Leeds tended to do, that flying bombs or no flying bombs, things were better Down South, Dad threw up his job with the Co‑op and we migrated to Guildford. It was a short-lived experiment and I don’t remember ever finding the public library, but this was because a few doors down from the butcher’s shop where Dad worked there was a little private library, costing 6d a week, which in the children’s section had a whole run of Richmal Crompton’s William books. I devoured them, reading practically one a day, happy in the knowledge that there would always be more. Years later when I first read Evelyn Waugh I had the same sense of discovery: here was a trove of books that was going to last. I wish I could say I felt the same about Dickens or Trollope or Proust even, but they seemed more of a labour than a prospect of delight.


It wasn’t long, though, before we ended up going back to Leeds where we now lived in Headingley, with the local public library on North Lane, a visit to which could be combined with seeing the film at the Lounge cinema opposite. When I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School, a state school at Lawnswood (and now called Lawnswood) I used to do my homework in the Leeds Central Library in the Headrow. It’s a High Victorian building done throughout in polished Burmantofts brick, extravagantly tiled, the staircases of polished marble topped with brass rails, and carved at the head of each stair a slavering dog looking as if it’s trying to stop itself sliding backwards down the banister.

The reference library itself proclaimed the substance of the city with its solid elbow chairs and long mahogany tables, grooved along the edge to hold a pen, and in the centre of each table a massive pewter inkwell. Arched and galleried and lined from floor to ceiling with books, the reference library was grand yet unintimidating. Half the tables were filled with sixth-formers like myself, just doing their homework or studying for a scholarship; but there would also be university students home for the vacation, the Leeds students tending to work up the road in their own Brotherton Library. There were, too, the usual quota of eccentrics that haunt any reading room that is warm and handy and has somewhere to sit down. Old men would doze for hours over a magazine taken from the rack, though if they were caught nodding off an assistant would trip over from the counter and hiss, “No sleeping!”

One regular, always with a pile of art books at his elbow, was the painter Jacob Kramer, some of whose paintings, with their Vorticist slant, hung in the art gallery next door. Dirty and half-tight, there wasn’t much to distinguish him from the other tramps whiling away their time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend the night in the refuge in the basement of St George’s Church, where occasionally I would do night duty myself, sleeping on a camp bed in a room full of these sad, defeated, utterly unthreatening creatures.

With its mixture of readers and its excellent facilities (it was a first-rate library) and the knowledge that there would always be someone working there whom I knew and who would come out for coffee, I found some of the pleasure going to the reference library that, had I been less studious, I could have found in a pub.

In my day, it was a predominantly male institution with the main tables dividing themselves almost on religious or ethnic lines. There was a Catholic table, patronised by boys from St Michael’s College, the leading Catholic school, with blazers in bright Mary blue; there was a Jewish table where the boys came from Roundhay or the Grammar School, the Jewish boys even when they were not at the same school often knowing each other from the synagogue or other extra-curricular activities. If, like me, you were at the Modern School – and there were about half a dozen of us who were there regularly – you had no particular religious or racial affinities and indeed were not thought perhaps quite as clever, the school certainly not as good as Roundhay or the Grammar School. The few girls who braved this male citadel disrupted the formal division, leavened it, I’m sure for the better. And they worked harder than the boys and were seldom to be found on the landing outside where one adjourned for a smoke.

Of the boys who worked in the reference library a surprising number must have turned out to be lawyers, and I can count at least eight of my contemporaries who sat at those tables in the Fifties who became judges. A school – and certainly a state or provincial school – would consider that something to boast about, but libraries are facilities; a library has no honours board and takes no credit for what its readers go on to do but, remembering myself at 19, on leave from the Army and calling up the copies of Horizon to get me through the general paper in the Oxford scholarship, I feel as much a debt to that library as I do to my school. It was a good library and though like everywhere else busier now than it was in my day, remains, unlike so much of Leeds, largely unaltered.

There is no shortage of libraries in Oxford, some of them, of course, of great grandeur and beauty. The Radcliffe Camera seems to me one of the handsomest buildings in England and the square in which it stands a superb combination of styles. Crossing it on a moonlit winter’s night lifted the heart, though that was often the trouble with Oxford – the architecture outsoared one’s feelings, the sublime not always easy to match.

There are in that one square three libraries, the Bodleian on the north side, on the east the Codrington, part of Hawksmoor’s All Souls, and James Gibbs’s Camera in the middle. There is actually another more modest library, neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally splendid surroundings of the Codrington, and a few undergraduates did so. They tended, though, to set less store on what they were writing than on where they were writing it and I, with my narrow sympathies but who was just as foolish, despised them for it.

Staying on at Oxford after I’d taken my degree, I did research in medieval history, the subject of my research: Richard II’s retinue in the last 10 years of his reign. This took me twice a week to the Public Record Office then still in Chancery Lane and in particular to the Round Room, galleried, lined with books, a humbler version of the much grander Round Room in the British Museum. Presiding over the BM Round Room in his early days was Angus Wilson whereas at the PRO it was Noel Blakiston, friend of Cyril Connolly, hair as white as Wilson’s and possibly the most distinguished-looking man I’ve ever seen.

The Memoranda Rolls on which I spent much of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment about five-feet long and one-foot wide and written on both sides. Thus to turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, and what would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter’s tea party struggling to put wallpaper up was just me trying to turn over. A side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straightaway propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers alongside and among those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.

The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet-metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. “Do you know the Atlantic at all?” she once asked me and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family, she was quite snobbish; talking of someone, she said: “Then he married a Mitford… but that’s a stage everybody goes through.” Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversations will, to fork-lift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil’s sphere of interest I said: “Do you know what a fork-lift truck is?” She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner. “I do. To my cost.”

When I first bought books for myself in the late Forties they were still thought to be quite precious and in poor homes books might often be backed in brown paper. “Books do furnish a room”, wrote Anthony Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection – not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over, still less read such a book in bed.

There were other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by books is a good description of what the play is about. “Hopkins,” I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, “Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.” Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own risks.

In the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learnt to read. I needed books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family is today in exactly the same boat.

The business of closing libraries isn’t a straightforward political fight. The local authorities shelter behind the demands of central government which in its turn pretends that local councils have a choice. It’s shaming that, regardless of the Party’s proud tradition of popular education, Labour municipalities are not making more of a stand. It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for 15 years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as a think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, “a valuable retail outlet”.

This is an edited version of an article that appears in the current issue of the London Review of Books. www.lrb.co.uk


from: Telegraph

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Towering Book Stack

by: Daniel Magnuson

Image by Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires,
licensed under Creative Commons.


A bibliophile’s personal library might start out neatly contained on bookshelves—perhaps even organized alphabetically within genre—but soon enough more volumes are wedged willy-nilly above the orderly rows, stacked on the floor, jammed into nooks and crannies around the house, and perched atop the refrigerator.

If this describes your home, you’ll appreciate the seven-story tower of books built by visual pop artist Marta Minujín on a pedestrian plaza in Buenos Aires. Composed of 30,000 donated books encased in protective plastic, the art installation spirals 80 feet above passersby, writes 1-800-Recycling.com. Called the Tower of Babel, the artwork stood in the plaza for three weeks, after which it was dismantled and some of its building blocks given away to visitors.

Minujín, who specializes in large-scale “livable” art events that engage the community, conceived the tower to celebrate the Argentinean city’s designation as the 2011 book capital of the world. Many of the volumes were donated by foreign embassies, creating a multilingual piece of art. As Minujín says, “Art needs no translation.”

from: Utne Reader

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Google on the Brain: How the Internet Has Changed What We Remember.

by: Katherine Hobson

Not so long ago, if you woke up in the middle of the night, driven crazy by not being able to remember the name of the shortstop on the 1986 Mets, or the title of Kevin Bacon’s first movie or the year Toni Basil’s “Mickey” hit the Billboard charts, you were out of luck until you could call a friend or hit the library.

But thanks to Google, IMDB and other search engines and databases, most people can now access that information very quickly — without even getting out of bed, if you keep your smartphone on your night table. (In case your own phone is out of reach: Rafael Santana, “Animal House,” and 1982.)

In a paper published online by the journal Science, Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and colleagues report that a series of experiments suggest the ubiquity of all this online data means the way we remember things has actually changed. Much as we’ve gotten used to relying on friends, family and colleagues to know things for us (why bother to learn the subway route to your mother-in-law’s house if your husband already knows where to transfer?), we may be unconsciously outsourcing some memory functions to the collective intelligence of the internet.

The first experiment, for example, showed that if you ask people difficult trivia questions, they are more likely to subsequently quickly react to words like “Google” and “Yahoo” than the non-computer-related “Nike” and “Yoplait.” That, the authors say, suggests when we are asked about things we don’t know, our first instinct is to think about finding the information online.

Other experiments showed people are more likely to remember trivia statements they’re typing into a computer if they think they’ll be erased from the computer’s memory, and more likely to forget them if they think they’ll be saved. Being explicitly told to remember the information made no difference in whether people remembered it, suggesting this process of “deciding” whether to remember something is unconscious, Sparrow tells the Health Blog.

Another experiment offers “preliminary evidence” that if we’re faced with information we think will be easily available in the future — like the cast list from “Animal House” — we’re more likely to remember where we can find it (IMDB.com) than details of the information itself.

Sparrow emphasizes that this doesn’t mean that the brain’s ability to remember facts and figures has atrophied — only that we don’t access this skill as much as we used to. If someone took your cell phone away forever, you’d still be able to memorize important phone numbers, she says.

Now Sparrow is interested in studying whether there are any benefits to these changes in our memory function. For example, if you read an article about the Civil War, full of facts but also broader themes, would you be more likely to remember the larger takeaway messages if you expect to be able to get the names and dates online anytime you want?

In other words, the outsourcing of memory to the internet may help us remember what’s most important.

from: Wall Street Journal

Monday, August 15, 2011

Homeless patrons prompt Bethlehem Area Public Library's behavior policy


Bethlehem Area Public Library officials say they used to have
 problems with people sleeping on tables in the library until they
revised their acceptable patron behavior policy last month.
Express-Times Photo - Matt Smith


by: Lynn Olanoff

The Bethlehem Area Public Library is a place to take your kids to story hour, pick up your favorite book or search for jobs on the Internet.


As of last month, it's not a place to sleep, bathe or panhandle.

The library revised its acceptable patron behavior policy to deal with the significant influx of homeless people who were spending their days at the library, Executive Director Janet Fricker said. While most of the 26 behavior rules are general — such as no eating, smoking or talking on cell phones — others seem to be directly targeted at the homeless, including rules that prohibit bringing in sleeping bags or having offensive bodily hygiene.

Those are the rules that particularly trouble the Rev. William Kuntze. The senior pastor at Bethlehem’s Christ Church United Church of Christ has long been an advocate for the homeless and said he doesn’t like to see them discriminated against.

Kuntze said he is particularly bothered by the rules that involve judgment calls. What constitutes offensive bodily hygiene or sleeping versus napping is subjective, he said.

"I have no doubt if I was in a suit and was napping for a long time I wouldn’t be thrown out," he said. "It’s very clear some of these wouldn’t be applied in the same way to someone like you or like me as they are to our homeless neighbors."

Kuntze also said he would like to see some change to the rule that patrons cannot bring in sleeping bags, bedding or more than two bags total. Unlike people with homes or cars, homeless people don’t have anywhere else to store their belongings when they go to the library, he said.

Kuntze met with Fricker about his objections. She brought them up last week to the library board, which made one minor revision to the policy, changing no sleeping, napping or loitering to merely no sleeping.

Homeless people have always utilized the Bethlehem library, but the issue came to a head early this year when a van started dropping a group of them off at the library every weekday morning, Fricker said.

“A library cannot be an adult day care center — we do not have the resources for it,” she said. “It was getting out of balance. It was getting to a point where people who regularly use the library with their kids weren’t coming here anymore.”

Anyone violating the behavior policy is first issued a warning and will be asked to leave the library for subsequent violations.

The van was from the rotating shelter program run by a dozen Bethlehem churches that provide the homeless with places to sleep in the winter. Craig Updegrove, the program’s volunteer coordinator, said the program has both a Center City and South Side pickup location and that the library was seen as a central location for homeless people who use the library, Trinity Episcopal Church’s nearby soup kitchen and other Center City services.

Kuntze has been keeping Updegrove and others involved in the sheltering program apprised of his objections to the library behavior policy, but Updegrove said not all participants, including himself, feel similarly to Kuntze.

“What can we really expect the library to do?” said Updegrove, a parishioner at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. “We don’t expect them to let them sleep there or smell up the place, if that’s the case. It’s a public place, and you want to have a safe place for everyone.”

The church coalition met in the spring along with other officials to try to find solutions to assist Bethlehem's homeless. The city does not have a year-round shelter, and the group resolved to work toward creating one and providing the homeless with health services.

The coalition is talking to potential health services partners and will run the rotating shelter program again this winter, but it is far from its goal of a year-round shelter, Updegrove said.

Fricker told the library board last week that she feels the revised policy has already been helpful. A library employee mentioned the offensive bodily hygiene provision to one man, and the next time he came in, he was wearing fresh clothes and seemed very pleased about it, she said.

“This can have some positive effects, too,” she said.

But Kuntze knows of others who have steered clear of the library since the new policy was enacted.

“The people who are experiencing them know they’re discriminatory against them,” he said. “Those who are advocates, particularly for the homeless in this case, we need to try to at least get fairer policies with some options.”

from: LeHighValleyLive

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Pa.-based kids' lit website aims to give back

Once upon a time, there was a bookstore. One day, the bookstore went away and reopened online with a new name and a mission to combat childhood illiteracy.

The rest of the story of year-old e-tailer MonkeyReader.com is still being written but its founders hope the ending will be happy -- and successful.

"We're beginning, we're growing, we have a lot of great ideas," co-founder David Lenett of the venture, a successor of the Discovery Bookshop, a popular Philadelphia children's bookstore that closed in the 1990s and became an online storefront that evolved into the more interactive MonkeyReader site.

The site aims to provide online guidance and ideas on book selections by age and subject, similar to the kind of assistance customers would get in a brick-and-mortar shop. Teachers and reading specialists answer emails from parents and a section of the site offers book suggestions to kids featuring the site's monkey mascot.

MonkeyReader, which has its orders filled and shipped by wholesale book distributor Baker & Taylor, pledges competitive prices on its merchandise. Books and DVDs for grown-ups can also be ordered on the site, though the company's focus is on children's literature.

Lenett and his partners in the privately held company recently announced an agreement with a Los Angeles literacy group to provide 5 percent of profits for one year to the organization for promoting its literacy programs.

"Socially responsible commerce is an important aspect of our business model," Lenett said. "Illiteracy is such a serious problem and for us, it also makes good business sense to have a literate population."

After-School All-Stars Los Angeles serves 11,000 students at 25 inner-city schools. L.A. Lakers superstar and Philadelphia-area native Kobe Bryant serves as goodwill ambassador of the Los Angeles group, one of 12 cities nationwide with the program.

"It was a total synergy to what we're aiming for in regard to philanthropy and social responsibility," program spokeswoman Shannon Mayock said. "It ties right into our initiatives, so we're very excited."

The partnership started in June, and the company is just getting off the ground, so Lenett didn't estimate how much could be raised.

"There are a lot of reasons why it's better to buy from an independent bookseller," Karin Isgur Bergsagel, president of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, a trade group. "It's a relationship thing ... like shopping in your neighborhood grocery store."

The overhead for independent online booksellers is low -- they don't have to pay commissions or fees like sellers operating out of virtual storefronts on sites like Amazon -- and many socially conscious sellers donate far greater than 5 percent of profits, she said.

For example, Biblio.com since 2005 has donated at least 10 percent -- some years upward of 30 to 40 percent -- of annual profits to literacy causes, chief executive officer Brendan Sherar said.

He said the company's nonprofit arm, called BiblioWorks, has helped pay to build eight libraries in South America.

Lenett said he and his partners at MonkeyReader realize that 5 percent of profits may not amount to big bucks at this point but the fledgling website is just getting started.

"We're not looking at this as a race. We know it will take some time to get to where we want to get to," "We think once we become a more visible destination in the marketplace, if we're fortunate enough, we can make a real difference."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Online:
MonkeyReader: http://www.monkeyreader.com
After-School All-Stars: http://www.la-allstars.org

from: Lancaster Online

Friday, August 12, 2011

Amazon Quietly Launched a Kindle Social Network

By: Nate Hoffelder

Twitter is a buzz Sunday night with the news that Amazon had added social networking features to the Kindle support site at kindle.amazon.com. Kindle users can now create a profile page, follow other Kindle users, share details about their reading habits, and so on.


I’m not sure that this qualifies as news, other than the fact it happened so quietly. The new features appear to have been launched quite some time ago; there are some users with hundreds if not thousands of followers.

But if you knew about this already then you’re one up on me. I did not know until it came across the twitter transom Sunday night. I had known that you could share highlights, but I didn’t know about the other social networking features.

In fact, the last time that eBookNewser covered this site (back in February) there was only a mention of some of the features, not all. I also cannot find any thorough discussion of these features, not even on the Kindle blogs I follow. That would fit my definition of Amazon quietly adding features.

Compare that to any other social network and you will see a rather odd difference. I’ve never seen a new social networking site launch with so little notice, have you?

Have you been using the Kindle Social Network? Is it any good?

from: MediaBistro

Thursday, August 11, 2011

After Much Ado, a Google Book Deal in France

by: Eric Pfanner

PARIS — France has caused plenty of headaches for Google. Its politicians have denounced the U.S. Internet giant as a cultural imperialist; its publishers have called it a copyright cheat.


Yet France is suddenly the only country in the world in which Google has managed to achieve a longstanding business goal. A few days ago Google signed an agreement with the publisher Hachette Livre under which tens of thousands of French-language books will be pulled out of ink-on-paper purgatory and provided with a digital afterlife.

Hachette and Google reached a preliminary deal last year, but it was overshadowed by a far broader agreement between Google and U.S. authors and publishers that would have settled longstanding litigation. Like the deal with Hachette, the U.S. agreement involved books that were out of print but still protected by copyright, a category that accounts for the vast majority of the world’s books.

But last winter, a U.S. judge, Denny Chin, rejected the American settlement, and talks have stalled since. Meanwhile, with a final agreement in place in France, Google says it intends to start selling e-book versions of the Hachette titles by the end of the year, when it introduces a French version of its digital bookstore, Google Editions.

The deal with Hachette, which is part of the media conglomerate Lagardère, does not end Google’s problems with French publishers. At least three of them, Albin Michel, Flammarion and Gallimard, are pursuing lawsuits against the company, saying it illegally scanned their books. Another publisher, La Martinière, previously won a similar court case against Google.

Yet Google and Hachette, the biggest French publisher, with about one-quarter of the French market, said they hoped their deal could serve as a model for a broader rapprochement.

“We would love to implement similar arrangements with other French publishers, and it’s something that we have in mind as we talk to other partners,” said Simon Morrison, copyright policy and communications manager at Google in London.

Hachette said it would make digital copies of scanned books available to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and other libraries, “thus contributing to the advancement of French culture,” as the company put it in a statement.

Could the agreement end up showing the way forward in the negotiations on a revised U.S. deal?

There are several key differences between the French accord and the U.S. proposal that Judge Chin rejected. One is that Hachette retains control of which books can be scanned and sold by Google, just as it does with copyrighted works that remain in print. Under the U.S. proposal, Google would have been free to digitize any out-of-print books, unless the copyright holders expressly opted out of the settlement.

In a hearing in New York last month, Judge Chin asked representatives of Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild whether it might be possible to negotiate a so-called opt-in agreement — in other words, along the lines of the Hachette deal. Both sides were noncommittal, according to news reports of the hearing.

Until now, Google has steadfastly resisted switching to an opt-in system in the U.S. talks. Doing so would be a big setback for a company that says its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Some authors or publishers would opt out. So-called orphan works, those whose copyright holders cannot be clearly identified or tracked down, might never make it into the digital future.

Judge Chin has given Google, the publishers and the authors until Sept. 15 to come up with a revised deal. If nothing is settled by then, the litigation that prompted the talks is set to restart, six years after the authors and publishers originally sued Google.

Meanwhile, the French digital book business, which so far has trailed far behind the United States, with e-book sales still in their infancy, is about to pull ahead in one small but significant way.

from: NY Times

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Kurt Vonnegut library offers pupils free copies of banned book

'Decide for yourself,' says director Julia Whitehead, responding to school ban by giving away 150 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five

by: Alison Flood

"To hell with the censors!" said Kurt Vonnegut. "Give me knowledge or give me death!" Now the late author's memorial library is acting on his words, giving 150 copies of his seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five away for free to students at the Missouri school that banned it late last month.


The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is asking interested pupils at Republic High School in Missouri to drop it an email requesting a free copy of Slaughterhouse-Five after an anonymous donor provided it with 150 copies of the book. "We think it's important for everyone to have their First Amendment rights. We're not telling you to like the book ... we just want you to read it and decide for yourself," said Julia Whitehead, the library's executive director, in a note on its website entitled "stop the madness".

Last month the school's board voted to ban Slaughterhouse-Five and Sarah Ockler's young adult novel Twenty Boy Summer from its curriculum and library following a Missouri professor's complaints about their content. In a column for the local paper, Wesley Scroggins wrote that Slaughterhouse-Five "contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The 'f word' is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ."

In a statement to the Huffington Post, Whitehead said that it was "shocking and unfortunate that those young adults and citizens would not be considered mature enough to handle the important topics raised by Kurt Vonnegut, a decorated war veteran".

"Everyone can learn something from his book," she said. "All of these students will be eligible to vote, and some may be protecting our country through military service in the next year or two."


from: Guardian

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Meet the real Little Miss Sunshine

If you're a real-life Mr Rude or a Miss Lucky, don't all the jokes wear just a little bit thin?

By: Kate Youde and Tara Mulholland (additional reporting Charlotte Sundberg and Phillip Wood)

Roger Hargreaves' cartoon phenomenon is celebrating its
40th anniversary

To mark the 40th anniversary of Roger Hargreaves’ cartoon phenomenon, we track down the Mr. Men namesakes.


Mr. Tickle

Former Big Brother contestant Jon Tickle, 37, lives near Staines in Surrey and designs databases for British Gas

"It's a perennial problem finding shirts that fit. Marks & Spencer do a good line in shirts 2ins longer than normal in the sleeve, but I often wear short sleeves. It's quite handy: I am 6ft 2in and have long arms. The ability to reach stuff is definitely a core skill."

Mr. Strong

Paul Strong, 48, of Rushden, Northamptonshire, is founder of Be Strong Life Coaching

"I remember when Mr. Strong was released. Before then, I would get teased because of my name, but things changed and it became a much more positive name for me. I used to get a little bit of bullying – I was called 'Mr Weak' because I was built like a pencil ... People still have a bit of fun with it, but it's become much more positive now."

Mr. Wrong

Sebastian Wrong, 39, is development director for London design and manufacturing company Established & Sons

"You get all the usual stuff at school: 'Wrong by name, wrong by nature', 'Two wrongs don't make a right'. And there was somebody called Wright, which led to more jokes. I'm launching my own shop at the end of the year, called the Wrong Shop."

Mr. Cool

Darren Cool, 26, is a photographer for the Brighton and Hove Studio

"I've been given a lot of Mr Men T-shirts ... In fact, my girlfriend was given a 'My boyfriend thinks he's Mr Cool' shirt. When I went on holiday to Jamaica I got a free boat ride because of my name. And my middle name is Robert, so my initials spell 'Dr Cool'."

Little Miss Sunshine

Hayley Sunshine, 29, of Harlow, Essex, is a field marketing executive

"I have just come back from LA and I've been telling everyone at work and they said, 'I bet everyone loved your surname'. In the business I work in, everyone knows me as Little Miss Sunshine. It's just a nice name. I think I have always been known as a bubbly character and the name fits, basically. I am very positive."

Mr. Snow

Robert Snow, 39, of Southampton is a speechwriter

"Every Christmas, people comment on my surname. Cashiers in banks say, 'Oh, it's your kind of weather'. I remember watching Mr. Men on TV, but I never knew there was a Mr. Snow – that's cool! Oh, I didn't mean to say that."

Little Miss Wise

Nicola Wise, 41, of Northampton, is a graphic designer

"I was Wise and then I got married and my surname became Tunbridge. Before I got divorced, I changed my name back to Wise by deed poll. I like the name: it's short, it's easier to spell. I like Nicola Wise as a person as well."

Mr. Bump

American-born JD Bump, 38, lives in Inverness, Scotland, and is the founder of coffee roasting business Nola Bump's Coffee Co

"I am not accident-prone at all. In college I used to make up a story, because lots of people thought it was a nickname and called me just 'Bump'. They didn't know it was my real name, so I'd make up this story about a hang-gliding accident."

Little Miss Neat

Amelia Neat, 35, lives near Bath and is insert sales manager for TRT Media Sales

"I am neat by name and neat by nature. I get that a lot ... I'm verging on OCD, really. I am always – especially round the house – tidying every five minutes, wiping down surfaces. My work desk has neat little piles of paperwork everywhere: things have to be just so."

Mr. Rude

Romain Rude, 31, originally from Lyons, France, is a selection analyst at direct marketing agency Proximity London

"Most of the time people think that it's a cool name, to be honest, or at least that's what they say ... I notice people laughing at it the most when I am in a doctor's waiting room or hospital ... I've just found out that Mr. Rude is actually French! I think we are rude compared to the English."

Little Miss Quick

Liz Quick, 48, is a lecturer in events management at the University of West London

"I get a lot of comments from people and the same old jokes: 'Are you really quick?' It used to be a nightmare at school sports day or in any races. Most people think they are the first to have thought of the joke. I often get people saying, 'Quick, quick, slow' and stuff like that."

Mr. Busy

Laurent Busy, 39, of London, is exchange permissions manager for IG Markets

"I get quite a lot of funny reactions. There's the obvious ones and the jokes: 'Are you busy?' There's always a lot of banter going on in the office. I also get the funny pictures that might be ripped off the internet: people might get a picture and superimpose my face on Mr Busy, who is all blue with a hat."

Mr. Tall

Andy Tall, 39, lives in London and is senior manager at Partnership Marketing Network

"I get a lot of questions about how to spell my surname, as if people can't believe it's real. I remember thinking it was great to share my name with a book character. It was also the time Star Wars came out, so I was probably wishing my name was Skywalker."

Little Miss Star

Hayley Star, 22, of St Albans, Hertfordshire, runs a dance school, Dancing Stars

"The name of the school was an easy choice. I find it really catchy and appealing to children ... Everybody always asks if it's a stage name, which it's not. It's funny really, no one understands. I nicknamed my little boy Rocco, 'Rock Star'. I'm sure he will be."

Little Miss Lucky

Claire Lucky, 33, of London, is a museum administrator at Sir John Soane's Museum

"My family are often asked if we are lucky. It does make people smile when we say, 'Lucky by name, lucky by nature!' I feel like I am Miss Lucky – I have good health and fantastic family and friends. I love my name. I couldn't bring myself to lose it if I were ever to marry – the best I could do is double-barrel it. I dated a Mr Star once: imagine being Mrs Lucky-Star! I would love to meet Mr Charm or Mr Smile ..."

Mr. Greedy

Peter Greedy, 46, of Cheltenham, is the inventor of Greeper laces

"People find my surname amusing at times and have a giggle when I introduce myself, but I'm in my 40s so it doesn't bother me any more. I've heard all the jokes before, so I'm used to it."

Mr. Messy

Frenchman Philippe Messy, 41, is partner in Knightsbridge restaurant Chabrot Bistrot d'Amis

"I'm not messy. I leave things around but I know where they are ... It's not the same spelling, but when I talk to someone who doesn't know the spelling, because of Lionel Messi, the Barcelona footballer, they always relate it to the famous Mr Messi."

Mr. Small

Mark Small, 20, of Southampton is a fashion student

"It's funny because, unlike any other children's book, the Mr. Men series will stay with me all my life. Once I locked my best friend outside his house. We saw the top bathroom window open. I climbed up and got in. I had no idea how I managed to fit through such a tiny window; maybe I am Mr Small after all."

Little Miss Shy

Zofnat Shy, 42, of London is a support engineer

"I moved to the UK five years ago from Israel, where my surname is common and is derived from Hebrew. However, I am not shy at all! I am very outspoken and very direct in my approach. Ask any of my friends or family and they will tell you that I am not backwards in coming forward."

Mr. Jelly

Casper Jelly, 30, of London, is a software developer

"In general I grew up with a lot of teasing, and it didn't help when I started to put on weight in my teens. My first name didn't help either, but these days I'm far more likely get compliments about both my names."

Calling Little Miss Magic...

Some of the 47 Mr. Men and 34 Little Misses published have proved rather elusive. Where are the real Mr Nosey and Mr Fussy? Do you know a Mr Lazy, Mr Noisy or Mr Chatterbox? Is it possible there is a Mr Impossible? We found a Mrs Magic but no Little Miss. Is there a Little Miss Naughty out there or Little Miss Trouble? Contact us via email at sundaynews@ independent.co.uk if you know where they are

Good, Muddle, Grumble

The 20 people featured weren't the only ones we found sharing their names with Mr. Men and Little Misses.

Spare a thought for 63-year-old Mr Grumble, of Ipswich, whose name makes it difficult for him to complain: "If you call a helpline, you go through the whole process of saying what's wrong, but there always comes the time when you have to give your name, and you can sense them thinking, 'Well, that makes sense'," explains Geoff, a quality manager at Actaris Metering Systems.

There are probably a lot of people out there hoping to meet Mr Perfect; we found him in Norwich. Tim Perfect, 39, is director of Sigman, a storage company. He keeps a copy of the Mr. Men book on his desk. Meanwhile, Mr Muddle – aka 32-year-old Nick from Glasgow, who is sales manager for Scottoiler, a motorbike chain lube system manufacturer – has a picture of the other Mr. Muddle pinned to his office door. And Mr Good – 31-year-old creative director James, of Swansea – gets a lot of "That's good, Good", when presenting work.

Michael Slow, 65, of Leicester, does not live up to his name. "You name it, I've been it, but I've not been slow at it," he says. "I used to be a milkman. I had to be out at 4am. There wasn't a chance to be slow." But whatever their name, the Mr Men – including architect David Mean, 50, from London – have heard all the jokes before. However, project manager Gary Rush, 29, of Nottingham, says those who make jokes about being in a rush are, thankfully, "a rare and peculiar breed".

from: Independent