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…
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…
Meet Jennifer Windsor!
Welcome to our latest BALLER Profile! This week it is my pleasure to introduce you to my friend, designer and writer and all around wonderful human, Jennifer Windsor…
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…
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…
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?…
Canadian Born Chinese
Today we’re taking a bit of a deeper dive into one graphic novel in particular. And to the surprise of no one who’s been reading our recent posts about our Comic as Object Project or Drawn Together, this will be doing double duty as an assignment for our Head Alien’s LIS 518 course at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.
As some of you might have already guessed from the title of this post, the graphic novel in question is American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang…
But it’s a fancy box
So as part of the Comic as Object Project, I want to share with you a series of comics called Sentient by Jeff Lemire and Gabriel Walta, published in 2019 by TKO Studios. A series of six, Sentient tells the story of the U.S.S. Montgomery, a deep space colony ship whose AI, VALARIE, must help the children left aboard survive after all the adults are killed.
But the story is not what’s important here…
Okay, yeah, that’s a comic book…
We would be remiss as part of the Comic as Object Project if we didn’t take at least a passing look at the format that probably most people would consider a ‘real’ comic book: the 6 5/8 inch by 10 1/4 inch 16 page plus cover saddle-stitched booklet format, known affectionately (or derogatorily, depending on your personal stance on such things) as the “floppy.”
The Comic as Object Project
As part of our Head Alien’s ongoing studies at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies, this project starts with a basic, and I think self-evident, premise taken from a different medium altogether – that a video call is not the same as an in-person meeting…
Who is this ISBN guy?
So, no, this isn’t a post about International Standard Book Numbers, and, no, this isn’t even really directly about the book we are featuring.
But since the back cover of this book provides one of two featured quotes in my Book Cover Project, and the front cover features on my “book wall” pictured at the start of the project, it seemed to make sense to give the book its due as a case study for that same project…
