When: Wednesday, March 3, 2010, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Where: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts @ 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 (Map)
The Internet Archive is holding a salon to discuss the resources available at the Internet Archive, how artists and creative people can access and contribute to the Archive, or to our Open Library and BookServer projects. The salon will be hosted by Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA), here in San Francisco.
I learned a new word today: biblioclast, or destroyer of books. Found it on the frontispiece of The Enemies of Books by William Blades.
As you can see from its Table of Contents — Fire, Water, Gas and Heat, Dust and Neglect, Ignorance, The Bookworm, Other Vermin, Bookbinders, Collectors & Servants and Children — the author, William Blades, has spotted elemental, entomological and occupational enemies, even as far back as 1880.
John Bagford, “shoemaker and biblioclast,” appears in the chapter about Collectors. He apparently “went about the country, from library to library, tearing away title pages from rare books of all sizes,” intent on creating a key to the history of printing, but detaching key bibliographic information from parent works. You can see glimpses of The Bagford Fragments on the British Library’s website.
Just a note to say that we’ve just updated the design of the Open Library blog. Thanks to Lance & Raj!
In lieu of the soft launch, we thought it might be nice to give you a teeny taste of the new look.
“The expander of horizons,” is what a noted critic called Jules Verne. He was the prophet, the foreseer and foreteller of our great mechanical age.”1
Gawd, this redesign is getting so exciting we can hardly bear it! Metamorphosis, eat your heart out! We’re very close to calling a lot of the new pages finished, although we expect to continue improving things after we do our soft launch.
I found these beautiful plates in a book called European Butterflies and Moths. There’s a huge collection of gorgeous old things in the Smithsonian Libraries collection on archive.org.
This post was somewhat inspired by a juicy thread over on the NGC4LIB mailing list. What is a butterfly?