On October 4th I will not be at BloggerCon. I will not be at the National Book Festival either. Instead I will be at a panel sponsored by the Ticknor Society and the Harvard Humanities Center’s History of the Book Seminar.
The panel, titled “Four Contributions to the History of Libraries”, will feature the following talks:
- “The librarian in loco parentis” by Matthew Battles
- “‘A beginning is made’: Women and Harvard’s Nineteenth-Century Card Catalogue” by Barbara Mitchell
- “‘Variously employed’: Sir Sidney Cockerell and the Boston Public Library” by William Stoneman
- “Building ‘Wisdom and Stability’: Mary Lowell Putnam’s Library and Women’s Book Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston” by Helena Toth
I have previously heard a version of Barbara Mitchell’s paper on the role of women in the creation of Harvard’s first card catalogue, and I think that it is a very interesting topic (worth listening to again). The other topics sound equally as interesting.
Matthew Battles, by the way, will be speaking this Friday at the Harvard Bookstore. His new book, Library: an Unquiet History is definitely receiving a great deal of attention, and it is, in fact, this month’s Librarian’s Book Club selection.
For more information on the library history panel or on other events for bibliophiles, check out the Ticknor Society events page. The page was recently updated to include all of the events for 2003-2004, and there are many exciting book-related activities planned. I am particularly happy to see one event for children’s book collectors as I know that there are many of us in the Boston area and at Harvard.
September 17th, 2003
I was so distracted by problems with my blog that I forgot to post about the first night of Latin class on Monday. As I reported earlier, Latin has suddenly become one of the most popular classes at the Extension School, for reasons not quite clear to me. Monday night the room was at capacity with, clearly, many more people than the thirty enrolled students and ten wait-listed students on the roll. In fact, until people brought desks and chairs from other classrooms, it was standing room only.The good news is that starting next week there will be two sections of Latin E-1A meeting on Monday nights. So, if you were not able to register and still want to take Latin this year, you can.
However, I am really not certain how the class will be divided. The instructor decided to split the class into two groups based on where people were sitting this week. I noticed, though, that this will result in one class that is predominantly female and one class that is predominantly male.
I would prefer if the class was divided by language abilities, somehow. Some people in the class are taking Latin E-1A as a refresher course. The people in this group know Wheelock (the textbook) well and/or have a basic understanding of Latin or other classical languages. Other people are complete beginners. I am one of these people, and (I think) I would prefer to be in a class with other complete beginners . . . But maybe there would not be enough people in one group or the other. Plus, that would be a complicated division to make.
At any rate, I will see how things go next week. It should be better next week. I started feeling faint in the extremely hot and crowded room this week. Fainting on the first day would have been a dramatic, but not particularly good, way to start the semester.
September 17th, 2003