I just love libraries; I wish I could visit every single one of them.  And I love history.  So, when I found this website, I just had to share it with you!

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1. The Great Library & Mouseion: The First Universal Library (Alexandria, Egypt)

History tells us that the first ‘universal’ library was the Great Library & Mouseion in Alexandria, Egypt. Hungry for conquest and knowledge, Alexander the Great spent the last 11 years of his life (334 to 333 B.C.) exploring the world. To broaden the enterprise, he dispatched scholars to unexplored regions to gather knowledge and map their journeys…[more info at the website below]

2. The Celsus Library: One of Antiquity’s Finest Libraries (Ephesus, Turkey)

Image: Alaskan Dude

Another early library was the Celsus Library in Ephesus, built in 110 A.D. by the Council Gaius Julius Aquila. The library became one of the largest collections of antiquity, storing an estimated 12,000 hand-written books. Books could not be taken out of the library, but were handed to readers by library officials and read in the reading room.  Interestingly, the library had its own temperature regulation system: a second set of outer walls to protect the books from humidity and temperature variations.

3. The University of Sankore: An Ancient Seat of Muslim Learning (Sankore, Timbuktu)

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All this copying provided a lot of work for scribes. The University of Sankore in Timbuktu employed an army of scribes, who earned their living copying the manuscripts. As a result, Timbuktu became a repository of an extensive collection of manuscripts.

What were scribes paid? A papyrus of the second century AD gives rates “for 10,000 lines, 28 drachmae … For 6,300 lines, 13 drachmae.” The Emperor Diocletian tried to standardise the pay scribes received throughout the Roman Empire: “to a scribe for the best writing, 100 lines, 25 denarii; for second quality writing 100 lines 20 denarii; to a notary for writing a petition or legal document, 100 lines, 10 denarii.”

4. The Bodleian: One of The Oldest Surviving European Libraries (Oxford, England)

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It is said that King Charles I once asked the chief librarian of the Bodleian Library if he could borrow a book. A few years later, Oliver Cromwell asked the same question. The librarian refused them both. Stuart or Roundhead, books in the Bodleian could be read on the premises or not at all.

An earlier repository of books and documents at Oxford University was destroyed in the effort to rid England of all traces of Roman Catholicism, including “superstitious books and images”. Some were burnt, some sold and others used by glove makers to press gloves. Oxford University was not a wealthy institution and did not have the resources to build up a collection of new printed books to replace those destroyed…Today’s Bodleian claims to hold 11 million volumes, and to offer fuller access to online publications and databases than any other academic institution in the UK.

5. Chetham’s Library: The UK’s Oldest Free Public Reference Library (Manchester, England)

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Chetham’s library is said to be Britain’s oldest surviving public library. Karl Marx visited the library in 1846, at the invitation of his friend Frederick Engels. In the bay of the library’s reading room, they carried out the research for Das Kapital…

6. Library of Congress: Jefferson’s Legacy (Washington D.C., United States)

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The Library of Congress, founded in 1800, is said to be the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. However, like the libraries of Ephesus and Alexandria, it became a victim of fire. During the War for Independence in 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building and destroyed the Library’s core collection of 3,000 volumes. One year later, however, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950 and the Library was restored.

Today the Library of Congress claims to be the largest library in the world, with nearly 142 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials, 3 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 5.6 million pieces of sheet music and 62 million manuscripts.

7. The British Library: One of The World’s Most Extensive Collections (London, England)

Image: lisabatty

Compared to many other significant libraries, the British Library is relatively young having been brought into existence by the 1972 The British Library Act. The 1971 White Paper recognised that the constituent bodies of the proposed British Library (principally the British Museum Library) were seriously short of space and that rehousing the various collections was of top priority…

Literacy & Power: Inextricably Linked

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…From the early sixteenth century onwards it was viewed as especially dangerous for women to read fiction.

In the Civil War era in the United States, knowledge was considered dangerous and white citizens in many areas imposed a ban on teaching slaves to read or write. In the years following the Civil War, only those who could read and write could vote, effectively fencing out many African Americans.

The First Public Libraries & The Spread of Knowledge

Image: Celeste

The dream of Thomas Bodley was to make collected books “available to the whole republic of the learned”.

In the 1840s, William Ewart, Joseph Brotherton, and Edward Edwards espoused a more democratic vision and launched a campaign to provide a system of public libraries. Brotherton and Ewart were both Liberal MPs. Edwards, however, was a Chartist and involved in the struggle for universal suffrage. A former bricklayer, he had educated himself by spending his non-working time in Mechanics’ Institute libraries, and in 1839 became an assistant in the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum.

However, when William Ewart introduced his Public Libraries Bill in 1849, he encountered considerable hostility from the Conservatives in the House of Commons. They argued that the rate-paying middle and upper classes would be supporting a service that would be mainly used by the working classes, and harked back to the old argument that: “the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.”

After several fairly significant compromises, the Public Libraries Act became law in 1850. Due to these compromises, libraries were largely unfunded for many years and had to rely on the support of wealthy entrepreneurs. The greatest financial supporter of public libraries was Andrew Carnegie, who helped to finance over 380 libraries in Britain. It was not until 1919 that a truly comprehensive and free library service emerged.

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Please visit the website to find out about the first public libraries and more!

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Here are some visual statistics measuring the volume of the internet into:

• reading
• weight
• ink cartridges
• time
• trees

How cool is this!

Source

The largest library fine I ever received was for $42 for late fees because I misplaced some video tapes during a move–oh, the shame.  Then I found out about this gentleman…

An Illinois handball coach returned a book that was over 145 years overdue!

“The leather-bound volume was taken from the shelves of the Washington and Lee University library in Lexington, Virginia on 11 June 1864 by a Union soldier when General David Hunter and his army of West Virginia raided the area. Passed down by the soldier, CS Gates, through generations of his family, it eventually came into the possession of Mike Dau, of Lake Forest, Illinois, from one of Gates’s descendents.”

Read the whole story here

Look at the names of these WONDER-FULL literary locations (in alphabetical order) in stories and novels written between 1405-1910.  Some inhabitants conceive infants in their minds and give birth through their fingers!  My personal favorite is THERMOMETER ISLAND where the islanders are born with visible signs of their vocation.

AFFECTION, a country of unknown location, on the coast of the Dangerous Sea.  Many people have expressed a desire to visit Affection, or Tendre, but from New Friendship.  Affection itself is divided by three rivers: Gratitude or Avowal, Attachment, and Esteem, which descend into an estuary leading to the Dangerous Sea.  On the Sea of Enmity are a few towns best avoided: Pefidy, Slander, and others.  However, this region is not far from the beautiful city of Affection-on-Avowal, and a few hamlets like Caring, Sensibility and Constant Friendship should be visited.  Important towns are Loveletter, Pretty-poems, and Obedience.  The capital of Tendre is Affection-on-Esteem.  To the west of the country is a desolate region which harbors the Lake of Indifference.

(Madeleine De Scudery, La Chllie, Paris, 1660)

CITY OF VIRTUOUS WOMEN, or City of Ladies.  Not much is known about this famous city except that it is inhabited by women only, who are considered, because of their nature, more important and more noteworthy than men.  It was built with enormous blocks of stone, each of which carries the name of a famous woman.  The visitor will be able to identify the names of Semiramis, Amazonia, Aenobia, Artemis, Berenice, Clelia and Fredegorida, even though their deeds are now no longer remembered.  It is said that in order to open the gates of the city, a traveler must make herself a key out of “prudence, economy and breeding.”  No other instructions are given for visiting the City of Virtuous Women.

(Christine de Pisan, La Cite des Dames, Paris, 1405)

FLUTTERBUDGET CENTRE, a large town on a hill in southern oz, almost ont he border between Quadling Country and Winkie Country.  Like Rigmorole Town, Flutterbudget Centre is one of the defensive settlements of Oz.  Anyone in the country who shows signs of becoming a Flutterbudget is sent to live there.

Flutterbudgets are characterized by their constant worrying over imaginary fears and are obsessed by the disasters that might befall them if such-and-such a thing happened.  To take only one example: a Flutterbudget may complain that he cannot sleep because in order to do so he would have to close his eyes.  If he closed his eyes, the lids might stick together and he would then be blind for life.  He may well agree that he has never heard of such a thing happening, but will immediately add that it would be dreadful if it did and that the very idea makes him so nervous that he cannot fall asleep.

(L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, Chicago, 1910)

ISLAND OF POETRY, inhabited by distracted and dreamy people not much given to speech.  Every morning they fall on their knees to adore the goddess Dawn whom they place high above the Nine Muses and Apollo.

The islanders possess the odd chacteristic of conceiving their infants in their heads and of giving birth through their fingers.  Many of these children are monsters; however, the inhabitants of the Island of Poetry do not cast them away but feed them with a nourishing meat called esteem.  When one of the islanders dies, he is embalmed in elaborate rhetorical apparatus and the trumpets of fame are sounded at his funeral.

The lack of political organization, economic development and military forces on the island is surprising.  The inhabitants’ only occupation seems to consist of wandering, lonely as clouds, by lone seabreakers, and sitting by desolate streams, composing all sorts of indifferent verses which they like to recite with great emphasis at their social gatherings.

(Jean Jacobe de Fremont d’Ablancourt, Supplement de l’Histoire Ventable de Lucien, Paris, 1654)

SEA OF FROZEN WORDS, on the edge of the frozen sea of the north.  In winter, all words and sounds in the area are frozen; as the milder weather approaches in spring, they begin to thaw out and can be clearly heard.  Travelers can pick up the frozen words, which resemble crystallized sweets of various colors.

Crossing the sea in summer, a certain Pantagruel heard the noise of a battle between Arimaspians and the Cloud-riders–a battle which had taken place at the start of the previous winter.

(Francois Rabelais, Le quart livre des faicts et dicts du bon Pantagruel, Paris, 1552)

THERMOMETER ISLAND, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, so called because the laws of the country allow couples to sleep with each other only if the sexes of both husband and wife, measured with special thermometers, have reached the same temperature.  The sexual organs of the male inhabitants have curious shapes–parallelepipeds, pyramids, cylinders–and correspond exactly to those of the female islanders.  The queen of the island is elected from among those women who are the quickest in measuring the temperature of their own and their partners’ sex; this dexterity is highly honored on the island.

The islanders are born with the visible signs of their vocation: in this way each one is what he should be.  Those destined to the science of geometry are born with fingers in the form of a compass; someone who is to be an astronomer is born with eyes in the form of telescopes; geographers are born with heads like terrestrial globes; musicians with hornlike ears; hydraulic engineers with testicles like water pumps and they are capable from an early age of urinating in long jets.  Certain inhabitants who are born with several characteristics combined have proved in later life to be, in fact, good for nothing.

Visitors will be interested in a curious instrument found only on this island, a harpsichord that instead of producing sounds produces colors and is used by the ladies to find harmonious combinations for their dresses.

(Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux indiscrets, Paris, 1748)

TRUELAND, a country of unknown location, where nothing can be said or done that is not true.  Visitors will find upon arrival that every one of their actions must correspond to a strict code of gallantry and good manners and that everything they promise must sooner or later be fulfilled.  Should a visitor allow himself to drop even a piece of paper on the impecable streets of Trueland, he will find that it immediately jumps back into his pocket–an unpleasant characteristic of a country which has forced its inhabitants to dispense with dogs as pets.  Every blow given in Trueland comes back to the attacker, and every insult is felt as a blow by the one who has uttered it.  Visitors can go through the motions of their everyday life in Trueland, but these will here become unbearably tainted by social hypocrisy, disguised feelings or any other form of deceit.  Previous friendships, business partnerships and marriages tend to break up with astounding  regularity upon arrival and very few travellers who have been to Trueland are ever reinstated in their previous occupation.

(Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, “Voyage au Monde Vrai“, in Le Cabinet du Philosophe, Paris, 1734)

I absolutely LOVE staircases; so when I saw these, I just had to share them.  Image credits unknown.

1. Obama’s ancestors owned slaves:

A distant cousin from his mother’s side, Gabriel Duvall, a Supreme Court Justice and a member of the US House of Representatives, from the second district of Maryland was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson and the owner of 37 slaves

2. His maternal grandparents liked to move around:

Born in Kansas, Obama’s maternal grandparents lived in four states before settling in Hawaii.

3. Obama’s great-uncle liberated a Nazi concentration camp:

Charles T. Payne, served in the U.S. Army 89th Division and helped liberate Buchenwald concentration camp.

4.  Obama has highly educated family members

Father Barack Hussein Obama got a Master degree in economics from Harvard University, Mother Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro got a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawai, Half-sister Auma Obama got her PhD from the University of Heidelberg.

5.   China Business Consultant among family members

Mark Ndesandjo, Barack Obama’s half-brother, son of Ruth Nidesand and Barack Obama Sr. runs an Internet company called WorldNexus that advises Chinese corporations how best to reach international customers.

6.   Obama’s Grandmother was a bank president

Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother was a bank vice president in Hawaii.

7.   His wife was assigned to be his mentor

In 1989 Michelle Obama was asked to mentor a summer associate from Harvard name Barack Obama. Michelle Robinson initially brushed off advances from Barack because he was an intern, and she was higher up the law firm’s hierarchy as an associate.

8.  Obama has won two major media awards

Obama has won two Grammy Awards. First for Best Spoken Word Album in 2005 for the audio book edition of Dreams From My Father (2004), and again in 2007 for the audio book edition of The Audacity of Hope (2006).

9.  Gandhi is Obama’s hero

His heroes are Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso and John Coltrane.

10. Who would Obama choose to play Obama in a movie?

Obama has said that he would like Will Smith to play Obama in a movie.

[Source]

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER LORE AND LEGENDS

Senior editor’s view of his job

At a cocktail party celebrating the launch of a new book, a young woman waving a highball approached the publisher’s senior editor and asked, “Are you a writer?”

“No,” replied the editor.

“Then just what do you do,” she asked.

“I’m in the cleaning and repairing business.”

Editorial director looking to get lucky

One day, the editorial director at a small technical publishing establishment was observed hanging a horseshoe over the door to his office. His colleagues, in surprise, asked the director whether he believed it would bring luck to his acquisitions efforts.

“No,” the editorial director replied. “I don’t believe in superstitions. But I’ve been told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

Most honest book jacket blurb ever written

Perhaps the most honest wording ever to appear on a book jacket was the blurb signed by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf on a 1936 Gertrude Stein book titled, The Geographical History of America on the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Here’s what Cerf wrote:

This space is usually reserved for a brief description of a book’s contents. In this case, however, I must admit frankly that I do not know what Miss Stein is talking about. I do not even understand the title.

EVOLUTION Of BOOK MAKING

Thumb index

The thumb index, those rounded notched indentations cut into the edges of pages to facilitate quick reference, have been around for over a century. The process was invented in 1884 by Alfred A. Butler of Bay City, Michigan.

Origin of plastic book jacket cover

The plastic book jacket cover had its origin in Newark, New Jersey. In 1939, Arthur Brody, son of neighborhood pharmacist and a former stock clerk in Bamberger’s downtown Newark department store invented the plastic book jacket cover.

Since his father ran a profitable book lending library out of his drugstore on Bergen Street, young Brody looked for ways to protect the thin paper book jackets, which frayed and tore easily, so that the books would have a longer lending life. He experimented with rigid sheets of clear plastic which he cut to book jacket size, folded between the rubber wring rollers of his grandmother’s washing machine, and wrapped around the lending library book jackets. Thus was born the plastic book jacket industry.

Early book publishing

By the end of the 15^th century, printing had taken place in over two hundred European communities. As a result, more than 30,000 different editions of printed books were produced.

More than half of these books were church or religion-related, consisting of sermons, commentaries, polemics, lives of the saints, church histories, brevaries, Psalters, and Bibles. Of the remainder, publishing was done on such subjects as astrology, alchemy, chemistry, and the art and practice of healing. There were also an abundance of textbooks of grammatical and philological content made necessary by the rapid spread of the printed word.

BOOK TITLING TIDBITS AND TRIVIA

Book for amnesiacs

A European publisher issued a book titled The Memoirs of an Amnesiac that contained only blank pages.

Recurring themes in 20th century book titles

One of the most interesting phenomena in publishing in the 20^th century was the evolution of book titling themes often patterned after a single successful book or series of books. Some of the more popular book titling themes dealt with numbers, minutes, days, nights, seasons, colors, landscapes, and even the earth, sun and moon.

INNOVATIVE BOOK PROMOTION

Strange new market for books: Losing lottery ticket buyers

Here’s a book promotion aimed only at lottery ticket buyers but only those who lost.  The sponsor was the government of Ontario, which runs a weekly lottery for $1 a ticket. What the Ontario government did, during several periods in the late 1970s and 1980s, was to establish a time interval during which losing lottery tickets could be used as cash toward a purchase of a book by a Canadian author.

When first tried for three months in 1978, losing Wintario lottery tickets could be used as 50c cash up to four tickets per purchase to buy any Canadian-authored book, hardcover or paper. In subsequent promotions in the early 1980s, losing lottery tickets could be used to buy only Canadian-authored paperbacks, with a limit of $1 per book.  Over 95% of Ontario’s booksellers honored the losing lottery tickets as cash, for which they were reimbursed from lottery proceeds by the Ontario government.

PUBLISHING MISCELLANY

How publishers said “NO” when rejecting famous books

The following rejections have been adapted from Rotten Rejections with the permission of the publisher, Pushcart Press.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961) “A continual and unmitigated bore.”

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe (1929) “Marred by stylistic cliches!  Has all the faults of youth and inexperience.”

Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954) “You have (not) been wholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea.”

Lust for Life, Irving Stone (1934) “A long, dull novel.”

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1856) “A heap of details which are well done but utterly superfluous.”

Poems, William Butler Yeats (1895) “Absolutely empty and void; does not please the ear, nor kindle the imagination.”

The Good Earth, Pearl Buck (1931) “Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.”

The Ipcress File, Len Deighton (1963) “Author tends to stay too long on non-essentials, is enchanted with his words, his tough style, and that puts me off badly.”

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair (1906) “it is fit only for the wastebasket.”

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, John le Carre (1963) “le Carre – he hasn’t got any future.”

The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham (1944) “I do not find the thing good of its kind. ¦ I think it is distasteful.”

The Time Machine, H. G. Wells (1895) “Not interesting enough for the general reader; not thorough enough for the scientific reader.”

Why authors once sold dedications in their books

In ancient Rome books were individually produced by hand and, thus, had very limited circulation. Consequently, this meant little income for their authors. Probably as a result, it was common practice for authors to dedicate their written works to friends or patrons who were expected to reciprocate with payment in coin or kind.

The ancient custom of selling book dedications by authors survived at least into the 18^th century. This is evidenced in the work of the British religious leader and novelist, Laurence Sterne [1713-1768] who, in one of his published volumes, in the space usually used ft dedication, published this message: “To be let or sold for fifty guineas.”

Unschooled youth who learned from books

He was born in a log cabin in the Midwest and grew up without schooling. As a youth, he clerked at a country store and found friendship in books that helped him envision a world outside that he had never seen or known about. He told his neighbors, “The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”

He widened his circle of book friends and educated himself. Eventually, his friends helped him acquire the knowledge that elevated him to the highest office in the land. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

How you as a reader should evaluate an author

“You must of necessity enter his thoughts before you can rightly evaluate them.” –From John D. Snider’s I Love Books.

Bookseller permanently on the shelf

James Edwards (1757-1816) was an English bookseller who achieved both fame and riches traveling throughout Europe buying and selling books. At his death in 1816, in accordance with his wishes, he was buried in a coffin of wood made from his own bookshelves.

His burial was at St. Mary’s Harrow-on-the-Hill, a little parish church on a prominent hill in Middlesex, England. “He lies here to this day,” wrote Michael Olmert in Smithsonian Book of Books, “permanently on the shelf, but definitely out of circulation.”

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Source: The Joy of Publishing by Nat Bodian.

I went to  the library yesterday to pick up the novel “Blindness” by Jose Saramago so I could read it before I saw the movie.  The concept was intriguing.  It’s about a city that’s hit with an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one.  What I didn’t know was that it has no chapter numbers, no dialogue punctuation, run-on sentences, and in some places the paragraphs are two pages long.  If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a sample from page 3 (a driver has just become blind at a stop light and strangers are trying to convince him to get help at a hospital):

…but the blind man refused to hear of it, quite unnecessary, all he wanted was that someone might accompany him to the entrance of the building where he lived.  It’s close by and you could me no greater favour.  And what about the car, asked someone.  Another voice replied, The key is in the ignition, drive the car on to the pavement.  No need, intervened a third voice, I’ll take charge of the car and accompany this man home.  There were murmurs of approval.

Personally, it’s hard reading–there are four speakers in some paragraphs without any dialogue marks.  I’ve read that this author has written all his books this way.  Would I read another book from this author?  Probably not.  Despite the grammatical confusion, I’ll continue to read because I want to see what happens next.

Have you read this book?  What are your thoughts?

Image via Wikipedia

I love reading the history of now well-known books.  It gives me hope that my magazine, Perspectives, has the potential of sitting on the shelves next to the great Reader’s Digest.  The first issue of Reader’s Digest appeared on February 5, 1922, and had a white paper stock cover with 62 pages of print (no illustrations or advertisements).

A drawing of a Beardsley-type woman writing on a scroll with a huge pen which adorned the cover was an ornament the printer happened to have in his case.  Inside, the opening article was “How to Keep Young Mentally.”

The humble beginnings of major reference books such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Encyclopedia Brittanica, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, National Geographic Magazine, Reader’s Digest, and Roget’s International Thesaurus can be found here.

*****

Click here to read more about my magazine.

The following entries come from the Petras’ paperback, Unusually Stupid Celebrities, A Compendium of All-Star Stupidity (Villard, $13.95).

B – Kim Basinger demanded cases of Evian water on a movie set; not for drinking but for washing her hair.
C – Naomi Campbell ordered a sandwich at the famous Le Grand Vefour restaurant in Paris and was “forced” to send back her toast because it was scratching her gums.
I – Enrique Inglesias, who once told an interviewer, “I can never find extra-small condoms and I know it’s really embarrassing for people, you know, from experience.”
J – Scarlett Johannson hates to be ungrateful but said, “The studio will send you a wilting fruit basket or some mediocre champagne … some people get cars, that would be nice but will they also pay for my parking?”
L – Courtney Love had her breast implants removed and kept them as souvenirs. Her dog ate one and died.
M – Demi Moore ordered a plane to fly her from her Idaho home to New York City but upon discovering that the plane was too small and she’d have to stack her luggage, had her studio–Sony–provide a larger one.
P – Joaquin Phoenix asked at a news conference: “Do I have a large frog in my hair? Something’s crawling out of my scalp. I’m not worried about the looks. I’m worried about the sensation of my brain being eaten…what did you ask me?”
U – Usher has a $1-million watch with his face on the face, surrounded by 1,106 diamonds.
V – Vanna White reportedly makes $3 million to $5 million a year turning letters on Wheel of Fortune and maintains, “It’s not as easy as it looks.”