Dictionaries are an ever-changing record of language, constantly being updated, amended and added to. This goes for all dictionaries: Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary, Collin’s.Updates to the dictionary can be new words entirely,
Today I talk a little about pandemic projects, zines, and artist’s books, and have a wonderful discussion with the Quarantine Public Library. The Quarantine Public Library (QPL) is a collaborative project dreamed up by artists Katie Garth and
Follow the process of making a book while we cover specialized book terms, and some surprising idioms with bookish origins that we use in daily language.
This episode covers the true story of James Cook, a bookbinder who murdered tool engraver John Paas the town of Leicester, bookbinder James Cmurdered tool engraver John Paas over a dispute about brass finishing tools. The tale is particularly
Willard Library is the oldest library in Evansville, IN, established in 1885. There have been reports of apparitions and poltergeist activity from patrons and employees of the library since 1937 that continue to this day. In this episode we wil
We at BookLab II have just returned from a fabulous but exhausting trip to the CODEX Symposium and Book Fair, held every other year in the Bay Area, California. Today I am joined by my fellow BookLab colleagues: Craig Jensen, conservator, maste
If you've ever watched any television shows or movies ever, you may have seen a familiar looking newspaper read by many fictional characters for decades. This exact same newspaper has been spotted in Scrubs, Modern Family, No Country for Old Me
Today’s episode is all about unreadable books. What does it mean to read? How do we garner read meaning from text written in a language that we do not understand? Today We will talk about the process of reading, and I have some fun historical a
Now that we are in October, we are getting into the Halloween spirit by talking about an infamous book called The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches. A book responsible for fueling the heinous witch trials throughout medi
What is book art exactly? What is an artist book? Are all art books book art? What do you mean by "codex"? Or livre d'artiste? Are you making these words up? I've been getting questions like these for the past seven episodes or so. So today we
Lyall Harris is a book artist, writer and painter who lives and works in Charlottesville, VA, and Florence, Italy. Lyall's artwork has been exhibited in more than one hundred solo and juried group shows and recognized with over twenty awards. S
Today we are on the hunt for missing punctuation. Like many letters and even entire words, quite a few good punctuation marks have been lost to modern English. In this episode, we’re going to track down some forgotten and elusive marks, from th
For his 90th birthday in February 1913, renowned British naturalist and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace received a mysterious package containing a small booklet called Shall We Have Common Sense. This booklet, dated 1849, contained
Artist Talk with Book Artist Julie Chen at University of Washington on March 16, 2017 during the reception for "Every Moment in a Book: Three Decades of Work by Julie Chen"
In early 1916 on an excursion through the ruined city of Ypres, Belgium, British soldiers came across a damaged letterpress machine in a bombed out print shop. Over the next two years, Captain Frederick J. Roberts and his men produced twenty-th
Today's episode is all about reading - what it means to read, how we read, and a brief history of reading. I'll talk about literacy rates, the alphabetic principle, phonetics, and nonsense poems by Lewis Carroll.
Originally published as "Marginalia Podcast" in November 2016, this is the pilot episode of Books in the Wild Podcast. In this episode we cover the gruesome book of John Horwood, a man whose punishment for his crimes didn't stop at just executi