Shameless Plug Alert

In case you missed it this weekend: the Library Society was featured on on nationally-distributed basic cable not once but twice. C-SPAN's BookTV aired Robert Rosen's discussion of Confederate Charleston, hosted here back in June, and a Treasures from the Vaults segment that discusses the Society and looks at a few items from our collections. A big thanks to all the folks at CSPAN, who were awesome throughout the whole filming process A double share of thanks to the warmhearted film editor who ran the Library's web address at the bottom of the screen when your loyal blogger mentioned how we happily accept donations for the restoration of old manuscripts.


Anyhow, if you missed it on TV, here it is on the interwebs- enjoy!

Let's go guys! National TV! Everybody's mama's watching!

"If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", or at least that's what I learned reading the Nietzsche Family Circus; here at the Library Society we are all staring into the abyss that is the fall events calendar. Of course it's a fun, educational, enjoyable abyss, but here in the quiet of summer it looks daunting indeed.


Of course, most of the dauntingness is just the chair-moving... thirty-or-so events, averaging around 90-120 attendees... and pretty soon you're moving over 3,500 chairs. Which wouldn't be so bad, but your loyal blogger almost died moving one credenza yesterday. On a related note, the Library Society now has a lovely credenza sitting right inside the back door. Riiight inside the back door.


Anyhow, back to fall events. Nan Morrison will be back teaching Shakespeare (The Roman plays this time, yay!); Unedited returns, and will be joined by an all new Chamber Music Series; Wide Angle Lunches III; special events with Marshall Chapman, the CCL, the Poetry Society, a new non-fiction book club... it's going to be another great events season, and we'll keep you posted on each and every upcoming programme.


One final (kind of last minute) update: look for the Robert Rosen's Library Society lecture on Confederate Charleston to air on CSPAN's BookTV at 5:30PM this Saturday and 11:15AM this Sunday. Also, some of our treasures from the vaults on C-SPAN's BookTV channel this Sunday at 12PM.

After April

A month without the blog! Porca miseria. If you haven't been around the society since the last post, you've missed out. We averaged an event every 2.3 days here this April... I think we've put more mileage on the tables in the research room in the past few weeks than I've put on my car.

Of course, we've had a lot of fun doing it. Poetry society, book sale, two film screenings, an amazing Unedited concert, a St. George's Day soiree, and a little event series called the Wide Angle Lunches, which manage to pack the house - in the middle of the day - week after week. Oh, and we even managed to make it onto the cover of the Mercury this month (check it out here if you missed it). So we're kind of a big deal.

Since I've brought up the Wide Angle Lunches (there are still three left... get your tickets now), I'd like to mention one thing about them that is easily overlooked: they come with terrific displays. Our incomparable archivist, Trish Kometer, has managed to find things in our vaults to tie in with every talk, and fill our display cases with them. Some weeks it's been quite the feat (like when the lunch topic was the Sudan), but she has come through unfailingly with the most unique and interesting items. This week involved rice, so local works from the 18th through the 21st century are on exhibit. This includes the Library's original manuscript of John Drayton's 1803 A View of South Carolina, with his original illustrations. Very cool.

Take advantage of the displays, quickly, though: they're only around until the the next Wide Angle Lunch. Like some manuscript mandala, they are gone almost as soon as they are constructed. Consider it another advantage to visiting the Library Society frequently!

More important than the following blather: happy birthday Pat Conroy!

It's always interesting to browse the minutes of old CLS board meetings.  262 years of mostly boredom interspersed with virulent fighting.  Perhaps my favourite: a particularly heated record of one late 1950's meeting at which a trustee suggested smoking be allowed in the Main Reading Room. 

As every television/film Eisenhower/Kennedy period piece has taught me, in the late 1950's, EVERYBODY smoked.  Grandmothers, titans of industry, Blue Collar Joe, Presidents of the United States, newborn babies...  from the offices of Sterling Price, to NASA's Mission Control, to the office of your very own doctor, everybody smoked.

But not at the Charleston Library Society.  Thanks to the valiance (and vehemence) of trustee Mrs. I'on Rhett, it was not to be.  The motion went from near passage by acclimation, to a long, (one-sided) bargaining for "half the room" to "part of the room" to "one smoking chair", to the cold hell of being infinitely tabled.  The anger and the yelling of the whole affair really does come right through all the stuffy, formal language of board meeting minutes...

So that's why, sixty years later, the Main Reading Room doesn't reek of cigarette smoke.  Kudos, Mrs. Rhett.

 

Remember, smoking is not attractive.  Except on Mad Men... then it's cool.

Another interesting thing from the minutes is the hours of operation the Library has held.  While I've never seen a record of us being open on Sunday, the other 144 hours of the week have been fair game.  Open at five, open at six, open at eleven in the morning; closed at three, closed at six, closed at nine at night... as customs evolved  (and indoor lighting, and air conditioning, and the standard 9-5 business day came into existence), we've changed our hours of operation.

And as of tomorrow, we're doing it again.  Every Wednesday through the end of cotillion season, the Library Society will remain open after 5:30 until 8:30.  Circulation will remain open, through research services- i.e., trips to the vaults - will not be available.  We hope you'll stop by and grab a book, have a cup of coffee, and enjoy the peace and quiet of the South's oldest cultural institution during our new "after work, during cotillion" hours.

Deo Vindice...

Your loyal blogger has acquired a new work computer after about three years of begging, so please pardon any delays in blog posting or updating the website.  It's taking some time to transfer years of photos, fonts, bookmarks, address lists, applications, etc. from The Underpowered Compaq From Hell to my shiny new Mac, hallowed be its name.

And since there's Young Professionals tonight, and a new brochure that needs to be mocked up, and event photos to tag, and in a few minutes, it'll be Children's Storytime downstairs, I'll just share a quick anecdote about work at a 262 year old institution:

This morning, your loyal blogger was called upon to help satisfy the need of a certain federal agency to prove that the Charleston Library Society is, truly, an ancient and venerable eleemosynary library, and not a sinister terrorist front.  And to be fair to the diligent fellows of the DHS, the Society has held a copy of the Qur'an for longer than we've been "Americans"... our Qur'an dates from 1762, twelve years before the founding of this country.

So we get a call this morning that we need something- anything really- that shows our organization's legal incorporation, and proves we're real, live, nephews of our Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July.  Which would be easy enough, if we weren't chartered by the monarch of another country, Mr. George the II, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Hannover, Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

This little issue required going back and finding out if His Highness's Royal Charter is still good enough to prove we're not terrorists.  Apparently it is (I suppose it does indicate we're not IRA members, at least).  So now that it's approved, your loyal blogger must make a copy of the document to send in.  One doesn't just stick a Royal Charter in the Xerox machine, especially since the chances of getting a new one from ol' Liz Windsor are slim-to-none.  So I also got permission to use "the first reprint of the charter that is in good enough shape to photocopy".

So the (fully approved) document now on file, the one that shows we're no threat to the "homeland", is the Library Society's Act of Incorporation... printed by A.J. Burke, 40 Broad Street, Charleston, C.S.A, 1861... NHS, osculare pultem meam.

That's it.  Young Professionals tonight, library's closed on the 15th, and check us out in the latest issue of Charleston Magazine!

Your Michaelmas present: Pat Conroy's coming!

Happy Michaelmas, the third most painfully English of holidays (just behind St. George's Day and Guy Fawkes Night, but slightly ahead of Plough Sunday and Remembrance Day)! We can't cook you a goose or bring bannock bread, so this'll have to do:

Pat Conroy is coming to the Library Society.

To mercilessly crib John Keats; we wish a more exciting word than excited, a more thrilling word than thrilled, to express our regard for so wonderful a writer. Our pleasure in hosting this event cannot be contained.

So, yeah, we're a little hyped up over it. And y'all are too: twenty-four hours after the Post and Courier wrote about the coming fundraiser- more than two weeks before tickets will be on sale- the Society was receiving phone calls about the event. Personally, I've received about a dozen calls and emails looking for tickets, and thereby learned that hanging out with Pat Conroy is a great way to get reacquainted with old friends and distant relations (and then disappoint them terribly).

Tickets will be available after October 15th: priority reservations will be available to Society members, and tickets will be limited. Hard details- exact times and prices- will not be released until sometime next week... so be patient.

While on the topic of events, I would be remiss to neglect the fantastic one we hosted last week. Bret Lott, bestselling author of Jewel and The Hunt Club and about a half-dozen other books delivered a terrific lecture to a very large crowd of members and guests. It was a great kickoff for our Fall events season, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun... sorry, sorry, more Keats. Anyhow, Bret not only gave a great talk; he supplied the A's in an insightful Q and A session (that could have lasted all evening, had it been allowed); and stuck around for an hour on top of that, talking to attendees personally and fielding lord-only-knows how many more questions. As folks who know him- even those who met him just last Thursday- know, Bret is as wonderful a person as he is a writer, and the Society is always pleased to have him here.

...about a lucky girl who made the grade...

Your devoted blogger hopes your weekend was a great as his- I finally got Hey Jude, the weird compilation album released in early 1970 by Apple Records while the Beatles were still with Capitol Records, which means I'm only A Collection of Beatles Oldies away from having the complete official discography.

For those of you who haven't read the news today, our own Anne Cleveland was given a quick writeup in this morning's Post & Courier. Check it out here. P&C columnist, naval historian, and all-around good guy Bryan Hicks put together a nice piece highlighting not only Anne's (impressive) CV but her goal of increasing membership, especially amongst younger Charlestonians. So remember: go grab a young Charlestonian and drag them to the Library Society, to-day. You know that they'll be glad.