There was a library in Syracuse…

Rosamond Gifford was the only child of a wealthy lawyer, who inherited a fortune in 1917, invested it with care, and left a greater fortune when she died in 1953.  The first grant of the Rosamond Gifford Trust was a set of incubators for premature babies; her most recent grant brought me to Syracuse to…

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Mysterious California

I love libraries.  I adore them, always and continuously. My abiding affection had a boost last night, with an event in the Sunnyvale (CA) library, where some of the staff remembered me as part of an event—oh, how many years ago could it have been?  Thirteen? Fourteen?—with Sisters in Crime authors.  This time it was…

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The romance of research

An academic’s love letter to the stacks, to mark National Library Week. Now, I’m as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines.  I download obscure tomes…

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We Love Libraries!

Happy National Library Week! I had an impressive tour of the Santa Cruz library last week, from check-in to donations collection. I’ve also had a haul of books from the university library, building blocks for the story I’m working on. Both reminded me how much I love and depend on libraries. Don’t go to your…

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Fantasy Library contest

As I said yesterday, this was no easy contest to judge.  I hope you’ve looked at my top ten submissions, which I chose in part with an eye to having some of each kind.  (The only things we didn’t get were audio or video submissions.  Or baked goods, none of those so far have arrived.) …

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National Library Fantasies

Mary Russell’s Wednesday post is over on her MySpace page — and that episode of “A Case in Correspondence” in its original form will appear here on Friday. ** Oh, I’ve had such fun looking at the submissions for the Fantasy Library contest—you people are great!  The only problem is, after setting the contest under way, I now…

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Love your library!

Happy National Library Week—kiss a librarian today.  Or maybe take her or him a batch of nutritious muffins, or a shiny apple, or just a thank-you card.  We love libraries! And this being Library Week, the Twenty Weeks of Buzz contest for “My Fantasy Library” is now closed.  I’m going through the entries (Wow, what…

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Temples of book worship

If you visit, or subscribe to, this blog, you love books.  And if you’re anything like me, you caught your bibliophilia from a library, most likely the one in your home town. Here was mine, in Santa Cruz, California, a building I visited at least once a week when we lived there in the early…

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Lost in the medina

I am currently in Morocco, eating the world’s most gorgeous cooking and wandering the narrow streets of Fes. I’ll post a photo or ten when I return to Lisbon later in the week, but in the meantime, don’t forget that this week’s contest is “My Fantasy Library,” with the description and details here. Send your…

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Don’t we love the libraries?

National Library Week is coming, and I want to know your fantasies. No, not that kind—the real ones, the important ones. The fantasy of the absolute, ultimate, perfect ideal of a library. It can be a public library or your personal space, large or small, vast or intimate, dim or bright, wood or glass—this is…

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