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Archive for October, 2010

What Would Tavi Gevinson Read?

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

If she were looking for the best reference sources, books, and images on the history of fashion, we bet that “Style Rookie” blogger, Tavi Gevinson, would use The Berg Fashion Library. This new addition to UVM’s collection provides access to a wide variety of works on the history, culture, and artistic uses of fashion from a variety of perspectives. Search the collection by keyword or explore time periods and places. Highlights of the collection include The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and The Dictionary of Fashion History, numerous scholarly books, and amazing illustrations and photographs from The Victoria and Albert Museum.  Additional content including more books, primary documents on fashion and images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art are coming soon.

With Scissors and Paste

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Special Collections Exhibit

The shelves of Special Collections are filled with nineteenth- and twentieth-century scrapbooks compiled by Vermonters of all ages, from all walks of life. Scrapbooks can be challenging to preserve and use: adhesive dries and items fall out of sequence or disappear, the pages grow brittle and crumble with the passing of time, and sometimes what was so significant to the creator baffles a later observer.

The five scrapbooks currently on display, however, are in good shape and tell fascinating stories.  Unknown compilers collected newspaper clippings and arranged them on scrapbook pages to create unique narratives about the 1935-36 Vermont Marble Company strike, the endeavors of two enterprising Vermont brothers in South America and New York City in the decades before the Civil War,  a 1907 campaign to encourage consumption of electricity in Burlington, and paper salvage efforts during World War II.

Farming Today

Monday, October 11th, 2010

Are you buying, cooking and eating locally grown food? In these four books, Vermont farmers write and talk about farm life and what it takes to produce the bounty available at our farmers’ markets, grocery stores and CSA’s.

Forty-Six Years of Pretty Straight Going: The Life of a Family Dairy Farm.

Forty-Six Years, in documenting the farming lives of Larry and Grayson Wyman and their Weybridge, VT farm, helps readers understand why family farmers work long hours for meager economic returns.  For the Wymans, “farming is for those who value the rhythm and routine of the seasons and the diversity of each day’s challenges, for those who accept that farming is a difficult way to make a living but steadfastly believe that it can be a fulfilling way of life.” State Representative Chris Bray says that “Every reader will come away informed about the day-to-day realities and sensibilities of a small farm operating in the second half of the 20th century.” The text is accompanied by evocative black and white photographs.

Up Tunket Road

Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader.

“Philip Ackerman-Leist writes about homesteading, using his experience in Vermont as an example. Ackerman-Leist challenges conventional notions of homesteading (owning one’s own land, self-reliance, independence). Those days are gone, he writes. Today, you can homestead anywhere (a student of his has founded the “back to the yard” movement), not only in rural settings, and the key to successful homesteading is interdependence, not independence. It is no longer possible to fully retreat from society. “Homesteading is an act of defiance and of reliance: defiance of cultural norms and habits and reliance on self and local community.” It is, he writes, “much less about location than it is about intent.” Up Tunket Road raises the issue of mentors, literary and practical. Ackerman-Leist cites Thoreau, Helen and Scott Nearing and others who have written about the experience. (Thoreauvians try not to disturb the land; followers of the Nearings bring “shelter, order, and a whir of activity to a place.”) He writes with great reverence about a local farmer-gardener who gave Ackerman-Leist time, tips and help. “Up Tunket Road” takes us through the choices the author and his wife made about their lifestyle: how to create light, how to bathe, how to eat. Homesteading brings you “face to face with ecological choices,” forcing the homesteader to confront, to realize the effect we have on our environment. The book also contains an excellent reading list for people dreaming of a different American Dream.”-Los Angeles Times


goat song

Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese.

“Novelist and journalist Kessler (Birds in Fall ) introduces us to a more personal side of his life—his life with goats. But this book is more than just a memoir. As Kessler recounts the early years when he and his wife moved from Manhattan to a farm in Vermont where they raised goats, he intricately intertwines the relationship humans and goats have had throughout history, pulls in several literary works that inspired him, and takes readers back to the roots of the pastoral lifestyle. This pleasant and poignant book journeys between present and past, demonstrates the delights and challenges of raising goats, and explains how fresh milk and cheese can make the effort worth undertaking. VERDICT Whether experienced with goats or not, readers will appreciate Kessler’s ability to weave explanatory passages into his text to enlighten and promote an understanding of the herding way of life that continues today. Sure to appeal to urban dwellers thinking about going back to the land.”  -Library Journal


Harvest

Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic Farm.

“Freelance writer Smith and her husband, photographer Hansen (My Life as a Dog), dispel the “dreamy, nostalgic haze” surrounding urbanites’ notions of smallholder agriculture with this detailed look at life on a working farm. For a year, they follow their Vermont neighbors, Jennifer Megeysi and Kyle Jones, through the snow, mud and manure as they work Fat Rooster Farm. Numerous vignettes, illustrated by Hansen’s appealing pictures, pile up a wealth of detail about this small organic establishment, which raises both livestock and produce. It’s a gritty life: Megeysi and Jones, who also hold jobs off the farm, must deal with murderous raccoons, hypothermic piglets, ducks overdue for slaughter, byzantine food regulations (and the legislators behind them) and their own difficult marriage. More than most writers on farming, Smith is attuned to the people who do it: Megeysi may be one of the most vividly drawn farm women since Letters of a Woman Homesteader.” -Publishers Weekly.

John Lennon Book Returned After 40 Years

Monday, October 11th, 2010

After being checked out 40 years ago, In His Own Write, by John Lennon has been returned to the library after being found in an apartment in Burlington.

We’ve ordered a more up-to-date copy, but you can see the original, along with the letter that accompanied its return…just in time for what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday on October 9th.

The craziest thing? The book was originally checked out to Michael Breiner, who now works in the Libraries’ cataloging department!
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