A simple job that isn’t so simple…

ShadowGirlMei shows up at a beautiful house on mysterious Arrow Island to tutor a rich man’s daughter, Ella, for the summer. She thinks the job will be drama-free but what Mei doesn’t know is that there is something wrong with the Morison house.  Mei tries to focus on her work but she becomes increasingly distracted by the family’s problems and her feelings about Ella’s brother, Henry. She also has to deal with the weird noises she hears at night, the howling, thumping, and cries. Mei can’t shake the fear that there is danger lurking in the shadows of the house and that darkness could possibly destroy the family and her.

Check it out in the Popular Reading Collection!

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From the Archives & Special Collections: The Towers Restaurant

1.) AWS president-elect, Marian Swanson (center) with Rosemary Martinson (left) and Betty Rusk (right). A Sound Past.  2.) New Otlah members. A Sound Past.  3.) New SPURS members. A Sound Past.

FROM TOP:  1.) AWS president-elect, Marian Swanson (center) with Rosemary Martinson (left) and Betty Rusk (right). A Sound Past. 2.) New Otlah members. A Sound Past. 3.) New SPURS members. A Sound Past.

On December 30, 2017, Imperial Dragon, a Chinese restaurant on Sixth Avenue in Tacoma, shut down. Although the Imperial Dragon restaurant had been in operation since 1993, the site was previously home to two other restaurants: Empress Garden, from 1971 until Imperial Dragon’s opening; and The Towers Restaurant from 1947 until the late 1960s.

The Towers Restaurant was frequently used as a venue for University of Puget Sound (then College of Puget Sound) student events. One such event was the Associated Women Students’ annual banquet on May 15, 1950, celebrating the first anniversary of the Associated Women Students (AWS) as an organization. Women’s groups on campus such as the Women’s Athletic Association (WAA), Otlah (an academic honors group for senior women and the predecessor to Mortar Board), and SPURS (a service honors group for sophomore women) were present at this event. WAA introduced the president and cabinet for the 1950-1951 school year, as well as awarded individual students and sororities for athletic achievement. Both SPURS and Otlah announced their new members for the 1950-1951 school year. The AWS president-elect, Marian Swanson, received the president’s book. For more detail about the women present and the awards given, see the May 19, 1950 issue of The Trail or take a look at A Sound Past to see our collection of photos from student events held at The Towers.

For more information about Imperial Dragon and its history, see the Tacoma News Tribune article from January 4, 2018.

The Archives & Special Collections is open Monday – Thursday from 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m. or by appointment.

By Julia Masur

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Research Tip #1: Stuck?

STUCK?  A librarian can help you brainstorm ways around or over any research hurdles.

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From the Stacks – A few of our favorites – 1891: Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine

StrollsByStarlightWritten by William Hamilton Gibson, an American naturalist from Connecticut, this book is a lovely tribute to nature with illustrations by the author. But equally impressive is the book binding.

The book is bound in  green cloth over boards with gold decoration by Alice Cordelia Morse. Morse was born in Ohio and studied at Cooper Union in New York and at Alfred University. She worked with both John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany – well known designers of the period .  Learn more about Morse and her life by visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s timeline.

Bookbinding  techniques were perfected to a fine art toward the end of the 19th century. During the zenith of the American Decorative Arts Movement, something of an aesthetic crusade, women rose to the fore of book cover design. Alice Cordelia Morse (1863–1961) was a front-runner among the first generation of artists to design commercially produced books. The Grolier Club, an organization devoted to the art of the book hosted an exhibition on the life and work of Morse. Mindell Dubansky, preservation librarian in the Metropolitan Museum’s Thomas J. Watson Library was responsible for the research. She discovered Morse’s designs 10 years ago in a storage room of the Met’s Department of Prints and Drawings.

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The chalk man mystery from the past!

Chalk-ManEddie and his group of friends follow a chalk man and a message which leads them to the dismembered body of a teenage girl. Fast forward thirty years, Eddie is now an adult with a drinking problem, who is working as a teacher at his old school and is trying to forget his past. This is until he receives a letter containing a single chalk figure, the same one he saw that led him to the body. All his group of friends received the same anonymous letter. They try to brush the letters off as a prank until one of them is killed. Eddie realizes that he has to figure out what really happened thirty years ago, which proves more dangerous than anticipated.

Check it out in the Popular Reading Collection!

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Events/Exhibits in Collins Library – Spring Semester 2018

*EXHIBITS: We are pleased to host the following exhibit in the Collins Link:
Louder Than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement: (February 1-May 15, 2018)
Full list of library exhibits (past, present and future)

FEBRUARY

  • Exhibit: “Louder Than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement”, (February 1-May 15, 2018)  The Link, Collins Library.
    Curated by Black Panther Party Archivist and Historian Bill Jennings, Louder than Words: A Portrait of the Black Panther Movement focuses on the Party’s social justice and community programs. The exhibit features a broad range of artifacts, including original pamphlets, newspapers, memorabilia and books on the Black Panther reading list. The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton while they attended college. Motivated by the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Malcolm X, and riots in Los Angeles, the initial impetus for the party was to protect local African American neighborhoods against police brutality. However, the party was more than armed patrols. It also established free breakfast programs, health clinics, and some of the first drug education programs. Billy Jennings grew up in San Diego and moved to Oakland in June 1968. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968 to 1974. He currently works to maintain the legacy of the Black Panther Party, running the website It’s About Time which was started by former members of the Black Panther Party in Sacramento in 1995.
  • Monday, Feb. 12:  A Conversation with Bill Jennings, 4:00-6:00pm, Trimble Forum.

MARCH

Frankenweek! Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Proudly presented by the STS program and Collins Memorial Library:

  • Monday, March 26, discussion of the novel’s literary and film history, and its connections to science and society. 12:00-1:30pm, Thompson 193.
  • Wednesday, March 28, Shelley and Frankenstein: In the Makerspace,
    3:00-5:00pm, Collins Library, Makerspace.
  • Thursday, March 29, Frankie, the Safety-pins Keeper: In the Makerspace, 5:00-6:00pm, Collins Library, Makerspace.

APRIL

  • Thursday, April 5:  Letterpress Printing: Jennifer Farrell, Starshaped Press, 4:00-6:00pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library.  Since 1999, Jennifer Farrell has operated Starshaped Press in Chicago, focusing on printing everything from business cards to posters, as well as custom commissions, wholesale ephemera and limited edition prints & books. All work in the studio is done with metal and wood type, making Starshaped one of the few presses in the country producing commercial work while preserving antique type and related print materials. Jennifer’s work has been repeatedly recognized both in print and design blogs, and has appeared in poster shows throughout the USA and Europe. Work can be viewed at www.starshaped.com.
  • Thursday, April 12:  Booklyn: Supporting Artists’ Books and Social Justice, 11:30am-12:30pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library. Marshall Weber, founder of Booklyn, will be sharing examples of the most recent work of artists. Booklyn’s mission is to promote artists’ books as art and research material and to assist artists and organizations in documenting, exhibiting, and distributing their artworks and archives. Booklyn helps artists document, exhibit, and distribute their artwork and provides the general public and educational institutions with services and programs involving contemporary artists’ publications and works on paper. Booklyn assists artists in inventorying and cataloging their archives and collections and finds institutions to acquire, conserve, and provide access to these resources. Booklyn has created a global network connecting hundreds of artists and educational organizations.Marshall Weber lives in New York City. He has significant bodies of work in the media of: artists’ books, collage, drawing, printing, video, and public endurance performances. He has curated 100’s of exhibitions around the world since the 1980’s and he is known for his outspoken advocacy for artists and cultural organizations that work outside of the conventional academic and commercial art world. Weber received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981, and went on to co-found Artists Television Access, one of the longest (still) running alternative media art centers in the US. Weber was an Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Matters. In 1999 he was co-founder and is now Curator of the Booklyn Artists Alliance, where he has recently organized several innovative funding projects for activist arts organizations, including co-producing a fine art print portfolio to benefit the Occuprint Project of the Occupy Wall Street movement and working on arts projects with: Bulletspace, EZLN (Zapatistas), Food Not Bombs, IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War), Justseeds, World War Three Illustrated and many other organizations. He designed Booklyn’s international archive program which helps underrepresented artists and organizations catalog and place their archives in appropriate educational institutions. In 2012 he and Xu Bing curated the acclaimed Diamond Leaves exhibit which was the first major museum exhibition of artists’ books in China. It has since become a Triennial event. In 2017 Weber was the keynote speaker at the Codex Foundation Symposium.
    (source: http://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Entity/Show/entity_id/792)
  • Thursday, April 12: A Poetry Reading by Local Poet, Glenna Cook, 4:00-5:00pm, Archives & Special Collections Seminar Room, Collins Library.
    April is National Poetry Month! To celebrate, the Library will host a poetry reading by Puget Sound alumna, Glenna Cook. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and, while at Puget Sound, she won the Hearst Essay Prize for the Humanities and the Nixeon Civille Handy Prize for Poetry. Glenna will be reading from her first full-length poetry collection, Thresholds, which was published in 2017. Thresholds features over 100 poems that explore family narratives and life’s complex events, infused with a unique sense of language. Q & A to follow.

 

Past events blog: Fall 2017 | Summer 2017 | Spring 2017 | Spring 2018 | Summer/Fall 2018 | Fall 2018
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From the Stacks – a few of our favorites

CALLOUT_PoemsEmilyDickinson

Photo courtesy of http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/dickinson.htm

1890: Poetry of
Emily Dickinson

Author/Editor:
Emily Dickinson

The  Poems of Emily Dickinson were first published in 1890 and are still in print today.  Many library resources, like the Concise Dictionary of American Literature,  provide insight into the life and work of Dickinson.

The Editor’s Commentary states, “This selection from her poems is published to meet the desire of her personal friends, and especially of her surviving sister.  It is believed that the thoughtful reader will find in these pages a quality more suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found – flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame.” (p.3)

Prelude is the first poem in the book:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, –
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me?

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Sign up for our subscription to New York Times!

CALLOUT_NYTDon’t forget we have a subscription to the digital content for the New York Times – Sign up Now!  Click here to learn how.  Follow the directions to set up an account.

Did you know over 815 Loggers have registered for this service and we had over 5, 491 sessions!

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Artist Talk: “The Amazing World of Colette Fu: Pop-Up Book Engineer”, February 15, 6 p.m., Collins Library, Room 020

Colette-Fu_image-06Colette Fu received her M.F.A. in fine art photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. She has designed for award-winning stop motion animation commercials and free-lanced for clients including Vogue China, Canon Asia, Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, and the Delaware Disaster Research Center. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the West Collection, and many private and rare archive collections. In 2014, Fu attended a 6-month artist residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where she continued her We are Tiger Dragon project, an extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minorities. There she also designed China’s largest (single-spread) pop-up book, measuring 2.5 x 5 x 1.7 meters high.

In her own words: “Pop-up and flap books originally illustrated ideas about astronomy, fortune telling, navigation, anatomy of the body, and other scientific principles. This history prompted me to construct my own books reflecting ideas on how our selves relate to society today. My pop-ups are a way for me to speak and inform; the real and implied motion in the pop-ups link to a temporal element and an inevitable corollary is to awe and unsettle. Constructing pop-ups allows me to combine intuitive design and technical acuity with my love of traveling as I try to understand the world around me. With pop-up books I want to eliminate the boundaries between people, book, installation, photography, craft, sculpture.”

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Campus New York Times Access

CALLOUT_NYTDear Campus Community,

The New York Times is currently experiencing what they are calling a “systems glitch” which has impacted most of their institutional subscribers, including Puget Sound.  This is why those of you who have registered for institutional access are not being recognized when you access articles and/or try to register or re-register for an account.

The Times has assured us that they are working diligently to address the issue.

Our institutional subscription has been renewed for the coming year, and as soon as they address the technical issues they’re having you should have full access.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and fingers and toes crossed that they will resolve this soon.

Thank you very much for your patience,

Andrea Kueter, Social Sciences Librarian & Coordinator of Electronic Resources

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