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Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie (via bookmania) This is a great quote for archivists. Do what you can, but it’s all going sometime. |
A new blog post to “Fuzzbee in the Archives,” which gives some updates on my last semester of library school and my new upcoming job!
nypl:
I iz MOVING!
Our new Stereogranimator site (which was created by NYPL Labs and allows you to turn historic stereographs from the Library’s collections into animated GIFs or 3-D images) has gotten tons and tons of attention this week (as well as tens of thousands of hits), so we thought we’d use it for this week’s Caturday! Check out this amazing dancing cat, originally photographed in September 1918. The original image is in our Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. How cool is it to breathe new life into these old photos? Gotta love it.
Nazis, needlework and my dad | Life and style | The Guardian
After six months held by the Nazis in a prisoner of war camp, Major Alexis Casdagli was handed a piece of canvas by a fellow inmate. Pinching red and blue thread from a disintegrating pullover belonging to an elderly Cretan general, Casdagli passed the long hours in captivity by painstakingly creating a sampler in cross-stitch. Around decorative swastikas and a banal inscription saying he completed his work in December 1941, the British officer stitched a border of irregular dots and dashes. Over the next four years his work was displayed at the four camps in Germany where he was imprisoned, and his Nazi captors never once deciphered the messages threaded in Morse code: “God Save the King” and “Fuck Hitler”.
This subversive needling of the Nazis was a form of defiance that Casdagli, who was not freed from prison until 1945, believed was the duty of every PoW. “It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing their rounds,” says his son, Tony, of his father’s rebellious stitching. It also stopped him going mad. “He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity,” says Tony. “If you sit down and stitch you can forget about other things, and it’s very calming.”
Images via @Craftzine.com blog
For anyone who doubts the power of craft…
Today I headed to downtown to the library for the last day of my internship at the Preservation Department. While it was a little bittersweet to be coming to the end of a semester’s worth of work, it was nice to have a chance to reflect on how far I’ve come in the last three months. My final binding project was one I was given this afternoon: Journal of a Voyage to North America by Pierre Franc̜ois Xavier (1923), which is a two volume work of the Special Collections’ books on early exploration. I took a few pictures of the before and after. Enjoy!
Labels, a set on Flickr.
These are some examples of labels produced for books bound in house at the Hennepin County Library Preservation department by interns Wyatt Sandberg and Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus, Fall 2011.
Here are some of the labels Wyatt and I have been making throughout the semester!
