[sosuperawesome]

Hardcover / Softcover Notebooks

Cognitive Surplus on Etsy

See our #Etsy or #Stationery tags

[4gifs]

[raserus]

LIL BABBY

U CANT SCARE THE OCEAN

GO LAY DOWN

[amiseeingyourcolourormine]

IT LOOKS LIKE TOOTHLESS

[bladeoffenris]

I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.

[tanoraqui]

I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.

[mzminola]

…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.

She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.

[ladyswearalot]

That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!

[personalprofundity]

Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.

Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.

Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.

[planeoftheeclectic]

http://www.online-literature.com/edith-nesbit/book-of-dragons/6/

[roombapetowner]

@bryntwedge Maybe??

[repost-this-image]

Always reblog both cute kittens and stuff about Edith Nesbit. My local used bookstore has some of her books for DIRT CHEAP because hardly anyone’s heard of her anymore, so it doesn’t sell. (Which reminds me, I need to buy a couple.)

[thats-what-sidhe-said]

Her stuff is awesome. Five Children and It is a good one to start with. A family of British children on vacation get one wish a day, and of course, each wish finds a way to go wrong. It’s the start of a series featuring that family.

Her books are public domain, so if you’re cool with ebooks, you can get them from Project Gutenberg or for free on Amazon.

[bookporn]

So interesting!

I bet you saw the post and thought we had made a mistake ;)

[niimph]

“She preferred most of all to live with flowers and music and to have a book, in quiet solitude.”

— Hermann Hesse, from “Iris”, The Fairytales of Hermann Hesse (trans. Jack Zipes)

[realfakeeggs]

The saga of floral fucks continues. 

[saint-hemlock]

@kinomatika new project for you? :o

[broderiemyworld-deactivated2020]

commonthread.us

[berghahnbooks]

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Henry Ward Beecher (via berghahnbooks)

[thenordroom]

[ocean-wav]

Learning To Cat

[whitni]

this work is called “the impact of a book.” – West Plains Public Library

[build-me-a-home]

[sosuperawesome]

Women In Science Art Prints and T-shirts by Rachel Ignotofsky on Etsy

More like this

[thexfiles]

i love women. in the feminist way and in the gay way. happy international women’s day

[sosuperawesome]

Journals by House Of Stopan on Etsy

More like this

[shabbytigers]

Today I learned that the university of Coimbra in Portugal has a great 18th-century library, the Biblioteca Joanina, that maintains a colony of bats to effectively control the population of paper-eating insects called papirófagos. These bats are less than an inch long. They roost during the day behind the bookcases and come out at night. There doesn’t seem to be any English word for papirófago, a cursory search turns up no details about what sort of insect they are, and ngl I am slightly concerned about them as a phenomenon. But I think my overarching point here is clear: 

This library keeps tiny bats that look after the books.

[spookyloop]

I’m here for tiny bats saving books.

[betteroffdeaddesigns-deactivate]

Ooh look at the little bebehs!!!

[liritarnauld]

@fairandradiantmaiden I can’t handle their little faces. I would never leave that library

[twyxted-mind]

@orchidbreezefc @amarantae

[iridescentoracle]

@dubiousculturalartifact

[hello-delicious-tea]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bats-act-as-pest-control-at-two-old-portuguese-libraries-9950711/ Your source. Now excuse me, I need to go tell ALL MY STUDENTS ABOUT THESE BATS.

[awesome-picz]

[jordanmcmakin]

[widenerlibrary]

A rare example of cat-bird cooperation. An enterprising cat gets a bird to carry a letter for her. Later the bird shares a flower with the cat. From Kocia Ksiażka, a Polish children’s book from 2015.

Another find by Joshua Lupkin, our cat man in Collection Development.