Category Archives: Books

Advisory council, Alumni, Books, Development, Exhibits, Faculty, Fine Arts Library

Distinguished Author Dinner Recap

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Earlier this month, the Libraries hosted a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its third annual Distinguished Author Dinner.

Jacqueline Jones — who has earned accolades for her book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, — spent the evening before a rapt full house of University of Texas Libraries supporters discussing her ideas on race as a social construct.

“The effects of this fiction have been devastating throughout history,” Jones recently told The Daily Texan. “The idea here is that this myth or idea has been a very powerful one in justifying the exploitation of [people of] African descent and other people as well.”

The thought-provoking talk provided attendees with ample fodder for discussion after Jones exited the dais.

Jones is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Bancroft Prize for American History, among many other awards and distinctions. She’s author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Basic Books, 1985) and Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (Vintage, 2009).

The Distinguished Author Dinner is an invitation-only event to acknowledge and thank major donors, advisory council members and friends for their support and interest in the Libraries.

In addition, it provides an opportunity to reinforce the Libraries role in teaching, learning and research, and to promote the outstanding research of world-class faculty on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin.

Past events have featured Hamilton Book Award winner for Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite Dr. L. Michael White, and acclaimed author, library advocate and Texas favorite, Sarah Bird.

To become a Libraries donor and receive invitations to events like this one, please visit our online giving page.

Books, Collections

The Birth of Chemistry

Annales de Chimie, Tome Premier. Paris, 1789. Octavo, 22cm. Mallet Chemistry Library.

Antoine de Lavoisier (1743-1794) was one of the founding fathers of the modern science of chemistry.  He and his contemporaries established a more quantitative, empirical method of inquiry grounded in physics and mathematics. In 1789, as the French Revolution was beginning, Lavoisier and his colleagues, including Claude-Louis Berthollet and Antoine-François Fourcroy, launched the first French chemical journal, Annales de Chimie. Despite the upheavals of the Revolution and Lavoisier’s own execution during the Reign of Terror, the Annales became a major component of the early literature of chemistry.

The establishment of a strong chemical research library was a high priority for the University’s first chemistry professors. Significant sums were spent on acquiring complete runs of major chemical journals. The first series of the Annales (volumes 1-96, 1789-1815) was purchased in 1914 for $325 – over $7,300 in 2014 dollars, and resides in the Mallet Chemistry Library.

Contributed by Mallet Chemistry Library Head Librarian David Flaxbart.

Books, News, Poetry, Staff

A Poet in the Science Library

“Backmasking” by Harold Whit Williams.

One wouldn’t necessarily expect to find a poet in the stacks of a science library, but then again, creativity often occurs in the least anticipated of places.

The Life Science Library boasts among its staff a prize-winning poet, as Library Specialist Harold Whit Williams has garnered praise for his work, which is both a catalog of his experience as a musician, and reflective of his southern heritage. His most recent collection of poems, Backmasking, earned Williams the 2013 Robert Phillips Chapman Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press, and his poem “Blues Dreams,” received the 2014 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize.

In some ways, it would seem to make perfect sense that Williams would understand the finer points of cadence and pentameter  — he’s also the guitarist for notable Austin pop band Cotton Mather.

Williams’ first collection of poetry, Waiting For The Fire To Go Out, was published by Finishing Line Press, and his work has appeared in numerous literary journals.

Whit kindly indulged a line of questioning about his poetry, his music and his life at the Libraries. 

When did you start writing poetry? Was it an outcropping of your music?

Harold Whit Williams: I’ve been writing poetry off and on since college days, but started giving serious attention to it, and publishing, now for about seven years.

Strange, but poetry is a totally separate thing to me from songwriting. As a guitarist first, my songs, or the guitar parts I play in Cotton Mather, happen musically first. Then lyrics come later. But with poetry, it’s all wordplay from the get-go, and the musicality in the words themselves tend to direct where I go in a poem.

Does the inspiration for poetry and music come from the same place, even though the jumping off point is different? Or are they driven by different urges? 

HWW: Good question. What makes me plug in an electric guitar and make loud horrendous noise has to come from a much different urge than the one making me get to a quiet place, alone, to jot down a poem. Continue reading A Poet in the Science Library →

Books, Ephemera, News

Paul Otlet and the pre-digital Internet

Paul Otlet’s sketch for the ‘worldwide network’ he envisioned
(Image: Mundaneum Archive, Belgium)

If you’re unfamiliar with  lawyer Paul Otlet and his monument to document science, the Mundaneum, Cataloging the World appears to be a worthy introductory volume to an oddly prescient episode in human history.

Otlet carried a grand vision of interconnecting the various knowledge gateways throughout the world in order to bring about a sort of collective enlightenment and benevolent world order… decades before Turing’s rudimentary machine even hinted at future computational possibilities.

Check out an excellent overview of Otlet’s work and Cataloging the World at the blog Brain Pickings.

 

Alexander Architectural Archive, Architecture & Planning Library, Archives, Books, Collections, Commentary

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Posthumous Contribution: An Icon of a City

Plans for the redevelopment of Olin Park in Madison, WI from Frank Lloyd Wright’s work on the Monona Basin Project.

While searching for all of the items in Karl Kamrath’s Collection last semester, I was directly exposed to the vast depth and diversity of a successful architect’s personal library. From Alden Dow to Katherine Morrow to Richard Neutra, Kamrath’s collection spanned decades and encompassed elements of major movements and achievements in the 20th century.

While his collection contains some quintessential readings that were quite prolific (such as Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, Hassan Fathy’s Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Future of Architecture), there are also some limited publications of several design projects that Kamrath and his firm were associated with. As I sifted through special collections to find these professional reports, one caught my eye before I even noticed the Kamrath Collection stamp on the cover: The Monona Basin Project.

My interest directly stems from the report’s subject: a schematic master plan for the city of Madison, Wisconsin. As a University of Wisconsin graduate who spent five years in Madison, I was immediately intrigued by the possibility of being able to compare my visual of Madison with a plan dating back to 1967.

For anyone that’s either been a resident of the greater Wisconsin-Illinois area or happens to be a Frank Lloyd Wright buff, you know that Wright’s career began in Madison as a student at the University of Wisconsin. Though he never completed his engineering degree, he went on to realize many significant projects in Madison and the surrounding area, including the Robert M. Lamp House, Unitarian Meeting House, and Taliesin in nearby Spring Green, one of his most famous projects. However, Monona Terrace likely possesses one of the most interesting timelines of all of Wright’s works – and I’m here to share that story with you all!

You can continue reading the rest of this article by Architecture & Planning Library GRA Stephanie Phillips over at the Battle Hall Highlights blog.

Books, Collections

Poet Adds His Voice

The Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection

On a steamy day in September, renowned poet and fiction writer Ken Fontenot welcomed Sean O’Bryan, Manager of Preservation and Gifts Processing at the UT Libraries, and I into his downstairs apartment. The walls in the living room and hallway were lined with bookshelves packed with brightly-colored poetry, poetry journals, writing guides, and stacks of chapbooks. This is a poet’s home, and Fontenot wants these bound words to feed our next generation of poets. Ken Fontenot received the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of Poetry Award for his 2013 In a Kingdom of Birds (Pinyon Publishing), his second book of poetry; he has also published translations of German poetry and a novel. The poetry began when he attended a reading series at Tulane, his alma mater, and seemed more possible when he made his way to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection at The University of Texas at Austin Libraries.

In the 1980s Fontenot moved from his home in New Orleans to Austin and to UT where he would receive an MA in German Language and Literature. While here, he found himself at the Flawn Academic Center, in a room adjacent to what was then the Undergraduate Library, a room full of poetry. “You go on filling your jar of hope with yet more hope,” he wrote in A Kingdom of Birds. Ruth Stephan founded the Poetry Collection at UT Austin in 1965, and Fontenot realized amidst these books and poetry reading events that he was a poet. The influence of the Poetry Collection stayed with him.

Last year he decided he wants his collection to make poetry possible for other potential poets and readers. His donation will add hundreds of volumes and contributes to an ongoing revitalization of the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection, now on the 6th floor of the Perry-Castañeda Library, in collaboration with the English Department and the New Writers Project. Ken Fontenot, along with the UT Libraries, hopes that the sweet cacophony of verse he has added to the Ruth Stephan Poetry Collection will feed you, poet. Revel in the work of Rosemary Catacalos, Kay Ryan, Cyrus Cassells, Ai, Louise Gluck, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and many more. You’ll see these titles added to the shelves over the next couple of months.

Fontenot’s fiction towers still in his apartment on other shelf-lined walls. These books, he says, he is keeping as he writes his second novel.

– Kristen Hogan, English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies Librarian

Books, Events, In the News

Sticks and Stones

Catholic school students burn thousands of comic books in Binghamton, New York (1948).

One would think that we’ve evolved enough as a society to move beyond the sort of censorship that has marked the darker periods of our history.

One would be wrong.

Last Tuesday, the Randolph County Board of Education in North Carolina voted 5-2 to remove Ralph Ellison’s masterwork The Invisible Man from the shelves of its school libraries.

The book is one among a much larger list of works that with depressing reliability have been prohibited from consumption by readers.

Next week is Banned Books Week. Sigh.

Well, because the First Amendment still sees regular challenges, the Libraries and the Department of English have teamed up to have a public discussion about the state of censorship in the Lone Star State.

“Texas Banned Books: Questions and Answers” (TXBBQ&A) will be an interactive roundtable discussion about the real, relevant state of censorship in Texas. The conversation will center on Texas schools and values, books in prison, freedom of the press and the right to read.

Maley Thompson of the Department of English will moderate the discussion among five distinguished panelists:

The event is free and open to the public, and all voices are welcome.

More info here.

Books, Ephemera

New Life for Misfit Books

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An offbeat bookstore has conceived an equally offbeat way to sell underappreciated titles.

Meet Biblio-Mat, a peculiar book vending machine created by designer Craig Small (of The Juggernaut) for The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto as an alternative to discount bins at the bookstore.

For $2, the rudimentary mechanics creak to life to provide both a random bit of reading material and unique shopping experience.

(via bOING bOING)

Books, Libraries

Escape to Book Mountain

Book Mountain in the Netherlands.

Though we often focus our thoughts and attention on the changing nature of libraries, it’s good to occasionally be reminded that our “storied” past is also part of the present.

Nearly ten years in the making, a new library recently opened outside of Rotterdam that is a monument to the book.

A pyramidal structure of wood, glass, stone and steel contains what may be the world’s largest bookcase, “Book Mountain” – a structure of staircases, pathways and terraces surrounded by some 50,000 books that spirals upward to a reading room and café at its peak.

And despite its remarkable design by Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, the building is more function than form, as it is set amongst a community of government housing complexes where the population has a 10% illiteracy rate.

See more photos here, and a report by the BBC, here.