The Stacks
Please note that you may be seeing a filtered view of our stacks.
Check the url to confirm, or click the header above at any time to reload the full contents.
The Eclectic Abecedarium
So if you’re a regular patron of the Butterflies & Aliens Library, you probably know that I have a particular fondness for alphabet books and also miniature books.
Well imagine my delight at discovering that Bruce Peel Special Collections has as part of its collection a miniature edition of The Eclectic Abecedarium by Edward Gorey…
Proof of Life…
So, yeah, it’s been another hot minute since we’ve added something the stacks here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library but life is like that sometimes. And while we’re still in the thick of things, we thought we’d better pop our heads up and at least say hi…
Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials
So back in January my fellow student staffer at Bruce Peel Special Collections, Michaela Morrow, and I had the privilege and delight to lead a Peel Workshop of our own design, titled Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials. Basically it was a chance for us to pull an absolute treasure trove of materials from the collection, share them with friends and patrons, and – perhaps the biggest bonus to me – spend some extra time studying them ourselves.
And what a trove it was…
An ever widening path of destruction…
…but also a path of creation?
Today I want to share about an altered book that I did not personally alter but for which I am nonetheless somewhat to blame… a book being altered because I gave someone the idea to.…
There is just the way you choose…
On this day that has so much meaning to so many, but which I am choosing to spend in a much simpler way, I thought I’d share the latest acquisition to the Butterflies & Aliens Library… call it a Christmas gift to myself, if you so choose…
A Book of Centuries
Hey there, Head Alien here, just casually walking around with an almost-600-year-old book for Fridays at the Peel…
Journal of a Voyage
This week for Fridays at the Peel we take a peek at the Journal of a Voyage to North America, written by Pierre de Charlevoix and published in 1761. But if you’ve been a patron of the Butterflies & Aliens Library for any amount of time, you know I’m much more interested in the voyage taken by the book itself than the voyage it recounts within its pages…
Arranging Furniture
Okay, yes I’m posting this on a Saturday, but the important point here is that Fridays at the Peel are back!
To share today, a book called Arranging Furniture, created by Jason Dewinetz at his fine press “small publishing concern” based in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, Greenboathouse Press…
No avatar, just an original
So just wanted to share a quick post about a new acquisition up here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library North, and a bit of an associated mystery, a real literary eccentricity and rarity. The book is Avatar Inc: A Sci-Fi Anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer and published March 13, 2020, by the XPRIZE Foundation.
Yeah, that XPRIZE Foundation…
Now with an update!
An extraordinary correspondance, unbound
In anticipation of Chapter 13 of the When Words Collide festival, and an opportunity to display and discuss some examples of altered book art while I’m there, I wanted to post a little post about a work I made based off of one of my favourite books, Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock…
Social climbing
Once upon a time I had a shoebox full of favourite comic strips that I had diligently cut out of the newspaper… Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, to name but a few. Somewhere over time and over moves, I lost that box, much to my sadness.
But if the strip got popular enough, some publisher would come along and reprint them into a little book…
Because stickers
This post for the Comic as Object Project doesn’t even care about the comic part… this one is just about the object part. We just get to sneak it into the project because the object incidentally happens to be a graphic novel… and apparently quite a well known and well regarded one. And by a Canadian creator. And also incidentally the same creator who was involved in our previous fancy box post.
Not important.
This is why we bought the book…
