11.01.2007

Yee-haw! Time for a round-up!

Bad blogger, bad blogger! In addition to my round-up, I still have to chat about the Dining section and the preview at Little, Brown yesterday. And I'm going to Lit-Fest tomorrow so there will be lots to share about that as well, n'est-ce pas? Got the secret to creating more hours in the day? Please share it. Please.

  • Queens Library may have the #1 circulation in the country, but NYPL gets a collection of Katherine Hepburn memorabilia, gifted to the library by her estate. We don’t have anything like that at QL that I’m aware of. See, this is why I mildly entertained the idea of focusing on archival studies in library school. I want access to these beautiful items. Thanks to my weekly AL Direct email for this tidbit.

    Along the same lines, this was why I always wanted to work at HarperCollins – I’d do just about anything to see Ursula Nordstrom’s original letters.

  • Also courtesy of my AL Direct email, Germany’s Library of the Year has been awarded to a small prison library, JVA-Münster, winning over all the showier public and academic libraries. I found this article particularly interesting given the controversy in the States lately about religious texts in our prisons. I’m not a big fan of loveliness in prisons – otherwise, why would it be considered a punishment to be there? However, I am in favor of the library being the one and only lovely place. When 80% of the prisoners use the library, and are bettering themselves by doing so, I can’t help but be a fan of that. I’d like to believe that if anything will help a prisoner succeed once they’ve rejoined society, it’s being literate and educated. But that’s just my naïve view…

  • Visit the Longstockings page where Caroline Hickey tells a scary Halloween story that actually happened to the poor Longstockings crew. Some crazed B&B proprietor went completely berserk on them during their retreat and left our gals hunting for a place to stay on a rainy autumn night. I couldn’t help but wish that I was a writer so that I could have been there to be part of the story. Also, I thought that those sorts of things are horrific when they’re happening but – goodness gracious! – they make the Best Stories Ever. And even though I'm not a writer, I have to guess that it is life moments like this that make perfect fodder for creativity.

  • Lastly, this past Tuesday we held an in-service meeting for the children’s librarians. We started off with a speaker who passed on frightening information about lead poisoning – she scared the crap out of everyone in the room, rightly so. To lighten things up, we ended with a visit from Amy Hest. I’m a bit sentimental about Mrs. Hest’s work – when I started working in a children’s room in Salem, Oregon at 22 years old, When Jessie Came Across the Sea was the first children’s picture book I bought for myself. Having just gotten married myself, I was incredibly sentimental about the moment at the end when Jessie gets the proposal. So I was awfully gushy about meeting Mrs. Hest. Luckily, there was no reason to be nervous – she was lovely and engaging. Not to mention that she inspired an entire room of children’s librarians to be writers: we get to swim laps in the morning, write in our pajamas, and be steps away from the ice cream in the freezer?!?! Sign me up for that gig!!!!

    By the way, I tried to load a nifty little cover picture of Mrs. Hest's newest book, Remembering Mrs. Rossi, but my computer connection hates me. Truly. It's out to get me. So use your imaginations...or check out the link to Amazon. Apparently my computer can do hyperlinks but not images. Curse you, technology!!!!

And goodness gracious, lots of posts coming about food and books. You know, once someone figures out that time machine thing.

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