February 2019

Studies of menus, however, are a little trickier to find. Menus as scholarly artifacts have come a long way in recent years — traveling from the libraries of antiquarians and sentimental dilettantes to invocations in academic monographs about everything from environmental history to immigration patterns to changing trends in graphic design. The New York Public Library’s collection of over 45,000 menus is getting a lot more traffic than it used to, while To Live and Dine in L.A. (2015) — a collaborative project sponsored by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles that resulted in an exhibition and a book — celebrated the menu collection of the Los Angeles Public Library.

From Menu Matters: On Alison Pearlman’s “May We Suggest” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Noted historians serve as your personal audio guide through a virtual walking tour of the New York Public Library. Find out about hidden details of the famed NYC building as these expert reveal the history behind the Winnie the Pooh toys, the Rose Main Reading Room, the iconic lion statues Patience and Fortitude, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building, the Milstein Division, the map collection, the book train and more.

From Hidden Details of the New York Public Library | Architectural Digest – YouTube

Last summer, University of Michigan art and design librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek acquired 20 Slices—a squat, square volume composed of 20 plastic-wrapped Kraft singles sandwiched between bright yellow covers. “For me, a lot of the purpose of the collection is engaging with people who usually have never seen an artist’s book before,” she explains. “So I have tailored my selections away from subtlety. It’s really important to me that people get excited about the work that I buy, and that it happens quickly.”

From Every Page of This Book Is a Slice of Cheese – Gastro Obscura

Partly this is the story that we all know: Google Books has failed to live up to its promise as the company has moved away from its original mission of organizing information for people. But the particular ways that it has actually eroded, including this one, are worth documenting, because it’s easy to think that search tools that worked perfectly well a few years ago won’t have been consciously degraded.

From Sapping Attention: How badly is Google Books search broken, and why?

Faced with the hideous maw that is today’s news cycle, there could be little more soothing than slipping into the esoteric world of We Love Endpapers, a society for enthusiasts to share their favourite examples of the most beautiful pages bookending tomes.

Endpapers date back to at least the 15th century, when pieces of old manuscript or vellum would be used to help sew a book block into its binding, and to protect it. By the 17th century, they were being used as decorative items; today, they can feature everything from maps to an extra shot of artwork from a book’s illustrator.

From Hold the front pages: meet the endpaper enthusiasts | Books | The Guardian

Amazon markets the service to publishers as a way to have “100 percent availability of books” internationally, and the company has enrolled a number of publishers. The problem is that Amazon apparently doesn’t police whether book content uploaded to CreateSpace actually belongs to the person doing the uploading. As others who sell through Amazon have discovered, Amazon has had a problem with mixing legitimate and counterfeit products in fulfillment warehouses because of how it prepositions product for Prime Delivery.

From Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publisher’s computer books—again | Ars Technica

Books have used the “XYZ: A Novel” format since the 17th century, when realistic fiction started getting popular. The term “novel” was a way to distinguish these more down-to-earth stories from the fanciful “romances” that came before, says Steven Moore, author of “The Novel: An Alternative History.” Then, as now, it was a tag that identified the kind of literature you were getting yourself into.

From Book covers still use the phrase “A Novel” for works of fiction – Vox

Slipped behind other books was a lovingly worn copy of the 1929 children’s book “The Postman,” by Charlotte Kuh. Gregg’s mother had checked it out of a Silver Spring, Md., library in 1946, when Gregg was a toddler.

Nearly 27,000 days past its due date, Gregg, now 75, decided to return it.

From Meet the woman who took 73 years to return a library book — and wasn’t fined – The Washington Post

In fact, librarians have long been advocates of digital inclusion and literacy. That’s why, last month, ULC launched a new initiative to give public libraries a leading role in a future with artificial intelligence. They kicked it off with a working group meeting in Washington, D.C., where representatives from libraries in cities like Baltimore, Toronto, Toledo, and Milwaukee met to exchange ideas on how to achieve that through education and by taking on a larger role in data governance.

From How Libraries Can Make Public Data More Accessible – CityLab

Is Amazon taking over the academic library industry? That’s what a new study from a higher-education-focused non-profit takes a look at, and their findings might surprise you as long as you haven’t read the title of this article too closely.

For the study, Ithaka S+R gathered acquisitions data from 124 U.S. higher education institutions in fiscal year 2017 along with data from 51 institutions covering between 2014 and 2017. The report has more than one interesting takeaway about the under-examined world of academic literature, but here’s the big one: Amazon isn’t anywhere close to controlling the academic library market. 

From Amazon Sells Way Fewer Books To Academic Libraries Than People Think