blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

The twentieth century witnessed more than its fair share of war. Indeed, most of our conceptions of modern warfare began with World War I in the early twentieth century, and our views have grown and shifted with the onset of World War II, the violence that took place throughout the Cold War, and the most recent face of war in the Middle East. For many of the writers who chronicled wartime in the twentieth century, they did so with first-hand experience. What can literature tell us about modern warfare and the traumas that soldiers face at home and abroad?

Handwritten documents belong to a special part of a branch of print-collecting called ephemera. The Ephemera Society of the United Kingdom defines such artifacts as "the minor transient documents of everyday life." Ephemera encompass everything from leaflets to tickets to trading cards. There is a particular challenge in the preservation of ephemera, as ephemera are not made to last beyond their brief application. This often means that the materials used are less durable than those of a typical book. Thus, there is a gleeful rebellion in the act of preserving ephemera. While the documents were intended to be discarded, as the collector, it's your duty to ensure it lasts through the ages.

Katya Soll is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas. She won first prize in the 2014 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest with her essay, "Dictatorship, Recovery, and Innovation: Contemporary Theater of the Southern Cone." She has amassed an impressive collection of playbooks, programs, and performance tickets that document her immersion into a remarkable theatrical culture. Her scholarship illuminates a quintessential example of how a people reckon with a difficult history through art and creativity. We were lucky enough to get the chance to interview her about her work and collection.

In 1980, at age 48, Umberto Eco made his debut as a novelist with The Name of the Rose (originally in Italian Il nome della rosa) and has been a literary and philosophical juggernaut ever since.  In addition to his impressive publishing rap sheet, Eco also had a successful academic career in the fields of literature, semiotics, medieval history, and quite a few others. Given that he curated a 2009 exhibition at the Louvre in Paris on the essential nature of lists, we honor this great thinker today with one of our own.

Many major universities maintain a special collections library, either for areas of department expertise or to preserve older books from overuse. However, not all of them are as beautiful as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Thanks to the iconic glass tower of books at the center of the Beinecke, the library is well-known around the world in pictures. It also has a fascinating history and a very noteworthy collection.

Unlike other literary forms that we can date to precise texts and time periods, it’s a challenge to pinpoint the earliest work of poetry. In one form or another, poetry has been around for thousands of years. However, we might think of the epic poem as the first instance of poetry, appearing as early as the 20th century B.C. Jumping hundreds of years ahead, we might turn, then, to the sonnet form and its early appearance in the 13th century. Before moving into more modern poetic forms, it’s important to consider Restoration poetry of the 17th century and the satirical verses of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. 

2014 was a great year for blogis librorum. We'd like to thank all of you who came along for the ride - we're so grateful for our loyal readership! Thanks to all of you who read, subscribed, and commented on our blog. Your participation reminds us of why we do what we do.

In case you missed anything, we've compiled our ten most popular blog posts of 2014. Take a moment to explore our list, then tell us your favorite or what should have made the cut.

Happy New Year!

What did a handful of writers, artists, critics, and an economist have in common at the beginning of the 20^th century?  Living in a similar area of London, certainly. But it was a shared vision of life in all its creative, aesthetic, and intellectual glory that drew the Bloomsbury Group together.  

The collective influence of the Bloomsbury Group in the artistic and literary communities of the era should not be downplayed.  Despite an oft-changing membership list and much political upheaval in the world around them, the group existed over several decades and still casts its shadow on us today.

In Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult classic The Princess Bride (based on William Goldman's 1973 book of the same name), the story begins with a grandfather’s proclamation to his ailing grandson that “back in (his) day, television was called books.” While the old man’s dictum may be an overly bold one, it’s certainly true that books used to be a lot more like television. Indeed, the serialized format that modern television viewers have come to love-hate began nearly a century before the TV’s inception with the rise of serialized novels.

Upon receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, Rudyard Kipling was described as a “world-famous” author. Indeed, Kipling is rightly considered the author of the British Empire, expertly detailing the 19th and 20th century British imperial experience. His writing holds a significant place in the English Canon, both for its breadth as well as for its content, and limited editions of his short stories and poetry prove true treasures for the Kipling collector.