Not that anything I write will ever make any list, but it must feel like ass to make the “best books of the year so far” list but then be left off the “best books of the year” list.

Probably nobody cares about this but me but if you look from overhead you can still where East Madison Little League’s field was off of N. Sherman in the 1950s through 80s.

Look how they massacred my boy.

It is officially official.

There are many more substantial and less selfish reasons to invite medievalists to talk at your campus, but that they might send a thank you package with calligraphy and letter locking is certainly up there. Thank you @bookofthenorth.bsky.social!

So weird to see David Lance Goines' very distinct typographical signature on a sweetgreen ad. (He famously did the Chez Panisse posters and graphic design which is why, but still... weird.)

PBSA 120.2 is out digitally and in paper! With this cover image I was eager to find a way to represent the challenges of digital ransom, erasure, and loss as an aspect of biblioclasm and censorship. This sign from the BL provided a physical artifact to anchor the concept.

A great day for this poem by Lucille Clifton. #america250

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille. Bonus question: What are the absolute funniest "5-6 old books" I could bring along for this promotional video?

I may be the only person planet earth interested in this, but in case YOU too wanted to know what Julian Park's home library of English & American first editions looked like before he donated its contents to the Univ of Buffalo, these real estate photos for 33 Summit Ave, Buffalo, have the answer:

This is what I mean when I say I'm donating my body to science.

My question to all students these days is, “why do you think they’re so afraid to let you read, study, or perform this?”

AI, make me a picture of Madison, Wisconsin.

Some news: starting next year (and lasting for somewhere between 3-5 years) I will be the Faculty Director of the Chadbourne Residential College at the University of Wisconsin.

Regalia strip search.

Somebody has already written about the queer eroticism of the midcentury book collecting and bibliophilic world, yes? If not, who wants to write it and send to PBSA?

Wisconsin Incunable, for example. Ojibwe almanac, 1834 in Green Bay.

Yep this is what I do with elementary and middle school kids! Typeset their names and say congratulations you’re a printer!

My time at PBSA accumulates.

My undergraduate research fellow Caleb worked all year with me on the @wheatleycensus.bsky.social! He became interested in a tricky and uneven data point: year of last institutional collection (the last time a particular copy of the first edition of *Poems* entered an institutional library)…

In the Intimacy of Paper I started trying to think through presence as a way of accounting for what otherwise seems like woo woo vibes in the reading room:

Someone out there must know meteorology. We had insanely severe tornado/hail in Madison yesterday. Every car in my neighborhood is damaged. Why is all the baseball sized hail in the shape of a donut/saturn peach?

It's not lost on me that 260 years after oppressive taxation of paper & documents necessary to live and & work led to Stamp Act protests that precipitated revolution, a new revolution's earliest expressions might be taking form in the burning of warehouses of life's paper (toilet, kitchen, napkin).

I finally found some waste at the NEH.

And the pervasiveness of google images, google top results, and now google AI results is that there are reverberating downstream affects, like this artwork ostensibly commissioned by The Baffler: thebaffler.com/odds-and-end...

And here is the google image search for George Moses Horton, which, well....