Dylan Lewis
@iamdylanlewis
¶rare book librarian & bibliographer ¶historian of print and media ¶video game and cinema enjoyer ¶he/him 🏳️🌈 📍Atlanta (by way of Dallas, Munich, and DC)
My birthday is tomorrow but I’m going to be out of the office (again). Despite most of my colleagues being at a conference this week, my work bestie rounded up the few of us who are here and threw me a surprise birthday party 🥰🥹
The pulp novels with over 110 reprints can’t hurt you, the pulp novels with over 110 reprints can’t hurt you, the pul—
5th straight year at Rare Book School— how did I get so lucky? 🤓 Always a great time in CVille with talented, curious, and generous colleagues
With two of my best friends of 20+ years and they’re having a baby and I get to be Uncle Dylan!
I always love the visual contrast of texts that use Latin/English/French/Italian and German/Dutch and therefore have to figure out how the typographic identities are going to be negotiated spatially and aesthetically. This printer drew a typographical line in the sand.
new pfp just hit (me standing in a library & archives storage facility with over 3 million items)
My library has one of the best Robinson Crusoe collections in the world, not only over 1000 editions and adaptations of the novel itself, but also things related to Crusoe fan culture. Was working with a researcher today and discovered ROBINSON CRUSOE SMOKED SALMON from 1979 Chile
Carmen Sandiego's print culture (From Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time, 1997)
Here’s something beautiful while I distract myself from the ESTC outage— our lovely copy of The Art of Contentment (Oxford, 1675) in a binding by Samuel Mearne, Charles II’s royal binder. Also some lovely inscriptions here, including a #HerBook!
POV: you’re the book I was about to snap a photo of but my camera was flipped around (and the book)
fun thing I got to work w today pt 2: first illustrated edition of the Poeticon Astronomicon, printed in 1482 in Venice. While the placement of the stars is wildly inaccurate, making it a pretty poor guide to navigating the night sky, its images were influential models for later celestial atlases.
fun thing I got to work w today: 1st ed. of Robert Burns's 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, one of the great landmark publications of Scottish poetry. Out of the 612 copies of this Kilmarnock edition, fewer than 100 are currently accounted for NLS digitized copy: digital.nls.uk/74571116
I collaborated with our museum’s conservation team to do some p-XRF testing of a few of our suspicious-looking Victorian yellowbacks (the genre term, despite these being green 🤣) for the poison book project, and we’ve got arsenic! ☠️
I'm so incredibly busy these days (busier than I've ever been in my life), so I forget to post the cool shit I work with. Any Yoko Ono and/or Fluxus fans? At Emory we've now got her magnum opus, Grapefuit (1964)--a collection of short "event scores" which readers may choose to follow or simply read