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I hope you all have been enjoying The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent. The following are some discussion questions to help get the conversation rolling! Feel free to post your own thoughts and comments to let us know what you think about the book.

In the novel, Sarah comments on how her mother did not show strong affection towards her little sister because young children during this time period did not have a long life expectancy. However, Sarah feels that her mother doesn’t show much affection towards anyone. Do you find this trait is shared by other characters in the novel? Is Martha Carrier trying to distance herself in order to be more protective of her emotions?

While you read the novel, are you coming across new information that you weren’t familiar with about the Salem Witch Trials? Has Kathleen Kent successfully painted a believable portrait of this time period?

Stop by next week for some more discussion questions as we finish up the novel.

I hate to say it but the sports pages, I generally don’t read them. I like to watch sports but often the columns talk about sports in a way that makes it hard for me to understand. I often don’t know who they are talking about or I don’t know enough about sports so that a writer’s discussion of the minutia of a game will be completely over my head. Hence, this is the reason why I stay away from the reading the sports pages.

The writing of George Vecsey is something different. I am not sure exactly when I began reading Vecsey’s columns but I remember the first time, thinking what I had just read was a fluke. Then I began to look for his columns because I enjoyed them so much. I did not have to know all the ins and outs of the game to understand his columns; in fact I did not have to know anything about sports at all. The subject of sports for George Vecsey seems to simply be a vehicle for him to tell a greater story, the story people and human interaction. The playing of sports provides a superb stage for the examination of the human spirit.

There is no place better to find the best and worst qualities of people than on a sports field, be it on the 26 mile course of the New York City Marathon or daily grind of the Tour de France. George Vecsey eloquently reveals the human side behind the Adonis like athletes, like he did in his Sept 24 article “The ‘Other’ Armstrong is Bowing Out of Cycling in Style,” about cycling champion Kristen Amrstrong. He also brings the people behind the big names to life, like he recently did for his Oct 22 titled “Sympathy for the Umpires.” The crux of the article is we are all human and sometimes some of us have to pay more dearly for our mistakes than the rest of us. Vecsey’s seems to say love the sport for its human qualities and give a guy a break who usually does a damn good job is what I got from that wonderful article.

Please join us at the Mid-Manhattan Library on Wednesday Nov 18 at 6:30 PM on the 6th floor to listen to Mr. Vecsey talk about his work.

In celebration of the National Day of Listening, the Art and Picture Collections have been collaborating with StoryCorps to produce an all-day drop-in event to consider your art and your life.

We invited six artists to the StoryCorps booth to record the story of art in their lives. And, on the National Day of Listening (the day after Thanksgiving), we will hear excerpts from their tales as we look at images from their oeuvre. The artists will participate in a panel discussion about their StoryCorps experiences, while the audience will be invited to share what art means in their personal lives. And StoryCorps representatives will be on hand to explain how to record and document your own story.

Artists Michael Cline, Annette Cords, Anujan Ezhikode, Builder Levy, Justin Lieberman, and Charles Mingus III each traveled with a significant other to the StoryCorps booth in Foley Square to be interviewed about how art has influenced, molded, and changed their lives. Their stories were recorded by StoryCorps and will be archived in the Library of Congress, where their lives can be celebrated through the art of listening for years to come.

Excerpts from the recording session will be played throughout the day on November 27. As a bonus, join us at 2 pm for an artist panel, where they will share their stories and their recording experiences in person at NYPL for the National Day of Listening, a day to slow down and listen to the stories of the people in your life. We are also looking forward to hearing your stories in art. Whether you create doodles, mashups, crochet, or marble sculpture, we want to listen to where they come from.

When: Friday, November 27, 2009, 10 am to 5 pm
Where: South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 42nd Street & 5th Avenue

Schedule:
10 am Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
12 noon Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
2:15 pm Artist panel (arrive at 2pm to hear the artists in person), moderated by Arezoo Moseni
3:45 pm Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews

We are really grateful to the wonderful folks at StoryCorps for making this event possible. Please join us and listen to the stories of six contemporary artists, and tell the story of what art means to your life.

Sound poetry, also known as polypoetry, is a performance art, a live show, which combines many elements, such as the written word, human voice, musical instruments, electronic sounds, movement, mime and projected images.

A major proponent of this art form is Enzo Minarelli, performer and scholar from Bologna, Italy, who developed a Manifesto of Polypoetry, containing his theories of the performance of sound poetry, touching on the rhythms of language, exploitation of sounds and use of electronic media.

This Wednesday evening, November 18, starting at 6:30 pm, Enzo Minarelli, will be performing a one-man show of his polypoetry. The performance will be held in the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The entrance will be at 111 Amsterdam Ave. at West 65th St. The event is free and open to the public.  read more »

Welcome to week two of this month’s Reader’s Den! The Heretic’s Daughter is Kathleen Kent’s first novel based on the Salem Witch Trials. While Kent did an extensive amount of research, the story is very close to her heart as she is a “tenth-generation descendant” of the main character, Martha Carrier. Her family was very proud of their ancestor's role in this tragic moment in history.

“I grew up hearing stories about Martha Carrier and the fact that she was the only woman that directly confronted her accusers and the judges. My grandmother took almost gleeful pride that Martha was so outspoken and contentious. She always used to say Martha Carrier was not a witch, just a ferocious woman.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

Click here to watch a video of Kathleen Kent discussing her fascinating family story and why she wrote the novel. Stop by next week as we begin our discussion of The Heretic’s Daughter!

Mark Prensky coined the term digital natives to describe those born after the advent of digital technology, circa 1980. He posits that they differ fundamentally from those who came before. To carry the natives analogy a bit further, Prensky suggests that even if we digital immigrants learn the language, we will always have an accent.

Lark Birdsong calls many adults older than 50 technological outliers—“people at the end of the curve for receiving information literacy instruction [and] who are getting little or none,” with the understanding that not just their age, but their schooling and training may have kept them from picking up technological skills. Carol Bean, in a post on her BeanWorks blog, reminds us that libraries have become a place of refuge for older adults caught in the digital divide. As the old familiar formats become less available and more information and entertainment goes digital, those in their 50s, 60s and beyond can become marginalized if they don’t pick up computer skills. They must learn!

Public libraries have risen to the challenge; library-based computer classes are widespread and older adults make up the majority of the attendees. Organizations such as SeniorNet, adult and continuing education programs, senior and community centers, and local nonprofit organizations such as Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) and Per Scholas also aim to cast wide the net and bring all those who are willing into the world of computers.

Besides offering computer classes and computers for free public use, libraries also offer books (surprise!), whether they be digital or in print, to take library users from computer illiteracy to proficiency. Novices can start with handbooks in all the series you would expect to give you an easy-to-understand foundation:

Absolute Beginner’s guides, Complete Idiot's guides, and the For Dummies series, as well as books in the impressive Teach Yourself Visually line. I think you’ll find both the shelves and the library catalog replete with senior-targeted titles too.

For instance, Nick Vandome’s Laptops for Seniors in Easy Steps: For the Over 50s will make you feel like a Cyber-Superperson! The clear and profuse illustrations, numbered steps with short instructions, and abundant tips and hints empower and motivate.

Studio Visual Steps books brings us the 2008 title, Interesting Online Applications for Seniors: Get Acquainted with Thirteen Free Internet Applications. You’ll get a good grounding in YouTube, Google Earth, Facebook, RSS feeds, and several more applications you’re sure to find useful. The same publisher, a Dutch enterprise which specializes in books to support PC users, has produced several other equally accessible titles.

If you’re eager to travel—and which of us isn’t?—you may crave a more focused work like Sandy Berger's Great Age Guide to Online Travel
This tech expert gives you personal comparisons and advice along with the best websites for travel near or far, whether by ship, motorcycle, or anything in between. You’ll also get clued in on scams, healthy traveling, and taking pets along.

I confess—I can’t resist a good title. And once I heard of "Is This Thing On?": A Computer Handbook for Late Bloomers, Technophobes, and the Kicking & Screaming, I had to seek it out. The content more than fulfills the promise of the title. When you start to read it, the book grows on you quickly, soon becoming a friend. The author even has an accompanying “hand-holding website” which multiplies the loveability of the book/site duo. The website, abbyandme, is loaded with frequently-asked questions (and answers!), tutorials, and well over 100 hand-picked websites. When we learned that the author, Abby Stokes, gives a non-intimidating yet info-packed presentation we asked if she would speak in some of our libraries. We happily announce that she agreed and will be speaking in ten branches of The New York Public Library through the end of December.

We hope you can join us for one or more of these but whether or not you can, check out your public library for technology-related books and other media, as well as the whole gamut of classes for all ages and stages.

Earlier this week I posted a review here of Justine Larbalestier's wonderful new book Liar which had a bit of cover controversy because the book was slated to be released in the USA with a white model on the cover--despite the main character being very obviously black. I also received a wonderful comment on that post asking how such things could happen and if authors have approval on their covers.

The short answer is sometimes they do, but not always.

There is a lot of really information out in the world from authors, readers, and bloggers about book covers. Too much information, really, to put into a comment as I had initially planned. Which is why you get this post.

Onward to the information and sources:  read more »

I'm not even sure where to start this review there's so much going on with this book. The plot in Justine Larbelestier's Liar (2009) is so intricate and crazy awesome that the author has asked readers to please not post spoilers in their reviews (I wouldn't know how to explain the spoilers even if I did want to post them). Aside from that, the book has gone through three different covers and created a bit of controversy on the way. It doesn't relate to the story, but I think if you want to understand this book you really need to know about all the covers.  read more »

Over the years, as we push more and more of our maps onto the web, such as Pieter Goos' Zee-Atlas, 1672, from which the below image was taken, we ask…
...what do we do with all this stuff?
...how do we make digital maps meaningful?

One approach is through our blog, where we highlight various places and themes depicted. Often there is much more to read between the contours, about, among other things the social, geographic and cultural mix from where the maps were generated; something we, in future posts, will take the time to illuminate.

Another approach to extend the reach, utility and meaningfulness of our maps is through digital geographic indexing. Our staff has thus far created map indexes for close to 1/3 of our 10,000 digitized maps, which you can read about here and download here, in effect opening an opportunity for readers to access our collections geographically.

And while schematic and geographic indexes serve a much needed function, they merely point to the next logical steps in the presentation and re-purposing of map images in a web context.

The first step is placing the maps themselves (as opposed to outlines of the map coverages) into geographic context, or put another way, turning pictures of maps into digital geospatial information, where a pixel can be read by a computer as a pair of coordinates, as latitude and longitude.

These images can then, in turn, be rendered using tools such as web map servers and the ubiquitous Google Earth. The image below is Plate 1 from William Perris' Maps of the City of New York, 1852, georectified and then rendered in Google Earth.

Stay tuned. In my next post I'll go the details about how we "stretch" maps for web presentation. We will also explain how you too can participate.

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Reader’s Den! We will be reading and discussing the historical fiction novel, The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent. You can request a copy of the book by visiting the New York Public Library’s online catalog or stopping by your local branch to pick up a copy.

Sarah Carrier is the daughter of Thomas and Martha Carrier, who have recently fled the town of Billerica, Massachusetts in order to escape the deadly smallpox disease. They are coolly welcomed in the town of Andover and suspicions arise about the new Carrier family. However, the smallpox disease isn’t the only thing to spread throughout Massachusetts. Villagers are beginning to accuse their own neighbors of witchcraft, and the finger is eventually pointed at Sarah Carrier’s mother, Martha. Based on factual events and figures of the infamous Salem Witch Trials, The Heretic’s Daughter offers a page-turning glimpse into one of America’s most tragic events in history.

Feel free to post your thoughts and comments any time during the discussion by clicking on the “comment” link below.

["You must allow me to present this young lady to you."]

Over the past few weeks, my blogging voice seems to have evaporated from this site. That’s not because I’ve slipped into some eerie library limbo. My time and energies have instead been devoted to preparing a public presentation, “Elusive Jane: In Search of Jane Austen at the New York Public Library.” For ages, it seems, my desk has been buried under a small mountain of books by and about Jane Austen, necessitating a major excavation every time I needed a pencil or a piece of tape. But the hard part is over, and I’m finally ready to meet anyone curious about the life of Jane Austen this Friday, November 6, at 2:15.

Of the many facets of my job here at the New York Public Library, my favorite is the opportunity to get in front of a crowd of people and share my enthusiasm for my favorite authors. Don’t tell anyone, but I also get to read Jane Austen and call it work.

Is it necessary to know anything about Jane Austen’s life in order to appreciate her novels? Certainly not. But after researching the biographies and background materials available here at the library, I found that the novels I had always loved took on a depth and an emotional resonance they hadn’t had before.

Although there are more available biographies of Jane Austen than you would probably care to count, and the facts they contain remain quite consistently the facts, the interpretation of those facts seems to differ from biographer to biographer. It began with James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt’s life, which first appeared fifty years after her death. This gracefully written, kind, and loving work helped to rekindle interest in Jane Austen’s life and writing and was used by all later biographies as their foundation. At the same time, the Memoir created an essentially false image of a placid spinster who wrote her novels as a sort of hobby and didn’t pay much heed to the world outside her own narrow scope. “Of events her life was singularly barren,” he wrote, “few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of her life.”

This of a woman whose life paralleled the Napoleonic Wars and the American Revolution; who lived through the fears of a French invasion of British soil; whose wide reading included not only novels but histories, accounts of current events, travel books, essays, and religious works; whose cousin brought the French Revolution directly into the family home when her husband lost his head to the guillotine; and whose brothers (both Admirals in the Royal Navy) kept her well informed of events beyond the boundaries of rural Hampshire. It is now clear, as Tony Tanner points out in his critical study Jane Austen that she “was much more aware of contemporary events, debates and issues, of the wars and domestic unrest, of the incipiently visible results of the Industrial Revolution, and of a radical change taking place in the constitution of English society, than the conventional view allows, or perhaps wants to allow.” In addition, Jane Austen was very much a professional author who spent her life developing and perfecting her own manuscripts (which she referred to as her “children”), wrangled with publishers, and was honored by the Prince Regent. She was eventually able to earn an independent living from her writing--a feat few women of the day could boast.

This is the Jane Austen I will be discussing on Friday, November 6th, at 2:15 in the first floor classroom of the New York Public Library. If you can’t make it that afternoon--I’ll be giving the same talk again on December 3rd and January 8th, also at 2:15.

These talks will be alternating with Out of the Blacking Factory, the Charles Dickens presentation I introduced last year, on November 20th, December 18th, and January 22nd.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting in on Peter Apfelbaum’s oral history, conducted by long-time friend and jazz writer, Dan Ouellette. I was most pleased to hear about the origins of The Hieroglyphics – a band Peter formed in his teens. I am fascinated by how the band has successfully shifted and transformed alongside him - growing as he did throughout the years. There is a touch of sadness about this being my last opportunity to hear a Duke Jazz artist tell his story like this – laughing with a friend while articulating the first musical sounds he ever made, pausing to find the right words to describe his artistic process, or discussing the true impact of a commission from organizations like Chamber Music America.

Each time we enter the oral history studio, I am reminded of how invaluable we are as our own, best primary resources. I am reminded of the true power of our stories – and of the humanity we feel when we share in the telling of our experiences. I feel overwhelmed with gratefulness for having had the chance to sit in on, catalog, and provide access to these artist histories. Each one has affected me in ways I would only fail in trying to articulate. I hope you will join the Library in celebrating these fine resources. Utilize them! Bring friends!

In the meantime, we do hope you will join us on Friday, November 13th when we end our Duke Jazz Series with a 12-piece bang!

The November Duke Jazz Series concert features Peter Apfelbaum and The New York Hieroglyphics: Peck Allmond, Patrice Blanchard, Charles Burnham, Natalie Cressman, Abdoulaye Diabate, Viva DeConcini, Jessica Jones, Tony Jones, David Phelps, Dafnis Prieto and Josh Roseman.

Composer/multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum started playing drums at the age of three, taking up piano and saxophone in elementary school and forming his first band at age 11. In 1977 - his senior year at Berkeley High - he formed the 17-piece Hieroglyphics Ensemble as a vehicle for composing and exploring non-traditional musical forms; the Hieroglyphics Ensemble went on to perform with artists like Don Cherry and the Grateful Dead. Apfelbaum put the Hieroglyphics Ensemble on hold during the mid-90s, forming a sextet comprising Hieroglyphics musicians and acoustic bassist John Shifflett. In 1998, Apfelbaum moved to Brooklyn, where he soon formed a New York version of his Sextet. This group grew in 2003 to become the 11-piece New York Hieroglyphics and recorded It is Written in 2004. In addition to the New York Hieroglyphics, Apfelbaum continues to perform regularly with Steven Bernstein, Trey Anastasio, Dafnis Prieto, Josh Roseman, and Kamikaze Ground Crew.

The concert will be held on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 111 Amsterdam Avenue @ 65th Street. The program is free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. For more information, please call 212.870.1793 or visit nypl.org/lpaprograms.

Please do stick around, say hello and share your Duke Jazz experiences at the public reception to follow! Thank you all for your continued support.

Katrina M. Dixon, Librarian
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Project

When her parents decide they can no longer live in Nixon's US, Bliss is shipped off to Atlanta to live with her grandmother while her parents flee to Canada in Bliss (2008) by Lauren Myracle. The year is 1969 and after spending most of her life living on a commune, or wherever else her parents decided to hang their hats, Bliss is ill-prepared for conventional life in a big city.

Bliss isn't too worried when she starts at the prestigious Crestview High School though because she's spent a lot of time watching TV. Surely The Andy Griffith Show will tell her everything she needs to know about life in the "civilized" world of non-hippies, right?  read more »

Thank you participating in this month’s online book discussion. I hope you enjoyed The White Tiger as much as I did. If you didn’t have a chance to read the book and participate, please feel free to post your thoughts at a later time. The discussion will remain online in the Reader’s Den and hopefully, others will read the book and join in, as well.

Join us next month for our discussion on Kathleen Kent's historical fiction novel, The Heretic's Daughter. Request the novel online or visit your local library branch!

~Lynda P.

Halloween is fast approaching, as is the opening of the new film, The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in early November. Of course, many great books have been made into movies, and sure, there's the Twilight series and Cirque du Freak, both book franchises with new movies coming out, but what are the some of the best horror and science fiction books for adults that have been made into films that you may or may not have heard of?

• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison for Soylent Green
• The Box: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson for the new movie of the same title and a new Twilight Zone “Button, Button” episode from 1986. Also, don't miss his novella for "I Am Legend" [see the film]
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick for Blade Runner
• Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Ebba Segerberg) for the film of the same title. The U.S. version of the book is sometimes entitled Let Me In. A bestseller in his native Sweden.
• The Ring by Kôji Suzuki for the 2002 U.S. remake with the same title of the 1998 Japanese film, Ringu.
• For an example of Hollywood going to the book first, check out the first of Guillermo Del Toro (The Orphanage, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) and Chuck Hogan's new vampire trilogy, The Strain.

The 2009 World Series brings together two cities uncommonly rich in baseball history. Though you might guess which team NYPL is rooting for this year, we've posted a selection of images on The Commons on Flickr representing a variety of New York and Philadelphia ball clubs of yore.

Some of the game's earliest years are chronicled in over 500 photographs, prints, drawings, caricatures, and printed illustrations donated in 1921 to the New York Public Library by early baseball player and sporting-goods tycoon A. G. Spalding (whose name to this day is printed across every ball used in the National League).

As the contemporary Yankees and Phillies clash on the field, here you'll find Philadelphia Quakers, Athletics and Keystones in a gentlemanly mix with New York Giants, Knickerbockers and Metropolitans, and of course Brooklyn Excelsiors and Atlantics. Each one of these images of course has an enormous back story, which we hope the baseball history buffs among you will help fill in through comments, links, tags and annotations.

Also check out a smaller set, Proto-baseball, which gathers images of baseball's ball-and-stick forebears like cricket and Old Cat. Here's "Six boys with a ball and three bats, playing Three Old Cat":

We also invite you to explore the full Spalding Collection on the NYPL Digital Gallery and through this finding aid (PDF) from the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Now let's just pray for the rain to stop so Game 1 can get underway...

***UPDATE*** Picked up by Gothamist!

Beverly Sills musical scores have arrived at Lincoln Center in a venue in which she never sang: The Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. We take pride in announcing that we received the collection of her scores from her estate auction at Doyle's New York on October 7, 2009. (We also obtained two costume designs by Thierry Bosquet, a frequent designer for the New York City Opera, which I'll discuss in another post.)  read more »

The largest cultural institutions of New York City like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The American Museum of Natural History and New York Public Library, were established in the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. There was a major push among the wealthiest Americans to establish a cultural identity of our own. We were a young country, bereft of the cultural lineage that existed in Europe. Despite America’s youth we showed ourselves to be a vast country, devoted to the dollar, with seemingly room for little else. But men, like J.P. Morgan understood that life void of education and culture was a life not worth living. A balance must be met, to soften the edge of a hard capitalist society. Despite the controversy surrounding Morgan in regards to how he conducted himself in business, the fact remains that we owe much to him and others like him who bestowed great wealth on institutions, whose sole purpose was to enrich the lives of everyone and that tenet still holds today.

A number of years ago while in graduate school, I took part in a private tour of the Morgan Library. While we sat in Morgan's sumptuous jewel toned library, replete with priceless volumes from the 16th century to the 20th century, the speaker encouraged us to read Morgan: An American Financier by Jean Strouse. He described the book as the definitive biography of J. P. Morgan. At the conclusion of the tour, my mind a swirl in the world of J.P. Morgan, I made a mental note to myself to read Strouse’s lengthy tome. A few years later, I did.

After reading Strouse’s biography of Morgan, much impressed me about the man: his power, vision and his philanthropy. During the bridge years between the 19th and 20th century, tremendous energy was devoted to giving on a truly monumental scale. Morgan took the lead in giving among his peers. He perhaps more than any other of his colleagues combed the world over for treasures to fill the museums he was establishing back in America. With the steady intelligent eye of Bella de Costa Greene by his side, Morgan created a grand and lasting legacy. Every time I enter the Morgan Library or the Metropolitan Museum, I bow my head in thanks.

Please join Jean Strouse as she examines J.P. Morgan’s legacy in the arts on Wednesday, Oct. 28 @ 6:30 @ the Mid-Manhattan Library

Images of the Morgan Library courtesy of the Morgan Library
http://www.themorgan.org/about/historyMore.asp?id=11

Image of the Metropolitan Museum courtesy of: http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UES/UES074.htm

The commercial strips of the neighborhoods of New York City are the lifeblood of the community and city at large. It is where the action is. People shop, stroll, and mingle on the street. In warm weather men often pull up chairs, to discuss the day’s events in front of their local barbershop, with the twirling barbershop poll acting as a beacon in the background. While bodegas with their blinking colored signs often seem to host a never ending domino game in front of their storefronts. And corner candy stores are magnates for youngsters, tossing balls or cruising on skateboards. Teenage hoods hang out too but at curbside with cigarettes in their mouths. The commercial strips of the neighborhood of the city are a microcosm of the city itself. You can feel the life and energy in front of many storefronts. The social community that is organized around the business district help gauge the health of the neighborhood. Commercial strips are fluid entities and change like a river. In one generation the street may be lined with mom and pop businesses: a bread store, dry cleaner and an Italian deli with meats hanging in the window, while in latter generations the street may change many times over. In Park Slope, where I live, I have witnessed one storefront after another close, because the next generation did not want to continue in the family business.

In the time that I have lived in my neighborhood, I have seen the closing of many storefronts. Some close up shop because storeowners want to make a big buck as developers greedily eye the strip and think of tearing down and building anew, while others can’t bear the thought of having an outsider running their business, choosing instead to shut down their business that was instrumental in supporting their family. Remnants of the old sign of the business are often buried under the new signage, sometimes it is visible: a shadow on the wall where the letters were once placed or painted words that peak out from under the new sign and sometimes you can even see hints of where the neon tubing was attached. Or in the case of Garry Jewelers on 5th Ave, in my neighborhood, it is the name Garry in a smooth mosaic tile on the ground, at the entryway. The neon of Garry Jewelers is still there, but now it is always dark and it is only a matter of time until this beautiful sign, established in 1951, finds its way to the junk heap.

Please join the authors of Store Front James T & Karla L. Murray as they present a slide lecture on the Disappearing Store Fronts of New York City on Monday, Oct 26th at 6:30 PM on the 6th floor of the Mid-Manhattan Library.

Images from: http://www.jamesandkarlamurray.com/JamesandKarlaMurraySTOREFRONT.html

Vivian Vande Velde is basically my hero. She is a master at taking traditional fairy-tale-like themes and making them fresh and totally unique. Companions of the Night (1995) does that for the vampire story.

Kerry's little brother, Ian, had a simple request: drive to the laundromat to retrieve Ian's stuffed bear. Kerry knew all the reasons she should tell Ian no (she had a big test to study for, it was the middle of the night, she only had a driver's permit and shouldn't be in a car without a licensed driver), but then Ian started to cry and Kerry knew she couldn't say no--not if Ian was going to cry. It was late, there would be no traffic. Getting the bear would be simple.

And it was simple. Until Kerry got to the laundromat and stepped into what looked like a gang shootout. Or a kidnapping. Or a vampire hunt.  read more »