Friday, July 2, 2010

Libraries in the News

“Libraries are our future—to close them would be a terrible, terrible mistake—it would be stealing from the future to pay for today, which is what got us into the mess we’re in now.”
—Neil Gaiman, in his acceptance speech for the Carnegie Medal, The Telegraph (U.K.), June 24.

Lawmakers override S.C. governor’s library veto

The South Carolina House overrode Gov. Mark Sanford’s vetoes of two critically popular state services June 16: aid to county public libraries and the Department of Archives and History. Lawmakers from smaller counties and rural areas pleaded with House members to overcome the Sanford veto of $4.6 million for libraries, which would have caused some to close and wiped out public access to internet services. The override vote was 110–5....
The State (Columbia), June 16

Rikers Island prison library

Joe Halderman, the CBS news producer convicted in 2010 of trying to extort $2 million from David Letterman, is now an inmate librarian at a makeshift New York Public Library branch started in March at one of the correctional facilities on Rikers Island. The branch is run by Nicholas Higgins, the supervising librarian of NYPL’s Correctional Services Program. Every week, Higgins takes a city bus to the Eric M. Taylor Center, lugging a sack of books that inmates have requested. Watch the video (3:35)....
New York Times: City Room, June 25 


Sherlock Holmes’s first caper for sale

Stephen J. Gertz writes: “The only known inscribed copy, apart from Arthur Conan Doyle’s own, of the first printing of A Study in Scarlet, the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on July 15. Published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in November 1887, it is expected to sell for £250,000–£400,000 ($375,000–$600,000 U.S.). There are only three signed or inscribed copies recorded of this classic debut in the detective genre of literature, one of the rarest and most highly sought books of modern times.”...
BookTryst, June 28


2 comments:

Andrea I said...

Congratulations to the SC legislators for overriding the govenor's veto. I grew up in a small town in NW FL before the internet.Our local library was my salvation during my preteen and teen years. I was reading beyond the books in the school libraries.

Mystica said...

Thank goodness sense prevailed.

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