Henry Handley

PEN America Report Finds the Battle Over Book Bans Has Entered an Alarming New Phase “For many students, families, educators, librarians, and school districts, book banning is a new normal,” the report, 'Banned in the USA 2024-2025: The Normalization of Book Banning,' concludes.

"PEN America identified 2,520 book ban cases... out of those, only 3% of the bans were triggered by a law requiring the removal of a book—the rest, 97%—came from bans caused by the fear that districts had of being out of compliance" #DontComplyInAdvance
www.wordsandmoney.com/pen-america-...

Thank you! Slowly but recovering.

MAYBE "nimbus" in the sense of halo/cephalophore martyr carrying their head so far and no further. Anyway time to up my neurowhatever and tamp down this fever with acetaminophen.

Caught covid for the first time 5 years in, shortly before annual shot. and I gotta say naming variants after clouds is underwhelming at best and 100% offensive to clouds

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, September 19, 1984, Former U. S. President Gerald Ford was stuck in an elevator in the Van Pelt Library at UPenn. Was there a medieval manuscript stuck in the elevator with him? Probably not, but we can dream. #medievalsky

UC Berkeley shares 160 names with Trump administration in ‘McCarthy era’ move Prominent professor Judith Butler among students and faculty investigated for ‘alleged antisemitic incidents’

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I don’t have words

Booklist for the 10th century library at Bobbio.

Among the various categories: "Books We Have But Can't Find" (de libris quos non reperimus sed habemus)

Christ in the wine press maybe?

Thanks!

Thanks, Julie!

A marbled pastedown in a detached board of a 19th century book, with a bookplate dated January 1, 1866 and addressed to Ulysses S. Grant from the "citizens of Boston" with city seal and a decorative border.

Personal announcement: I've been appointed Assistant Director of the Marian Library and Special Collections here at UD (Dayton, not Delaware) which means among other things that I get to figure out things like this copy of Anatomy of Melancholy with a detached front board and uh, this bookplate?

It's always like this with archives, i have so many beefs with dead people

Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger, and I think that is evidence that there are at least some good forces in the universe.

“I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity. I’m for it.”
-from the intro to “Smut”

A drawing with text and images describing some of the basics of handling rare books, including: don’t slide along shelves, try not to touch the ink, touch materials with clean, dry hands, keep materials out of direct sunlight, etc.

Finally got around to doing a first draft of an infographic/drawing on the basics of handling rare books :)

This is #BookHistory too. Of a heartbreaking kind.
Tho' I imagine they haven't succeeded in accessing ICE detention facilities, this seems a good time to remind people to support the Prison Book Program (prisonbookprogram.org), which does amazing work compensating for the cruelties Öztürk describes

Whatever happened to these books, they cursed weeding/collection management for 149 years (this year IS the year I break the curse)

Early (earliest extant?) mention of library collections at what became MPOW, 1876: "Useless books are to be removed from the Brothers' Library and put in an old box to be stored away somewhere."

Streaming It's Not You, It's a Trend: Managing Social Media in Archives and Special Collections since 2020 at #rbms25 and that title... oof, spot on.Grateful for survey work, panelists willing to share challenges in case studies and to @librarycolleen.bsky.social!

The pope posted this this morning and I’m thinking a lot about it

Declaring the rest of June queer restlessness week, personally!

The story of LGBT rights is a story of advances followed by setbacks followed by media with no skin in the game saying, "It's because you were too loud/asked for too much/moved too fast/got too big for your britches/didn't make your case." That never changes--but happily it's never the last word.

I am ❤️

Honestly would use this with 9 am library visit tomorrow as a bridge between breakfast, hand washing, and old book touching. Books are like eggs! Think about it

A sign on top of some late 19th century books that reads BOOKS ARE LIKE EGGS HANDLE WITH CARE!!!!

I saw this sign in an antique shop yesterday and I can’t stop thinking about it. Books are like eggs

Also I FOUND THE BOOK in the main library. It has a penciled "gratis 10/43" note in the customary Marian Library spot, and October 1943 was the first month of the library's existence.

Text from a magazine article on the Marian Library, with the relevant passage reading: "To reach his goal, Father Monheim had in mind a Marian center which would collect every book possible on Our Lady. After several months of existence the "library" amounted to a dozen volumes on the top of a file cabinet in the small office of the department of religion at the University of Dayton. (One of these few works was an innocuous popular novel called Mary Darlin', with no reference to the subject at hand, but the first in a long series of books which have been donated to the library by those who insist on judging a book by its cover.)"

New (to me) library lore: the first out-of-scope donation in 1943, "the first in a long series of books which have been donated to the library by those who insist on judging a book by its cover" 🙃

Brutalist Academia

Thank you, sorry the spirit of Posting took over me there!

The WV teachers strike in 2018 got some of the "working people" support the original post mentions but that's very different than the "working people" "support" which extractive interests show/fund.