Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Today's edition of Saturday Sharing mixes poetry with rare books with letterhead with images from Mars with book sculptures. You can't leave here without being excited or inspired by one of these sites.

✦ A new, dedicated Website, the Woodberry Poetry Room, has been created by Harvard University. A prestigious collection of 20th Century and 21st Century English-language poetry, the WPR features a "listening booth", a huge audio archive, and "the vocarium", which comprises oral histories, poetry recording sessions, podcasts, and multidisciplinary installations. The site also features a calendar of events, ranging from book festivals, to public poetry performances, to readings, to poetry seminars and workshops, to collaborative poetry and dance master classes. Be sure to read the details about the WPR's audio-visual collection, Blue Star collection of limited-edition monographs, chapbooks, and broadsides; and book and serial collection.  A tremendous poetry resource! The Woodberry Poetry Room is a physical place, too, and is open to the public. (My thanks to the Poetry Foundation for the link to this Website.) 

✦ Winchester, Virginia, is home to Lorne Bair Rare Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera whose tagline is: "Selling rare and valuable objects to wealthy communists for more than 15 years!" Lorne Bair specializes in the history, literature, and art of American socio-political movements. To get an idea of how wide-ranging the book-buyer and -seller is, take a look at the drop-down All Categories section on the Search page. The site boasts autographs, graphics and original art, photography, music, Native American literature, and much, much more.  (My thanks for this link go to the always interesting The Fine Books Blog.)

Lorne Bair Rare Books on FaceBook

Lorne Bair Rare Books Blog

✦ A site offering something we all might have had at one time: LetterHeady, described as "an online homage to offline correspondence"—not the content but the design. See examples of letterhead from Apple Computer, Campbell's Soups, The Muppet Show Fan Club, Mickey Mouse Magazine, Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek, and many other companies and individuals of note, including Andy Warhol, Ozzy Osbourne, Guerrilla Girls, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Lloyd Wright. A companion site is Letters of Note, which features collections of letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. (My thanks to Walker Art Center blog for the link to LetterHeady.)

✦ If you have never visited HiRISE, for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, you are in for a treat. Created by the University of Arizona, the site posts high-resolution images (25 cm/pixel) from Mars that are out of this world. The images, available in a variety of formats, come from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter operated out of the university's Lunar & Planetary Laboratory. HiRISE is one of the remote sensing instruments on board the MRO, which was launched in 2005. (My thanks to my Slow Muse friend, artist Deborah Barlow, for this wonderful link.) 

Note: There is no copyright restriction on the use of the HiRISE images.

Richardson Crater Dunes on Mars

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Image Catalogue

HiRISE FAQs

HiRISE on FaceBook and Twitter

HiRISE Blog

✦ EdgePiece describes itself as "a place for anyone with a voice and the human desire to have it heard." Established by a group of "emerging editors" who are "launching emerging writers", the online literary magazine publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, photograph, and art. See the first issue; the second released November 10.

Submission Guidelines

✦ Using traditional needlework techniques and drawing inspiration from Japanese craftwork as well as historic costumes and etiquette, British paper artist Phiona Richards creates extraordinary interactive book sculptures and jewelry that she exhibits throughout the United Kingdom. Take a look at some examples of her origami jewelry and book sculptures, and be delighted by Richards's use of regenerated materials. Wouldn't you just love to take a paper craft workshop with Ricards?! (My thanks to my friend Ann at All Things Paper, who first brought Richards to my attention via her post here.)

Phiona Richards on FaceBook and Flickr

Phiona Richards Blog, Rare Notions