BGC Library Blog

Two disparate pieces of news on plastics manufacturing caught our attention recently.  Firstly, Herman Miller has announced at NYC Design Week that they have developed a new, more environmentally friendly way of manufacturing fiberglass, so they will resume manufacturing the Eames chairs out of fiberglass for the first time since 1989.

Via Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/the-iconic-eames-molded-chair-is-being-made-with-fiberg-509005125

I’m also obsessed with Ian Frazier’s recent New Yorker profile of two young Rensselaer graduates who have developed an all-natural, compostable substitute for styrofoam. It’s made from agricultural waste products and mushroom mycelium, and the story of both the invention and the inventors is incredible: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_frazier

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The New York Times recently attended a meeting of metropolitan New York’s professional society for archivists, the Archivists Round Table, and the resulting article appeared in the paper yesterday.  Fun to see our colleagues and their collections profiled there!

The reporter was very taken with the fact that a pair of Gypsy Rose Lee’s panties (above) are stored in the archives of the Library for the Performing Arts at NYPL.

The BGC Library participated in the International Edible Book Festival for the second year in a row by hosting a very decorative arts and design –centric celebration of the event at the BGC on Wednesday, April 3.

Started in 2000 by an artist and a librarian, the International Edible Book Festival falls on or around April 1st each year and pays homage to the French gastronomer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). Bibliophiles and food lovers around the world gather locally and virtually to celebrate the book arts and the (literal) ingestion of culture by constructing books made entirely of edible materials. Their work is displayed, judged, and subsequently eaten, and photographs are submitted to the International Edible Book Festival website.

All members of the BGC community were encouraged to participate in the BGC Library’s second annual festival. Participants brought foods based on book titles, authors, and cover designs, and many contestants chose to represent books from the BGC Library’s collection. It was a pleasure to see on display the playful pride and affection our community feels for particular books in the collection.

BGC students, faculty, and staff from all departments arrived throughout the day to view and judge the submissions. They cast votes for the most appetizing entry, the best play on words, the best interpretation of the theme (i.e. the best “book”), and finally the best in show.

A blackberry cream cake by Karyn Hinkle representing Bee Wilson’s new book “Consider the Fork” was deemed “most appetizing,” while a clever group project by Christine Griffiths, Andrew Goodman, and Nicole Pulichene was “best play on words.” They used Alfred Gell’s classic anthropology text, “Art and Agency,” to create an apple TART and Agency with apricot “Gelly”!

Janis Ekdahl’s “Book of Tea,” hand-bound with packaged tea bags as the “pages,” was runner up in the “best book / best interpretation of the theme” category, but the winner of that award as well as winner of “best in show” by an overwhelming margin was Corrine Brandt’s incredible submission based on the late eighteenth century tract “American Cookery.” Corrine’s tidy and impossibly tiny hand-piping in toothpick-thin chocolate letters  awed all who saw it, and truly embodied the spirit of Edible Books.

Further pictures of the event and more tasty, creative “books” are posted on the BGC’s website here.

In a piece of great news for fashion researchers, ARTstor announced today that they will collaborate with Conde Nast to offer 25,000 images from the magazine publisher’s vast collections, including New Yorker cartoons, selections from the Conde Nast Archive of Photography, and highlights of “the fashion world’s preeminent image gallery,” the Fairchild Photo Service.

More details in ARTstor’s blog post here.

On Wednesday March 27, a research session for graduate students co-sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center library and led by two NYPL librarians will focus on primary source materials available at the NYPL including archives and newspapers.

Brooke Watkins, Bibliographer for German, and Thomas Lannon, Assistant Curator in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, will offer a one-hour instructional course aimed at graduate research focusing on fulltext databases such as America’s Historical Imprints and Readex and Proquest Historical Newspapers. This short session will help researchers locate items across the Library’s special collections, begin more specific research in archives, and learn how to navigate the NYPL’s research centers.

“Archives, Books and Databases for Scholarly Research” will be offered Wednesday, March 27 from 6 to 7 p.m. in the South Court Classrooms (1st floor) of the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

To attend, RSVP Brooke Watkins at brookewatkins@nypl.org or 212-930-0033 and include your name, institution, and your subject interest.

Another of New York City’s great art institutions has finished arranging and describing their archives and opened the records to the public. From MoMA:

The Museum of Modern Art Archives is pleased to announce the opening of the MoMA PS1 Archives to the public. Stretching over 300 linear feet in more than 11,000 folders, the archives is the comprehensive institutional record of the groundbreaking nonprofit art space from its independent beginnings in 1971 through its merger with MoMA in 1999 and into the 21st century. Nearly half of the collection comprises exhibition and press records—direct documentation of nearly 900 exhibitions and events—while seven other series contain records of the founder and director Alanna Heiss and other programs and administrative activities. The collection is an exceptional record not only of an individual organization but also of successive eras of the New York art world.

This fun video by the Argentinian design group Ombu has been making its way around the art and architecture worlds online this winter.  It shows 26 iconic buildings by 26 famous architects in alphabetical order like a kids’ alphabet book. The animations are simple and I love seeing how the buildings were illustrated.