Holding out for a hero

We at Treasure Hunt Towers like to start our morning with Radio 4’s Today programme and this morning we were intrigued to hear an interview with the editor of one of our very favourite online resources, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. If you missed it, you can listen here - here (it’s the last item). He was discussing the way the concept of heroism has changed over the last 150 years.

Anyway, this prompted me to revisit the ODNB (linked from the Biography page of the Westminster Libraries Gateway and check out the fascinating article on heroic figures in the ODNB here with links to biographies of such varied characters as Grace Darling, The Unknown Warrior and Princess Diana. This led me to some of the other themed articles on such subjects as Childhood in the ODNB, the Great Fire of London, Servants in the ODNB and Trafalgar Square.
My thirst for knowledge not satiated, I checked out the Life of the Day (you can subscribe at Lives of the Week) and found the rather sad little story of Penelope Boothby (1785–1791), artist's model and subject of poetry.
Then I took a quick look at the list of 90 new names added this month including Kathleen Drew, (1901–1957), phycologist (who knew there were celebrity experts in algae?) and George Tuthill, (1817–1887), banner and regalia maker.

Fascinating stuff and you can easily get lost browsing around there but you’ll certainly learn a lot more than you set out to.

After all those biographies, I felt like a change of scene and had a look at a rather fun site sent in by Stuart Walsh, a correspondent from Victoria. This is the Literature Map. Simply put in the name of your favourite authors, (here at Treasure Hunt Towers it’s George Orwell) and watch as a hypnotic pattern of names appears, all of other writers who you might enjoy. Click on one of those for another hypnotic cluster of suggestions. It’s rather like the If You Like… site linked from the Books & Literature page of the Gateway or the book Who Writes Like? which some of you may have at your enquiry desk but a lot more psychedelic.

Too Many Books Spoil the Broth

Are you running up huge bills on Amazon every month? Worried your bookshelves will collapse under the weight of your acquisitions? Struggling to get your suitcase through customs since you can’t possibly go away for a week with less than seven books? Then maybe an eBook reader is for you. We at Treasure Hunt Towers, being at the cutting edge of technology, have already invested in one of these lovely shiny gadgets, much to the envy of our colleagues and now all we want is some books to put on it!

Obviously we could head off to Amazon and hand over some of our hard-earned cash but that would be ridiculous when there is so much free stuff around. And fortunately the Westminster Libraries Gateway (http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/gateway/) is here to help. Just click on the section for Books and Literature and scroll down to Online Books and you’ll find literally tens of thousands of free books to download onto your new toy.

The mother of all online book sites is Project Gutenberg, named after the chap who invented the printing press. The creator of the site claims to have invented the eBook back in the Neolithic era or 1971 to be precise (trivia note – the first ever eBook was The Declaration of Independence) and since those unimaginably far distant days, long before the web was even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, he has added over 30,000 copyright free (in the USA) titles to the site. These range from the classics – you’ll find all of Dickens and Thomas Hardy there as well as the Sherlock Holmes stories – through children’s titles such as Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables to heavier reference works such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language and various translations of the Bible. If it was published in the USA before c1923 and you’ve heard of it, it’s quite likely to be there. And they can all be downloaded to your ebook reader for the grand sum of nothing! And the site has some useful advice on how to do it.

Once you’ve read everything on Project Gutenberg, where to go next? Also linked from the Books and Literature section of the Gateway is the Online Books Page, created by the University of Pennsylvania. This covers a lot of the same ground as Project Gutenberg but it also has handy collections of Women Writers and, excitingly, Banned Books so you can gather together Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Frankenstein, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Rousseau’s Confessions and Black Beauty into one playlist on your eBook reader and also find out what was so controversial about them.

Staying on the Books and Literature page for a moment, don’t forget Contemporary Authors, one of the key links at the top and one of the unsung heroines of the 24/7 library. Not flashy or glam but very useful indeed with biographies, bibliographies and critiques of 1000s of authors which you can search by name, book title, country, genre or even by year of birth.
Hopefully, all this should keep your eBook readers well-stocked and more importantly your readers happy until The Management unveil their scheme for Westminster Libraries’ eBook Collection