Not only did we launch the registration page for “Find The Future: The Game” by renowned designer Jane McGonigal (and, yes, it IS real, even if we are launching it on April Fool’s Day) we also launched the website for our overall Centennial celebration, marking the 100th birthday of our landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street. Right now we’re featuring Q and A with Jane McGonigal, as well as a calendar of events celebrating the Centennial (which officially takes place on May 23, 2011). There is a big festival with all sorts of free programming for the public the weekend before so mark your calendars!
Looking for something free and fun to do Saturday at around 2 pm? Go to our Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library at 40 W 20th Street in Chelsea and check out dance group Dana Salisbury and the No-See-Ums, who will perform “Bark,” one of their original “unseen dances.” See, after you arrive, they’ll take your stuff, blindfold you, walk you into the theater and spend the next 45 minutes or so dancing around you while making noises. They also move you, ask you to lay on the floor, ask you to stand, ask you to sit and so on. At first, it seems a wee bit weird. By the end, it’s simply amazing. You really feel like you’ve gone on a trip or something. The dance forces your other senses to come alive, and your imagination really runs wild. It’s very cool. Check out what WNYC and the Staten Island Advance wrote about it. Now go and see for yourself! Want more info? Get it here.
It’s alive! The NYPL has animated the first book Frankenstein author Mary Shelley ever worked on - a kid’s story called Mounseer Nongtongpaw, or the Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris. It was published by Shelley’s anarchist philosopher dad William Godwin in 1808 when she was a mere 10-years-old and is “probably the first book publication Mary Shelley was ever involved in,” said Charles Carter, a librarian from the Pforzheimer Collection, which houses the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, his family and his friends. “She basically came up with a plot sketch for what was going to happen in the story. She had help from adults, but still, it’s very interesting.” In-house digital producer Jonathan Blanc put the video together in only a few weeks, Carter said, as a way to promote a new exhibit opening today called Shelley’s Ghost at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. The show - a version of which will come to NYPL in 2012 - features 12 of the collection’s “greatest treasures,” said Carter, who wrote a blog post about it today. “I was trying to think of ways to promote it that would be adaptable to an electronic medium,” he said. “This particular item, because it’s so heavily illustrated, would lend itself well, I thought. I was thinking of a Reading Rainbow kind of thing.” Well done, and appropriate. The story was originally based on a comedic song from the early 1790s. Mary Shelley and company remixed it into the book. Since the book and its lavish artwork are part of the public domain, we were free to remix that and create our little animated adaptation. Some things never change.
