The Stacks
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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?…
When Words Collide… 2023 and beyond
For those of who may not be familiar with it, When Words Collide is an annual festival for readers and writers and bookish folks of all kinds.
And for us here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, it has long been the never-to-be-missed event of the year…
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…
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…
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…
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.”
