Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

There's a lot to like in this edition of Saturday Sharing, beginning with some letterpress-printed poems you may purchase singly or as a set from Architrave Press. Read along and you'll learn about a new book showcasing images of J.R.R. Tolkien's original artwork for The Hobbit, the Wayback machine that lets you browse collections of Web pages dating back to the mid-1990s, the disassembly and conservation of the Damacus Room rebuilt for the new Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an artist's book documenting a writers' retreat at Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch, and an online site where you may purchase original artworks and artbooks and other publications. I've also included a link to an audio of a reading by the great writer Flannery O'Connor.

✦ Now here's a marvelous idea: Architrave Press offers poetry lovers the opportunity to buy single letterpress-printed poems to create a DIY collection. Edition 1 comprises 11 poems, any one of which may be purchased separately or as a complete set. Just 250 prints on 5-1/2" x 8" archival card stock are made of any one poem. Edition 2 is to be published in the spring. Architrave sells individually packaged poems online and through various book shops. The press also considers submissions.

✦ Fans of Flannery O'Connor will enjoy this 1959 audio recording of O'Connor reading from A Good Man Is Hard to Find. It's marvelous. (My thanks to The New Yorker Book Bench blog for the link.)

✦ J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was first published in 1937. A new full-color book, The Art of the Hobbit, was published this past October to mark the 75th anniversary; it includes a complete collection of artwork — more than 100 original drawings, watercolors, paintings, sketches, and maps — discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Recently, The Guardian shared online images of some of the artworks.

Tolkien, Official Online Bookshop

Limited-Edition Print of Poem "Oliphaunt" from The Lord of the Rings (Video Promotion)

The Tolkien Estate Website (Temporary Site)

✦ Access the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to browse an outstanding 150 billion+ Web pages archived from 1996 forward. Some of the collections you'll find in those Web archives: Asian Tsunami, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Election 2002, and September 11.

✦ The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City unveiled on November 1 its new Islamic art galleries —  New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia — showcasing more than 1,000 artworks covering some 13 centuries. (The museum's Islamic art collections number more than 12,000 objects.) Go here to experience a 360-degree tour of the 26-foot-long Damacus Room, originally built in 1707 as a reception room (see a 3:19-minute video about its disassembly and conservation here), or to look at various objects and artifacts close-up.

Here's a very brief video about the creation of the Moroccan Court (additional images may be seen here):

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Islamic Art 

The MetMuseum on FaceBook

✦ In 2011, while an artist-in-residence at A Room of Her Own writers' retreat at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe's home in New Mexico, Susan King created Borrowed Landscape: Finding Our Place in O'Keeffe's New Mexico. The book of photographs, poetry, and prose is available for purchase from the author. See a selection of King's other work here, including images of her artist's books. 

Susan King Blog

✦ Original works of art on paper by emerging, mid-career, and established artists, as well as art books, museum exhibition catalogues, photography monographs, and small-circulation publications are available through the online venue folioleaf. The curated collection of artworks, priced from below $1,000 to more than $4,000, are collected from artists, galleries, and printmakers. Media include drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, and mixed media.

folioleaf on FaceBook and Twitter