Winston Pei 2021-11-13 Winston Pei 2021-11-13

Happy World Kindness Day!

Just a quick share of a book cover from our alphabet collection, and the letter of the alphabet that happened to stand out most today, in honour of World Kindness Day.

Winston Pei 2021-11-10 Winston Pei 2021-11-10

Happy Sesame Street Day!

Premiering on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street has been a cornerstone of my reading life for my entire life. “C is for Cookie” is one of my earliest alphabet memories and The Monster at the End of This Book helped set me on the path that led to a Master of Arts on the design of books and now has me going back to school again for a Library degree.

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A Happy Butterflies & Aliens Halloween!

Nope, no way we could let our very first Butterflies & Aliens Halloween go by without posting something! Not when there are so many Halloween-themed books over which our Head Alien and Butterfly-in-Chief bonded!

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International Coffee Day 2021

We will have nothing further to say until the levels depicted in the picture above are significantly lower…

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Moonshots: Indigenous Comics, Indigenous Voices

On the occasion of the very first Canadian National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library wondered what we could do to mark this important moment in history.

On the one hand, there is a lot of heavy but important reading and learning to be done. But the thing is, the whole point of the Butterflies & Aliens Library is that books allow us to learn about our fellow humans and the worlds that we all live in.

So in that spirit and in the spirit of reconciliation, we thought we would start by sharing three graphic novels from our collection that we love, that also happen to contain an absolute wealth of stories from Indigenous voices: Moonshot, Volumes 1, 2, and 3.

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Banned Books Week 2021

Banned Books Week is an annual celebration of the freedom to read.

Although it is a more US-based event, we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library are happy to signal boost and use this week as another opportunity to shout out some items bookish and book-adjacent.

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International Day of Sign Languages

Proclaimed by the UN General Assembly “in order to raise awareness of the importance of sign language in the full realization of the human rights of people who are deaf,” the International Day of Sign Languages was declared in part to recognize that “early access to sign language and services in sign language, including quality education available in sign language, is vital to the growth and development of the deaf individual and critical to the achievement of the internationally agreed development goals.”

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Books and Birds

Today is National Pet Bird Day in the US! And, of course, I had to jump on the opportunity to wax enthusiastic about two of my favourite things – books and birds!

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Star Trek Day 2021

Being the huge science fiction fans that we are here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, we couldn’t let this day go by without at least some small post of recognition! So in honour of Star Trek Day, we wanted to share a peek into Star Trek Stellar Cartography: The Starfleet Reference Library / Maps from the Star Trek Universe…

Stacey and Winston 2021-08-09 Stacey and Winston 2021-08-09

Book Lovers Day 2021

Now, really, every day is Book Lovers Day at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rareties, but since the all-knowing interwebs say this is a with-capital-letters Day day… albeit with an origin story lost to the mists of time… we did feel we had to post a little something.

Winston Pei 2021-08-05 Winston Pei 2021-08-05

Happy Underwear Day 2021!

We here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library have been a bit remiss in keeping up with our Bookish Calendar posts, but this seemed like a critical day to commemorate.

As such, we took a look under there on our shelves and pulled up Jared Chapman’s Vegetables in Underwear to share.

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Happy Towel Day!

One of the earliest books we bonded over here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library was Douglas Adams’ profoundly comic and comically profound trilogy in (at least) four parts, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and we have definitely known where our towels are ever since.