People have accused my macro photos of being AI which is such a bummer. Like yeah man bugs and crabs are weird but they really do act like that. That’s why nature is cool. AI has ruined weird little guy photography.

How many tripods and arms and goosenecks an mf needs to teach a workshop on making short videos

Trying to prep a workshop for next week but being DEEPLY distracted by tree people taking down a neighbor's tree. The ropes! The physics! The massive logs!

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard University fights to preserve Black newspapers. www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/... Last year, during a move, workers found two whole boxes of Frederick Douglass’s’ The North Star’s first year of publication.

I was able to adjust Deez Nutz so that the N is right side up. I now feel much more comfortable with Deez Nutz. I am glad to report that the new-and-improved copies of Deez Nutz have dropped in my store. #letterpress #nogarbagerobots

Hey hey, it’s now official on Concordia UP’s website, 20% discount code KENNEDY2026 at CUP (CAN) or Chicago (USD, link in next post) for Illuminating Media: Transmitting the Renaissance in England, 1400-1550! concordia.ca/press/illumi...

I'm so glad "balls to the wall" is an airplane thing and not an anatomy thing because my balls really do be to that wall

ART OF PAINT ᴳ

my mac doing its best to telephone a seventeenth century ecclesiastical record 🗃️

Every time this memory pops up on Facebook, I’m thankful that I was enough of a nerd to take a selfie the first time I ever used a special collections reading room 😂

Holy shit, just learned about the typewriter art of Montserrat Alberich Escardívol, a Catalan typist. Using an extra wide typewriter and 180 color ribbons, she built up elaborate images from simple characters like 'm' and '.' and ';'. Here is her typewritten painting of the Cathedral of Barcelona.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Oh, to be a Fly... In a Choirbook? #ThingsInBooks

Are you an artist? Do you work with artists or cultural organizations? Do you want to learn about how to approach media outlets about such work? Well well well, my colleagues at Broad Street Review and I have a virtual training for you on December 10! www.eventbrite.com/e/help-us-he...

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

I’m apparently just causing all kinds of trouble this morning as I respond to emails and do to-dos, but… Also hoping to talk to Philly-local (or adjacent) game dorks who would be willing to help evangelize for a few hours to 800+ 18th century scholars in April.

Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Hearn's Lamps $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

“Are those…” “Hearn’s lamps? Yeah they are.”

The paperback of Medieval Twitter has landed omfg Not quite a stocking stuffer price, but much much more affordable than before, thankfully www.arc-humanities.org/978180270265... #MedievalSky 🗃️ @archumanities.bsky.social

People who talk on speakerphone on the train should go to jail

You meet all the best people at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair! @book-historia.bsky.social

To shreds you say?

You know what they say: dress for the book you want 😂

To shreds you say?

Does anybody know of a database/list of the monograms in signed fine bindings? I feel like I came across something like that once upon a time, but Google is so shit now I can’t find it anymore…

Come to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair this weekend, there’s doohickies and contraptions

"If discovery tools return hallucinated results, the credibility of the library itself could be undermined. Students may come to see the library’s systems as just another unreliable search engine." BINGO

Beantown bound!

Just found out about this amazing example of #manuscript #recycling . The whole manuscript is made up from the margins of an earlier liturgical manuscript, cut out and rearranged (hence the unusual format), the (mostly) blank margins then used to copy various magical texts in the mid 16th century.

I feel like my hair looks very art teacherly today

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

LET'S FUCKING GO

Go vote today!! Local elections matter!!! Love, your friendly neighborhood poll worker

New awareness campaign

I am beyond excited (and nervous!) to announce that my first book, "The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities" is available for sale! This series of essay includes reworked talks, new reflections, and a lot of my heart weherespace.myshopify.com/products/the...

We are the daughters of the daylight you couldn’t save

Vast and trunkless legs of stone $200 Half sunk shattered visage $150 Wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command $800 Hand that mocked them $3600 Pedestal $150 someone who is good at entropy help me budget this. No thing beside remains

Eminently reasonable proposed principles for professors’ use of AI, from a student refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/a...

The scariest thing about today is that it’s November tomorrow .

Wanna hear a scary story? The first American vampire was Black. Seriously. 78 years before Dracula appeared in American literature, there was "The Black Vampyre" by Uriah D'Arcy. It was written in 1819 as an antislavery critique and the effect the Haitian Revolution had on the States

Uh-oh sisters, looks like Penn got hacked

I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re an uncataloged book someone tried to rebind with duct tape

Opens file drawer Sees contents *sigh* Closes file drawer

Question from my rare book cataloging class! What is the longest amount of time you have spent working to catalogue one rare book? (You can DM if you don't want to admit it "out loud"). We are fascinated to hear your answers.📜

Solidarity with BL workers on strike

Joan of Arc — Arthur Szyk, 1942

University of Glasgow MS Hunter 231 my beloved

It is hard to overstate the stress produced by the incoherence of academic institutions pumping generative AI when they want to play business and then leaving instructors to deal with the results when they want to play school

if you see this post, your actions are: - if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this - if you don't have a spare buck, just repost your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

Everyone’s a baller until they get to the “In this chapter, I will” part of the proposal