A Week for Book Lovers: Introduction and Discovery (part one)

Neil Gaiman is a masterful storyteller. In this lecture, Gaiman talks about how certain stories survive.

Every piece of work Gaiman does involves him telling a story of one kind or another, and so his profile in the culture has risen to great heights as, simply, a storyteller. That made him just the right man for the job when the Long Now Foundation, with its mission of thinking far back into the past and far forward into the future, needed someone to talk about how certain stories survive through both those time frames and beyond.
~ Open Culture

Here is the description from Archive.org:

Dark blue ribbed-morocco grain cloth over boards; edges sprinkled in red

Two copies bound together; variant hand-coloring. Spec. Coll. copy 1 is complete; scribbling in pencil on p. 16 and 32-[33]. Spec. Coll. copy 2 lacking half-title, frontispiece, p. [15]-16 and [79]-80; p. [81]-96 misbound before t.p

Illustrations hand-colored by previous owner or owners

Continuing with the coloring theme, did you know about the #ColorOurCollections campaign?

In early February 2016, museums and libraries worldwide took part in #ColorOurCollections–a campaign where they made available free coloring books, letting you color artwork from their collections and then share it on Twitter and other social media platforms, using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections.
~ Open Culture

You can still follow along on Twitter and see what people are creating:

#colorourcollections Tweets

Here is a list of the museums taking part at the time the Open Culture piece was published:

• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Bodleian Library (PDF)
• Digital Public Library of America
• Europeana
• Folger Library
• James Madison University (PDF)
• National Archives of the United States (patents)
• New York Academy of Medicine
• New York Botanical Garden
• New York Public Library (PDF)
• Special Collections and Rare Books, University of Missouri Libraries (PDF)
• Smithsonian Libraries – (PDF)
• The Getty
• The Huntington
• The Open Library
• Wangensteen Historical Library, University of Minnesota

Open Culture describes Europeana Collections as:

…a portal of “48,796,394 artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe,” sourced from well over 100 institutions such as The European Library, Europhoto, the National Library of Finland, University College Dublin, Museo Galileo, and many, many more, including contributions from the public at large.

Open Culture has featured many wonderful treasures from the New York Public Library and in March 2016, part way through Women’s History Month, they shared this list from NYPL Manager of Reader Services, Lynn Lobash. Lobash’s list, Know Your Feminisms, includes a number of titles from 1929 to 2015. You can find it here.