World Book and Copyright Day (what a mouthful) is a yearly event to commemorate Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, all major figures in world writing (and I wonder where the women are…). Legend says that all these great men died on April 23, 1616, although more accurate calculations reveal that Shakespeare’s death date was actually marked on a Julian calendar, and therefore should be May 3^rd on the Gregorian calendar.

In any case, the date was proposed to the UNESCO’s International Union of Editor as a day to promote culture and raise awareness around intellectual property rights. Final approval came on November 15, 1995.

Current festivities include a rotating title of World Book Capital. This began in 2001 with Madrid, last year it was Bogotá, and this year the world’s book capital is Amsterdam, next year it will be Beirut.

Click here for UNESCO’s page on World Book and Copyright Day.

At random, here are a few links to how a handful of libraries around the world are celebrating.

• Bibliotecas Municipales de Málaga, Spain
  
• Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico
• General celebrations in Colombia
• Canada’s Education Ministry

Image info here.

This morning the New York Times had an article about two parallel art exhibits displaying art looted during WWII. The exhibit is a collaboration between France and Israel in aims at reconnecting these pieces with their original owners. Most of the art on display was either outright looted or forcefully “bought” by the Nazi, and so far has gone unclaimed, presumably because the original owners were likely killed in the Holocaust. The collections contain a number of “common” pieces, but also works from renown artist such as Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, and Monet among others.

Art and other cultural pieces are often looted during times of war and much has been written and discussed on the subject. Actually a couple semesters ago I attended a lecture by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on collections held in Russian archives which previously belong to other nations. Her book, “Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” discusses the complexities of restitution and why countries loot other nations’ cultural treasures.

Fortunately there are efforts around the globe to stop this practice. The Lost Art Internet Database is a project from the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste which is working to reconnect lost cultural property to its original owners. Looted Art is another such initiative, and while many of these efforts circle the Holocaust this is not a phenomenon seen exclusively around WWII, Chile recently returned a number of book taken from the Peruvian National Library about 100 years ago. And it’s not just armies who walk away with cultural property that belongs to others. Some of the largest and best endowed universities and museums around the world have gotten some of their material in such a matter. Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, to name just one example (You can read about this from an article in the BBC). Unfortunately we are still seeing this practice in current times; the National Museum of Iraq was gravely looted during the USA invasion. (You can read about the Iraqi National Museum from an article in the Guardian.)

Yes! You can enjoy the opera at the movie theater! Last season Peter Gelb, director of the Metropolitan Opera began this amazing project of doing live broadcast to a number of HD movie theaters across the USA and around the world. Tickets do cost about twice as much as regular movie tickets, but this project is still bringing extraordinary cultural events to a much larger audience that those who can afford regular opera tickets.

Presentations also include some behind the scene takes, allowing the audience to see how the sets are installed and some of the makeup and props used during the production. During the broadcast of Hansel and Gretel, Renée Fleming also provided background commentary and short interviews with the two main singers and the stage director, giving the presentation a very interesting and well rounded approach.

During the presentation I attended today, we did have some technical difficulties with the sound during the second part of the show, but people after the theater was notified, the rest of the presentation went very smoothly. All in all is was a great experience and I was delighted to be able to access a world class cultural event at an affordable price.

For more information on the Metropolitan Opera’s HD presentations check out their website. On the left you will find a link to buy tickets in the USA or around the world. Other countries participating in this project include Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, among others.

On Friday, January 4, 2008, Tom Ashbrook, presenter of WBUR’s On Point interviewed Peter Gelb about this project. You can listen to the interview here.

This weekend I attended the 31st. Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. I heard about this event after a visit to the John Carter Brown Library and decided to check it out. I saw a number of fascinating book, not all as old as I expected. Some of the exhibitors had material that dated back hundreds and hundreds of years, as well as other book from the 20th century. Newer books were usually first editions and they were usually signed. Among these first editions I saw books by Garcia Marquez, Steven King, and John Steinbeck, among others. Some of the vendors had old maps, prints (including an original Chagall), poster, and I even saw an entire case of glass eyes that was for sale.

I also attended two lectures the first by Anne Bromer, titled Miniature Books: 4,000 of tiny treasures, and the second presentation was titled Japanese Illustrated Books, by Charles Vilnis. During the first presentation I learned about the practical use of miniature books (usually books smaller than 3 inches). We saw a copy of a miniature book version of the Emancipation Proclamation which Lincoln had printed and gave to soldiers to hand out throughout many southern states. I also heard of a collection of classics that were printed in miniature form which people who spend a lot of time on the road could easily take with. In general I was surprised to learn that miniature books were usually created to be read and used, instead of being only for decoration.

During the presentation on prints in Japanese books we saw an amazing selection of images that dated as far back as the 1600s and as recent as the mid 1900. The illustrations ranged from very simple, elegant images, to long scrolls that describes entire journeys.

Earlier this week I was in NYC to witness the auction of a portion of a collection I helped inventory about two years ago. The collection was pieced together by Maury Bromsen, a rare book collector based in Boston, who passed away in 2005, bequeathing the entire collection to the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence Rhode Island. The Bromsen collection originally included material by and about Simon Bolivar, which had already been donated to the JCB, along with material mostly, but not exclusively, from the 18th, 19th and 20th century spanning the length and width of Latin America. Among the material I inventoried were original proclamations of the Mexican independence, along with entire collection by Andres Bello. There was also material on tourism, politics, novels, memoirs, cookbook, and all kinds of other literary pieces emerging from the region.

The auction, which took place at Swann Auction Galleries, included 68 lots from the original Bromsen collection, all of which were sold in about an hour. This sale was set up as a shelf sale, meaning that everything had to sell, regardless of the price; this would be in contrast to a catalog sale where the seller set a minimum price, and items will be kept if there are no buyers willing to pay this price.

Buyers in this occasion were mainly book dealers who had to buy entire book lots to get a few hidden gems, which they would later resell individually. Someone else that was there buying and whom I got to meet was the director of the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, in Bogotá, Colombia. The fact that she came all the way from Colombia to buy books on Latin America in New York was very telling of how the flow of books works these days.

There are still thousands of book from the Bromsen collection that will be auction off sometime in the future. The next sale will likely be middle prices material, and the last one will be for all the remaining treasures.

Photograph by colombianflowers.

This weekend I was in Philly to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. My mom saw this exhibit when it toured the USA back in the 1970s and she still raves about it today, so we met-up and saw the exhibit together.

I had read a good amount about the exhibit for a paper I wrote a while back and found out that this time around the exhibit was being promoted more as a rock concert than a cultural event. This was very much the case. The exhibit is surrounded by a lot of fanfare, and lots of publicity. It is being hosted by a partnership between the L.A. based Anschultz Entertainment Group (AEG) (better known for promoting rock concerts), Egypt’s Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and National Geographic.

While it might be another 30 years before we are able to see world treasure such as Tutankhamen, this exhibit wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. My mom says that the first time around there were a lot more objects, and that while the museum was crowded, one could still enjoy the exhibit and see things in a leisurely manner. This time some of the more famous pieces were missing, including Tutankhamen himself along with his many sarcophagus, and seeing the pieces was challenging in the overly crowded rooms. I also saw a guy in a wheel chair who probably spend the entire time looking at people’s backs since he wasn’t able to get up close to the cases because there were so many people there. These short-comings might give credence to some of the criticism that has surrounded the exhibit, among them the challenge that AEG has outsourced museum curatorial jobs to others outside the field.

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass explains that Egypt has a wealth of treasures that need to be preserved, not all as flashy as Tutankhamen, so the motivation behind the exhibit is to raise much needed funds to help with this preservation initiative.

In interviews, several Egyptologist said that most of what Dr. Hawass was doing for their field was long overdue, things as simple as installing air conditioning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He has instituted zoning around major antiquity sites and built visitor centers to prevent further degradation. He also has plans to build a regional museum in Egypt, including a sprawling new structure besides the pyramids (Waxman, 2005).

While this effort is certainly much needed, a tricky situation has been created whereby the hosting museums are needing to charge significantly higher admission prices than usual in an effort to brake even, since the Egyptian government must make 10 million per stop before the museum makes a penny. The Egyptian government claims that all the hosting museums made money during the first tour, while they made none, although this is contested.

I guess some balance needs to be found by which poor nations with treasures of importance to the world should be able to access needed funds for preservation and promoting education, but doing so in a way that doesn’t limit the amount of people who can see them because they have been priced out of the market. Treasures like Tutankhamen, in a way, belong to all of humanity and should be accessible to everyone, not just those with deep pockets.

Image info here.

I just got back from the Charles Darwin (1809-1882) exhibit, and even though I already knew the basics of his life (My dad is a big admirer of his), I was still very impressed by it.

Darwin was born into a family of privilege in the UK and as a young man his father pushed him to pursue first a career in medicine and then as a clergy man. His father is quoted as having told him, “you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Initially Darwin didn’t try to go against his father’s wishes, but instead found ways of working around them. If he were to become a clergy man in a small rural community he would then have all the time he wanted to explore the countryside and its wonders.

Luckily for us, Darwin did begin to associate with some of the scientists of the time and was eventually invited by one of them on a world tour aboard the Beagle. This voyage was to last two years, but instead lasted more than five, yet it is also the trip that squarely set Darwin on the path of finding an theory to explain the natural diversity that surrounded him. About this trip he wrote, “The Vogayes of the Beagle“.
By 1842 Darwin had a pretty clear theory to explain evolution though natural selection, but it took him almost two decades to make his findings public. Before making his work public, Darwin wanted more time to think about his theory, and to gather more evidence to convince those who he knew would criticize his work. He also wanted to have a more solid reputation in the field and for the general societal climate to change, since he realized his ideas would be attacked by the church. Eventually a letter outlining another man’s version of natural selection finally got him to publish.

On a curious note; According to the exhibit, Darwin didn’t believe in waste, and often gave his children discarded manuscript pages of the “Origin of Species” to draw on. Because of this there are only 28 pages of the original document known to exist.

Today, 150 years after he first published the “Origin of Species” Darwin regularly becomes a topic of controversy. Oddly (sadly) enough, his work continues to be challenged with the same arguments and objections that were used when his work first came out. The exhibit acknowledges this controversy, but did so with only one small display tucked away in a corner.

My only disappointment with the exhibit was that there were very few original documents on display; almost every single one was a facsimile of the original.

“There is a grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” -Charles Darwin

04.29.07 - Darwin’s writings covered a vast array of subject. You can find practically everything he ever wrote at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Each document has been scanned so you can see the original, but they have also been retyped to allow keyword scanning.

05.16.07 - Tomorrow the University of Cambridge will be releasing digitized versions of approximatley 5,000 letters Darwin wrote over the course of his life. You can find these letters at the Darwin Correspondence Project. The BBC has an article about this today.

1st image, Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Darwin; 2nd image, Voyages of the Beagle, both available here.

One of the things that I miss the most about living in the Bay Area is the enormous amounts of culture that I could easily access. Case it point, Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib collection, currently on display at UCB’s Doe library, right where I used to work! From what I’ve read about this collection, Botero first learned about the atrocities occurring in this prison from the news, just like the rest of us; he was deeply disturbed and moved to “say” something about the matter. He commented that art has an important role in times of war, giving the example that while many of us do not know the details about the many battles fought during WWII, all of us who have seen Picasso’s Guernica still have that image engraved in our minds. Botero hopes that his work on Abu Ghraib will be remembered in the same way.

It was also interesting to hear that Botero offered this exhibition to a lot of galleries, both public and private, and with the exception of the Marlborough gallery in NYC and now UCB, no one else will display it. Yet Botero is so committed to showing this disturbing reality that he has offered to give away the collection to any gallery that is willing to permanently display at least a few of his drawings. He also commented that it should really stay in either the USA or in Iraq, since these are the two communities most deeply affected by the mater.

UCB Center for Latin America Studies has two webcasts on the event; one of them is “A Conversation with the Artists,” an hour long interview with Botero. The second one is titled “Art and Violence,” and runs close to a 1:45mins. Both can be accessed here.