LISNews: Librarian News

Authors in New Zealand are threatening to pull their books off the shelves of public libraries in protest over a funding cut for writers. Apparently the government has decided to take away $100,000 from the $1.1 million fund. The fund was established as a means of compensating writers for lost royalties as a result of libraries freely distributing their work. more... from The News Room

More from the desk of the junk e-mail goddess...
Kristin Bakke and Laurel Rayburn compiled the following for Ms Magazine.
\"Of the Modern Library\'s top 100 novels of the twentieth century, only nine were written by women, and only two made the top 50: Virginia Woolf\'s To The Lighthouse and Carson McCullers\' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. No book by a woman of color is on the list. more...

From the Plattsburg, (NY) Press Republican, Diane Petryck Bloom writes...

\"When a flood burst through the doors of the little library in Lincoln, VT, three generations of the townsfolk, ages 8 to 80, lined up old-fashioned bucket-brigade style to save what books they could. \'Despite the water in their own basements,\' said author Chris Bohjalian, who lives in the 1,000-resident town, \'the people thought that was the most important thing to be doing.\' Bohjalian, in Plattsburgh recently to address a gathering of the Clinton-Essex-Franklin Library System staff and friends, used the story to promote his belief that no mere e-text of any kind will supplant the traditional book.\" more...

Bob Cox sent along This Washington Post Story on A 1603 Painting in Toronto Purports to Show the Young William Shakespeare, if they prove to be right, the picture may be the only one of him painted while he was still alive.
The owner says the portrait was painted by an ancestor named John Sanders, who may have been an actor in a theatrical company owned by Shakespeare.

\"It looks to be quite conceivably a 1603 painting of someone. Whether it is Shakespeare, we won\'t be able to answer,\" says Christina Corsiglia, curator of European art of the Art Gallery of Ontario. \"We don\'t know what he ultimately looked like.\"