I carved out my first page this week! As predicted, the linoleum did not sit right on such textured paper. Good thing I had some respectable vanilla drawing paper lying around to print on, which will go superbly with my color choices.
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When you first set out to make a book, everything has to be DIY, original, hand-crafted perfection right? That’s what I was going for anyway. However, making paper is a process and therefore time consuming. Instead, I went to Blick. When in doubt, always go to Blick. I found 2 sheets of beautifully dense, textured, sturdy paper that look as though I could have made them by hand–if I had amazing papermaking skills.
I chopped ‘em up to the right size and folded each piece into recognizable book form ready to be sewn together.
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“I’m making a book.” It sounds strange when I first explain to my friends what I’m working on these days. I clarify adding, “It’s an Art Book,” as if that makes things any more transparent. As most of these individuals are also artists and thus, visually inclined, I tell them to read about my process on the Chicago Underground Library’s blog. My Sunday blog spot over the course of many weeks, I believe, will aid them and the world in understanding what it means to make a book.
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Spring is here and people are shaking off their winter coats, crawling out of their caves and divesting themselves of the various possessions that they discovered was cluttering up their hibernation.
If you are one of those generous souls with stacks of juvenile fiction that you would like to go to a better home, the Chicago Deskset is having another books-n-booze event. A whole lotta’ celebration going on as this is their One Year Anniversary! So come on out and toast the Chicago Deskset and another year of civic librarianship.
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Kathleen Whalen FitzGerald observed that “Chicago priests are like no other priests in the world.” If so, Father Michael Pfleger is truly in a class by himself. He is like no other priest in Chicago.
Pfleger is probably the only white man to be the undisputed leader of an African-American religious community. His legendary preaching style, often jarring to outsiders, is black Pentecostal far more than traditional Catholic. A tireless neighborhood activist, he is never far from the public eye. And there has never been a book about him…until now. Continue reading →
Donovan and Kathy from the Letter Writers Alliance (LWA) are wonderful. They know how to run a social, AND… they have plenty of typewriters to go around. I suggest that anyone who wants to learn more about stamps, the United States Postal Service, or writing letters become a member of the LWA. For $3, you get a lovely badge, a membership card, and access to hidden treasures included in their website. Visit them on the web at http://16sparrows.typepad.com/letterwritersalliance/
Here is a picture of my badge, which I promptly added to my bag after receiving it from Donovan.
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Writing creatively, whatever that means to you, is difficult to do successfully without some kind of guidance. You may be considering formally studying writing and need to develop a portfolio; you may have already formally studied writing and still feel like you’ve got more to learn; you may be completely uninterested in pursuing a formal study because you think creative writing programs at many colleges appear contaminated by academic politics, cost too much, or don’t seem to teach you what you want to know. Whatever category you fall in, you’ve got a lot of resources at your disposal.
I recently took Jerry Cleaver’s Writers’ Workshop, which focuses almost exclusively on craft. Well, that and constantly pounding into your head… Continue reading →
Digital humanities is a fascinating area of study that you may not be too familiar with. But have you played with the Google Books Ngram Viewer? Then you were doing digital humanities. We at the Chicago Underground Library are part of the digital humanities world. In our forthcoming cataloging system, we put our special items cataloged uniquely by our volunteers online. We are always looking for ways to improve the catalog and do more with our data. In late November, Nell Taylor (the CUL’s Executive Director) and I presented the latest version of our catalog in a poster session at Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science.
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We want our blog, like our forthcoming interactive catalog, to be a forum for discussion for our site’s users. We set up the site so that any comments on posts need approval from an admin first, to prevent spam–but the spam has gotten so ridiculously out of hand recently that we stopped being able to keep up with it. With a whopping 24,000 comments awaiting approval, we realized trying to go through and approve/delete them individually was just not feasible, and decided to delete the whole lot of them and start fresh.
Readers, if you submitted a comment that was drowned out by spam before it made it to the site, our sincerest apologies. We’ll be upgrading the blog soon when we launch the new website, and will also be doing whatever we can in the meantime to keep spam to a minimum.
We’ll keep you informed, and look forward to posting all your comments soon!
-The Admins
