The Stacks
Please note that you may be seeing a filtered view of our stacks.
Check the url to confirm, or click the header above at any time to reload the full contents.
Meet Alex Melton!
It’s Wednesday, which means BALLER Profile day, where we get to introduce you to some of the authors, publishing professionals, library people, readers, and more in our neighbourhood.
This week we are making our first visit to Library School to meet Alex Melton…
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…
Ready or not, here I come…
Ray Bradbury once said “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As a book nerd, student librarian, and global citizen, I think about that quote almost daily.
And as a student librarian, I’m learning that there is yet another tactic – make the books unfindable…
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…
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…
Publishing and librarianship in the news, and at school
So following in the tradition of The Catalogue Projects here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities, the convergence of school and not-school for our Head Alien continues apace…
Puck's Arena
My introduction to artist’s books, and altered books in particular, started with an undergraduate field trip to the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta, and one work in particular.
At first glance, it seems innocuous enough, perhaps even a bit boring or common? But if there was ever a time to apply the broader advice to not judge a book by its cover, this would be it.
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…
Immersed in book culture…
The present moment has brought an interesting alignment between my personal, professional, and student lives… everything focussed on book culture, print culture, reading culture…
Loved to pieces
In the digital world, lack of attention is what often gets a website “deaccessioned” or “weeded” from the world wide web. But ironically, in our equally beloved world of physical books, a lack of attention, of a certain kind, is actually better for a book’s longevity…
Starting with our ABCs…
We wrote in a past post about the challenges of alphabetizing our collection of alphabet books, and have since continued to acquire more items. Rather than manually updating the list of books from that post, we decided to experiment with an online cataloguing tool, a project we alluded to in our recent post about The Organization of Information. And how best to start any project? You start with your ABCs…
A miniature fairy library…
One of the lasting benefits of being a regular at When Words Collide, a readers and writers con held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, is connecting with a community of book nerd artists alongside the “usual” readers and writers and publishing folks. The latest addition to our shelves from this talented crew is this Janice Blaine original, a fairy library to grace the shelves of our human one…
