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The Oxford English Dictionary is the work of people: many thousands of them. In my work on the history of the Dictionary I have found the stories of many of those people endlessly fascinating. Very often an individual will enter the story who cries out to be made the subject of a biography in his or her own right; others, while not quite fascinating enough for that, are still sufficiently interesting that they could be a dangerous distraction to me when I was trying to concentrate on the main task of telling the story of the project itself.

The post Esperanto, chocolate, and biplanes in Braille: the interests of Arthur Maling appeared first on OUPblog.

Sir David Willcocks sadly passed away in September 2015. This is OUP’s tribute to a highly gifted musician and outstanding choral director whose leadership, decency, and humanity have inspired countless singers and conductors to try to follow his example.

The post Sir David Willcocks (1919-2015): an inspirational life remembered appeared first on OUPblog.

Greece is not alone in suffering from budget cuts arising from the era of austerity. In the UK, local councils, libraries, museums – all public services have been cut. Criminal Justice has not escaped this cost-cutting. The consequence has been fewer police officers on the streets, less money for legal aid lawyers, and closures of Magistrates courts.

The post Austerity and the prison appeared first on OUPblog.

This June, we’re featuring Ludwig Wittgenstein as our philosopher of the month. Born into a wealthy industrial family in Austria, Wittgenstein is regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century for his work around the philosophy of language and logic. Take our quiz to see how well you know the life and studies of Wittgenstein.

The post How well do you know Ludwig Wittgenstein? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

Continued from Part 1 (Prep, Angst, Anticipation) - Part 2 (Meeting Michael Ian Black, B&N event in NYC) - Part 3 (Simon & Schuster meet-and-greet)

When I woke up in Boston, this was the view out my hotel room window:

Wow, how very cool. I had been to Boston many years before, but hadn't much time to look around. Someday I WILL go back and spend more time in Boston!

Meanwhile, though, I must tell you about a wonderful indie bookstore: Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA.

I had enjoyed interviewing bookseller Sarah Rettger the month before. Sarah's been in bookselling since 2006 ("with a few detours"), and I loved what she said about Porter Square Books:

"We have the best customers here. Many of them are here just about every day (possibly for our cafe's fantastic pastries as much as for the books). Bear, the large stuffed animal who lives in our kids' section, has a couple dozen devoted attendants, and it's fun to see them make a beeline for him whenever they come to the store."

When I asked Sarah about the importance of picture books, she replied:

"The great thing about picture books is that they're universal. A really good picture book appeals to adults just as much as it does to kids, even after hundreds of readings. 32 pages can reveal so much!"

As soon as I walked into Porter Square Books, I could tell they have a very active community. The place was packed! And LOOK, they had a copy of NAKED! smack dap on the front table, with info about the upcoming event:

While chatting with the staff at PSB, I discovered that Porter Square Books had been awarded a grant from James Patterson which covered copies of NAKED! for all the kids that came to my presentation (!). This article will give you some background on the James Patterson program, which aims to boost the health of America's indie bookstores. In a blog post earlier this year, Porter Square Books said they planned to use their allottment to support children's author visits to schools as well as be able to underwrite the costs of books for children who don't have the means to buy them.

James Patterson, who started a program to help indie bookstores. Photo: David Levonson/Getty Images.

"One of our missions has always been to play a role in promoting children's literacy in Cambridge and Somerville. We are now in a very good position to do just that. We are very grateful to Mr. Patterson."

Sarah also had some of the new Atheneum/Simon & Schuster reissues of the Judy Blume classics with my illustrations. It was the first time I had seen these in the wild, so I was VERY excited:

Also great to spot ICE DOGS on the shelf, a book by my friend Terry Lynn Johnson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):

I had so much fun during the two sessions at PSB, first talking to kindergarteners and then first-graders. 

I arrived half an hour early before the first session, but made the mistake of not setting up my laptop and projector IMMEDIATELY (lesson learned for next time :-)). The kindergarteners arrived 20 minutes early and I found it a challenge to adjust the position of the projector and the extension cord amidst the already-sitting children. The kids were VERY adorable, though, and I really enjoyed talking with them.

Some of them, like those at the B&N event, noticed my NAKED!-themed earrings and necklace:

For the adults who have been asking, I bought these custom book earrings from Emma Dreamstar Creations on Etsy. Kids seemed to be disappointed that the pages in the little book were blank. :-)

I was so impressed by how efficient Porter Square Books uses its space. At least some of the shelves are on wheels, which makes it handy for events since these shelves have to be moved around to make room for an audience each time. 

As soon as the kindergarteners left, Sarah helped me readjust the position of the projector table, and I also made sure to stand near the screen for the next group instead of by the projector. That way, the children wouldn't be torn between looking at the screen and looking at me as I talked.

As much as I enjoyed the B&N event, I couldn't help but be drawn to the more intimate/cozier atmosphere of Porter Square Books event. Also very cool to hang out and chat with PSB booksellers Sarah, Robin Sung and Carol Stoltz. Such nice people!

Carol was excited to hear that I was going to Northshire Books Saratoga the next day. She had just been there, she told me, and it was a fantastic bookstore.  

Thanks also to some of my other friends in the area who dropped by, like Gary McGath and Ellen Kranzer. So great to see some familiar faces. :-)

Afterward, Sarah and I had lunch at Cambridge Common -- so fun! Wonderful conversation about books (of course), historical fiction, writing, crosswords, needlepoint (I suck at needlepoint, Sarah enjoys it :-)) and more. Like me, she has had short forays into other jobs before finding her home career. For Sarah, it was software testing and municipal wetlands management.

After lunch and some directions from Sarah (I am directionally challenged), I even had time for a short walk through Harvard Square before the car service came to pick me up.

THANK YOU SO MUCH, SARAH AND PORTER SQUARE BOOKS! I enjoyed my visit tremendously and hope to go back someday.

Places where you can find out more about Sarah and Porter Square Books:

On Twitter, Sarah's at @SarahRettger and Porter Square is at @PorterSqBooks.

You can find out more info about Porter Square Books at their website Portersquarebooks.com including an event calendar, book recommendations, an ebook resource, a blog and children's section.

But back to the book tour....

I had been dreading the 4-hour car ride from Boston to Saratoga Springs (I get carsick pretty easily), but Mike Boez and the cushy LTI Worldwide Limousine car made the trip much more enjoyable than I expected:

I ended up writing a letter to the service after I got home, telling them so.

I arrived at Saratoga Hilton around dinner time, and felt very spoiled when I saw my room:

Wow.

I briefly considering going out and walking around to see the area but ended up cocooning in my über-comfy hotel room that evening instead, ordering in room service, then organizing and prepping for the next day.

A school in Saratoga Springs had signed on at the last minute -- thanks so much to Rachel Person (Northshire Books Saratoga) and Katy Hershberger (my publicist) for making it possible for me to add this to my itinerary! I had been disappointed that no schools had been able to have me visit, so was excited about this last-minute addition. While Katy changed my flight home to a later departure time, Rachel and I had been exchanging a flurry of emails about our plans.

After adjusting my scribbled notes re: new schedule, I crashed blissfully early.

----- To be continued....

Next up: Northshire Books Saratoga and my visit to Division St. Elementary School!

Part of the reason behind a drought of posts is because I've (finally) got my head down on Corvus!


I don't want to show too much too soon, so here are some inked sketches of crows and or ravens... Done whilst at the second meet-up session for Cambridge based comic creators inaugurated by the hugely talented Emma Vieceli.

Just to prove I'm still drawing things, here's a decorated envelope for one of Stuart's Russian-connection friends.


And here's the best non-handmade card I've had this Christmas, from James and Asako, which isn't even a Christmas card, really, but is just so fabulous:




And thanks to all you fab comics makers at the James Allen's Preperatory School, you ladies rock.



Cool thing, I just heard from Amanda Rigler that you can now listen to most of the talks at the Women in Comics conference in Cambridge. Yay! The only hitch is that most of the talks came with extensive slideshows, but even without the visuals, you can still get a pretty good idea of what was being talked about, by Woodrow Phoenix & Corinne Pearlman, Asia Alfasi, Kate Evans, Dominique Goblet and others. (Here's the direct link to my talk, Comics and Picture Books: women bridging the gap.)

One of the books I refer to is my studio mate Viviane Schwarz's There are Cats in this Book, which you can look at online here!

I get very squeamish listening to my own voice: it sounds so choppy, I babble, I have a weird hybrid accent, and you can shoot me if I keep saying the word 'really' three times in every sentence. (I think I was trying to be emphatic or something. Really, Sarah!)

I once took a class at U Penn with my friend Brynn to try to make our voices sound better. It turned out to be a class about how to get rid of your Philadelphia accent, which neither of us had, but then it was so interesting listening to these really strong Philly accents that we kept going to the class anyway. This one woman had the deepest, richest voice I'd ever heard, and she totally hated it. It was fun to see how she went from disliking her voice because it was so unusual to realising it was actually totally amazing. I never got to hear her sing, which was a great pity.

On Monday, Alex Fitch from Panel Borders came to the studio to find out about the three of us who work at the Fleece Station. Gary Northfield had a meeting and couldn't be there, but Viviane Schwarz and I chatted happily to Alex about comics, picture books, gossip about Gary, and how we got together to find a studio, and you can hear it all here!



I've also posted my own very short interview with Viviane (who was messing about with boxes) over on the Fleece Station blog.

(Thanks for linking it, FPI blog.) :-) From last weekend in Cambridge, you can see sketches posted by Natalie d'Arbeloff, a review by Matthew Wivel, and a conference-inspired comic by Prozacville.

If you're interested in some Morris the Mankiest Monster activities, I've designed a couple pages where you can make your own monster, plus a 'Pin the Eyeball on the Monster' party game and a couple other fun sheets. You can download them here!
(Or here's the direct PDF link.)





Thanks for the fifteen or so concerned people who have contacted me about the Random House Children's Book site listing the illustrator to Morris as Nick Sharratt. I've complained four times to the publicist, editor, publisher and web guy, David Fickling has apologised twice, and apparently the website people live on a totally different planet and it's easier for me to change my name to Nick Sharratt than it is for the website to change the listing. So you can call me Nick now, it's a rather nice name, I suppose. The other Nick Sharratt is a fabulous illustrator and a lovely guy, maybe we can do a collaborative project now that we're called the same thing.

Hey, I learned loads this weekend, and took so many notes that I'm basically just going to do a list of links and go back and explore them all when I get a moment! I didn't get many photos of the talks, but that's okay, Natalie D'Arbeloff was busy with her sketchpad, so we were well documented! Here's Asia Alfasi and Natalie with her drawing of the talk Asia, Sarah Zaidan and I gave. Here's Asia giving her talk:


sketches by Natalie D'Arbeloff

We also got to hear great talks by political activist Kate Evans and Lost Girls illustrator Melinda Gebbie:



Kate was really inspiring and I'm half-way through reading her book about climate change, Funny Weather (which has an intro by George Monbiot). Melinda bought my Morris book to add to her big picture book collection and said she was excited by what all us young people are getting up to, that comics creators are the barometers for the rest of humanity and 'the ones who make gold out of s***' (which, with my Morris book, isn't that far off, although Giles calls it 'dung'.)

Woodrow Phoenix and his Rumble Strip editor Corinne Pearlman from Myriad Editions were the ones who gave me the big list of people to look up in their talk about autobiographical comics. I know of some of the names, and I even mentioned a couple in my own talk, but many of them are new to me.


Woodrow Phoenix, Bridget Hannigan and Corinne Pearlman

Woodrow and Corinne's list included: Ludovic Debeurme and his book Lucille, Debbie Drechsler, Sarah Glidden, Phoebe Glockner, Hannah Berry, Jeremy Dennis (cleanskies), Miss Lasko-Gross, Lee Kennedy, Vanessa Davis, Bastien Vives, Nicole Hollander, Kate Charlesworth, Claire Bretecher, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin, Lynda Barry and M.K. Brown.

Dominique Goblet gave the last talk, and I was hugely impressed both by her artwork and by the project she did with her daughter, Changements. When her daughter was seven years old, they decided to draw portraits of each other every week, and they continued doing it until the daughter was 17 and needed her own space. They were experimental with the different ways they painted and drew, and it was fascinating to watch their artistic progression along with the clear aging of the girl and the less obvious aging of the mother. And what a cool idea of something to do with your kid. Click on the link to see some of the images from the project.

Thanks to Sarah Lightman and Amanda Rigler at Murray Edwards College for organising such an informative and fun day!


Melinda Gebbie and Danish PhD student of comics Rikke Platz Cortsen

Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, provides a highly original introduction to ancient Greece that takes the city as its starting point. He uses the history of eleven cities – out of over a thousand – to illuminate the most important and informative aspects of Greek history. In the original post below, Professor Cartledge talks about the recent publicity surrounding his claim that the ancient Greeks introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France.

Recently I have been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, on the BBC World Service, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (my local station), and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The cause of all this interest? The claim that it was the ancient Greeks who introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France in around 600 BC (E). That was when Greeks from ancient Phocaea, a city that sits today on Turkey’s Aegean shore, founded the city of Massalia – which has ultimately evolved into contemporary Marseille(s).

This is just one illustration of two major points. First, that ‘ancient Greece’ was not any one country or nation-state but a cultural conglomerate – ‘Hellas’ in ancient Greek – stretching from Spain in the West to Georgia in the East and unified not by politics but by commerce and custom, especially religious custom. Second, that this enlarged Ancient Greece had – and still has – such an impact on our modern western world partly precisely because it was so enlarged.

Altogether ancient ‘Hellas’ – a cultural concept like medieval ‘Christendom’ or ‘the Arab world’ today – comprised around 1000 different Hellenic communities at any one time between say 600 BC(E) and AD (or CE) 300. Besides Massalia, there are Cnossos (where the earliest examples of Greek writing are attested, datable about 1400 BCE), Mycenae (’rich in gold’, as Homer calls it), Argos, Miletus, Sparta, Athens, Syracuse, Thebes, Alexandria, and Byzantion (which in CE 324 became Constantinople, and later, much later, after both the Ottoman conquest and the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, Istanbul).

The ultimate origins of Cotes du Rhone is not perhaps the most earth-shattering issue for most of us today, though for the ancient Greeks it was not just what wine you drank, a matter of taste, but how you drank it (with what admixture of water) that counted – a matter of civilisation that divided Greeks from all non-Greeks. But the role of ancient Alexandria (the one in Egypt) as allegedly the ‘birthplace of the modern world’, as one recent book on the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 would have it, is no trivial issue at all. For if you consider its outbreaks of (pagan) antisemitism (or judeophobia) and of Christian fundamentalist fanaticism (that resulted in the murder of Hypatia in AD 415, say), you would have reluctantly to answer ‘yes’. On the other hand, much more cheeringly, you would give the same answer if you were looking for the birthplace of scholarship (in the Museum and Library) and were considering numerous astonishing pioneering achievements in science, literary criticism and technology (the polymath Eratosthenes, the maths genius Archimedes, and the geographer Claudius Ptolemy all worked here, and it was here too that the steepling multistorey Pharos lighthouse was constructed in the 3rd century BCE, a genuine Wonder of the Ancient World).

Massalia, though, did not only merit inclusion because it was through there that the grapevine was first introduced to the south of France. It was also the birthplace of the man who ‘discovered’ Britain (and a great deal besides) in about 300 BCE, one Pytheas. And similarly horizon-expanding feats with major contemporary resonance and relevance can be identified in every one of the eleven ancient cities selected to represent ‘Ancient Greece’. It is a privilege as well as a pleasure for me as Cambridge’s endowed A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture to investigate and celebrate critically our ancient cultural ancestors in this and other ways. There is no peace for wicked Cambridge Classics dons.

The Corporation of the City of Cambridge wants to force the Cambridge Public Library to install and use Internet Filtering Software on their computers. Councillor Tucci put forward the following Internet Filtering Proposal found in the City of Cambridge's Council agenda of February 9, 2009.

Councillor Tucci - Internet Filtering Software On Computers

Recommendation
WHEREAS there is no law in Ontario prohibiting pornography and other sexually explicit material from being viewed on computers in public schools and libraries;

AND WHEREAS there are public schools and public libraries that do not use
internet filtering software on computers that blocks such inappropriate material;

AND WHEREAS significant changes have occurred with respect computer technologies, software and programs that could filter access to inappropriate, explicit sexual content;

AND WHEREAS parents in the province of Ontario have the right to ensure
their children are protected from pornography and other inappropriate material available on the internet in their public schools and libraries;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Council of The Corporation of the City of Cambridge petitions the Honorable M. Aileen Carrol, Minister of Culture, the Honorable Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario and, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to require all public schools and libraries in Ontario to be required to install internet filtering software on computers to avoid viewing of sites with inappropriate, explicit sexual content;

AND FURTHER THAT the motion once approved be forwarded to all MPPs representing Waterloo Region, to the Leader of the Official Opposition, to the Leader of the 3rd party and, through AMO, to all other municipalities for their consideration.

In 2004, a Cambridge man was arrested for using a city library computer to download child pornography, according to a story in The Record. In the fall of 2008, the Cambridge Public Library Board twice rejected the call for the use of filtering but promised to review the situation as technology advances. The City of Cambridge refused to force the library to purchase filtering software in January 2009. Cambridge Public Library is the only library system in Waterloo Region that doesn't use filters. The issue has been raised once again. Cambridge Council voted 4-3 to support Tucci's recommendation, calling on the Province of Ontario to force libraries to use Internet blocking software.

Cambridge MPP Gerry Martiniuk is pushing a private members' bill (Bill 128) that would put internet filtering rules in place. Private members bills are rarely passed into law. Councilor Gary Price, who sits on the Cambridge library board, pointed out that libraries have a mandate to provide free access to legal information and that filtering software can block legal sites as well as questionable ones.

Below is the text from Bill 128 which is relevant to schools and public libraries:

Education Act
Every school board is required to ensure that every school of the board has in place technology measures on all of the school’s computers to which a person under the age of 18 years has access. The technology measures must do the following:

1. They must block access on the Internet to any material,including written material, pictures and recordings, that is obscene or sexually explicit or that constitutes child pornography.

2. They must block access to any form of electronic communication, including electronic mail and chat rooms, if the communication could reasonably be expected to expose a person under the age of 18 years to any material,including written material, pictures and recordings, that is obscene or sexually explicit or that constitutes child pornography.

3. They must block access to any site on the Internet or to any form of electronic communication, including electronic mail and chat rooms, if the school has not authorized users of the computers to access the site or the communication or if the site or the communication could reasonably be expected to contain material that includes personal information about a person under the age of 18 years.

A school is required to have a policy on who are authorized to use its computers to which a person under the age of 18 years has access and to monitor the use that persons under the age of 18 years make of those computers.

Public Libraries Act
The Bill amends the Public Libraries Act to make amendments that are similar to those that the Bill makes to the Education Act, except that the duties of a school board are those a board with respect to every library under its jurisdiction and the duties of a school are those of a public library.

Read an article which gives alternatives to internet filtering.


The Pelham Public Library challenges you to take the Banned Book Challenge. This challenge will run until June 30, 2009.