Library of Congress Blog

A bunch of ninth-grade girls got in touch with their favorite radio station, making a song request for a tune by one of their favorite artists.  But they couldn’t resist the chance to raise that universal complaint:

“Why, why, why, why do you always repeat the same songs?”

It could have been from the suburbs of Cleveland or the boroughs of New York – but in fact, it took place in Afghanistan.  The girls’ request was delivered not by a quick call from a cellphone, but rather via an elaborately hand-decorated letter to Radio Azadi (Radio Freedom), the Afghan service of Radio Free Europe.  The station receives some 500 letters a month from its listeners, many of them beautifully decorated as is the tradition in Afghanistan.

More than 50 of these letters, including descriptions of their contents, went on display today in the Library of Congress’ Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First St. S.E. in Washington, D.C.  The exhibition, in the north orientation gallery on the building’s first floor, is titled “Voices from Afghanistan.”  It’s free and open to the public, on display from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily, and will run through May 8.

An online version of this exhibition can be viewed here.  Also, see the PBS Newshour blog and video story on the exhibition here.

Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress, termed the letters – of which RFE is offering the Library 15,000 for its collections – “a fantastic resource … it’s the first time that the voices of ordinary Afghanis are being heard. We’re going to have a window into a segment of the population, across the board.”

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington initiated the exhibition; several members of Congress also contributed Radio Azadi letters from their own collections to the display.

The letters cover many topics. They include criticism by students of the conditions in their schools, young people writing love poems to the objects of their affection, villagers harpooning corrupt officials, prisoners asking for prison reform.  And yes – lots and lots of song requests.

Akbar Ayazi, who has been with Radio Azadi for five years, has been described as the “Jim Lehrer of Afghanistan.”  He’s presided over on-the-air presidential debates, and notes that the station carries political satire, which the audience delights in.

But what is astonishing is the lengths the station’s listeners will go to in “talking back” to the station, which is the most popular source of news and information in the country. Many listeners have to travel miles and miles to a town with a post office. Some cannot write, and must use the services of public scribes to convey their feelings. And yet, the letters pour in.

Increasingly, there are e-mails, but even many of these electronic transmissions are decorated – using such modern means as Photoshop.   

And those ninth-grade girls? They asked for a song by the late and very beloved Ahmad Zahir.

Blake illustration

Art and science, and sometimes art and politics, mirror each other in times of rapid change. Robert Hughes made that case in his history of modern art – noting it moved from straight representation to pointillism, cubism, and abstraction as science checked off its discoveries of the 20th Century, such as X-rays and the structure of the atom.

A similar reflection can be seen in the poetry of William Blake, who lived in England in the late 1700s at the time of the American and French revolutions.  Blake’s rejection of standard religious views of the era and his freethinking writings caused him to be considered odd, even crazy, in his lifetime – but gained him a wide-ranging posthumous fan base including such luminaries as Irish poet W.B. Yeats, scientist/humanist Jacob Bronowski,  punk rocker Patti Smith and U.S. poet Allen Ginsberg.

 “This was a man who had visions as a child, who was ridiculed and even beaten for having these visions,” Patti Smith told Rolling Stone writer David Fricke in May, 2004. “But he maintained those visions his whole life. Wherever they came from, whether he animated them from within or they were from God, William Blake held on to his vision. He never got a break in his life. His work never sold. He lived in poverty. When he spoke out, he nearly lost his life. He could have been hanged for insurrection,” Smith said.

“What I learned from William Blake is, don’t give up.”

Blake, perhaps best-known for two of his poems (“Tiger, Tiger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night …” and “To see a world in a grain of sand/ and a heaven in a wild flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ and eternity in an hour … ”) was trained as an artist and illustrated his books with amazing engravings, which his wife would hand-color.

What’s that got to do with the price of a Kenmore washing machine?

In addition to Yeats, Smith and thousands upon thousands of poetry lovers, Blake had another important fan: Lessing Rosenwald, the scion of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. founding family.

Several original works written and illustrated by William Blake are part of the vast collection of rare books given to the Library of Congress in 1979 by Rosenwald.  You can see the digitized Blake books here, and other rare volumes in the Rosenwald collection, which includes the Library’s famous Giant Bible of Mainz, here.

Speaking of the Library of Congress and poetry, Jill McDonough and Atsuro Riley — two poets who are getting more recognition in their own lifetimes than Blake did, as winners of the Library’s Witter Bynner Fellowships for 2010 – will read from their own work Thursday evening, Feb. 18 at 6:45 p.m. in the Mumford Room, 6th floor of the Madison Building at 101 Independence Ave. S.E. in Washington, D.C. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, who selected them for the honor, will introduce them. The event is free of charge and open to the public; no tickets are required.

 The Blake illustration above is from “For Children: The Gates of Paradise,” published in 1793.

Ever wonder what goes on before an exhibition is mounted and displayed?  My colleague Donna Urschel takes an in-depth look at the preservation steps that were required for the Library’s “Herblock!” exhibition, on display through May 1:

Famed editorial cartoonist Herb Block ("Herblock").

Preserving ‘Herblock’ a Rewarding Job for Conservators

by Donna Urschel

Shortly after the famous Washing­ton Post political cartoonist Herb Block (“Herblock”) died in late 2001, Holly Krueger was part of a small reconnais­sance party checking out the condition of the cartoons in Block’s Georgetown row-house basement.

Krueger, a senior paper conservator in the Conservation Division in the Library’s Preservation Directorate, took a small elevator down to Herblock’s non-finished basement and walked to the back, where there was a small, secured room.

Inside, Krueger found metal cabinets stuffed with cartoons, tables stacked with cartoons and boxes filled with cartoons— 14,400 in all. A moldy carpet covered the floor. Miraculously, there was no mold on the cartoons.

Krueger was accompanied by Harry Katz, a curator at the time in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, and members of the Herb Block Foundation—which had donated Herblock’s entire col­lection to the Library of Congress along with funds necessary for its preservation. They all agreed on the next step: remove the cartoons as soon as possible. Within a week, the Library sent a team to pack up the drawings and bring them to the Library.

“When I first stepped into the room, my first reaction was just of awe. I was standing amidst the entire life work of an incredible 20th-century figure,” said Krueger. “My second thought was ‘Boy, are we lucky they’re in good condition.’ And then I felt anxiety, an anxiety shared by the trustees to get the cartoons out as quickly as possible.”

Krueger has been the lead conservator in preserving the collection of Herblock, the master of political cartooning. For more than 70 years, from 1929 to 2001, he crusaded against corruption and injustice, inequality and immorality. He was a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Herblock’s work is on display at the Library in an exhibition that celebrates his long career. The exhibition–which opened on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Oct. 13, 2009–is located in the second-floor South Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building and runs through Sat­urday, May 1.

On Wednesday, Feb. 10, Krueger will hold a noontime gallery talk in the exhibi­tion area to discuss the Library’s efforts to preserve Herblock’s voluminous body of work.

Boxes and stacks of cartoons litter Herblock's basement.

Fortunately, with the supplemental funds from the Herb Block Foundation, Krueger and her conservation team were able to prepare the collection for service. But there were many challenges along the way.

The majority of the drawings were executed in graphite media pencil, a substance that is very “friable,” which means the pencil smudges and rubs off easily. Each drawing had a clear sheet of tracing paper stapled on top to prevent smudging.

“But the translucent paper was of poor quality, so we knew it had to be replaced. And we knew each drawing would need individual housing,” Krueger said. “We had to develop a housing that was stiff enough to keep the cartoon from flexing and find a good, translucent paper that would prevent smudging.”

Krueger continued, “It was a chal­lenge to design housing to accommodate safety needs, yet provide easy access to the drawing and fit in the allotted space in the Prints and Photographs Division.” Once the conservation team designed the housing system, the Library com­missioned an archival supply company to make the product.

Krueger’s team also had to deal with the treatment needs of some of the draw­ings, including tear repair, tape removal and consolidation. Some of the materials used did not adhere to each other very well, such as the Wite-Out™ and the stick-on labels. Each of these elements had to be re-adhered to the drawings using a variety of appropriate adhesives.

Now all 14,400 cartoons have been properly treated and housed in their own individual folders, a project that took five years. The project also included dealing with Herblock’s 50,000 “roughs,” pre­liminary cartoons drawn on poor-quality newsprint. Some had been housed in Herblock’s Georgetown basement with the finished drawings, but most were stored in a warehouse.

“He saved everything!” said Krue­ger.

Each day, when Herblock was trying to decide what cartoon to draw, he would sketch up several possibilities. Then he would take these rough drawings around to his colleagues at the Washington Post and ask their opinions.

The roughs have been sorted and placed into archival file folders by the Library’s conservation team. The rough drawings are not available to the public, because they are in poor condition and cannot be handled. “We would like to digitize them,” said Krueger. “There’s a gold mine in there, depictions of his thought process that haven’t been seen before.”

Holly Krueger, a senior paper conservator in the Conservation Division in the Library's Preservation Directorate, led a team in preserving more than 14,000 cartons of material by political cartoonist Herblock. (Photo by Abby Brack)

The next preservation phase for the Herblock col­lection involves further study of the materials he had used. “Launching into this new study will be very satisfying for me. I hadn’t had a chance to catch my breath. But now I can go back and take a more in-depth look at the cartoons from a materials standpoint,” added Krueger.

The results of this study will help the Library store the cartoons under the best possible condi­tions in the future and guide conserva­tors on how best to handle the drawings during exhibitions.

Krueger also is working with Fenella France from the Library’s Preservation, Research and Testing Division in moni­toring the Herblock cartoons while on display in the current exhibition. Seven drawings underwent hyperspectral imag­ing prior to display, to get a baseline on their condition. They will continue to be examined via hyperspectral imag­ing three months into the exhibit and again at the end. The results will show if or how the cartoons changed during exhibition.

“It’s been a huge privilege to work on this collection,” Krueger said. “I’ve been able to closely observe the work of a really great artist, watch the development of his style. It’s been humbling to see his body of work. He had a lot of integrity, knew what he believed in and fought for it. And I’ve learned a lot about the 20th century.”

The preservation stories of Krueger and other conservators and scientists in the Preservation Directorate will be shared with the public starting some­time this spring, when Preservation rede­signs its web pages. Staff members will write first-hand accounts of their experi­ences handling the Library’s treasures. The launch of the web pages will be announced later.

Even for many of those who might yawn their way through the gridiron action on Sunday between New Orleans and Indianapolis, they will perk right up and stare intently at the screen during the station breaks.

Super Bowl commercials have become something of an event of their own, alongside the actual game.  The Inside Adams blog takes a look.

(The following is a guest article about new preservation capabilities at the LOC by my colleague Donna Urschel, which was recently published in the the Library’s staff newsletter, the Gazette.)

Preservation Research Chief Eric Hansen explains how equipment is used to capture sound from damaged audio recordings. (Abby Brack photo)

For many decades, details of the 1791 Pierre L’Enfant Plan of Washington, D.C.—one of the many treasures at the Library of Congress—had been obscured. A long-ago application of a varnish preservative had darkened the map’s surface. But today, thanks to special imaging techniques, the invisible streets and special locations, including the “President’s House” and “Congress’ House,” pop out.

Hyperspectral imaging, a process of taking digital photos of an object using distinct portions of the light spectrum, is revealing what previously could not be seen by the human eye.

In room 27 on the sub-basement level of the James Madison Building, fascinating details of our historical heritage are coming to light in the recently opened Optical Properties Laboratory. Operated by the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD) in the Preservation Directorate, the lab contains a hyperspectral imaging system, an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM), equipment for optical disc quality testing and a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) system.

The new lab enhances the Library’s capability to use nondestructive analytical techniques to track changes in optical properties of materials, helping conservators, curators and librarians extend the life of the collections. Along the way, many interesting details about the documents are revealed.

The Optical Properties Lab is one of three new labs in the Preservation Directorate. Two more will open in the Madison Building in 2010: the Chemical and Physical Properties laboratories. The new equipment and redesigned space will bring the 30-year-old science labs of the Preservation Directorate into the 21st century.

Stephen Hobaica in the Library’s Preservation, Research and Testing lab tests for chemical markers of degradation of magnetic media. (Abby Brack photo)

“Other libraries in the United States and around the world depend upon the cutting-edge capabilities of the Library of Congress preservation labs. I invested in updating the labs to continue Preservation’s important legacy,” said Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services. “Current analytical technology allows us to do more now with less. More sensitive analysis can now be undertaken with less sampling, less preparation, in less time and with less instrumentation and waste, making the entire research and development process more streamlined, sustainable, effective and cost-efficient.”

Marcum continued, “I’ve been gratified with the discoveries and advances the Optical Properties Lab has made in the few short months it has been open, revealing hidden writing and lost text, giving new insight into the Library’s top treasures.”

Recent imaging of the Library’s hand- written draft of the Gettysburg Address (the Nicolay copy) illuminated a thumbprint on the front and three fingerprints on the back, as if someone had been holding the document while reading it. Was it Abraham Lincoln?

Fenella France, a PRTD scientist who heads up the hyperspectral imaging, discussed the recent discovery. “We had noticed a darkened area on the document. We looked closer and the fingerprints came into focus. It was a goose-bump moment.”

Fenella France and Jennifer Wade, research chemists in the Library’s Preservation, Research and Testing Division point out detail on a map that can only be seen using the lab's hyperspectral imaging system. (Abby Brack photo)

France then tried to track down information on Lincoln’s fingerprints but could not find anything for comparison. She hopes someday to conduct hyperspectral imaging on other Lincoln documents.

Hyperspectral imaging looks at materials via narrow-wavelength-band regions of the light spectrum, from ultraviolet through visible to infrared. The images are captured and digitally combined with or subtracted from each other to reveal details invisible to the naked eye. The results inform scientists on how to better preserve treasured items.

The document detective work also enhances historical details. On the 1791 L’Enfant Plan of Washington, imaging reveals a traffic circle drawn at 16th and K Streets that had been erased. Did L’Enfant make a drawing mistake or was he seriously considering a circle there? On the 1516 Carta Marina World Map by Waldseemüller, imaging revealed the reverse side of a small section that was pasted down onto the map. Written on the reverse side was a list of errors that needed to be corrected on the map

The PRTD lab’s first service is to meet the needs of the Library’s conservators and curators, but occasionally the Library will use its imaging system to assist other agencies. The Library recently was part of a forensic document examination team for the National Archives and Records Administration that studied two pages of handwritten notes of H. R. Haldeman, chief of staff for President Richard M. Nixon. These were the notes taken on the day that Nixon lost more than 18 minutes of conversation on his office tapes. Results will be released in 2010.

Jennifer Wade, a scientist in the Library's Preservation Research and Testing Division, places a photograph in the chamber of the environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) in the new Optical Properties Laboratory of the Preservation Directorate.

The environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) is another system that reveals details invisible to the naked eye. The microscope produces images at a very high magnification, up to 100,000 times.

As with hyperspectral imaging, ESEM is a non-invasive method. An entire document can be placed in a chamber of the microscope, which maintains proper environmental temperatures, humidity and pressure. A high-energy beam of electrons scans the document and produces digital images and a chemical analysis reading.

Jennifer Wade, a PRTD scientist who oversees ESEM imaging, said the electron microscope yields a digital image with a three-dimensional appearance that reveals an item’s surface structure. In addition to an image, a spectrum is produced with peaks that represent the chemical elements. The higher the peak, the more that element is contained in the material.

The ESEM, like hyperspectral imaging and other new systems, can help identify chemical components through a colorization process sometimes referred to as “false color” or pseudocolor. Wade can identify elements by programming a “dot” map of colors assigned to elements. For example, she can assign pink for lead and orange for carbon. When the microscope creates an image and those colors are revealed, Wade knows those elements are present and can share that information with conservators and other scholars working with collections.

In a current project, Wade is using ESEM to analyze ungilded daguerreotypes. Daguerreotypes were the first form of photography, introduced in France in 1839. Until 1841, daguerreotype plates were not gold-coated or gilded, resulting in surfaces that are uniquely fragile and difficult to study or treat. The Library holds more than 725 daguerreotypes, eight of which are ungilded. One of the eight is the first American photographic self-portrait, an 1839 image of Robert Cornelius.

A series of the digital images that were captured by the hyperspectral imaging system are on display. (Abby Brack photo)

The Library commissioned a company to create four daguerreotype plates that mimic the ones created in 1839. With these model plates, Wade can use ESEM to learn how the plates are damaged and corroded and then work with conservators who develop treatment, storage and housing guidelines.

The Optical Imaging Lab also contains a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) system. Like ESEM, FTIR looks at objects at a microscopic level and reveals the chemistry. FTIR is best used for examining organic materials, such as plastic binders and coatings affecting, for example, longevity of audio and video tapes, and ESEM is best used for analyzing inorganic materials, such as minerals and pigments found in the text or images of manuscripts and prints.

“In order to ensure full access to all knowledge contained in our collections, we need to guarantee the longevity of the collections,” said Dianne van der Reyden, director of the Preservation Directorate. “We do this through understanding the materials science, understanding the effects of aging and use on the optical, chemical and mechanical properties of items. We redesigned the Library’s labs to be devoted to characterizing and identifying changes in these properties.”

In 1867, the American West was still very much wild.  It was into that new frontier that a young photographer named Timothy O’Sullivan ventured to provide a visual record of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, led by Clarence King.

As much a PR effort to encourage settlement of the West as it was an expedition, the survey yielded stunning landscape photos from the lens of O’Sullivan, who had been an apprentice to Mathew Brady.

Today the Library is home to more than 900 O’Sullivan photos, more than 90 of which are on display as part of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan.”  (A companion book accompanies the exhibition.)

In order to make these remarkable images more broadly available and known, we have uploaded a set of them to our Flickr photostream.  According to our curators in the Prints and Photographs Division, O’Sullivan’s task was slightly more arduous than those of today’s point-and-click shutterbugs:

Look closely, and you’ll see traces of a photographic art quite different from today’s pocket-size tools. A wagon for equipment, a large negative made of glass, a heavy wood camera, and O’Sullivan himself. The large-format prints were presented on mounts about 16 x 20 inches. The smaller stereograph pairs were mounted side by side to produce a three-dimensional effect.

If you haven’t visited our photostream lately, stop by and add your tags and comments.  Our thousands of images have received, at last count, about 23 million views.

One recent set of pictures commemorates the recent second anniversary of our Flickr pilot project, rounding up some of the best of the best comments we have received so far.

(Photo above: “Butte near Green River City, [Wyoming]” from Flickr.)

(Guest post by Michelle Springer, Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives)

Jan. 16 is the two-year anniversary of the launch of the Library’s account on Flickr, the photosharing website. We started with approximately 3,100 photos in our account; today 30 additional archives, libraries, and museums from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and Sweden now contribute images with no known copyright restrictions to the “Commons” on Flickr.

The Commons loudly invited people to “help describe the world’s public photo collections,” which in turn inspired a spontaneous “Friends group” and website called Indicommons, where supporters write about interesting images, curate thematic selections, set up interactive games, and create new applications.

As of today, there have been more than 23 million views of the images and more than  27,700 Flickr community members call us a contact.  In two years, we have loaded more than 8,000 images in two collections (historic photographs and historic newspapers) in 11 sets on diverse topics—baseball, women’s rights, and Abraham Lincoln, to name a few. Over a thousand records in the Prints and Photographs online catalog have been enhanced with information from the Flickr Commons community.  More accurate and detailed information in our catalog, with links to interesting histories, makes the pictures not only easier to find but easier to understand.  The interactions with our photos are remarkably varied-ranging from the practical (corrected spellings and dates) to the imaginative. Energy for volunteering information continues to run high. 

Just in time for the birthday, there’s a new Library of Congress set on Flickr, titled “Great Comments, THANK YOU!” It points to images that generated a variety of interesting comments.

We look forward to the coming year and making more connections!

As America prepares to celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday later this month, the Library of Congress also will have two offerings in February in commemoration of African American History Month. 

On Feb. 3, the Library will launch a new online exhibition about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that has donated its records to the Library, where they are the most-consulted collection. That exhibition will be launched with a ceremony in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium at 10 a.m. featuring Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, joined by NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous and AARP Vice-President, Multicultural Markets Edna Kane-Williams.

On Feb. 26, the Library of Congress also will hold a symposium on the NAACP in room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C., from 10 a.m. to noon.  The symposium will be free and open to the public. Both the online exhibition and the symposium are made possible by the generous support of AARP.

The new website will feature nearly 70 treasures from the NAACP’s storied history, including the “Call,” Oswald Garrison Villard’s manifesto that launched the NAACP; the organization’s constitution and bylaws; photos of such key events as the New York Silent Protest of 1917, the Marian Anderson concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and Rosa Parks’ 1955 arrest; documents about investigations of lynchings; President Harry Truman’s executive orders barring discrimination in the federal government and military; the Supreme Court decisions on discrimination; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and background on seminal figures in the NAACP.

Speaking at the symposium “The NAACP: Reflections on the First 100 Years” will be Patricia Sullivan, associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of South Carolina; Robert L. Zangrando, professor emeritus of history at the University of Akron; and Kenneth W. Mack, professor of law at Harvard University. The symposium will explore both the history of the NAACP, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009, and its future.

In addition to the NAACP records, the Library also houses a vast array of materials useful in the study of African Americans’ struggle for equal rights: the original records of organizations including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the microfilmed records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Also, the Library holds the personal papers of major figures in black American history, including those of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Spingarn, Moorfield Storey, James Forman, Patricia Roberts Harris, Edward W. Brooke, Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter and Joseph Rauh.

Today Katherine Paterson, the author of “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Jacob Have I Loved,” “The Day of the Pelican” and more than 30 other children’s books, was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.

She summarized her platform for the reading-promotion post in four words: “Read for your life.” Paterson, who has won both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award two times each along with numerous other national and international awards, said books had altered her life on more than one occasion and have an unsurpassed power to bring delight and wisdom to readers.

She takes over the two-year gig from the hilarious Jon Scieszka, who warned her at a ceremony at the Library that the big medal that goes with the title is best not worn through airport security, where it sets off metal detectors and raises questions, even packed in the luggage.  Scieszka, the first National Ambassador, shared with the audience a recording of a special fanfare for kettle drum, trumpet, trombone and xylophone that was created for him by students in California.  Scieszka was thanked by the Librarian and those assembled for his two years of zany, madcap service.

Paterson’s charge – as Scieszka’s was – will be to appear at many venues around the nation over the next two years, including the 10th annual National Book Festival sponsored by the Library of Congress, to be held in September. She will share the joys of books and literacy, especially for youngsters.

Paterson said she began writing with the goal of writing a book “that will do for a child what “The Secret Garden” did for me” when she was a somewhat lonely girl. “I remember how comforted I was by “The Secret Garden.”

A large crowd of schoolchildren attended Tuesday’s ceremony in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, asking such questions as: What’s your favorite book? (When she was their age, it was “The Yearling” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.) What’s your favorite among your own books? (She couldn’t pick one. Like her kids, she found much to love in each.) What inspired “Bridge to Terabithia?” (A childhood friendship of her son’s.) What inspired “Jacob Have I Loved?” (Hearing an adult friend complain that the friend’s mother had always loved her brother more.)

The post is cosponsored by the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book, the Children’s Book Council (CBC) and its foundation, known as Every Child a Reader.  The post is financially supported by Penguin Young Readers Group, Scholastic Inc., HarperCollins Children’s Books, Random House Children’s Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, MacMillan Publishers, Holiday House, Charlesbridge, National Geographic Children’s Books, Candlewick Press and Marshall Cavendish Publishers.

… And despite all good cheer,

It sized up as “boringest night of the year.”

Still 36 hours until Christmas dawning,

And reruns of reruns were leaving ‘em yawning.

The tree decorating had happened last week

The lineup of movies appeared rather bleak.

The cookies were eaten; the sprinkles were scattered

No Christmas ‘till Christmas! That’s clearly what mattered.

Yet out on the web was a trove worth a look:

A digitized shelf-full of rare, classic books.

By Dickens!

By Moore! and

By Frances H. Burnett!

And free off the web –

You won’t have to return it!

So, hold off those sugar-fueled siblings’ catfights

By letting them read “The Arabian Nights.”

And with one shopping day left, right next to that Wii™,

You can guarantee holiday books  ‘neath that tree.

Merry Christmas to all … and to all, a good read!

There’s something very satisfying in music about the number three: three notes in a basic chord, a romantic waltz in 3/4 time, the three-movement form of early symphonies.

So it’s appropriate that the Library’s third blog (behind this one and “Inside Adams” from the Science, Technology and Business Division) would come from the Music Division.

“In the Muse” (I got the pun without help from anyone) will showcase the Music Division’s diverse collections and public programs that range from Beethoven to The Beatles and beyond. A single blog post might link priceless manuscripts that can be viewed along with performance footage from our own Coolidge Auditorium, making historical documents come alive. Guest posts will come from our enthusiastic specialists on staff, as well as from the vibrant artists who grace our stage.

Did you know that we have a vast performing arts collection, numbering in the tens of millions of items?  It’s one reason we say that we’re “more than a library.”

I hope you’ll find that that In the Muse will be a lively and insightful guide into a world song and inspiration.

December 18 is a special day in the yearly calendar of the Library of Congress – it’s the day when several of the rare stringed instruments in the Library’s collection are taken from their display cases and handed to the members of a talented string quartet.  The collection was assembled with the intention that it be used – and these incomparable Strads couldn’t find a better place to strut their stuff than the Coolidge Auditorium stage, built for chamber music.

The instruments are played yearly in honor of their creator, Antonio Stradivari, who died on Dec. 18, 1737.

This year, the musicians on stage will be the Parker Quartet (external link),  which originated in Boston – a youthful group with classical chops and a fresh attitude. They offer a broad classical repertoire, but they’re equally at home with jazz and folk; the Dec. 18 program includes pieces by Beethoven, Haydn and Dutilleux (a piece commissioned by the Library’s Koussevitsky program). Before the concert, at 6:15 p.m. in the adjacent Whittall Pavilion, expert bowmaker Yung Chin will talk about the endangered Pernambuco tree, which provides wood for the finest string bows.

Considering that access to this 8 p.m. concert is free (tickets must be obtained through Ticketmaster, (301) 808-6900, where there’s a $2.75 per ticket charge to use the service), what’s not to like? You’ll get a chance to see some of the world’s rarest instruments in actual use, hear sublime music and enjoy the acoustics of a world-famous auditorium designed to deliver this exact experience.  What’s more, there’s a whole season of these free concerts to enjoy.   

Here’s a tip – sometimes there are unoccupied seats at concert time.  If you come to the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St., S.E. shortly before showtime, there are often standby seats at the will-call desk starting at 6:30 p.m.

 For a sneak preview of the Parker Quartet, click here (external link).

 For a video of Bach’s Chaconne being played by virtuoso Nicholas Kitchen on one of the Library’s Strads – the “Castelbarco” –  click here and then click “play RealMedia.”

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division has added 116 photocrom travel views of the Netherlands from 100 years ago to our Flickr page, bringing the total number of photochroms on Flickr to 773.

Photochroms, published primarily from the 1890s to 1910s, are prints that were created by the Photoglob Company in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Detroit Publishing Company in Michigan. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches. You can learn more about them here.

The Library is looking toward the power of crowd-sourcing to help enhance our records about these images:

“Your addition of current place names is much appreciated! Some locations have changed names or even countries since 1900. And, the titles we had to work with from the photochrom publishers based in Detroit and Zurich tended to be English or German versions of the place names.”

(The included image, “Native girls, Marken Island, Holland,” from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog and also online at Flickr.)