Saturday, December 10, 2011

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.


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):



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

4 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

Love the Architrave concept -- very cool.

And there you go again -- enriching my Saturday morning. Except, this Sat morning I must run as I've 12 for dinner tonight and the living/dining area look like a Christmas storm blew through. The tree is done but the rest of the decorations and boxes they were stored in are scattered all about.

I'll be back tomorrow to treasure your finds!

Kathleen said...

Cool stuff. Flannery O'Connor fan!

Laura said...

So much to love here, Maureen, especially for this Tolkien fan. I'm off to explore! Thank you for this wonderful map to follow on this winter afternoon.

Anonymous said...

i kind of like the idea of the one poem per card thing. it's an idea that one could play with... hum.