blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Born in New York City on November 20th, 1936, Don DeLillo has become an acclaimed author whose postmodernist works portray an America which has become consumed by materialism and dumbed down by a culture of meaningless interactions. He grew up in a working-class Italian American family in the Bronx. His was a childhood filled with family and wholesome entertainments. He described it as one in which he was “always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn’t know any other way.”

Good things do often come in small packages.  Miniature books are quite literally books that are very small.  Miniature books are typically like any other book inside, but printed on a smaller scale- usually with all of the same text and illustrations that a traditional book would contain, just much smaller.  Although the current definition of a miniature book is anything measuring less than three inches in width or length, their history is anything but small.   

Today we celebrate the birth of noted author of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell.  Born in Atlanta Georgia in 1900, Ms. Mitchell drew her influences from her experiences in the south. The Pulitzer Prize winner continues to influence us today. 

Today we celebrate the life of the English poet John Keats. Keats was born on October 31, 1795 in London, England and died a very short 25 years later in Rome, Italy of tuberculosis. With such a short life, most would assume that he could not have produced much, if anything, of worth. Yet Keats is perhaps one of the most well known of the English Romantic Poets. Through his poetry he sought the perfection of poetry filled with vivid imagery that expressed philosophy through classic, often Greek, legend.

Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist, was born in Minneapolis Minnesota on October 25th, 1941.  She grew up in rural North Carolina in a Quaker commune.  Tyler did not attend a traditional school until she was 11 years old, instead going to the tiny schoolhouse that the mountain children attended in the mornings and in the afternoons going to homes within the commune to learn from those within the community.

It's commonly known that “Frankenstein” was the creation of nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin (later, Shelley) in a contest to create the scariest ghost story as a guest at the Lord Byron’s Italian villa.  However, there may be significantly more to the story. There were four separate European scientists who may perhaps have played muse to Mary: Luigi Galvani, Giovanni Aldini, Andew Ure, and perhaps most influentially, Johann Konrad Dippel.

Today we celebrate the birth of a novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass.  He was born on October 16, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. Grass used his “frolicsome black fables [to] portray the forgotten face of history,” as noted by the Swedish Academy when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.