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Be warned- Lori Nix’s dioramas are very appealing. Once you catch a glimpse of her world-making you won’t want to leave. From Womankind:

Lori Nix constructs hand-made worlds from her living room, complex dioramas sculpted out of foam board, paint, plaster and wood. She lives with power tools scattered throughout her apartment, and a chop saw under her kitchen table. Her worlds, as small as 50 centimetres and as large as 182 centimetres in diameter, take time; nine years to build The City, a series of deserted architectural interiors, which she calls a “safe space to think about larger ideas”, a “meditative space that’s full of possibilities.”

In Lori’s world, ceilings fold in to reveal the sky, creeping vines haunt walls, and shelves of books – lined up with an alert expectancy symbolic of our quest to seek, to learn, to make sense of it all – quietly transition towards dust.

See much more at Nix’s website or watch her create a diorama on the episode of “How Its Made” below. The diorama section starts at the 10 minute mark.

From Audubon a look at photographer Joel Sartore’s plan to capture close-up images of every captive species on Earth:

Sartore finds comfort in the species that have thus far been rescued from the brink: giant pandas, black-footed ferrets, California Condors, Whooping Cranes. Those animals’ populations remain alarmingly low—in the mere hundreds—but they might have disappeared altogether if not for publicity, their natural charisma, and determined efforts to save them. “It’s tough to get people to pay attention, because it just doesn’t affect their daily lives. They figure, Why should I care if a rabbit or a frog goes extinct? Is it going to affect what I make at work? Or is it going to affect my love life? Not in the short term. But I tell you, it’s really folly to think that you can doom everything else to extinction and not have it come back to bite us hard.”

Go the main website and see the pictures – they are truly stunning.

From a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine on the rehabilitation of the Marquis de Sade and a visit with his modern descendant, Count Hugues de Sade:

The family’s embrace of their ancestor is such that Hugues named his eldest son, now 39, Donatien, a first in generations. “We’re proud of the marquis,” Hugues said. “And why not? Today, he is considered a great philosopher. His works are published by the most prestigious publishing house in France, Gallimard. There are conferences about him at the Sorbonne. He is the subject of university theses, and is studied by high-school students in the baccalauréat.”

As we spoke, Hugues pulled down from his bookshelf an array of distinctive heirlooms passed down from the attic trove—the marquis’ church prayer book, original plays (with notes in the margins), his annotated copy of Petrarch (the 14th-century Italian poet’s great love, Laura, may have been a member of the ancient Sade clan)—as well as an enormous rare volume of erotic Salvador Dali drawings inspired by Sade’s novels. As a parting gesture, he produced a bottle of Sade red wine named after one of the marquis’ most famous heroines, Justine, who suffers bloodcurdling abuse as she travels the world. Sade’s novel Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, goes far beyond Voltaire’s Candide in its desire to show humanity’s inherently evil nature.

“Some of his writing is too extreme even for me,” Hugues said. “It is work of total delusion.”

I will confess I am one of those people who did not realize that de Sade was a historical figure – he seemed like someone created in fiction to symbolize all the depravity in the world. I have never read any of his works but was really intrigued by the fact that they have been held in the so-called Hell section of the National Library in Paris.

As interesting as the changing attitude about de Sade is, I find something like a forbidden library more appealing. I imagine in the very modern looking library it is more of a temperature controlled storeroom than the sort of cave it ought to be.

In The Allure of the Archives, historian Arlette Farge unexpectedly discovered de Sade in her usual haunt, the judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille. Apparently, after a slight altercation between two carriages, de Sade stepped out of his and stabbed one of the opposing horses (it lived). Farge writes:

In this situation the marquis acted in the way that made his reputation: gratuitous violence, a sword sunk into the belly of a defenseless horse. This insignificant account confirms so well what we have heard about the vile character of this man that I find myself almost doubting this surprising coincidence; the find is almost too perfect.

All of us engaged in research dream of an unexpected archive discovery although most will be about people and places far less dramatic as de Sade. I’m hoping to find something personal about someone who most of the world knows nothing about, although I hope to write something rather dramatic about him. I don’t plan to look in any “hell” sections for my long overlooked historical figure but I wouldn’t pass up the chance to stroll through one if I could.

Wouldn’t we all like to say we went to hell by visiting the local library? Talk about a middle school dream come true…..

[Post pic via reuters of Guatemala police archives.]

From Tingle Alley:

When Jane was working on this story on the history of Seventeen, we did a lot of emailing back and forth about Back to School magazine issues and how much we loved them. In junior high I read the hell out of every September issue of Seventeen, and the memory is all caught up with the anticipation of seeing people again after the summer and the belief that Everything Was Going To Be Different This Year.

One year, one of the pieces of editorial advice was to soak cotton balls with perfume and lay them on your next day's outfit so that the outfit would become pleasantly layered with scent. I did this DILIGENTLY for at least a month. Four or five cotton balls each night. So that's what September always feels like to me, like the time of year that you believe that you can soak some cotton balls in Jean Nate, tuck them in your clothes overnight, and become magically alluring the next day.

I was a huge fan of Seventeen, from about 1980 (7th grade) through high school. I identify completely with what Carrie writes here about the back to school issue. Every summer I plotted transformations to be unleashed upon the world (and school) in September.

It never happened.

But I still get that thought--that "bouquet of newly sharpened pencils"--thought about making my mark in the fall. Back then it was all about changing my clothes and my hair, now it's more about getting my closet sorted out and reducing the stacks of paper that threaten my laptop; about plotting future articles and organizing research notes.

September comes around again this year, just like it always does, and I'm so happy to see it. I love September and all the accomplishments it still dares us to have.

Excellent article up at Outside on the lengths the people of Timbuktu were willing to go to last year to save their long protected (and centures old) books and manuscripts from an invading jihad. Here's a bit on what books have always meant to the people of Mali who dwell on the Niger River:

The skies had been smudged with Saharan sands all day, but this blew out at night, leaving an enormous Milky Way overhead. When Scottish explorer Mungo Park first came down this river in 1795, he was astonished by what people requested: they wanted paper. In the 1840s, the explorer Heinrich Barth gave away reams of the stuff and described traders wandering the desert with nothing but books to sell. Illiterate Africa was a myth. Words--books--had always been necessary.

And this is just a taste of what the people of Timbuktu did to save their books:

"Then, in August, we found the solution," Traore said. Late at night, they began to pack up manuscripts, stuffing them into old rice sacks. Just the packing took a full month and involved dozens of men from several book-owning families. Traore hired five donkey drivers to carry the thousands of manuscripts--no one could count them all--out of the dispensary around midnight, every night for a week. They loaded the donkeys, and then Traore's 72-year-old grandfather, the retired guardian, walked point, scouting for jihadi patrols. Each night, they distributed books to a different house, joining the small number of high-priority works smuggled out of the main library by underwear.

Go. Read the whole article. It will make you believe in the goodness of the world again.

[Post pic: Malian calligrapher Boubacar Sadeck consults an ancient manuscript at his home in Bamako, Mali. Photo: Marco Di Lauro/Reportage by Getty Images.]

First, there is a call for panel and presentation ideas for the 2011 KidLit Conference over at the Kidlitosphere site. Please fill out the form and let us know what you are thinking.

Second, check out Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura photosover at National Geographic. They are amazing (as you can tell from the one below) but I've been a fan of Morell's forever. I have a copy of his Alice in Wonderland that is outstanding (feel free to be jealous - it's out of print).