Posts Tagged ‘Samuel Langhorne Clemens’
Gabba Gabba Hey meets Yabba Dabba Do…
The late Seventies re-imagined: from artist Dave Perillo (AKA montygog), a look at what might have happened if two paragons of Punk had instead gone the Hanna Barbera route…
[TotH to the always-amazing Dangerous Minds and to the ever-bodacious Boing Boing]
As we contemplate the consolations of a cel out, we might send trenchant birthday wishes to two of history’s most acute observers of the human condition: Jonathan Swift, the satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and cleric who’s probably best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, was born on this date in 1667.
And Samuel Langhorne Clemens– Mark Twain– the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and its sequel, “The Great American Novel” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was born on this date in 1835.
Swift ultimately rose to high church office, serving as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Clemens did not.
Old habits, dying hard…
From the afore-cited and ever-amusing Criggo.com (“Newspapers are going away. That’s too bad.”) TotH to Miss Cellania.
As we realize that it’s time to get to work on our New Year’s resolutions, we might pause to wish the happiest of birthdays to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain; he was born on this date in 1835 in Florida, Missouri.
Clemens began his career as a newspaper man– first as a typesetter, then as a reporter. But he had no fear of new technologies: he was the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to his publisher.
The worst of the best…
“Mary and Holly” (Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner) are librarians at “a medium-sized public library in Michigan,” who have worked together for over ten years. They’ve developed a long suit in culling library collections– those of their own institution and those of libraries to which they consult.
In the course of that selective work, Mary and Holly face choices that are tough… and some that are not so tough. By way of celebrating that latter group– books that are “odd, outdated or maybe should be reconsidered under a current interpretation of collection policies”– they created Awful Library Books, showcasing such (currently-in-a-public-library-collection) gems as…
Published in 1971: Usually the lingo and references are so dated, I can’t believe this would work for any school report for kids. Interestingly, this book also mentions nutmeg and a few cleaning fluids as sources of a nice high. So I guess this is more a “how to” type of book…
“I can be obsolete”
Published in 1985: there are a lot of public libraries out there that own it. However, this is the first computer book we have posted that doesn’t seem to have an abundance of mullet hairstyles.
Browse the shelves at Awful Library Books.
As we head for the reference desk, we might spare a celebratory thought for an author who has had his own share of troubles with libraries (though, I’m quite confident, never with Mary and Holly): writer and aphorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens– Mark Twain– who was born on this date in 1835. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is consistently cited as a (if not indeed the) Great American Novel, at the same time that it is equally consistently the target of censors who would ban it from school and public libraries.
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