Small Chirp: The Book as Artifact

From the desk of Melissa, the Library Canary:

There’s so much talk about the future of books lately. As readers turn increasingly to electronic alternatives to paper and the internet book-trade, the usual fingernail-nibbling questions emerge. What will happen to the book?  What will happen to brick-and-mortar libraries and bookstores?

Maybe books will become our bricks and mortar.

A recent trip to Vancouver, BC had me pondering the idea of the book as artifact. In Vancouver, book-oracles seemed to whisper from every street corner, prophesying the destinies of our discarded, unwanted and remaindered books. Here is what they showed me:

The Book Beyond Art:

An art installation at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia suggests one possibility. Continue reading

[ In The Nest ] Q&A with Empress Chronicles author Suzy Vitello

The Empress Chronicles: Historic Fantasy with a New Kind of Heroine

by Melissa, theLibraryCanary

The Keepsake is the soon-to-be-released first novel in the Young Adult Empress Chronicles series, a fantastic look at the life of teenage princess Elisabeth in Bavaria—known familiarly as Sisi.

In The Keepsake, Sisi’s magical locket takes her back in time and gives her the power to predict true love—but it also embroils her in a dangerous competition with an evil enchantress who would use the locket to wicked ends.

The character is based on the historical princess Elisabeth who goes on to become the Empress of Austria and the Queen of Hungary—a cult figure legendary for her eccentricity: bizarre diets, extreme exercising, exotic pets, a penchant for pink, and a mother-in-law from hell. In other words, the stuff of a novelist’s dreams.

The Empress Chronicles brings us Sisi as researched and imagined by Suzy Vitello.  And when Vitello’s not busy writing novels and running a popular series of writer’s workshops, she also maintains Sisi’s Blog. She first began writing the blog as a way of organizing her research, as well as delve more deeply into the mind and persona of the 19th century princess.

What would Sisi have made of Twitter, blogging, and Facebook gossip? What would she sound like? The result is, by turns, hysterically funny and eminently educational.

I asked Vitello to tell us a little more about her interest in Sisi, the scope of the series, and when we can expect to get our hot little birdclaws on The Keepsake. Continue reading
https://canaryreview.com/author/librarycanary/
canaryreview.com
CC-MAIN-2023-14
95066
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:Q66VUANBEAOZCXSZW5T3MPQ3FICYVX3K
<urn:uuid:24b749bb-688e-40fb-9c01-f2bfe54b362d>
2023-03-28T23:33:28Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:3FKE6L25M2LZMLSZOQ5M7YTMV3QKY66O
<urn:uuid:65e190c2-b5d4-457e-80a5-e7b56d2609f1>
https://canaryreview.com/author/librarycanary/
response
<urn:uuid:112b6963-6334-49ab-961c-90502d0c65fc>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-14
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March/April 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-253
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/