Above: Maker kits being delivered to Illinois State Library.
By Victoria Rakowski
February 8, 2016
Librarianship is a funny profession–the day is often a mixture of hokey jokes from people who haven’t been in a library in years, and strategizing ways to implement robotics and computer coding into programs for everybody from preschoolers to seniors. When people see what libraries actually get up to these days, they’re almost always surprised. So many people in America depend on their libraries to help them forward when it comes to technology, and lots of libraries have answered that call with aplomb, learning as they go.
Make it @ Your Library was founded in 2012 as part of an Institute for Museum and Library Services Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant, and our original intent was to help get all libraries up to speed on the concept of makerspaces in the library–or, rather, DIY culture and content creation in the library, versus content consumption. While libraries bring a great deal of technology to their communities, there was no denying the gap in access that exists all over our home state of Illinois: Many rural libraries just aren’t on the same financial playing field as suburban Chicago libraries. We originally began with the simple intention of helping libraries, no matter their budget and ability, bring makerspaces and DIY concepts into their communities. Our mission morphed a bit when we were awarded a Knight Prototype Fund grant in January 2015.
With Knight’s backing, Make it @ Your Library has created Maker Kits that are largely technology-based, and partnered with the Illinois State Library to circulate those kits throughout the state. The kits include everything from engineering toys to 3-D printers, and have been in constant circulation throughout Illinois since November 2015. While more detailed analysis is in the works, “the kits are very popular and fly out the door to another library as soon as they are returned,” according to Kathleen Bloomberg, associate director library operations. This project has been an amazing way to put technology into the hands of librarians who have less to work with, and enabled them to take those possibilities to their patrons through programming and open access.
The opening of a maker kit at Fondulac District Librar
Our big takeaway from this project has been that people will rise to the occasion when they have the tools they need to grow and learn. A perfect example of this comes from Fondulac District Library, one of the libraries that helped us test our 3-D printing kit. Long story short, they broke the 3-D printer, but didn’t give up, fixed the printer and learned a lot in the process. So much of the maker movement is about experimentation and tinkering and with the Maker Kits–breaking and making.
We’ve also learned to dream big when it comes to looking for organizations to partner with, to look not necessarily to the organizations that are most like us, but the ones who want the same things. During our first phase we partnered with Instructables, a website focusing on the DIY movement, and in this phase we’ve relied heavily on the Illinois State Library and their expertise in connecting Illinois libraries. Whatever the next phase of Make it @ Your Library brings, we know we can’t do it alone and that building partnerships is key.
The Knight News Challenge on Libraries opens for entries on Feb. 24. Winners will share in more than $3 million for ideas that answer the question, How might libraries serve 21st century information needs? Check out our schedule on online sessions where you can ask questions. Visit newschallenge.org to apply and give feedback on other ideas beginning Feb. 24.
Victoria Rakowski is a public librarian and co-founder of Make it @ Your Library.
Last month the Park Ridge Public Library, IL, approved fees for those using the facility for business purposes. On its face, this decision runs counter to the burgeoning interest in libraries embracing a workforce that is increasingly outside the office by developing coworking spaces and gathering essential tools to enable them to succeed. On a deeper level, it runs counter to the ingenuity involved in continually removing barriers to access—even barriers constructed to keep the use of the library fair, such as overdue fines—and this I find much more problematic and worth contemplating.
This got me thinking about the trouble with fees and fines. While many hold that fines, for example, are an incentive to return materials, and fees help pay for stretch services—or, as the Park Ridge example illustrates, intentionally to limit a certain use of the library—one thing is true of both: enforcing them costs resources. People, front and back of the house, have to dedicate time to developing and implementing processes, expanding communications, and paying attention to policing. The return on investment (ROI) is worth examining before instituting a fee or fine since, as has been seen where fines for overdue materials have been removed, the cost of collection can be higher than the revenue gained or the loss offset.
That’s hard cost, which any library manager and board should have top of mind. Then there are the soft costs, such as how this choice affects the library’s relationship with its community, what it signals about the library’s mission, and if it undermines an effective alliance between the library and the people it serves. Is a precedent being set that threatens to kick off a trend in service—intentional or not? It’s important to bear in mind what such a decision says about the library and will keep saying every time a policy is enforced.
Consider access. When a fee or a fine is present, a level of access is at risk, if not inherently denied. Given the core principal defining the library as a place to be used freely, any policy that limits access should be questioned, or at least designed to be as forgiving and easy to work with as possible.
Consider what it signals about money. Fines and fees are articulated in a budget as revenue, meaning that this income is then dependent upon people misusing the library or, in the case of fees, using it for a limited purpose. It can be hard to give up a revenue line, even one that has poor ROI, if a board doesn’t see the overarching benefit of sacrificing it. Hence, precedent gets set—and set in stone.
There’s also an issue with reinforcing the perception that the library is providing competition to local business enterprises. In Park Ridge, creating a fee structure for business use of the library buys into some idea that the library is taking an opportunity away from the community as a whole, while the truth is just the opposite. One fee threatens to lead to another. For instance, should coding be taught at the library without a fee if others teach it for a fee? I certainly think so. It gets back to access.
Worse, however, fines and fees can confuse the reality that libraries are a shared resource with the misunderstanding that they are a place for free stuff. A fee begs the question: Why charge for one thing but not another? More important, as I have written in my editorial “Worth the Price,” libraries that focus on being about free stuff miss the point. We should be fostering a deeper understanding of the library as something we all invest in (and support financially through taxes) and care for as a community, commanding our ownership and engagement. The message that gets conveyed in a fine-free setting, for example, is that these books (to pick one format) are all of ours, and we’re here to look after them and share them together. This may seem naive, but in settings where fines have been exchanged for donation jars, the goodwill flows.
Ultimately, we must reflect upon our bond with the people libraries are designed to serve. Interactions with patrons can become about the fine or fee, instead of the need addressed by the service. This risks turning librarians and clerks into cops and collection agents and diverting backroom capacity to fee and fine maintenance. In the process, it can set up an adversarial relationship between the library and its users rather than forging an alliance that supports a vibrant interchange. I vote for the library as ally rather than as adversary.
[Note: Several relatively recent examples of libraries giving up overdue fines, and the reasoning behind the decisions, are covered in these local news stories from Albany’s Times Union, The Repository in Canton, OH, and boston.com. If you have recently analyzed overdue fines for your library and opted to give them up or keep them, please share your insights with us at LJ for possible future coverage. Thank you—Ed.]
Vancouver Public Library reveals top 10 fiction books checked out in 2015
Breaking down checked-out books exposes city preferences and uncovers neighbourhood character
By Maryse Zeidler, CBC NewsPosted: Feb 17, 2016 4:00 PM PT Last Updated: Feb 17, 2016 4:00 PM PT
Vancouver Public Library's top 10 most checked-out books of 2015 reveal Vancouverites' penchant for mysteries and thrillers. (Vancouver Public Library)
The Vancouver Public Library's top 10 most checked-out fiction books of 2015 exposes the city's literary preferences.
Many of the novels in the top 10 list supplied to CBC News have garnered some serious accolades, whether it be the Pulitzer prize orCBC's annual Canada Reads competition.
Meanwhile, other books on the list reveal a definitive propensity for mysteries and thrillers.
Top 10 most checked-out fiction of 2015
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (2015)
As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, C. Alan Bradley (2015)
Hal Wake, artistic director of the Vancouver Writers' Festival, says writers and publishers have long been aware of the long-lasting effect prizes can have.
Hal Wake is the Artistic Director of the Vancouver International Writers' Festival. (Vancouver Writers Festival)
"It's why they despair when they're not on a list," he says. "It can give you a real leg up."
As for the dominance of mysteries and thrillers, Wake says the genre can be addictive.
"The advantage that mystery writers have is that they write series," he says. "People will discover one book, and then they're devoted and they can't wait for the next one."
The library's acting director of collections and technical services, Chris Middlemass, says not much on the top 10 list came as a surprise to her.
Library selectors choose books six to nine months before they're published, she says, and can easily spot what will be a popular title; they know to order multiple copies of books by authors like mystery writer Kathy Reichs.
Growth of sub-genres
Chris Middlemass is the Vancouver Public Library's acting director of collections and technical services. (VPL)
But, Middlemass says, the biggest change in book selection she's seen at the library comes beyond the top contenders, where there's been a growth of specific sub-genres.
"Readers are getting very focused," she says. "They have way better access to authors, through Twitter feeds and blogs and all that kind of thing, than they ever used to have."
Whereas readers may have once professed themselves as fans of broader genres like science fiction, Middlemass says they're now more likely to express their appreciation for more specific categories like gothic, steam punk, and alternate history.
Top 10 lists vary by library branch
The library also supplied CBC News with top 10 fiction check-outs by branch, revealing which neighbourhoods are still reading Dan Brown's Inferno or J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy.
As a former branch manager, Middlemass said head librarians know to cater to their communities.
"Each neighbourhood does have a different kind of mix," she says.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see more mystery readers on the West side. On the East side, from my recollection, there would be much more interest in the arts, performing arts, pop culture and out-there literary fiction."
However, she says, those differences have become less pronounced as readers are now able to order books from any branch.
In 1960, when Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird at age 34, it seemed the beginning of a brilliant career. Of course, that would turn out to be, for the vast majority of her life, her only book (until last year’s Go Set a Watchman). Her reputation was long ago cemented as a woman of few words, an author who stopped giving interviews back in the mid-’60s, and a person who chose to live a quiet life far from the world’s publishing centers.
Given all that, it’s easy to forget that in the wake of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was the sort of literary ingenue who placed essays in magazines like Vogue. In April of 1961, this magazine published “Love—In Other Words,” Lee’s meditation on the meaning of love, into which she deftly wove threads as disparate as the affection Prince Edward bore for his mistress, the gospel of St. Paul, and Cervantes’s zest for life.
“Every creation of man’s mind that has withstood the buffeting of time was born of love—love of something or someone,” she wrote. “It is possible even to love mathematics.”
Harper Lee died today at the age of 89, old enough, we hope, to see that her To Kill a Mockingbird, no doubt created from love, has stood the test of time.
Love—In Other Words
By Harper Lee
EDITOR’S NOTE: Here, for Vogue, is the first article ever written by Harper Lee, a shy young woman who has an engaging drawl, immense happy eyes, and, this year, the pleasure of having written an uncommon novel: To Kill a Mockingbird. Besides being good, Mockingbird is that literary rara avis, a first novel that sells. (In this country, it has sold more than half a million copies; abroad, it delighted the English and has been translated into German, French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Italian. A pair of independent producers now has the movie rights.) Not unlike someone who might crop up in her own fiction, Nelle Harper Lee lives with her father and sister in a small Alabama town; they practice law, she writes. (A nonpracticing lawyer, she studied a year after law school as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford, then worked a stretch as a reservations clerk for BOAC.)
Many years ago an aging member of the House of Hanover, on learning that the duty of providing an heir to the throne of England had suddenly befallen him and his brothers, confided his alarm to his friend Thomas Creevey: “ . . . It is now seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together; we are of the same age and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together, and you may well imagine the pang it will occasion me to part with her . . . . I protest I don’t know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon me . . . .”
Amused by the Duke of Kent’s predicament. Mr. Creevey recorded the incident in his diary and preserved for us a timeless declaration. The man who made it was not overly endowed with brilliance, nor had he led a noteworthy life, yet we remember his cry from the heart and tend to forget his ultimate service to mankind: He was the father of Queen Victoria.
What did the Duke of Kent tell us? That two people had shared their lives on a voluntary basis for nearly thirty years—in itself a remarkable achievement; that they had survived the fevers and frets of intimate relationship; that together they had met the pressures and disappointments of life; that he is in agony at the prospect of leaving her. In one graceful sentence, the Duke of Kent said all there is to say about the love of a man for a woman.
And in so saying, he tells us much about love itself. There is only one kind of love—love. But the different manifestations of love are uncountable:
At an unfamiliar night noise a mother will spring from bed, not to return until every corner of her domain is tucked safely round her anxiety. A man will look up from his golf game to watch a jet cut caterpillar tracks through the sky. A housewife, before driving to town, will give her neighbour a quick call to see if she wants anything from the store. These are manifestations of a power within us that must of necessity be called divine, for it is no invention of man.
What is love? Many things are like love—indeed, love is present in pity, compassion, romance, affection. What made the Duke of Kent’s statement a declaration of love, and what makes us perform without second thought small acts of love every day of our lives, is an element conspicuous by its absence. Were it present, the Duke of Kent would have left his mistress without a pang; the sound barrier breaking over her head would not rouse the mother; sinking his putt would be the primary aim of the golfer; the housewife would go straight to the store with no thought of her neighbour. One thing identifies love and isolates it from kindred emotions: Love admits not of self.
Few of us achieve compassion; to some of us romance is a word; in many of us the ability to feel affection has long since died; but all of us at one time or another—be it for an instant or for our lives—have departed from ourselves: We have loved something or someone. Love, then, is a paradox: To have it, we must give it. Love is not an intransitive thing—love is a direct action of mind and body. Without love, life is pointless and dangerous. Man is on his way to Venus, but he still hasn’t learned to live with his wife. Man has succeeded in increasing his life span, yet he exterminates his brothers six million at a whack. Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: Depend upon it, he will—should he cease to love.
The most common barriers to love are greed, envy, pride, and four other drives formerly known as sins. There is one more just as dangerous: boredom. The mind that can find little excitement in life is a dying one; the mind that can not find something in the world that attracts it is dead, and the body housing it might as well be dead, for what are the uses of the five senses to a mind that takes no pleasure in them?
Having at long last realized that he must love or destroy himself, man is proceeding along his usual course by trying to evolve a science for it. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis, when its special brand of semantics is put to rout, is to release man from his neuroses and thus enable him to love, and man’s capacity to love is measured by his degree of freedom from the drives that turn inward upon him. As one holds down a cork to the bottom of a stream, so may love be imprisoned by self: Remove self, and love rises to the surface of man’s being.
With love, all things are possible.
Love restores. We have heard many tales of love’s power to heal, and we are skeptical of them, for we are human and therefore prone to deny the existence of things we do not understand and cannot explain. But this tale happened:
On an August evening in a tiny Southern hospital, an old man lay dying. His family had been summoned, among them his eldest grandson, a boy of sixteen. The boy’s relationship with his grandfather had been a curious, almost wordless one, as such things often are between man and man. All that day the boy said nothing. It seemed that he could not talk. He would not wait out the old man’s dying with the rest of his family in the hospital lobby; instead, the boy found a chair and stationed himself in the corridor beside his grandfather’s door, where he sat all day, oblivious to the starched scurryings of hospital routine. Late in the evening the family’s doctor found the boy still sitting, still silent. The doctor said, “Go home, son. There’s nothing you can do for your grandfather.” The boy took no notice of him, and the doctor went into the room only to emerge moments later, looking bewildered. “Er—son,” said the doctor. The boy looked up. “He’s asking for something to eat. He’s better.” Showing no sign of surprise, the boy nodded: “I reckoned it was about time he was hungry,” he said, his first utterance of the day. Then he picked up the chair, put it back where he found it, and walked down the corridor, stretching his lanky frame and yawning. “Where are you going, boy?” called the doctor. “To get him a hamburger,” answered the boy. “He likes hamburgers.”
There is no satisfactory explanation for extrasensory perception—it simply is. There was no rational explanation for the old man’s recovery—it simply happened. One may only wonder.
Love transforms. Why is it that the quotation we are seeking, when we can’t find it in the Bible or in Shakespeare, most often turns up in Don Quixote? Because Cervantes, from sheer love of life, made the nuances of life immortal. Why, when we are familiar with every line, must we still stop and listen when “The Messiah” is playing? Because every note was born of a man’s love for his God, and we hear it. Try this experiment: Catch (if you can) someone who loathes Baroque music; play for him any part of Semele, then sit back and watch his polite attention turn to compulsive attention—see your captive become Handel’s captive. Avarice never wrote a good novel; hate did not paint The Birth of Venus; nor did envy reveal to us that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. Every creation of man’s mind that has withstood the buffeting of time was born of love—love of something or someone. It is possible even to love mathematics.
The history of mankind contains innumerable testaments to the power of love, but none touches the transformation undergone by the otherwise cantankerous St. Paul when he addressed himself to the subject: loving, he wrote of love itself, and he gave us a miracle. Listen:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing . . . .”
After St. Paul, we have done our best, but our best has never come near him.
Love purifies. Suffering never purified anybody; suffering merely intensifies the self-directed drives within us. Any act of love, however—no matter how small—lessens anxiety’s grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke of our fears. Love, unlike virtue, is not its own reward. The reward of love is peace of mind, and peace of mind is the end of man’s desiring.
This article was originally published in the April 1961 issue of Vogue and has been edited for the Web.
By Hephzibah Anderson January 6th, 2015
For authors of self-help guides, no human
problem is too great or too small. Want to become fitter, richer or
happier in 2015? There are books for it – shelves upon shelves of them.
Hoping for increased efficiency, decisiveness and creativity in the
months ahead? There are titles for that too.
As we knuckle down to
our New Year’s resolutions, we’ll turn in droves to self-help books,
hoping to find our own best selves in their pages. But a book needn’t
hector or lecture to leave its imprint. The truth is that all good
literature changes us, and a growing body of research suggests you might
do better browsing through fiction for support in battling life’s
challenges. Think of it less as self-help than ‘shelf help’.
Reading
has been proven to sharpen analytical thinking, enabling us to better
discern patterns – a handy tool when it comes to the often baffling
behaviour of ourselves and others. But fiction in particular can make
you more socially able and empathetic. Last year, the Journal of Applied
Social Psychology published a paper
showing how reading Harry Potter made young people in the UK and Italy
more positively disposed towards stigmatised minorities such as
refugees. And in 2013, psychologists at the New School for Social
Research found that literary fiction enhanced people’s ability to register and read others’ emotions.
We
think of novels as places in which to lose ourselves, but when we
emerge, we take with us inspiration from our favourite characters. A 2012 study
by researchers at Ohio State University found that this process could
actually change a reader’s behaviour. In one experiment, participants
strongly identifying with a fictional character who overcame obstacles
to vote proved significantly more likely to vote in a real election.
Well-read
They
may not promise transformation in seven easy steps, but gripping novels
can inform and motivate, short stories can console and trigger
self-reflection, and poetry has been shown to engage parts of the brain
linked to memory. Sometimes an author helps by simply taking your mind
off a problem, immersing you so fully in another’s world and outlook
that you transcend yourself, returning recharged and determined.
As
Aristotle noted in his Poetics, poetry – by which he meant fiction in
general – is more serious than history. While the historian is
preoccupied with what happened when, fiction allows us to see what could happen, exercising our imaginations and often our sense of morality along the way.
A
story needn’t lift your heart in order to lift your mood. As author
Jane Smiley confides in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, “Many
people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book”.
Experiencing the trials and tribulations of a fictional character can
even open us up to problems we’ve been ignoring, sparking rewarding
conversations – or offering a way into one that’s proving daunting or
difficult. And whatever the fix you find yourself in, there’s always a
book to remind you that others have been there before, it’s just a
question of finding it.
A reading cure
That’s
where bibliotherapy comes in. Practised around the world by
psychologists, social workers, and counselors along with librarians,
it’s become something of a buzzword in the past few years, drawing
scholarly researchers and bloggers alike. Alain de Botton’s London-based
School of Life
even has a quartet of resident ‘bibliotherapists’, including Ella
Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, whose book The Novel Cure: An A-Z of
Literary Remedies is a thrifty alternative to the school’s £80 ($120)
consultations.
Yet the notion of books as remedies for emotional
disorders isn’t as new-fangled as you might imagine. The ancient Greeks
posted signs above library doors, informing readers that they were
entering a healing place for the soul. And in the 19th Century, doctors
and psychiatric nurses doled out everything from the Bible to travel
literature and works in ancient languages.
Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary first
acknowledged bibliotherapy in 1941, defining the term as “the employment
of books and the reading of them in the treatment of nervous diseases”,
but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first popped up in
print in 1920, in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop.
Set
in a world still reeling from World War One, the novel pairs a screwball
rom-com involving a young adman and the heiress to a prune empire, with
a German plot to blow up the US president. It’s a period piece, really,
but its backdrop – a second-hand bookstore in Brooklyn called Parnassus
at Home – remains a bibliophile’s paradise, fragrant with the scent of
“mellowed paper and leather” and tobacco from the pipe that its owner,
Mr Mifflin, puffs away on day and night.
Mifflin is not just a
bookseller, though, he’s a “practitioner of bibliotherapy”. As he
explains it, “My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as
drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms... There is no
one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul
needed and he never knew it.”
Mifflin already knew what
researchers at the University of Sussex have since attempted to
quantify: that reading is a more efficacious stress reliever than
listening to music, going for a walk or sitting down with a nice cup of
tea. After just six minutes with a book – any book – their subjects
found stress was reduced by up to 68 per cent. With the right book, that
really could be time well spent.
That’s why we’re launching our
very own bibliotherapy column. Send us an email to tell us what ails and
what irks you, be it broken resolutions or a broken heart, whether
you’re feeling lost in life or stuck in your career. I’ll recommend you
some books old and new, mostly though not exclusively fiction, that are
sure to speak to your predicament, offering insights and encouragement
as well as a little escapism. And at the very least, you’ll discover
some great new titles. To quote the sign in Mr Mifflin’s bookshop,
“Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us
prescribe for you”.
In the first issue of "Aje", a Nigerian comic offering a new breed
of superheroes strictly from Africa, university student Teni casts a
curse on her boyfriend in a rush of jealous rage and purple lightning.
"Koni
dara fun o ni yi aye (it will never be better for you in this life),"
snarls Teni in Yoruba, a language and one of the major ethnic groups in
Nigeria.
Teni is the creation of Jide
Martins, the founder of Comic Republic, one of a handful of comic
startups making African superheroes to rival Iron Man, Batman and
Spiderman.
Unlike Storm, a beloved X-Men
superhero who is a dual citizen of the United States and the fictional
country Wakanda, the superheroes Martins brings to life are born and
bred in Africa -- and fight there too.
"In
university, I started wondering what it would be like if Superman came
to Nigeria," Martins told AFP at his flat in Lagos, where his dining
room doubles as a studio for his team of young illustrators.
"People
are trying to break away from the norm and find new things to aspire
to," Martins said. "You don't have to be white to save the world."
Nigerian names and spandex
In
2013, Martins, a slim 37-year-old with a freckled nose and goatee
beard, published his first issue of Guardian Prime, a hero wearing a
forest green and snow white super-suit in the colours of the Nigerian
flag.
Since then, readership has swelled from 100 an issue to over 28,000.
Despite
the 30-plus page comic books being free and only available as a digital
download, Martins is able to generate enough money through advertising
and spin-off projects, including educational booklets on malaria
featuring his characters, to keep the business running.
"People
had this idea that African comics had to be with people in traditional
clothes, but I don't agree with that," Martins said.
"Let them have Nigerian names, saving people in Nigeria, but let's put them in spandex."
Martins
isn't the only one realising the potential of the burgeoning African
superhero industry, which adapts the continent's long tradition of
voodoo and the occult for a modern-day audience.
Roye
Okupe is the creator of E.X.O. -- The Legend of Wale Williams, a
graphic novel set in Lagoon City, a futuristic Lagos riddled with
corruption and besieged by an extremist insurrection.
Okupe,
a 30-year-old who grew up in the Nigerian megacity of 20 million
people, saw a market for an African character grounded in reality.
"You're
probably not able to name five African superheroes off the top of your
head," Okupe said from Washington, where he is based.
"And as much as I love Black Panther, he's from a fictional African country."
At
a time when superheroes dominate the international box office, Okupe
says Nigerians are uniquely poised to offer alternatives to the waspy
roster of Clark Kents and Peter Parkers.
"Ten
years ago if you released a superhero from Nigeria, I don't think
anybody would care," Okupe said. "But now that it's a popular industry,
people want diversity."
'Long overdue'
For scholars on comic books, African superheroes are an inevitable reaction to a predominantly white cast of caped crusaders.
"I
think it's long overdue," said Ronald Jackson, co-editor of the 2013
book "Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation".
"As
we begin to appreciate other identities, we're going to become
increasingly more embracing of the kind of images coming out of African
comics.
"What you don't always see front
and centre are major spin-offs in terms of movies and television shows. I
think that may be the next step for African comics."
Back
in the Comic Republic studio, the team of illustrators -- all under 30
-- hope that one day their characters will appear on the silver screen.
They're
betting that their African cast, including witches stronger than the
Jedi warriors in "Star Wars", will be more than enough to keep
international audiences excited.
"You hear
about Greek gods like Zeus but no one has heard of Shango, the god of
lightning in Yoruba," 23-year-old illustrator Tobe Ezeogu said.
"It's a different take to what people are used to."
Along
with Aje and Guardian Prime, Martins and his team have created Avonome,
who goes into the spiritual world to fight battles, and Eru, a lecturer
at the University of Lagos whose alter ego is modelled on the Yoruba
god of fear.
"We're shocked at the way people have received the comics," Martins said. "It's been amazing."
Ticket Books function as a train ride pass and aim to encourage reading in Brazil.
by Leah Gonzalez
23 November 2015
People only read an average of about two books a year in Brazil. To promote reading, Brazil’s biggest pocket book publisher L&PM Editores created a collection of small paperbacks that also work as subway tickets.
L&PM worked with Agência Africa to create the Ticket Books, a collection of ten books with RFID cards built inside the book covers. The hidden RFID cards made the pocket books readable by the turnstile scanners at the subway. Agency Africa also worked with Via Quatro, the company that manages the subways, so that the Ticket Books can be made available at the turnstiles at the subway stations.
To celebrate World Book Day last April 23rd, L&PM gave away 10,000 books for free at subway stations across Sao Paulo. Each book came with ten free trips. When all ten trips have been used up, users can recharge them via the Ticket Books website and use them again or gift them to a friend to encourage even more people to read. The project was so successful that L&PM expanded the project to other cities in Brazil.
The Ticket Books collection included ten titles: Peanuts: Friendship. That’s What Friends Are For by Charles M. Schulz, Garfield: Sorry by Jim Davis, Hundred Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of Baskerville by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Murder Alley by Agatha Christie, Chives In Trouble! by Mauricio de Sousa, and Quintana Pocket by Mario Quintana. The books also featured cover art inspired by subway maps.
The Ticket Books campaign was awarded three trophies at the Cannes Lions Festival – Silver Lion for the category Promo, Silver Lion for the category Outdoor, and a Bronze Lion for the category Design.
