LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Slumming With Charles Dickens: New York Library Relives His American Tours
snippet: "The staging of Dickens In America led to the discovery of two heretofore unknown personal letters written by Dickens to John Bigelow in the 1860's."

"Beyond Text and Image: The Book as Art" opens on Thursday, Feb. 25, in Staniar Gallery, Wilson Hall, at Washington and Lee in Lexington, VA. Curated by W&L humanities librarian Yolanda Merrill, the exhibition showcases 30 works by nationally known book artists.

Merrill will give a curator's talk and slideshow on Wednesday, March 3, at 6 p.m. in the Concert Hall facing the Gallery. The lecture will be followed by a reception in Lykes Atrium, adjacent to the Gallery. The exhibit, curator's talk and reception are free and open to the public.

Merrill herself has many years of experience as a bookbinder and bookmaker, and has co-taught a course in the book arts at Washington and Lee. A selection of the student work made in the course is on display in the Lykes Atrium.

The focus of the exhibit is on sculptural books. However, there will also be photographs and other two-dimensional works in the show. Washington & Lee.

Enter exhibition here. Enjoy the elaborate virtual reality exhibition, and follow Yeats development as a poet, a playwright and writer of prose. The National Library of Ireland has the largest collection of Yeats manuscripts in the world, many contributed over the years by his widow and by his son.

Whether you've been naughty or nice...this might be your opportunity to (virtually) meet the man of the moment, Santa Claus, in some of his many incarnations.

Clement Moore (A Visit from St. Nicholas) gets the credit. But Washington Irving wrote about a sleigh-riding, gift-giving St. Nick a year earlier, in 1821.

That's one of the fun factoids in the Santa exhibit at the F.M. Kirby Gallery in the Morristown/Township Library. The display includes patriotic, carved Uncle Sam/Santa figurines from the 400-piece collection of former Morristown resident Terese Rolio McCann.

More from NJ.com.

Inspired by the December 3 post on LIS News, 3 librarians at the new William H. Hannon Library Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles decided that their library needed its very own Mansell Christmas tree.

Check out their handiwork here!

The handwritten letter to former New Mexico Gov. Lew Wallace is polite, articulate and to the point.

"Dear Sir," begins the missive. "I wish you would come down to the jail and see me."

The letter is from Billy the Kid, dated 1881, and it and others like it are now housed at the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library in Santa Fe, NM.
Here's the story.

The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest surviving Christian Bible, dating from around 1,600 years ago. For all but 100 of those years, it sat in a monastery in Sinai.

800 pages of the book, written in Greek on parchment, are now available online for the world's perusal.

More on this story from the BBC site which includes an audio report about how the Codex was discovered and what it took to put it online.

The Library of Congress' Presents an Online Exhibit "Malice Towards None".

The exhibit commemorates the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation’s revered sixteenth president Abraham Lincoln. More than a chronological account of his life, the exhibition reveals Lincoln the man, whose thoughts, words, and actions were deeply affected by personal experiences and pivotal historic events.

The exhibit will be up through May 9.

Many collectors will tell you that books are works of art. Not just for their words, but as objects of art. Many artists at some point in their careers have made books. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is celebrating the book as an art form with it's exhibition "Text/Messages." It features books created by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Kara Walker, among others.

Story, slide show and audio from Minnesota Public Radio.

After some quick work using planet, LISFeeds is reborn. LISFeeds is serving as an aggregator portal to podcasts by and for librarians. The sidebar at the site explains more about its new focus and an explanatory release was made.