Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell
This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.
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Posts Tagged: archives
Keeping Time in Los Angeles
Music was noise, and noise was music, and George Antheil was on his way.
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To the Moon: Talking with Heather Christle
Heather Christle discusses her debut work of nonfiction, THE CRYING BOOK.
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Sound & Vision: Arthur Fournier
Allyson McCabe talks with Arthur Fournier, an independent dealer of books, serials, manuscripts, and archives, about how he developed his niche, and how digital access has both enriched and complicated the work of archiving and collecting.
...moreArchives for the Future
Preserving information and data archives in the digital age presents a new kind of challenge. Physical books may degrade over time, but even a book in poor condition can be taken down off a shelf and read. Digital storage devices, however, require functional systems to access any of the data. VICE spoke with Abby Smith Rumsey, […]
...moreThe End of a Library
One of the great challenges of libraries and archives is preserving the collections. Not all materials decay at the same rate and while some items can last thousands of years, other items are much more fragile. Now, scientists studying hundreds of European archival documents have developed a formula to predict the end of library materials. […]
...moreSylvia Plath’s Earliest Works
Gothamist was recently given permission to share some of Sylvia Plath’s earliest manuscripts in a video on their website. The manuscripts, which include drawings, some of her favorite poems, and her own original poetry, are held in a private collection at the New York Public Library and are only accessible by researchers who make an […]
...moreInside the Secrets of NYPL’s Underground Stacks
The New York Public Library holds more than 16 million volumes, making it the 4th largest library in the United States. Many of those volumes are stored in the Milstein stacks, two levels of the library directly under Bryant Park. To maximize the storage capacity of these facilities and allow for patrons in the main […]
...moreRemembering Your Online Life
After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory. For Aeon, Alana Massey writes about the long memory of the Internet and the inherent imperfections in […]
...moreHarvard Library’s Deep Storage
A new interactive documentary called Cold Storage invites viewers to peer beyond Harvard’s flagship Widener Library—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the university’s massive collection—and into the vault where more than 9 million books and artifacts are stored. Gizmodo reports on the viewing experience, describing a world designed for the convenience of the […]
...moreDigitizing Reels of History
The British Library says it has a window of 15 years to preserve an invaluable cache of sound recordings, but unless fundraising can help pick up the pace, the archives could take as many as 48 to complete. The artifacts represent a range of obsolete formats, some of them long dead; from wax cylinders of […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Margaret Atwood only tweets 10 minutes a day. What is the true cost of caring? Crowdsourcing is not the brave new world we imagined. Can funny tweets change the world? The Internet isn’t forever. But can it be? “The Netflix of magazines” won’t save magazines.
...moreArchiving in the Digital Age
Salman Rushdie donated his personal archive to Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) in 2006. Much of Rushdie’s personal archive was digital, a form that creates new problems for modern librarians to contend with. Consider, for example, Rushdie’s PowerMac from the mid-90s. It still functioned when he donated it, but librarians had […]
...moreThe Partisan Review, Digitized
The Partisan Review, printed from 1934 to 2004, marked 69 years of cultural history in the US, with notable contributors such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. Its whole archive […]
...moreYuppies Read
Now’s your chance to get your very own piece of David Foster Wallace. Today in New York, Sotheby’s art auction house is offering a small collection of letters the post-post-/meta-modern literary great once sent to his old friend JT Jackson, which Jackson sold to the Ransom Center in 2012. The correspondence includes everything from candid […]
...moreMissing Borges
Bibliographers are willing to commit crimes to follow their mad desire to own things. Book thefts, forgeries, Borges, and even more intrigue on the Paris Review.
...moreA Box Full of Old Emails
We know many people collect old letters, especially from loved ones who have passed, but what about old emails? What will happen to our electronic footprint after we are gone? And should we care? NPR’s All Things Considered investigates the humanity hidden in our inboxes. “[But] people change, people have new experiences, people get sad, […]
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For All the Saints
I’m a student, I say. My teacher has told me to go to a cemetery and find a stone, any stone, that speaks to me. I chose Kenda’s because hers gave more information, more anything, than any other stone I saw in the one cemetery I visited.
...moreSaturday History Lesson: That Time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica
If you’ve never been to an archive, this is what it’s like: you will go mad from the hum of cranked up air-conditioning. You are usually only allowed to bring a pencil.
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