Tag Archives: books

The Enemies of Books

Destruction of Books at Ephesus

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.

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Lepidoptera

European butterflies and moths European Butterflies and Moths

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?

Happy Australia Day!

Please excuse my national pride leaking out on to the Open Library blog, but, there are some wonderful classic Australian books in the catalog that I’d like to share with you.

While The Billy Boils by Henry Lawson

Woman and her Possibilities, a lecture delivered in 1913 in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia, by W. Ramsay Smith.

That’s enough about Australia, lovely as it is. We also wanted to let you know that a friend of the Internet Archive, David Rumsey, has been busy digitizing his wonderful collection of maps and geographical books, for example, The California Water Atlas, which is full to the brim with gorgeous illustrations, timely given all the rain we’ve had in San Francisco this month.