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Ready or not, here I come…
Book Adjacent Winston Pei Book Adjacent Winston Pei

Ready or not, here I come…

Ray Bradbury once said “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As a book nerd, student librarian, and global citizen, I think about that quote almost daily.

And as a student librarian, I’m learning that there is yet another tactic – make the books unfindable…

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Bread and representation
Book Life Winston Pei Book Life Winston Pei

Bread and representation

Back on October 15, we had a book launch up at the local indie bookstore where our Head Alien hangs one of his many hats on the regular. He arrived to have a fellow bookseller exclaim “Hey! Did you know you’re in the book?”

No, no he did not…

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Journal of a Voyage
The Book as Performance Winston Pei The Book as Performance Winston Pei

Journal of a Voyage

This week for Fridays at the Peel we take a peek at the Journal of a Voyage to North America, written by Pierre de Charlevoix and published in 1761. But if you’ve been a patron of the Butterflies & Aliens Library for any amount of time, you know I’m much more interested in the voyage taken by the book itself than the voyage it recounts within its pages…

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Arranging Furniture
The Book as Performance Winston Pei The Book as Performance Winston Pei

Arranging Furniture

Okay, yes I’m posting this on a Saturday, but the important point here is that Fridays at the Peel are back!

To share today, a book called Arranging Furniture, created by Jason Dewinetz at his fine press “small publishing concern” based in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada, Greenboathouse Press…

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No avatar, just an original
Rando Selections Winston Pei Rando Selections Winston Pei

No avatar, just an original

So just wanted to share a quick post about a new acquisition up here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library North, and a bit of an associated mystery, a real literary eccentricity and rarity. The book is Avatar Inc: A Sci-Fi Anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer and published March 13, 2020, by the XPRIZE Foundation.

Yeah, that XPRIZE Foundation…

Now with an update!

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A Faustian bargain… but the good kind
Book Life Stacey Kondla Book Life Stacey Kondla

A Faustian bargain… but the good kind

Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in my teen years was a gateway drug to reading other classics and it made sense that Faust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe quickly appeared on my radar. I mean, a book about selling your soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures – how can you resist?…

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Canadian Born Chinese
Rando Selections Winston Pei Rando Selections Winston Pei

Canadian Born Chinese

Today we’re taking a bit of a deeper dive into one graphic novel in particular. And to the surprise of no one who’s been reading our recent posts about our Comic as Object Project or Drawn Together, this will be doing double duty as an assignment for our Head Alien’s LIS 518 course at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies.

As some of you might have already guessed from the title of this post, the graphic novel in question is American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang…

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Social climbing
The Book as Performance Winston Pei The Book as Performance Winston Pei

Social climbing

Once upon a time I had a shoebox full of favourite comic strips that I had diligently cut out of the newspaper… Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, Bloom County, to name but a few. Somewhere over time and over moves, I lost that box, much to my sadness.

But if the strip got popular enough, some publisher would come along and reprint them into a little book…

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