Greetings! Welcome to what I hope will be an interesting, fun and informative new undertaking. My goal for this blog is to have an outlet for my literary musings, which range wildly. I have been blogging for about a year and a half over at Charging RINO, which suffices for my political rants and ramblings, but lately I've wanted another place where I can pass along news, reviews and commentaries about book culture, librarianship, archives, etc. So here we are!
First of all, I guess I should say a bit about myself. I graduated from Union College in 2004, having majored in political science. I worked there for a year in the Special Collections Department before moving to Boston in August '05 to begin a dual-master's program at Simmons College (library science with an archives management concentration, and history). Here in Boston, I work part-time at Commonwealth Books, and also at the Bostonian Society, where I'm assisting with a grant-funded project to catalog and digitize the Society's collection of Boston-related prints and paintings.
I am a voracious reader and collector of books on many subjects, from the rare to the brand-new (with subjects centering around history, books on books, biography, and natural history). Aside from Commonwealth, I make regular or semi-regular visits to many of the other used bookstores in Boston and Cambridge, and nearly always manage to find something I can't live without (much to the dismay of my grad-student budget). My catalog is now almost completely online, thanks to LibraryThing, a site which is one of the best tools out there for the modern reader. I wrote a more complete review of LT recently, which can be found here; I really can't say enough good things about it, and recommend it highly. Beware, however, of its wiles - if you aren't careful, you'll find yourself working for hours ... and I often do.
My book reviews for several months have been posted at Charging RINO, but given the particular audience there I comment almost exclusively on books of current events, history, or biography. Since I read in so many other areas, this will provide a place for reviews of those works; I'll also comment on articles from the library/archives literature that catch my interest, and will provide links and thoughts on other media pieces dealing with book culture as events warrant.
Part of the reason I hadn't begun this blog before today was my inability to come up with a name for it that I liked. That problem was solved last night as I read a delightful little book: Wayne Wiegand's History of a Hoax: Edmund Lester Pearson, John Cotton Dana, and 'The Old Librarian's Almanack'. In the early part of the last century, Pearson and Dana conspired to "reprint" a 1773 almanac that didn't actually exist; the author of that work was one Jacob Bean, or (as he signed the title page), Philobiblos ("lover of books"). It seemed perfect for this endeavor, so I've appropriated the term, with all credit to Pearson and Dana.
In the interests of not making this first post any longer than it's already gotten, I'll stop here for the time being. I hope you'll visit again; feel free to email me or post comments with news stories I've missed, book suggestions, or any other thoughts you might have.
