NPR is conducting a poll to name the best YA novel ever written.
The New York Times profiles the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, a week-long program course that draws three hundred librarians, dealers, scholars, conservators, collectors, and aficionados to Charlottesville for five weeks each year. Here’s a taste of what book camp is like: “In a Hogwarts-worthy reading room on an upper floor of the university’s Alderman Library one morning, students in Advanced Descriptive Bibliography were bent over books with tape measures and mini light sabers called Zelcos, scanning the pages for watermarks, lines, and other clues that can potentially trace a given sheet back to a specific paper mold in a specific mill.” We don’t know about you, but that sounds like fun to us.
As a bonus to the book camp article, the Times also wanders into the basement of the special collections library to examine the ominously named Hinman Collator, a 450-pound machine capable of identifying subtle typographical variations that the human eye can’t.
London Mayor Boris Johnson will read a poem in Ancient Greek during a speech to the International Olympics Committee. According to Harriet, via the Guardian: “Johnson commissioned the work to be written in the style of Pindar, a Theban poet who praised athletes at the original Olympic games in ancient Greece.”
Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (who you might remember from the contentious 2009 senate election, or alternately, from this) channels Langston Hughes in a two-and-a-half-minute-long campaign video titled “Let America be America Again,” a reference to Hughes’ 1935 poem.
A writer travels to Lake View, Illinois, to search for the inspiration behind Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
