Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too) @book_historia Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

@book_historia

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Pink-haired book historian, medieval manuscript liker. Curator of Special Collections @winterthurmuse . She/they. Views my own. book-historia on B’sky

https://t.co/8PFXMHm52Z

Joined April 2010

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@book_historia

Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Always wanted to learn about old books, but don’t know where to start? Check out my Bite Sized Book History series on YouTube!📺✨ Every week, I talk about an aspect of book history using examples from libraries and my own collection 📖✨ Check it out:

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I'm Allie Alvis, book historian and rare book cataloguer. Step into the world of book history with me!

www.youtube.com

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@book_historia

Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 months

I’m visiting the Lawrence Public Library and found what is possibly the strongest opener for any book ever

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Ah yes, the three genders,

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Wife guy of 1610!!!!

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 months

So many people refer to “libraries” or “The Library” with zero recognition that these Mystical Final Bastions of the Public Good are run by humans already stretched to their absolute limit

@mollyfleck

Molly

5 months

I am once again begging the city to open indoor playgrounds at public libraries. My child needs somewhere to burn off energy without getting frostbite, and all the private indoor trampoline parks and such are SO expensive.

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

@kittynouveau @LouisatheLast I… what…

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

@granny_st This piece was created in 2019 by Hollie Tibbs, a teacher in Brooklyn. You can read more about it and other doors here:

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These Teachers Have Taken Door-Decorating to New Levels for Black History Month

Teachers Take Door-Decorating for Black History Month

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 months

Nominate Amelia and Ingrid C. for a Peabody

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

The “o no a library weeded their collection! :’( what is this world coming to?” post has a similar vibe as that cop publicity stunt Little Free Library thing a few months ago. Both are manufactured emotional manipulation based on the IDEA of books rather than the REALITY of books

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Oh my god De Bry cosplay??

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

My jaw **DROPPED** at the footnote!!!!

@NoraEpstein

Nora Epstein, PhD

1 year

In a happy coincidence, this week, I finally got a tattoo of the psychomachic figure of Memory from John and Richard Day’s ‘A Booke of Christian praiers’, which I also sourced from LUNA. If you are wondering which edition or page, check my footnote. (Sorry to be so PEDantic).

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Tumblr remains undefeated

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Kids these days and their text message slang

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Wild that @'ing a company on Twitter is now more efficient than going through the company's actual customer service systems...

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

11 months

Ah yes, the three genders

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Books are cool, but there's this whole weird culture of Performative Book Loving that makes me grit my teeth. It's been around for centuries (see: rich folks decking out their stately homes in books they never read), but social media has made it particularly insufferable

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

@TheMERL @britishmuseum I know I’m a good while behind the curve on this one but check out this chonky boi I found at @librarycongress today

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

Here’s looking at Euclid

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Ever wonder what the rest of the Lindisfarne Gospels looks like? I asked an AI to

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Kicked the “Why aren’t you wearing gloves when you touch old books?!?!” hornet’s nest yesterday on Insta… the responses have been a great learning opportunity for some people!

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

The three genders: mister, misses, and manuscript

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

OBSESSED with the little peekaboo window the decorator left for the guide letter here :’)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

My absolute favorite thing about many mid-19th century alphabet books is how the authors just utterly give up when they get to XYZ 😂

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Why don’t rare book professionals wear gloves when handling old books? We’re not careless – we’re protecting them! And now you can read about it in @nytimes , with quotes @librarycongress , @MorganLibrary , @rarebookschool , @GrolierClub , and…me!✨🙌

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For Rare Book Librarians, It’s Gloves Off. Seriously. (Gift Article)

When handling rare books, experts say that bare, just-cleaned hands are best. Why won’t the public believe them?

www.nytimes.com

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Happy #ForeEdgeFriday from @typepunchmatrix land! Sail away on this hidden fore edge Viking longship on the 1859 “Northern Antiquities” 📚

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 years

That’s another New York Antiquarian Book Fair “in the books!” Fav of the day was this embroidered dos-a-dos binding at the Sokol booth 😍

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Oh 18th-century paleographer, I feel your pain…

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Unbelievably excited to announce I have accepted the position of ✨Curator of Special Collections✨ at the Winterthur Library! @WinterthurMuse

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Happy #ForeEdgeFriday ✨ This hidden fore-edge painting is from the New-York History Society Library 📖

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Ever wonder why composition notebooks look Like That? It’s an imitation of when they used to look like this! 📓

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

I got myself a little birthday present – a complete set of the ~1930 Allied Newspaper vest-pocket Shakespeare, in its original book case 😍

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

“Annie quit scribbling in your book”

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

If the library threw away old, out-of-date, poor condition books, that’s A GOOD THING. If you walked into your local library and grabbed a book and it was falling apart and full of food stains, I don’t think you would feel great about that library

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Why don’t rare book professionals wear white gloves when handling books? Short answer: to protect them! 🙌 To learn more about why – and where the white glove myth came from – check out my new episode of #BiteSizedBookHistory 📚

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Omg there’s a @wmata fireworks train! 🎆

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

6 years

“I’m searching for a single citation that will add maybe half a sentence to my article” starter pack

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Oh wow, this repair is extremely good

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

@Seb_Falk @guardian “There was no mathematics at that time” bitch WHAT???

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

My soul is absolutely leaving my body at this point

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Archives aren't JUST papers... sometimes they're also cat puppets 😂

@BeineckeLibrary

Beinecke Library

@BeineckeLibrary

1 year

Cat hand puppet from the Edmund Wilson Papers

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

There’s a certain kind of concern troll who values the idea of books over the reality of people. Librarians should be willing to work themselves to death for the noble cause of Books. What does that cause consist of? “Well, I don’t know, just HAVING them I guess.”

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind.

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Well THAT’S not normal… red line to shady grove at Rhode Island opened the wrong set of doors 😬 @PoPville

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

@Greg_Sideyr There it is, the center of the venn diagram 😂

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Doing inventory in 2017, @Georgetown Library found a hollowed-out book titled “Modern Techniques for Information Retention” containing two cans of Red Bull 😂

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

This is the MOST EGREGIOUS repair job I have EVER seen, I literally groaned when I pulled it out of its box

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Tell me, concern troller, how do you think things happen in libraries? Do the books just leap off the shelves into the hands of users? If there were to be a book sale, would they price, sort, and advertise themselves, and run the cash register?

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Oh no I have drunk purchasèd a book with a whack-ass vernacular repair on eBay

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

I KNEW baby Yoda looked familiar... (From Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly delights” @boschbot )

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Spoiler: no, the books don’t take care of themselves. People take care of the books, and there are often not enough people to do that. If you’re upset about libraries throwing away disintegrating fiction, maybe consider HOW HARD it would be to fix that book

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

We’re married!!!!!!!!!! And our Dewey Decimal table number printed by @umd_BookLab has shelved us accordingly 😂

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Packing like a normal person

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

When you stub your toe at work but you can’t curse

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

10 months

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: got startled by a cow in the stacks

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

If people were desperate enough to raid a LFL to get a couple bucks from shitty used paperbacks, they were probably in a tight spot (if they sold them at all!! That’s just what the cops speculated happened!! Maybe they just wanted books!!)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

10 months

My old book collection is finally all set up!!! 🤩 I particularly enjoy what I’m calling the “materials” shelf

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Off to work a miniature shift in the miniature reading room

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Librarianship is NOT just ✨Reading✨ all day surrounded by 📖books📖 #aesthetic , it’s a JOB. It’s a LIVELIHOOD. See this article for more on that:

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

(The thing that looks like an f is actually a long s, but it’s still funny)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

11 months

OMG I START AS CURATOR OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AT THE @WinterthurMuse TOMORROW AAAAAAA

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

I just LOVE dye sample books, they’re bursting with color! 🌈 This one lives in @SILibraries Dibner Library, and dates back to c. 1900.

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

The hottest new Tumblr Trend is (I swear to god) everyone subscribing to an email newsletter that sends out passages from Bram Stoker’s DRACULA sequentially, and as a book historian and meme enjoyer this is FASCINATING to watch

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Excited to announce that I’m facilitating a year-long seminar on making videos with rare materials for the @rarebookschool Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Heritage!

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 years

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

I love a good fore-edge, but these tail edges remind us that the brightest colors are preserved on the sides of the book that see the least light – the bottom! 📚

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Images of rainbow bookshelves cheer some and disgust others. But why? I've written about the historical and social contexts of bookshelves organized by color, and why raging over them reeks of gatekeeping:

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No Mere Foppery: A Defense of Rainbow Bookshelves — Allie "Book Historia" Alvis

Every few months it flares up again: Rage Against Rainbow Shelves. In the pandemic age of bookshelf-as-Zoom-backdrop, the most recent subject of this fury has been none other than National Youth Poet...

www.bookhistoria.com

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

This is an, uh… interesting way to display a 17th century book 😬

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Me in the freezing special collections reading room waiting for the librarian to bring out the rare book I requested

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

If you’re upset that the library didn’t sell/give away the books, consider how much labor goes into those things. Librarians are stretched thin due to budget cuts, and you think it would be a valuable use of time to organize a sale that would make them MAYBE a couple hundo?

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

As a nonbinary person, I don’t fit in just one of two boxes. That’s why this Pride month, I’ll be partnering with Hollinger Metal Edge to

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

My parents’ cat Muffin made a mini muffin :’)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Guess who has two thumbs and owns the world’s best shirt

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 months

“Libraries should do [thing]!” Girlypop do you think libraries are a sentient species that can just do stuff of their own volition, independent of local budgets and staff?

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

With the cop LFL incident, the idea of people taking books to sell was treated as abhorrent, immoral. The practice of weeding is seen in the same way. Neither view considers the people actually DOING the thing (taking books, weeding)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

6 years

The comments on this tweet are solid gold historian banter

@ihr_history

Institute of Historical Research

6 years

We are currently closed to visitors due to biblical flood/wrath of Poseidon. Stay tuned for updates. 🌊🚣‍♀️

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Well, 2020 managed to sneak in something good under the wire... I'm thrilled to announce that I will be joining @typepunchmatrix as a rare book cataloguer in January!! 🎉📚

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 months

I’m SCREAMING this website is so cooked 💀💀💀💀

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 months

Just realized today is my 10-year cancer free anniversary! ✨ Cervical cancer sucks shit, so consider this a reminder to get your pap smear 🙌

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Bug wedding bug wedding bug wedding

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

My masterpiece is complete 🥹🥹

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Did I need to make a pair of hot pink book supports? No. Did I do it anyway? Ya 💕

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

I was grabbing a picture of one of my books for a possible Instagram post and found this 375-year-old mosquito 😂😂

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

@evilvillain1231 Andreas Maler????

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Bookworkers don't just wander into a library with the innate ability to manage collections and serve users. It's a profession. And they aren't perfect. But the social media outrage over that one picture is OUTRAGEOUS when you consider how little is known about it!

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

MANICULE COOKIE CUTTER, THIS IS NOT A DRILL

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

2 years

Oh! My exhibition got a write up in the @washingtonpost !!

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Smithsonian exhibit digs out the ‘nature’ in old books

An exhibit focuses on long-ago artisans’ use of natural items such as leather, flax, lead and even semiprecious jewels to create tomes.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

A handy guide to “Paper, Parchment, and Books” from an ~1840s book of arithmetic I’m cataloguing for @typepunchmatrix 📖🔢

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 years

@DannyDutch The manuscript is located in the State Archives of Dubrovnik, and contains copies of letters sent to the envoys and merchants of the area (Lettere di Levante). Shoutout to @EmirOFilipovic for the find back in 2013!

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

Look at this absolute unit @walters_museum

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Do they seek out a school to home themselves in? (Never mind the labor and budget shortages in education, holy shit. You think a school librarian is going to have the time to process a bunch of “well-loved” books of different genres that a library dumps on them?)

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Okay can we talk about the illumination from @BeineckeLibrary MS 425 and the illuminated borders in the promo pix for the new @LilNasX shoes? Because my medievalist heart cannot take this 😍

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

This all cycles back too to the wack-ass idea that special collections have a fire suppression system that sucks all the air out of the stacks, and librarians are willing to suffocate to save their collections. NOPE

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

10 months

🚨NEW BOOK CURSE JUST DROPPED “Steal not this book, for fere of your life, for don’t you see my butcher knife 🔪 And if you die the lord will say, where is that book you stole, and if you say that you don’t know, he’ll send you down below”

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

For all we know, the library in question HAD a book sale, HAD a free pile that sat around for months, DID try to donate the books that wound up in the dumpster

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

Librarians need to make decisions not just for individual patrons, but for the survival of their organization as a whole. Managers need to decide where best to delegate the labor and funds they have access to in order to get the most out of them

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

But it also may be an indicator of a larger issue within the field: labor. What if those books WEREN’T gross? Why didn’t the librarians just give them away/have a book sale/keep them?

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

5 years

With great manicule cookie cutter comes great responsibility (Reference: @SILibraries 1491 editon of Pliny’s “Naturalis Historia,” digitized and available on @BioDivLibrary )

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

And these huge accounts tugging on bibliophilic heartstrings can, ironically, make the lives of bookworkers more difficult. I am genuinely concerned for the librarian who made the weeding decision that Twitter is yelling about today

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

1 year

Happy #WorldBookDay 📖 Here’s a stack of some of my collection, from not-quite-the-biggest to smallest 📚

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Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

4 years

You love to see it: @FolgerLibrary has put 2,663 "reference photos" (ie, reference librarian smartphone snaps) into their digital collection! These are a GREAT resource, AND a terrific conversation starter about what makes a digital surrogate!

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@book_historia

Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

3 years

The inability of concern trolls to reconcile the Sacred Ideal of the Book with the people that provide access to them is a pity.

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@book_historia

Allie Alvis (on 💙sky too)

9 months

Behold: a book bound in a pair of 18th century recycled leather trousers 👖

Tweet media one

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