The Stacks
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Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials
So back in January my fellow student staffer at Bruce Peel Special Collections, Michaela Morrow, and I had the privilege and delight to lead a Peel Workshop of our own design, titled Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials. Basically it was a chance for us to pull an absolute treasure trove of materials from the collection, share them with friends and patrons, and – perhaps the biggest bonus to me – spend some extra time studying them ourselves.
And what a trove it was…
An ever widening path of destruction…
…but also a path of creation?
Today I want to share about an altered book that I did not personally alter but for which I am nonetheless somewhat to blame… a book being altered because I gave someone the idea to.…
A Book of Centuries
Hey there, Head Alien here, just casually walking around with an almost-600-year-old book for Fridays at the Peel…
Journal of a Voyage
This week for Fridays at the Peel we take a peek at the Journal of a Voyage to North America, written by Pierre de Charlevoix and published in 1761. But if you’ve been a patron of the Butterflies & Aliens Library for any amount of time, you know I’m much more interested in the voyage taken by the book itself than the voyage it recounts within its pages…
Arranging Furniture
Okay, yes I’m posting this on a Saturday, but the important point here is that Fridays at the Peel are back!
To share today, a book called Arranging Furniture, created by Jason Dewinetz at his fine press “small publishing concern” based in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, Greenboathouse Press…
An extraordinary correspondance, unbound
In anticipation of Chapter 13 of the When Words Collide festival, and an opportunity to display and discuss some examples of altered book art while I’m there, I wanted to post a little post about a work I made based off of one of my favourite books, Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock…
Social climbing
Once upon a time I had a shoebox full of favourite comic strips that I had diligently cut out of the newspaper… Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, to name but a few. Somewhere over time and over moves, I lost that box, much to my sadness.
But if the strip got popular enough, some publisher would come along and reprint them into a little book…
Because stickers
This post for the Comic as Object Project doesn’t even care about the comic part… this one is just about the object part. We just get to sneak it into the project because the object incidentally happens to be a graphic novel… and apparently quite a well known and well regarded one. And by a Canadian creator. And also incidentally the same creator who was involved in our previous fancy box post.
Not important.
This is why we bought the book…
But it’s a fancy box
So as part of the Comic as Object Project, I want to share with you a series of comics called Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta, published in 2019 by TKO Studios. A series of six, Sentient tells the story of the U.S.S. Montgomery, a deep space colony ship whose AI, VALARIE, must help the children left aboard survive after all the adults are killed.
But the story is not what’s important here…
Okay, yeah, that’s a comic book…
We would be remiss as part of the Comic as Object Project if we didn’t take at least a passing look at the format that probably most people would consider a ‘real’ comic book: the 6 5/8 inch by 10 1/4 inch 16 page plus cover saddle-stitched booklet format, known affectionately (or derogatorily, depending on your personal stance on such things) as the “floppy.”
Living on the wrong side of the racks
In this first post to be included under the umbrella of the Comic as Object Project, we want to share a book that is both the most recent to be acquired here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library but also a throwback to the very first comics we ever read as a kid: Archie Digests!
The Comic as Object Project
As part of our Head Alien’s ongoing studies at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies, this project starts with a basic, and I think self-evident, premise taken from a different medium altogether – that a video call is not the same as an in-person meeting…
