Winston Pei 2023-09-10 Winston Pei 2023-09-10

No avatar, just an original

So just wanted to share a quick post about a new acquisition up here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library North, and a bit of an associated mystery, a real literary eccentricity and rarity. The book is Avatar Inc: A Sci-Fi Anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer and published March 13, 2020, by the XPRIZE Foundation.

Yeah, that XPRIZE Foundation…

Now with an update!

Winston Pei 2023-07-27 Winston Pei 2023-07-27

Canadian Born Chinese

Today we’re taking a bit of a deeper dive into one graphic novel in particular. And to the surprise of no one who’s been reading our recent posts about our Comic as Object Project or Drawn Together, this will be doing double duty as an assignment for our Head Alien’s LIS 518 course at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.

As some of you might have already guessed from the title of this post, the graphic novel in question is American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang…

Winston Pei 2023-02-15 Winston Pei 2023-02-15

Book Mail: Life Beyond Us

Just wanted to do a quick share of one of the Butterflies & Aliens Library’s latest acquisitions, Life Beyond Us, edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest, and published by Laksa Media Group in partnership with the European Astrobiology Institute…

Winston Pei 2023-02-10 Winston Pei 2023-02-10

The Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers

Thought we needed to break up all the book news with something more “traditionally” Butterflies & Aliens, so wanted to quickly share a favourite new read… the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers…

Winston Pei 2022-11-06 Winston Pei 2022-11-06

Lego Lost at Sea

On February 13, 1997, the cargo ship Tokio Express encountered a one-in-a-hundred year storm that knocked sixty-two shipping containers off its deck and into the waters of the North Atlantic. One of those containers contained 4,756,940 pieces of LEGO, many of which soon started washing ashore, especially on certain beaches in the UK.

imagine my delight at discovering a beautiful little book on the topic, a meeting of nerdoms, a moment of Books & Bricks out in the wild…

Winston Pei 2022-08-09 Winston Pei 2022-08-09

Finally, time for some summer reading…

Yeah, it’s been a hot minute, but between work and school and life we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library may have gotten a bit sidetracked from our (ir)regularly scheduled additions to our digital stacks.

But we have not forgotten you, beloved patrons!

Winston Pei 2022-06-01 Winston Pei 2022-06-01

99 Dead Snowmen

It’s been almost a year since we shared a post about our Memento Mori collection here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library – also known as our “funny books about death” collection. To recognize the occasion, we thought we’d share our latest addition to that collection, Tony De Saulles’ 99 Dead Snowmen, published in 2012 by Headline Publishing out of the UK.

Winston Pei 2022-03-01 Winston Pei 2022-03-01

It had a blue cover…

A quick post about a recent acquisition that will in particular tickle the funny bone of librarians and booksellers… A Library of Misremembered Books by artist Marina Luz…

Winston Pei 2021-11-10 Winston Pei 2021-11-10

Something from the Past, Something for the Future

Just a quick post to share three new acquisitions: Tom Wharton’s 1995 novel Icefields in its new Landmark Edition, and TWO new Short Story Advent Calendars, one for adults and a new new one for kids!

Winston Pei 2021-10-16 Winston Pei 2021-10-16

Otto & Victoria, Time Traveling in Style…

One of the challenges of being based in the Great White North is that ordering things from south of the border can be disproportionately expensive… so it was that we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library didn’t get our hands on this acquisition until just this past week.

But my goodness was it worth it.

Introducing Brian Kesinger’s Time Traveling With Your Octopus…

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Yeah, no, we’re still here!

Life has been a bit crazy here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities. But we couldn’t let too much time pass without popping in to our beloved library and saying hi!

So for today, a quick gallery post of some of our recent acquisitions to share with all of you.

Winston Pei 2021-08-31 Winston Pei 2021-08-31

Foundations

In celebration of a colleague receiving his mail ordered Folio Society editions, as well as the upcoming AppleTV adaptation, I thought I’d share a few images from my collection of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Beginning with the original trilogy published in the early 1950s, the Foundation universe grew to include seven novels in the series and another eleven within the same fictional timeline, plus additional books by other authors set in the same universe.