🌏📚 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS | *Prints across the Pacific, 1565–1815* Getty Connecting Art Histories Project 2026–28 (1/7)

English rare book dealers sure can drink.

It's a red flag when people describe themselves as creative.

There is truly no narrative that captures quite how - everything that could go wrong before a big international trip - that last 24 hours have been

Off to London tomorrow to judge these bad boys. Happy that we have three entries from East Asia. The Japanese submission is, funnily enough, on Conrad Gessner ilabprize.org/breslauer-ye...

Other places have rain, we have bursting chemical vats, oil slicking down the LA river, fires that turn the hills to memory, and an earth always wanting to suck you down.

Es un gran placer para nosotros presentarles el nuevo programa de la iniciativa Connecting Art Histories de Getty: “Estampas a través del Pacífico, 1565-1815,” coordinado por Stephanie Porras (Tulane) y Devin Fitzgerald (UCLA). (4/7) cmrs.ucla.edu/research/cal...

So @devinfitz.bsky.social and I are delighted to announce a new program through @gettymuseum.bsky.social Connecting Art Histories initiative: “Prints across the Pacific, 1565-1815." (en español también)(1/7)

So pleased to be working with Queen Dr @periodeye.bsky.social on this project. Please spread the word!

I am routinely humbled by the brilliance, passion, and zest of my friends. That's why they are my friends. They remind me to more. Nice little reflextion by one of my best, Ben Star: www.abraxasreview.org/features/fro...

It is wild to me that I am in charge of this collection: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_B... Unfortunately, because it was rolled into special collections, it lost its dedicated librarian. Now, it is only occasionally used. I feel as a queer, dyslexic, eccentric, I really should get people into it.

Ok Bluesky. I am planning on buying this for UCLA, but neither the dealer nor I have ever seen one. Probably circa 1780s, prints are from a 1730s series. You spin the knows and the picture scrolls through narratives of the old testament. Anyone seen one before? Know what they are called?

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

Since we do not have an exhibition program, I never get to do the deep-dive stuff. I am slowly going batty in my life of superficial encounters with really cool things.

Will a date in LA ever be on time? *screams in ancestral New England*

Lately life has been: I am sorry I missed your email. There was another email I missed that found me in the night. It put me into the trunk of a car. I woke up cold and naked in the desert. There was a jug of water and a revolver with a single bullet in it. Someone wrote "smile more" in the sand.

The NY fair is always such a great friend reunion. Also a reminder that, although I love LA, NYC is per capita the most exciting rare book city in the world. The number of smart librarians, good collections, dealers, etc. is unbeatable. The only thing I miss in LA are these 1am drinking sessions.

This is like ultimate nerd fan girl content for me: Jean Mabillon letter. Aka Paleography daddy

We have finally completed the digitization of this unique work, so as of now it is available online for all #earlymodern #rarebooks #bookhistory people to enjoy! ☞ dams1.antwerpen.be/asset/KIataT...

We are bad bitches, fwiw.

My round-trip from LAX to Charlottesville VA is as much as my flight to London. Love my UVA and RBS peeps, but ya'll are far.

Great unhinged question of the desk shift: "I hear you guys have Roman art. Where's the Roman art?" I think faculty should start each class by saying: "the best books for this class are in..." the arts library? Getty Villa?

Middle age is an occasional intense yearning to be home, even though home never existed, it's just an indefinite search for peace and safety.

UCLA Spec coll regularly loans to LACMA, and I helped a fair amount with the new show (selecting, meeting, presenting). It is rather my experience with art curators that library curators are just not considered for things like... openings and previews. Anyways, if you are in a museum, do better.

The is a book I helped a private collector get off ebay in 2019 or so. If it sells, I will have given him a 300k+ k profit (counting comission).

This quarter I am not teaching so as to catalog rare Chinese books. Descriptive standards are so wildly subpar, that it's rather shocking. A couple of things we are doing: 1) Counting leaves per chapter (a sort of way to collate) 2) Making lists of other contributors aside from the assigned author

Happy, "our tax rates are higher than the wealthy" day! Was very glad I only owed a small amount in federal taxes this year on my *checks notes* public sector librarian salary.

Rare book curators are either 1) chaos monsters with hoarded offices or 2) incredibly organized with a great attention to detail. I refuse to believe anyone with a moderate temperament gets into this job

God I hate this genre. These kids who protested Gaza got arrested, expelled, beaten up, doxxed, lives ruined by outside agitators and were utterly betrayed by the administrations that should have protected them at any cost. Shut the fuck up.

This thread!!!

Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.

It's Tuesday, you know what that means! Sit in your work parking structure listening to Pet Sounds as you heave a sigh that says, "I should probably go in now."

Even vampires get to reinvent themselves

I’m leading this London Rare Book School course on the history of collecting. Ideal for anyone interested in studying the history of libraries and how and why books have survived. We’ll be looking at why special collections are special. 22-26 June. #bookHistory👇📚📖 ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

This killer hack guarantees dating success: Ask questions and listen to the answers

I feel like it is a quintessential Enby/trans experience to bring up Judith Butler and gender performativity to then get piled on by other gender queer people for hurtful rhetoric. I am apparently an elder curmudge queer, with my hurtful ideas.

This week, the bureaucracy has won. So many good people wasting energy over Byzantine structures. I am properly reverent that we have done this... whatever it is... mostly because of good intentions.

Sino-Jesuit books in the news! www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/a...

PSA: Don't wear gloves to handle old books!* Clean, dry hands are best. *Exceptions may apply. Poison books, metal covers, etc.

How many rec letters for stuff are my other curator peeps writing? I have about 15 a year. Less than like R1 fac with grad students, but still feels like a lot. Does your unit see this as labor, or is it not regarded as such?

Absolutely devastating. Proceed with caution if you have an abuse history: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...

One of the people in this article was recently pitched to me as a guest for TGS. Am I petty enough to email back with the link to it, saying I am not interested in giving my platform to someone who finds pronouns too difficult to parse?

Thinking about Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. The idea emerged while he was in prison, and its ultimate expression came with an instrument that he didn't know existed yet (piano) = Whatever you are doing now, you cannot imagine what it will be someday

Tokugawa print culture is just beyond rich. Kobayashi Fumiko's talk is blowing my mind.

A lot of Americans, while still technically alive, have already given their souls over to evil and are completely dead inside

Rubio: “Let me tell you, Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics.”

No one before Ben has ever considered that trans women might actually be effeminate gay boys. No one has ever suggested such a thing to us, repeatedly, in a bid to prevent us from transitioning, or developed entire typologies around the idea, or reinforced it in multiple academic fields!

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946. In 2007, the US president was born in 1946. In 2017, the US president was born in 1946. And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

“The fact that Ellis was flagged for her name change alone suggests the state of Kansas is intensely monitoring transgender citizens.”

Health care really is wild. I have basically stopped going to my straight pcp and just route everything through the queer nurse who actually listens and believes me. I had to tell my pcp what prep is, explain dysphoria, etc. etc. I may be a Dr but, I'm only qualified to talk about the 16th century.