The National Park Service officially turns 100 this summer, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, is marking the occasion with two consecutive exhibitions drawn from its collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera. The first, Geographies of Wonder: Origin Stories of America's National Parks, 1872-1933, opened this past weekend. From an album of early photos documenting Yellowstone National Park at its beginnings to the many brochures, postcards, and guidebooks produced in the early twentieth century to entice tourists, the exhibition highlights early Euro-American encounters with the landscape and examines the consequences of our actions. Below are a few highlights now on view:

Sunset magazine; May 1904 issue cover, painted by Chris Jorgensen. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, Tenting Tonight, cover, 1916. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Great Northern Railway, Glacier National Park Invites You, 1925. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Geographies of Wonder will remain up through September 3. Part II, Geographies of Wonder: Evolution of the National Park Idea, 1933-2016, will open on October 22.

I'm not a cat person--if my parents' calico could talk, she'd readily testify to all the ways me and my basset hounds have made her miserable over the past decade. Still, I'd be foolish to ignore that books and cats are a winning combination. Librarian Jan Louch (with Lisa Rogak) explores that special bond in her new book The True Tails of Baker and Taylor: The Library Cats Who Left Their Pawprints on a Small Town...and the World.

Baker & Taylor want you to use the library. © Baker & Taylor LLC. Reproduced with permission from St. Martin's Press

In an era before the morass of social media made Grumpy Cat and other creatures international celebrities, there were Baker and Taylor. Bags, posters, and other freebies from the eponymous library distributor became cult items at library conferences (like the BEA taking place in Chicago this week), and remain fan favorites today, as their namesake company continues to use their likeness on promotional items.

Louch's memoir explains how she and fellow librarians at her sleepy public library in Minden, Nevada, initially adopted a cat to tackle a mouse infestation. When a representative from  Baker & Taylor learned the cat was named for their company, a companion was shrewdly purchased for the library. In return, the creatures posed for company advertising, resulting in a wildly successful marketing campaign that remains a cultural touchstone for librarians across the country. Posters and other items routinely pop up on eBay and other auction sites for around $30.

The inaugural members of Douglas County Public Library's Feline Literati section in their first poster for Baker & Taylor. ©Baker & Taylor LLC. reproduced with permission from St. Martin's Press.

                                                                                                                                                            The True Tails of Baker and Taylor: The Library Cats Who Left Their Pawprints on a Small Town...and the World, by Jan Louch with Lisa Rogak; St. Martin's Press, $25.99, hardcover, 274 pages. May 2016.

As part of the ongoing Shakespeare commemorations this year marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death, Transport for London has teamed up with Shakespeare's Globe to create a special map of the London Underground. 

All 367 stations across the Underground - as well as the 14 Underground Lines - have had their usual names replaced with characters from Shakespeare's plays in a special edition map. Instead of taking the Northern or the Bakerloo Lines, you can jump on board the Villains or Heroines Lines instead.

Station names along the way have had their names changed to match the theme of the line. So, the Central Line, which on the Shakespeare map is called the Lovers Line, has stations such as Hortensio and Juliet. Meanwhile, the Jubilee Line, labeled the Fathers and Kings Line, has stops at King Lear and Shylock.

"To think about navigating the plays in the same way we think about getting around the Underground reminds us that as complex as they are, the works of Shakespeare are entirely accessible to everyone," said Farah Karim-Cooper, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe, in an interview with The Independent.

Maps are available for £3.99 in a regular tube map edition or £15 for a special art print.

You had me at the subtitle.
                                                                                                                                                             Art historian Laura Cumming's new book, The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece (Scribner, $28), is the astonishing true story of an English bookseller whose purchase of a painting of Charles I at a liquidation auction changed the course of his life. It was 1845 when John Snare bid £8 for a painting supposed by the auctioneer to be a Van Dyck, but Snare had his own opinion: he thought the Spanish artist Diego Velázquez might have painted it during Charles' clandestine trip to Spain in 1623 when the proposed marriage between (then prince) Charles and Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III of Spain, was under negotiation.

It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of today's barn or attic find (or the Rembrandt dislodged from a NJ basement recently), and years of research and legal issues ensued as Snare attempted to prove the Velázquez provenance. Snare's enthusiasm ultimately veered into mania, causing him to lose his livelihood and very likely his family. He left them behind when he emigrated to New York City where he would continue exhibiting and promoting his "Velázquez" for decades.
                                                                                                                                                            The mystery at the book's core hooks the reader early on--is it real or isn't it? Was Snare clever or deluded? Cumming's thorough research and passion for the subject shines through her engaging prose, making The Vanishing Velázquez a riveting read for any book or art lover.
                                                                                                                                                        Image via Simon & Schuster/Scribner.

An enterprising fifteen year old--who built a collection of vintage Mac computers with money he saved from mowing lawns--is set to display his collection at a planned technology museum in Maine.

In just six years, and with limited means at his disposal, Alex Jason managed to collect 200 Apple computers, many of which are on display at the moment in his parents' basement.

The collection highpoint is a very rare Apple I, from 1976, which is still functioning. Fewer than 70 Apple Is are thought to still exist. One sold for over $900,000 in 2014 at a Bonhams auction.

Another collection highlight the Apple Lisa 2/5 (pictured), named for Steve Jobs' daughter, a Powerbook 100, considered to be the first modern laptop, and Cursor III, the first prototype of a mouse.

Alex's first major coup in building his collection was acquiring a lot of 50 Apple computers for $2,000.

Alex's father, Bill, is leading an effort in Maine to convert a Carnegie Library into the Maine Technology Museum, which would open in January 2017. In addition to housing Alex's Apple collection, the musuem would host a variety of interactive exhibits about engineering, renewable energy, space exploration, virtual reality, and, of course, computers. 

In the meantime, you can view Alex's collection, on display in his parents' basement, in this YouTube video:

[Image of an Apple Lisa from Wikipedia]

Emile Stange painted this Hudson River scene c. 1892, but it was his friend, writer Stephen Crane, who later captioned it, "The Sense of A City is War."
Crane lived in New York City from 1894 to 1897. He had established himself as an author with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893, and The Red Badge of Courage followed in 1895. His circle of friends at the time included Stange as well as another artist, Corwin Linson. It was Linson who recalled this 5 1/2" x 8 3/4" oil on canvas in his memoir, My Stephen Crane: "Stange had given me a small sketch of a great white cruiser at anchor in the North River against the line of city towers. Steve at once entitled it 'The Sense of A City is War.'"

The painting is inscribed by the artist at bottom right, "To my friend Linson 1894, Emile Stange 1892." In another hand (presumably Linson's) in the lower left is Crane's title.   

Swann Galleries will offer this painting at auction on May 18. The estimate is $1,000-1,500. Will it be an art (Stange) collector or a book (Crane) collector who covets it most?

Image via Swann Auction Galleries.

Recently we heard about the newly launched Collectors Café, branded as a "global lifestyle brand for collectors and the collectibles industry." Through its website, social media, and a TV series hosted by Larry King, his wife Shawn, and Mykalai Kontilai, Collectors Café is trying to appeal to a mass audience of collectors.

The Collectors Café website (still in Beta) contains a collector shop offering a selection of collectibles, all sold with "Authentiguard" consumer protection. Though not yet fully operational, it appears that the website will also anchor "CollectorBook" (like Facebook for collectors) and "Collectortube" (Youtube for collectors). Until then, Collectors Café has uploaded a handful of videos to its Youtube channel. Some are longer interviews between Larry King and a celebrity collector while others are two-minute programs designed for the nonspecialist on topics ranging from Superbowl rings to Elvis memorabilia to Teddy bears. Earlier this week, they even got into the rare book game by posting about first editions and "The Hobbit." See for yourself:

Anne Frank's personal copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, bearing the ownership signatures of Anne and her sister Margot, will be on the auction block today at Swann Galleries. The otherwise unremarkable 1925 German edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales (Aus Grimms Märchen) is expected to fetch $20,000-30,000.

   When the Frank family fled their Amsterdam apartment for the secret annex on Prinsengacht street, the book was left behind. The book found its way into a secondhand bookshop where a Dutch couple purchased the book shortly after the conclusion of the war. 

   In 1977, the children of the Dutch couple discovered Anne's signature in the book and wrote a letter to Otto Frank, Anne's father, and the only family member who survived the Holocaust. Otto wrote a moving letter in response, expressing his desire that the family keep the book for their own children. That letter will be sold alongside the copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales at auction.

   Anne Frank material is, of course, exceedingly scarce on the ground. A set of letters between Anne and Margot Frank and their American penpals was sold at auction by Swann in 1988 for $165,000.

   Other auction highlights include a portrait of Einstein bearing his signature and an unsigned manuscript from Oscar Wilde. The Wilde manuscript consists of notes for a pending, book review of a book on book collecting entitled The Book Fancier. Wilde wasn't impressed.

Opening tomorrow at the Getty Research Institute galleries in Los Angeles is a major exhibit, Cave Temples Of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art On China's Silk Road. Organized in collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation, the show will feature rare objects found at the famous Mogao cave site and full-scale replicas of three cave temples. The Magao caves, along the ancient Silk Road, date from the 4th to 14th centuries. The items on exhibit, including 43 manuscripts, paintings on silk, embroideries, sketches, and ritual diagrams, have traveled from museums and libraries around the world.

One exhibit highlight, especially for readers of this blog, is the Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest dated complete printed book, according to The Getty. The Diamond Sutra is a sacred Mahayana Buddhist text that dates to the year 868 CE. It was unearthed in Cave 17, also known as the Library Cave, where some 40,000 objects, sealed up for a millennium, were discovered in the early twentieth century. The book is on loan from the British Library for a rare stateside visit.

Susan Whitfield, the director of the International Dunhuang Project, will present a related lecture, The Diamond Sutra: A Story of Printing, Piety, and Preservation on the Silk Road, on June 5. The exhibit will remain up through September 4.

Image: Diamond Sutra, 868 CE, ink on paper. London, British Library, Or.8210/P.2. Copyright © The British Library Board.

A map of Middle Earth annotated by J. R. R. Tolkien has been acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where it will join the largest collection of Tolkien material in the world.

Last fall, we reported on a surprise discovery of an annotated map of Middle Earth that Tolkien created in preparation for a 1970 edition of The Lord of the Rings. That map, found tucked away in a copy of the novel owned by illustrator Pauline Bayes (who created the now iconic map for the same 1970 Allen & Unwin edition), was discoverd by Blackwell's in Oxford.  The bookshop priced the map at £60,000.

The Bodleian purchased the map with friends of the library funds as well as grants from the V&A Purchase Fund.

"This particular map provides a glimpse into the creative process that produced some of the first images of Middle-earth, with which so many of us are now familiar. We're delighted to have been able to acquire this map and it's particularly appropriate that we are keeping it in Oxford," said Chris Fletcher, keeper of special collections at the Bodleian in an interview with The Guardian.

"Tolkien spent almost the whole of his adult life in the city and was clearly thinking about its geographical significance as he composed elements of the map. It would have been disappointing had it disappeared into a private collection or gone abroad."