The Stacks
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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…
Meet Philip Worré!
Wednesday is BALLER Profile day, where we get to introduce you to some of the bookish people – authors, publishing professionals, library people, readers, and more – in our neighbourhood.
This week it’s my delight to introduce you to Philip Worré…
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…
Ready or not, here I come…
Ray Bradbury once said “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As a book nerd, student librarian, and global citizen, I think about that quote almost daily.
And as a student librarian, I’m learning that there is yet another tactic – make the books unfindable…
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!
A Faustian bargain… but the good kind
Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in my teen years was a gateway drug to reading other classics and it made sense that Faust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe quickly appeared on my radar. I mean, a book about selling your soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures – how can you resist?…
Finally, time for some summer reading…
Yeah, it’s been a hot minute, but between work and school and life we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library may have gotten a bit sidetracked from our (ir)regularly scheduled additions to our digital stacks.
But we have not forgotten you, beloved patrons!
A year… five years, and thirty-three years, in the making
Back on December 19, 2021, we celebrated a pretty significant anniversary… five years since our Butterfly-in-Chief survived a stroke. Which got us thinking about how much had changed in those five years… and the last two… and this last year, the first year of the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities…
Something from the Past, Something for the Future
Just a quick post to share three new acquisitions: Tom Wharton’s 1995 novel Icefields in its new Landmark Edition, and TWO new Short Story Advent Calendars, one for adults and a new new one for kids!
