The Stacks
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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!
Art From The Unknown
Welcome to any visitors who are arriving here from the Art from the Unknown virtual exhibit!
And if you ended up here first, I encourage you to go check out the Art of the Unknown, a virtual gallery sponsored by Rachel Notley and the NDP Caucus here in Alberta, in which I have the privilege and pleasure of being included for my dystopian altered book series.
From water does all life begin…
With the release of Denis Villeneuve’s new version of Frank Herbert’s Dune brought to the big screen, it seemed a terrible oversight to not have a post here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library about the original book itself, in many ways a key piece of our origin story…
Otto & Victoria, Time Traveling in Style…
One of the challenges of being based in the Great White North is that ordering things from south of the border can be disproportionately expensive… so it was that we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library didn’t get our hands on this acquisition until just this past week.
But my goodness was it worth it.
Introducing Brian Kesinger’s Time Traveling With Your Octopus…
A giant dose of tiny books…
Today I had a chance to leave the Butterflies & Aliens Library and visit another beloved library, the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta, to attend a workshop on miniature books titled Teeny Wonders…
Foundations
In celebration of a colleague receiving his mail ordered Folio Society editions, as well as the upcoming AppleTV adaptation, I thought I’d share a few images from my collection of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Beginning with the original trilogy published in the early 1950s, the Foundation universe grew to include seven novels in the series and another eleven within the same fictional timeline, plus additional books by other authors set in the same universe.
Video: An Introduction to Altered Books
Altered Books: When Your Finished Book Becomes Another Artist’s Raw Materials is the second of two session that I had the opportunity to present at this past weekend’s When Words Collide festival for readers and writers.
I think it is important to point out that the description in the conference program for this session starts with a trigger warning that I highlight again here:
Trigger Warning: This presentation may contain content disturbing to some readers, authors, and booklovers!
Video: The Book as Object, Sculpture, & Performance
This past weekend, I had the joy and honour of sharing an encore presentation of The Book as Object, Sculpture, & Performance at the When Words Collide festival for readers and writers. I presented this session for the first time back in 2019 in Calgary, Alberta, when the conference was still live. Getting to present it again online, this time as part of the 2021 virtual conference, means I now have a video record… well, of this one performance of it at least!
Who needs books when…
Content Warning: This post includes images of a book being physically altered, by which I mean getting cut up. Also #spoilers.
So this weekend my latest altered book project came together, the third in a series based on dystopic novels with themes relating to reading, censorship, and language.
This time the subject of my experimentation was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time…
Is Big Brother watching?
Content Warning: The following post describes and shows a book being physically altered.
In one of my earlier contributions to the Butterflies & Aliens Library, I shared the process of creating my first altered book project, Spark Unnecessary, using Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as the source work. Since completing that project back in 2017, I’d been pondering other altered books projects based around themes of dystopia and censorship, slowly gathering up materials and ideas.
Small Press Saturday: Hingston & Olsen
This week for #SmallPressSaturday, we are delighted to feature “a literary press in the frozen north” based out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with a passion for the physical book at its core: Hingston & Olsen Publishing. Best known as the publishers of the Short Story Advent Calendar, Hingston & Olsen was founded in 2015 by author Michael Hingston and designer Natalie Olsen, according to their website, “as a means of finding out just how far an untested idea could be taken.”
An “I Read Canadian Day” addendum
An amazing and accidental last minute addition to my “I Read Canadian” pile! The Barnabas Project by Terry, Eric, and Devin Fan — The Fan Brothers — edited by Tara Walker, designed by Kelly Hill, and published by Tundra Books.
