Special Collections Blog
« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »
July 07, 2008
Edwin A. Link, Jr., Digital Archives
Binghamton University Libraries has purchased CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software to help us provide access to materials in our Special Collections. The first major project using this software is the Edwin A. Link, Jr., Digital Archives, located at http://library.lib.binghamton.edu/special/linkhome.html. The digital archives currently consist of more than 200 photographs from the Link Collections, including images of the local inventor, industrialist and pioneer, and photographs depicting aviation, underwater archaeology, and ocean engineering.
left: Marilyn C. Link views a projection of the Edwin A. Link, Jr., Digital Archives Website
Using CONTENTdm, we hope to bring our collections to the world beginning with the extraordinary Link Collections!
If you have any questions about the Link Collections at Binghamton University, please contact Beth Kilmarx at bkilmarx@binghamton.edu
Posted by jgreen at 03:41 PM
July 02, 2008
The King is a Fink! is Featured Book for July
In the early 1960s Johnny Hart (1931-2007), who had been born in Endicott, NY, and had become successful among cartoonists for previously creating B.C., began collaborating with a friend who had not been published before, Brant Parker. Having already made a cartoon about the Stone Age in B.C., Hart advanced through time to the Middle Ages, taking an idea from a deck of playing cards to create the first few strips of The Wizard of Id. The strip was first syndicated on November 9, 1964, drawn by Parker and co-written by Parker and Hart.
The Wizard of Id deals with the goings-on of the run-down, oppressed Kingdom of Id. It follows people from all corners of the kingdom, but concentrates on the court of a tyrannical dwarf-sized monarch, known only as "the King". The jokes center on the idea that people are stuck with the King as their ruler, and that his administration's incompetence has led to a kingdom that is, amusingly, poorly kept. The cast is large for a daily cartoon strip, and there are recurring jokes for each character and for the kingdom itself, so that from day to day it appears as if it were several comic strips based in the same place.
Id is known as "the land of milk and honey", and while it is set a thousand years ago, the strip's humor occasionally takes the reader through satire of American culture. Technology changes to suit whatever a joke requires: a battle with spears and arrows might be followed by a peasant using an ATM. The general trend is that even though the personalities of the characters are well known, their surroundings will morph to satisfy a good joke. The aspects that stay the same, however, are that Id is in the middle of nowhere and is home to a large castle surrounded by a moat. The King and his subjects run an army that fight "the Huns", and keep guards who shout the time and "all's well" from the castle walls, while the peasants, or "Id-iots", make little money as stablehands to keep modest lifestyles.
Parker's drawing style was well suited to the humor of the strip; little background detail was given in each pane, to allow a concentration on dialogue. As the years passed, even as Parker's style became more refined (with cleaner lines and more consistent proportions) he drew still less background detail.
The Wizard of Id was named best humor strip by the American National Cartoonists Society in 1971, 1976, 1980, 1982 and 1983, and Johnny Hart received a Reuben Award for his work on it and B.C. in 1968, an award which Brant Parker later received for it in 1984. Furthermore, it has seen dozens of paperback collections published since 1965, and even now there are some still in print. The King is a Fink!, published in 1969, is one of these paperback collections and can be found in Special Collections located on the second floor of the Glenn G. Bartle Library.
Posted by jgreen at 04:42 PM
So This is Florida!
Broward County Libraries Division's Bienes Museum of the Modern Book: The Dianne and Michael Bienes Special Collections and Rare Book Library, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, is pleased to announce the opening of: "So This Is Florida: An Exhibition of Decorative Book Bindings and Book Jackets, 1873-1999, June 21-October 6, 2008
http://digilab.browardlibrary.org/sothisisflorida.html
The seventy Floridiana books and pamphlets on exhibit from the collections of the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book chronicle the evolution of American book design and publishing from 1873 to 1999.
The exhibition begins by showcasing gracefully designed pre-dust jacket decorative cloth bindings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A few decades later, in the 1920s, paper dust jackets begin to dominate. For the next twenty years the dust jacket gains more marketing prominence while decorative cloth bindings become less noteworthy. By the 1950s-1960s the dust jacket has won the publishers' visual battle for the reader's eye and the illustrated publishers' cloth and paper bindings practically disappear. The exhibition closes with predictably triumphant, wildly colorful and exuberant paper dust jackets from the 1970s-1990s.
Some of the well known authors in the exhibition who have written eloquently, and occasionally, ineloquently, about Florida are: Harriet Beecher Stowe; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Stephen Foster; Munroe Kirk; Carita Doggett Corse; Dee Dunsing; Don Blanding; and Tim Dorsey; and among the subjects they have covered range from Florida fiction and literature to children's books; satires and parodies; mystery and crime novels; travel and retirement guides; how-to and recreation books; poetry; and cookbooks.
In one way or another, all of the exhibited books are about the endlessly fascinating and complex State of Florida. Florida is defined in many ways: it is neither the North nor the South; it is a land of boundless opportunity; it is a land of perpetual boom and bust; it is a land of new beginnings; and it is a land of perpetual youth and beauty. From utopia seekers in the later part of the nineteenth century, to unbridled and unscrupulous capitalists of the first part of the twentieth century, and to the hordes of twenty-first century European and Latin American tourists, the state has been a magnet for those searching for new visions and new possibilities.
Posted by jgreen at 04:07 PM