The Zines Collection

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Posted on behalf of Heidy Berthoud, our zines librarian, and Matt Higgins, zine intern.

Need to read something new? Have you stopped by our zine library near the periodical room? We have dozens of titles on the shelves (and more coming regularly) that you can read in the library or take out at the front desk with your vcard. Also, watch out for zinemaking kits scattered throughout the library!

To find our zines collection, go to the second floor of Main Library and walk to the periodical room (room 255). Then turn around, and you’ll see the zines!

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(Click image to enlarge.)

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The Map Thief

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The Map Thief by Michael Blanding
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Who? Michael Blanding
Doing what? Talking about his book
Which is? The Map Thief
Which is? The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps
When? Monday, November 9th at 5:30pm
Where? VC Library, Class of ’51 Reading Room

 

 

 

THE BOOK: Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers – both as beautiful works of art and practical tools to navigate the world. For those that collect them, however, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and in some cases disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects. E. Forbes Smiley III, esteemed and respectable antiquarian map dealer, spent years doubling as a map thief until he was finally arrested while delicately tearing maps out of books in the Yale University Library in 2005. He would later confess to the theft of 97 maps valued at over $3m total, and serve 42 months in prison for his crimes.

blandingTHE AUTHOR: Michael Blanding is the author of The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink (Avery, 2010), and a journalist with more than 15 years of experience writing long-form narrative and investigative journalism. Previously a staff writer and editor at Boston magazine, Blanding has since freelanced for publications including WIRED, Slate, The Nation, The New Republic, Consumers Digest, and the Boston Globe Magazine, where he has focused on investigative stories involving intensive research and interviews. Blanding has been named a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and a network fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. An amateur map lover, Blanding has a collection of international subway maps and bought his first antiquarian map while reporting this book.

 

Posters in Miniature: The Ephemeral Cinderella

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HohlweinAn Exhibition in the Vassar College Art Library

September 17 – December 17, 2015

In 1845 a new form of graphic art called the poster stamp, referred to by contemporary collectors as “Cinderellas,” was launched in Austria as a means of commemorating and advertising an important Viennese trade exhibition. Based on the printed postage stamp, which had  just been introduced in England in 1840, poster stamps tended to be somewhat larger and were intended to bear messages rather than serve any official function. Circulated on envelopes, theater programs, packages and invoices, and assembled in collector’s booklets and albums, poster stamps gradually became so popular across Europe and America as an advertising medium that soon they were being designed in the tens of thousands. In 1914, for example, over 50,000 individual stamp designs were produced in Germany alone.

Despite their commemorative origins, as poster stamp production trickled off in the 1930’s so did recollection of their existence to all but a handful of collectors of historical ephemera. There is, for example, no Library of Congress classification for these objects, and virtually no art historical literature on them. This is astonishing when we consider that their designers included many of the most prominent graphic artists working in Europe and America over a sixty year period when poster art was at its height, that they engage all the major art movements and styles of the era including beaux arts, art nouveau, art deco, constructivism, futurism, dada, and surrealism, and that they present us with some of the most imaginative, visually arresting, and widely-disseminated pictorial art ever produced.

This exhibit showcases representative specimens of the medium from a substantial and significant collection of poster stamps generously gifted this year to the Vassar College Libraries by the Poughkeepsie ephemerist and collector Arthur Groten. As examples of an important but almost forgotten form of social media, we hope this collection will serve in the future as a material basis for reflection on relationships between art and industry, high and low, culture and communication, scale and distribution, memory and evanescence.