HSU IT Department

Today is St. Bartholomew’s Day, patron saint of bookbinders, printers, and papermakers. The day is also associated with the amusingly named Wayzgoose tradition. He's also the patron saint of beekeepers, so find some mead and raise a glass to honor him and those in the professions he guards and guides, who over the centuries have worked harmoniously together to bring us so much knowledge and pleasure. (And if you happen to be in Florida, you can go to an actual Wayzgoode Festival!)

Well now, this is fun: The Department of Special Collections at Marquette’s Raynor Memorial Library, which is home to much of Tolkien's original papers, is creating a collection of interviews of Tolkien fans. Their goal is to collect 6,000 audio interviews. Why 6000, you ask? One for each of the Riders of Rohan that Théoden mustered and led to the aid of Gondor, of course:

[S]ix thousand spears to Sunlending,
Mundburg the mighty under Mindolluin,
Sea-kings' city in the South-kingdom
foe-beleaguered, fire-encircled...

Find out more here ==> https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/Mss/JRRT/fandomoh.php.

Just got back from the SAA conference in Cleveland (if you ever get a chance to eat at this place don't pass it up it is To Die For) and my little fangirl heart is very happy. There was a great lightning round (where lots of people talk one after another very quickly) on collecting fandom, and then later three of us did a panel discussion on archival and primary source material in dystopian/horror fiction. Fabulous.

Pursuant to that, Archive of Our Own recently announced that they'll be importing en masse yet another archive of fanfic, this one relating to Seamus Finnegan and Dean Thomas of the Harry Potter books:

The Seamus/Dean Forever Archive was a Harry Potter archive which was active from approximately 2002-2005...Open Doors will be working with Miss Cora, the moderator, to import Seamus/Dean Forever into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, both its fanfiction and fanart will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

I'm happy to say that this isn't the first time AO3 has taken on a preservation role for fanfic collections. They've imported others in the past, as part of their Open Doors project. They're also encouraging people to document the stories surrounding fan communities via the Fanlore site.

So if you know a fan archive that's become -- or about to become -- defunct, or if you have an archive you can't or don't wish to maintain any more, contact AO3. If you have a story to tell about a fan community, or about how you got into fandom, visit Fanlore and preserve it for posterity.

And please spread the word: what we do has value, don't let it get lost!

Very cool!!

"Over six hundred historic photographs of London, never seen in public before, have been published for the first time...The collection features images of most of London's landmarks, churches, open spaces, statues and buildings, alongside social and cultural scenes from the Victorian to the inter-war period..."

read full article

The entire set of images is published in The Gentle Author's London Album.

An early work by Hans Christian Andersen has been found at the bottom of a box near the Danish fairy tale writer's home city, experts say. How amazing is that? A brand new fairy tale by THE author of fairy tales! Apparently it's called Tallow Candle and is about candle that's all neglected until someone notices its worth. Sounds a bit like a wax Velveteen Rabbit (which that one always makes me cry -- I can't even explain the Velveteen Rabbit to somebody without crying).

So yay, new fairy tales :)

There were two excellent aspects to this book, and two not-so-excellent.

The first excellence was the highly detailed and very true-to-life descriptions of rare books, special collections and archives. In one scene the main character, Edward, visits a fictional rare book library in Manhattan called the Chenoweth. Poor Edward is flummoxed by everything he encounters: the numerous different catalogs (books here, manuscripts there, backlog in the other place; a third of their holdings in the electronic catalog, a third on little index cards, a third uncataloged entirely); reading room etiquette (he tries to talk to someone, can you imagine??); where the books live (only three bookshelves are visible, all full of books about books), and so on. "The whole operation was a model of mysterious, gleaming efficiency, like some incomprehensible ultramodern public restroom."

Plus there are student assistants wheeling squeaky carts, patrons at other tables looking at folders of letters, red velvet bookweights, a "serious little magnifying glass that looked like demilitarized Russian spy gear," and lots of very sharp pencils.

My archivist's heart was deeply, deeply satisfied by this, not to mention vastly amused. Later they go to the Chenoweth's offsite storage in Virginia where, three floors below ground, they find a fenced-off corner piled with dusty, broken-down, moldering boxes and cartons containing donations made long ago and never processed. This also made me laugh. (Thank god the velvet bookweights were red, not green, otherwise I'd suspect that he'd modeled his descriptions on my own workplace!)

The second excellence was the curious story-within-a-story: Gervase of Langford's weird and disturbing narrative, with its stag-headed knight, Mobius-strip storyline, and page covered in black ink. Margaret, the medievalist who helps Edward in his quest, explains how alien this kind of story would have been to the era in which it was written, in almost every way a complete anachronism. She also offers a brief but accurate history of how people's view of the purpose of writing has evolved in the last 500 years or so, including how suspicious people were of the idea of the novel and reading for pleasure.

So yay for the vivid descriptions of many wonderful old and rare books, and the delights of a hunt for a mysterious ancient manuscript.

Boo, however, for a gaping plot hole and an ending both disappointing and anticlimactic. The gaping plot hole is that no satisfactory explanation is given for how the Duchess knew what was in the Gervase of Langford book. If no one had ever seen it, and indeed most scholars thought it never existed, then how could the Duchess possibly know that it contained anything she could use to ruin her husband?? And if the events took place 700 years ago, who would possibly care?? The disappointment of the ending lies in the fact that (a) it all boils down to the cliche of an alcoholic and vengeful woman who wants to get revenge on her husband, for no reason we can see; and (b) Gervase's odd and fascinating tale turns out to be totally irrelevant, since all that matters are the illuminated capitals!! Most vexing.

That said, the two "boo" components didn't outweigh the fun I had with all the rare-book-and-archives lusciousness. If like me you love that sort of ambiance, you can still enjoy this -- just be prepared for a somewhat limp ending.

Two recent college graduates sit in nameless, faceless cubicles, staring at glowing blue computer screens. One laments, "It's like my four years of college just went down the toilet...I'm not helping anyone!" The other says wistfully, "I just wish we could find something better."

Suddenly, a huge majestic half-naked figure (a bit like an older Thor) appears behind them. "YOU SEEK ADVENTURE AND PURPOSE? SEEK NO MORE, FOR YOUR SEARCH HAS BORNE RIPE FRUIT! BEHOLD, I AM...LIBRARIAN!!!!"

Yup, it's a comic book -- a very funny, original, creative and (I think) effective PR project from Emporia State College's School of Library and Information Management. Read the whole thing here.

Optimistically overlooking my inability to crank out acres of fabulous words for SSIAW, I've signed up for luciusbigbang. Eek. I have no plot bunnies gamboling about, no drafts lurking in drawers awaiting rescue, no idea what I will do, so it's anybody's guess what the outcome will be. (Sadly, I've already written my Modern Major Death Eater piece, so that's out.) I like Lucius as a character but I find him more difficult to write than Severus, possibly because he's not as complex a character. Of course, as we all know, "It does not necessarily follow that a deep or intricate character is more or less estimable..." etc etc etc.

Other Notes of Note:

SSIAW week 3 is in full bloom, but my buds thus far remain tightly furled, alas. What with words like "doxy" "perdition" and "inoculate" staring me in the face, it's going to be a hard slog. (The moderator CLAIMS she chooses the words randomly, but one can't help but wonder...)

Wrote to my newspaper today as they have cruelly disappointed me by bailing on the Doonesbury/ultrasound story arc. They ran Monday's and Tuesday's, which got my hopes up ("Yay, my hometown paper has GUTS!"), then suddenly replaced today's with a re-run from months ago. Grrrrrr.

Fab article in the New York Times about "the slam-bang world of pulp magazines" exhibit. Since pulps were the original publishers of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction they hold a special place in my heart, so I really enjoyed this piece. Hope to get to NYC in the next few weeks (Alan Rickman, my love, I know you're waiting for me!!) and maybe see it.

I love to find representations of archives and archivists in fiction. Dracula wants his books cataloged? Yes! Scholarly commentary on non-existent tomes? You bet! Footnotes with citations to fictional reference works? I'm so there!

So, for anyone else who loves that sort of thing and who's also on GoodReads, I've started a new group called Arrangement and Description: Archivists at Large. Step on over and join if you're interested!

For some reason I seem to be on a Russia roll at the moment...

The Library of Congress has a new online exhibit of a whole collection of beautiful color images from Russia -- which date from 30+ years before color photos were actually possible! The first color film (Kodachrome) came out in 1936, but a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii came up with a way to create color images (though not print them) way back in the late 1800s/early 1900s. He had the idea of taking three black and white photos of a subject -- one through a red filter, one through a green and one through a blue -- and then back at home he would project the three negatives together, each one through the appropriate filter, onto a white sheet or wall. (His projector looks a bit like a stoplight, with three lenses.) The blended RGB light created color images, just like it does on TVs or computers today. Pretty amazing!

The Library of Congress has his negatives and they've created color prints from the RGB negatives. The photos are GORGEOUS -- this page of the exhibit has some of the best ones with the lushest colors (the Emir of Bukhara has a particularly lively robe). The main page for the exhibit has a bunch of information about the photographer and a detailed explanation of his process as well as the process the LOC used to create the color images for the exhibit.

Go. Look. Marvel.