Civil servants and faithful hounds

Tom Grady gets a bit lost in the Library catalogue. 

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I was doing some research recently, trying to find pictures of greyhounds in the Library’s Art Gallery Gift Collection. It turns out they’re difficult animals to track down (in more ways than one). We have a few books devoted to ‘sporting and animal prints’ but most of the ones I found depicted only stilted hunting scenes, improbably high-stepping horses, and barrel-shaped pigs.

A fairly typical 19th century depiction of a pig. "Gloucester Old Spot by John Miles 1834" by John Miles.
 Photograph of original. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

And then I came across this book and - as is often the case - I got a bit sidetracked: The German drawings in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle by Edmund Schilling [London ; New York : Phaidon, 1971].

It has an innocuous-enough sounding sub-title: “Supplements to the catalogues of Italian and French drawings, with a history of the Royal Collection of Drawings, by Anthony Blunt” but the name caught my eye.

Anthony Blunt. The wartime Russian spy.

The scandal of a Soviet spy-ring at the heart of the 1940’s British establishment tends to be the main thing everyone remembers about Blunt (and Burgess and Philby). Clearly I’m as guilty as anyone of that but, among many other achievements Blunt was responsible for the Queen’s collection of pictures, and was the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art for 27 years. He also published respected works on Nicolas Poussin, William Blake and Picasso. We have a few of his books in the Library.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (which you can access with your campus login):

In almost every sense he was a superb [Courtauld] director. He had a natural authority, an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, and a winning way with students and younger colleagues. Teaching more by example than by precept, he inspired those around him to give of their best. Under him the Courtauld became the principal centre for training art historians in Britain, with a worldwide reputation for excellence.
from www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30829

One of those younger colleagues was Brian Sewell, who went on to become the London Evening Standard’s art critic for decades. You may not know that as well as being a famously-acerbic critic of poor taste in art (“The public doesn't know good from bad” Guardian, 31 Aug 2009) Sewell is a passionate dog owner. He not only wrote a biography of all the dogs he’s owned and rescued (about 17 in total), but he has also commissioned and built an ostentatious tomb where he plans to be buried alongside the carefully-preserved bones of them all.

In a roundabout way, Brian Sewell’s canine mausoleum brings me back to where I began. Why did a book with a foreword by a former Russian spy catch my eye when I was actually looking for an illustration of a greyhound? Well, because this is on the front cover:

Detail from the cover of The German drawings in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle
by Edmund Schilling [London ; New York : Phaidon, 1971]

It's a funny-looking one and it's a bit hairier than most, but it's a greyhound nonetheless.

Further reading

If you’re interested in learning more about Anthony Blunt you can find Anthony Blunt : his lives by Carter, Miranda [London : Macmillan, 2001] in the Library; or for a fictionalised account of the days leading up to his fall from grace there’s Alan Bennett’s tremendous play “A Question of Attribution” which can be found in the Library along with its companion-piece “An Englishman Abroad”. They both appear in Single spies : a double bill or Plays: two and are both on the shelves at MA 192.9 BEN.

You could also try the book that precipitated Blunt’s fall from grace: Climate of Treason : Five Who Spied For Russia by Boyle, Andrew [Hutchinson & Co. Ltd ; London, 1979].

And if you’d like to know more about greyhounds, there are some fantastic groups around the country who rescue them from poor treatment at the hands of the racing industry. Here are two:

• www.greyhoundgap.org.uk
• www.houndsfirst.co.uk

There's an organised walk by the river in York on 21 June if you'd like to see some up close and maybe get a chance to walk a greyhound yourself. It's part of The Great British Greyhound Walk - an annual national event: www.greatbritishgreyhoundwalk.org.uk

What do the terms 'whizz-bang', 'pipsqueak', 'toffee apple', 'coal-box', and 'souvenir' all have in common?

Believe it or not, they're all slang terms for 'shells' (the explosive kind) and were coined during WWI. And if you knew that already then the Oxford English Dictionary Needs YOU!

Photo: Uncle Sam by AJ Cann. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

The OED researchers consult a huge range of sources to check the earliest usages of words but they simply don't have the time or resources to check them all. And that's where you could come in: they have an appeals page on their website where volunteers can submit examples of early word usage (properly known as antedatings... but you already knew that).

At the moment, they're particularly interested in World War One words and phrases. Kate Wild, an assistant editor at the OED explains:

"As part of the First World War centenary commemorations, the OED has launched a special set of appeals relating to some of the WWI words and phrases it is currently revising. In each case, we believe that there is earlier evidence out there - perhaps in a private letter, a personal diary, a local newspaper, or a government record." Lexicon Valley blog (SLATE magazine) 27 Feb 2014

So if you fancy a challenge or always wondered what was in those old papers in that box in the attic, perhaps now is the time to dust off your research skills, dust off the boxes and get digging.

If you're on campus you can access the OED online for free - you'll get logged in automatically. If you're not on campus, you can go to our e-resources guide: from there you just need to scroll down and select Oxford English Dictionaries Online - again, you'll be automatically logged in with your University account.

Question: What links Kevin Costner, James Bond and the Fairhurst Building?

Tom Grady knows...

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Answer: John Barry the film score composer, of course. 

Photo: Classic Bond with Gadget Briefcase by Andrew Becraft.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

You may have noticed that the Library's collection of DVDs and CDs has a sign above the door, reading: "The John Barry Audiovisual Collection."

This is to recognise the achievement of a former York resident who went to school at St Peters and whose family home on Fulford Road is now the Pavilion Hotel (though in later years he lived in New York).

John Barry was an Oscar-winning composer perhaps best-known for his work on eleven James Bond films, from Dr No to The Living Daylights. He also wrote the music for Kevin Costner's horse-opera Dances With Wolves. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University in 2001, made an Honorary Freeman of York a year later and given an Academy Fellowship at the BAFTAs in 2005 for his lifetime contribution to cinema.

Most people could instantly recognise the 007 theme tune but not everyone knows Barry's involvement in its turbulent history. The theme was performed by the John Barry Seven and the John Barry Orchestra but law courts have twice ruled that, despite some stories to the contrary, the tune itself was written by Monty Norman, the successful singer and composer.

Over the course of a starry career John Barry won five Oscars and four Grammys. He died in January 2011.

(Little-known fact: according to the York Press, the great composer "kept pigs at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, just as [his] family did in Fulford.")

Monkeys, selfies and copyright (and the back of Rod Stewart’s head)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: man meets monkey, monkey steals man’s camera, monkey takes photo of herself, monkey causes international copyright storm that rumbles on for years.

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Back in 2011, nature photographer David Slater went to Indonesia to photograph - among other things - the native Crested Black Macaques that live on the island of Celebes. He certainly got some good pictures: one of the mischievous monkeys pinched his camera and seemed to enjoy the sound the shutter made. Several hundred photos later, Slater retrieved his expensive equipment (undamaged but with a pretty full memory card) and found one or two really quite startling and lovely images.

Photo: A crested black macaque - sadly not the contentious selfie - we thought it best not to risk using it here. 
This image is by Henrik Ishihara and is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence with consent of the copyright owner

The best of them was a selfie of a grinning female, taken in perfect focus. The encounter made the news, the image went viral…and it’s been at the centre of a copyright controversy ever since. You may indeed stop me because you probably have heard this one before. But why does any of this matter?

Well, I think it’s because this story neatly encapsulates the challenges of copyright in the digital age. How do we ensure that writers, photographers, musicians and artists are credited and treated fairly when today’s technology makes it so easy to share their stories, pictures and songs? This isn’t a trifling question: according to a report by Tru Optik (a digital media monitoring company) “over 4 billion movies and TV shows were illegally downloaded worldwide in the first half of 2014”. I wouldn’t even know how to download a TV show illegally – but I’d certainly know how to Tweet you a hilarious photo of a monkey that I found on Google.

How sure are you that something you found on the internet is OK to use in your essay, lecture, Slideshare or Prezi? Even the most cursory Google image search will demonstrate that it’s easy to find images in less than a second. But what you may do with those images should give you pause for thought. In the case of the curious macaque, ask yourself these questions:

• Who owns the image? The monkey or the photographer? Neither?
• Who needs to grant permission to re-use the picture?
• Since the picture was taken accidentally and not part of a deliberately set up shoot, does intent matter?
• What if the picture had been taken by a motion-sensor trigger set up by Slater? Or the monkey was deliberately rewarded with a banana each time she took a shot?

Wikimedia Commons seem to be still grappling with these questions; Slater is claiming ownership and re-use rights and has apparently successfully had the image removed from there several times, but it's then re-uploaded by editors who believe it's in the public domain.

Thankfully, the copyright minefield - as traversed by students, libraries and researchers - was made slightly less treacherous by recent changes to UK legislation. You may still need to tiptoe warily, but the changes on format make it legal to copy a snippet from a sound recording or film for personal use, and for lecturers to include them in presentations. Libraries can digitally preserve sound and film archives and, of course, you can now legally copy your CDs to iTunes for personal use (which will come as some relief to those of us who have faithfully waited for the law to change before clicking on that ‘Import CD’ button).

So what does all this have to do with Rod Stewart?

Photo: Rod Stewart by MEDIODESCOCIDO. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

Well, a recent image of the back of his head is raising another cranial conundrum and causing some copyright head-scratching (sorry, couldn’t resist). The New Yorker magazine reports that Rod is being sued to the tune of two and a half million dollars - by a photographer who once took a picture of the singing Scot’s mullet:

In 1981, a professional photographer named Bonnie Schiffman took a picture of the back of Stewart’s head, which was used, eight years later, on the cover of the album “Storyteller.” Now a different picture of Stewart’s head, also from the back, has been used to promote his Las Vegas act and world tour. Schiffman claims that the resemblance between her photograph and the new image is too close - the legal term is “substantial similarity”- and she is suing for copyright infringement. 

(From Louis Menand ‘Crooner in Rights Spat’; The New Yorker online, 20 Oct 2014)

Both controversies remain hotly debated, but no one yet seems to have approached the really pressing question: at what point will an infinite number of monkeys write the works of Shakespeare? And, when (not if) that happens, who will own them and will they be part of the required reading on university English Literature courses?

Further reading:

• You can see the licensed versions of the Macaque selfies on The Telegraph’s website and on David Slater’s official site: www.djsphotography.co.uk
• You can find lots of books in the Library that discuss human/primate interaction and self-awareness in monkeys. Here are just a couple:

o   Macachiavellian intelligence : how rhesus macaques and humans have conquered the world Maestripieri, Dario. Chicago : University of Chicago Press 2007

o   Self-awareness in animals and humans : developmental perspectives Parker, Sue Taylor. ; Mitchell, Robert W.; Boccia, Maria. Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press 1994

• For an engaging overview of copyright in the modern age you could try William Patry’s Moral panics and the copyright wars Oxford : Oxford University Press 2009
• You might like this interview about the contradictions of today's copyright laws with novelist, commentator and 'copyfighter' Cory Doctorow: 
• www.npr.org/2014/11/03/360196476/picking-the-locks-redefining-copyright-law-in-the-digital-age
• We also have lots of copies of Shakespeare’s plays and poems in the Library catalogue
• Sadly, we do not have any Rod Stewart albums in the AV collection

Weren’t we promised flying cars by now?

It may come as a shock to readers of a more mature vintage to learn that the classic futuristic film Blade Runner was set in 2019. Tom Grady wonders how close we are today to travelling by flying car.

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'San Diego Comic-Con 2007' by Jason Scragz. Re-used under a Creative Commons licence.

The film was made in 1982 but only 3 years earlier, the Usborne Book of the Future was predicting all kinds of interesting developments (not seen any gold mines in the sky yet, but artificial intelligence and 'space-based superscopes' weren't so wide of the mark).

And Marty McFly may have been using his hoverboard in 2015 but it doesn't look like we’re going to see them in Currys any time soon (though you can buy them on Amazon where a prominent disclaimer warns the unwary buyer: "this product does not fly"). But we might not be so far away from seeing Ridley Scott's replicants working in your Library.

Westport Public Library in the US recently unveiled a pair of humanoid robots whose job will be "to teach the kind of coding and computer-programming skills required to animate such machines". Named Vincent and Nancy, the two robots have cameras, microphones and motion sensors, and use sonar to detect walls. An article in the Wall Street Journal explains:

Vincent and Nancy can recognize faces and detect where sound is coming from. They have a "fall manager" that helps them right themselves after a tumble just as a human might, grunts and all. They can even "touch" and "feel" with the help of tactile and pressure sensors.

The robots come equipped with programming software, but embedded within that software are compatible programming languages, such as Python, that can be used to expand the capabilities of the NAO bots. Aldebaran [the manufacturer] also has a large development community continuously adding new behavior apps that facilitate everything from high-five gestures to a "wake-up" routine including yawning and stretching.

This is what they look like (they're pretty cute):

Robot manufacturer Aldebaran's booth at an exhibition. Picture by Axel Voitier, 
re-used under a Creative Commons licence.

Aldebaran robots like Vincent and Nancy (picture credit as above)

And if that seems incredible, hold on to your hats because self-styled polymath will.i.am has just designed a futuristic car! Not a flying one, sadly (though one of those exists), but one that is "equipped with four 180-degree external cameras that allow panoramic photos to be captured on your phone".

Now, your initial reaction may be similar to that of Alex Petridis in The Guardian who observed that "there are people out there who'll say that taking 180-degree panoramic photos on your phone while you’re driving sounds incredibly dangerous - in fact, it sounds like the kind of thing you would find yourself doing immediately before accidentally running someone over". But who knows? will.i.am's invention could actually just be one step behind the realisation of Deckard's hovercar.

Further reading:

The Library has a couple of DVD versions of Blade Runner (Director's Cut and Final Cut) and we also have several books discussing its significance and genesis, as well as a copy of the draft script.

• Future noir: the making of Blade Runner Sammon, Paul London : Orion Media 1999

• Retrofitting blade runner: issues in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep? Kerman, Judith, 2nd. ed., Ohio : Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1997

• The Blade Runner experience: the legacy of a science fiction classic Brooker, Will London : Wallflower Press 2005

Fun with Google Apps scripts. (Yes, you read that right)

One of our non-technical staff drank the Google Apps Kool-Aid. In this blog post, Tom Grady shares what he learned when he decided to get automated.

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I have come to the conclusion that I must be fundamentally lazy. Why?

Because I recently learned about Google Apps Scripts and have become a little bit obsessed with using them to automate everything in my life. Without openly admitting it to myself or my boss, I think I'm aiming to get to a point where I come to work, set all my scripts going and then wander off to drink cups of tea.

Ground Control to Major Tom by Chris Devers. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

So what exactly have I done? Well, we're hardly talking SkyNet taking over just yet, but I have managed to write some scripts that do the following:

• Collect the most recent stats for my team from several Google Spreadsheets, showing how hard we've worked and what's on the horizon for this week
• Put those figures into a pretty table so you can compare last week with this week at a glance
• Automatically email my boss with them every Monday morning at 10am*

*(I suspect she has an inbox rule that sends them straight to Deleted Items, thereby neatly closing a circular loop of automation, but anyway...)

I thought I'd share with you how I did it, in case anyone else out there is as lazy as me.

First of all, let me be clear: as an English Lit graduate I knew I wasn't going to be able to merrily start writing code from scratch. So I did what everyone does: I went to see The Oracles. They're not on a distant mountain top, they're in the Teaching and Learning team in IT Services in the Fairhurst Building. After an hour's overview with Mike Dunn and Tom 'Major Tom' Smith they let me loose, and over the course of a week I managed to cobble together a script that I thought might do the job.

It didn't work.

And then I learned the most important lesson of all: if you don't know what to do, ask StackOverflow and a kind soul somewhere in the world will help. If you follow their no-nonsense rules for asking questions ("This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.") you actually get some great ideas and, if you're lucky, they'll even throw you some code to take away. For free. And they don't even like it when you say thanks.

My code was copying stats from the spreadsheets OK but it wasn't copying the most recent cells; I could only get it to find fixed rows and columns and this is no good if you update your stats every day. Here's a snippet of what someone suggested.

if (origin.getName() == "Sheet1") {
    var r = origin.getActiveCell();
    var row = r.getRow();
    var numberOfCol = 3;
    if( row > 1) {
      var numberOfRows = row >= 7 ? 6 : row - 1;
      var startRow = row >= 7 ? row - numberOfRows + 1 : 2;
      range = origin.getRange(startRow, 3, numberOfRows, numberOfCol);
      range.copyValuesToRange(destination, 1, numberOfCol, 1, numberOfRows);
    };

On every edit event in Sheet1 this copies the bottom six cells from Sheet1 to Sheet2. I jiggled this into my script and hey presto! It worked. The final piece of the puzzle was to have an old-fashioned formula in another Google Sheet grab the stats from Sheet2 and format them nicely. Then I wrote another script that is triggered at 10am every Monday morning and uses the MailApp.sendEmail function to send the stats.

Apart from being absurdly and unreasonably proud of learning this from scratch, I think this is worth sharing because it's a good example of something that not long ago would have required input from a real developer. I would have had to persuade someone important that it was worth spending time and money on doing, and I'd have have failed because it really wasn't a pressing problem that needed solving. Fiddling with Google Apps scripting liberated me from so much red tape and allowed me to just go off and do it, without much fuss and without much training.

Next I'm working on a script that will churn out blog posts ...

It’s 'Banned Books Week' in the USA!

Each year, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documents hundreds of attempts by individuals and groups to have books removed from libraries and classrooms. September 21–27 is the official week when these books are celebrated in the United States.

Banned Books Week banner showing 99 of the 100 most banned books for 1990-2000. Image courtesy of
Dayton Metro Library, re-used under a Creative Commons licence. Can you tell which is the missing 100th book?

According to a recent article in TIME magazine, part of the reason why book banning remains so prevalent in the U.S. is that “the challenges to books happen mostly on a local level. The federal government stays out of it, but individual schools and libraries are ... eager to protect everybody from hazards like ugly words, sedition, blasphemy, unwelcome ideas and, perhaps worst of all, reality.”

The ALA publishes a list of all the complaints they receive and if you can name an author, chances are they're on it: from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip Pullman and children's author Judy Blume, to JK Rowling (several times), John Steinbeck and Stephen King.

Here are a few of the most well-known titles on their ‘challenged classics’ list. How many of these have you read?

The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
The subject of multiple attempts at banning and censorship, it’s been removed from various libraries and curricula for reasons such as “excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence, and anything dealing with the occult”. But my favourite reason was from a submission by Libby, MT, High School in 1983 who wanted it banned “due to the book's contents."

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
According to Vernon Verona Sherill, NY School District in 1980, it’s a "filthy, trashy novel."

1984 George Orwell
Challenged in Jackson County, FL back in 1981 because Orwell's novel is "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter."

Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
Only in 2009 was this book reinstated on the English curriculum at a school in Shelby, MI but parents “are to be informed in writing and at a meeting about the book’s content. Students not wanting to read the book can choose an alternative without academic penalty.”

But my absolute favourite reason for banning a novel is coincidentally for one of my favourite books. Just like the book, this reason has got the lot:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey
In 1974, five residents of Strongsville, OH, sued the board of education to remove Kesey’s book. Labelling it "pornographic," they stated that the novel "glorifies criminal activity, has a tendency to corrupt juveniles and contains descriptions of bestiality, bizarre violence, and torture, dismemberment, death, and human elimination."

These books are all available to borrow from the Library.

Further reading:

• A full list of ‘most-frequently challenged’ titles from 1990-1999, see: 100 most frequently challenged books and from 2000-2009: Top 100 Banned/challenged books
• Banned Books Week official site: www.bannedbooksweek.org

Mountweazels in Argleton: the phantom town on Google Maps, and the woman who never was

Tom Grady goes trapping for Mountweazels.

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Have you ever been to the town of Argleton? Probably not, because it doesn’t exist and never did. But for a while you could find it just off the A59 on Google Maps. 

If you had been there, I suppose you might have run into Lillian V. Mountweazel, a celebrated photographer, known for her shots of rural American mailboxes. She never existed either but she’s in an edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. So what’s going on? Copyright traps my friend, copyright traps.

The bustling metropolis of Argleton.
Photo courtesy of Micahel Nolan, neighbour; used under a Creative Commons licence.

Most cartographers will deny it, but it’s rumoured that they deliberately introduce mistakes into their maps in order to catch out copyright violators. Usually the ‘mistakes’ are small, like an extra cul-de-sac here or an exaggerated bend in a road there: they are calculated imperfections that identify authorship and are often known as ‘trap streets’. But the settlement of Argleton could be the boldest example yet - a ‘trap town’. Or it could just have been a genuine mistake that got corrected: either way, for a time it was on the map and then suddenly it wasn’t.

But in-between, the world went slightly mad.

Despite it never existing, news of the fictitious settlement spread across the internet after it was spotted and blogged about by a nearby resident in 2008. The story was picked up by mainstream media, gained momentum, and at one point you could even buy t-shirts bearing the slogan "I visited Argleton and all I got was this t-shirt". Pretty soon, you could find job listings, hotels, flats to rent, and even a chiropractor based there. According to The Daily Telegraph “the businesses, people and services listed [were] real, but actually based elsewhere in the same postcode”. Google removed the town from its maps in May 2010 and released a statement saying that it was a simple, unexplained error. As an earlier blog post of ours explains, you can report errors yourself and get them fixed.

A real weasel. Photo by Jared Kelly,
used under a Creative Commons licence.

But the case of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel is much more cut-and-dried: she was definitely made up.

The 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia has an entry for the "fountain designer turned photographer" who died "in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine" but a former New Columbia editor explained it quite simply to the New Yorker magazine:

"It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said... "If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us."

In a neat twist, the word 'Mountweazel' has now entered general usage as a term used to describe these lexicographical traps. It is an excellent word. See also Esquivalience.

Further reading:

1. If you’d like to know what the sky above Argleton and other non-existent places looks like, then there’s a Tumblr site for that (of course there is) theskyontrapstreet.tumblr.com
2. More Mountweazels can be found at mentalfloss.com

War heroes, abattoirs and Scalextric. It can only mean one thing: the Tour de France is nearly over.

You might possibly have heard that some kind of bike race came to Yorkshire earlier this month. Tom Grady has taken the opportunity to gather a selection of random facts about cyclists.

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Photo: Col De La Croix Fer 1989 by Steve Selwood. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

I'm a cycling fan so I'm not yet experiencing over-exposure and was fully expecting to be burbling on in this post about the history of the Yellow Jersey and who might win it this year. But then I thought "Hmm, people can find that out anywhere...what they really want to know is pointless facts like which member of the professional peloton used to work in an abattoir, and which one is a former Scalextric Champion." So that's what this blog post is about.

• Cadel Evans, the 2011 winner of the Tour is an obsessive fan of Tintin (and we have a Tintin book in the Library, plus an illustrated Tintin dictionary - of course - as well as a film).

• As a young boy, the three time World Road Race Champion Oscar Freire, was also the Spanish Scalextric Champion (the history of Scalextric is touched on in this book on the shelves at the National Railway Museum)

• Currently riding for Tinkoff Saxo, Danish professional cyclist Matti Breschel used to work as a male model in New York.

• Before turning pro, Australia's longest serving cyclist Scott Sunderland used to work in an abattoir. He was also memorably knocked off his bike by his own team car but went on to ride at elite level for another six years.

• Formerly one of the world's top sprinters, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov from Uzbekistan has a band named after him. I found their website, you can download some tracks for free: www.abdou.co.uk. Two bonus facts: (1) Abdoujaparov the cyclist was nicknamed 'The Tashkent Terror' due to his ferocious riding style; (2) Abdoujaparov the band have a free song called Here's Your Free CD.

• Winner of the 1988 Tour de France, Pedro Delgado also has a band named after him. The Delgados were from Motherwell in Scotland and released an album called Domestiques and another called Peloton - both titles are cycling references.

But this one is my favourite fact (it's also definitely true):

• Gino Bartali was one of Italy's most famous cyclists - he won the Giro d'Italia three times and the Tour de France twice in the 1930s & 40s. But few people know that during WWII he was part of the Italian resistance - at one point he was even arrested by Mussolini's Blackshirts. 

According to reports he used his fame and unique talent to act as a clandestine courier, undertaking training rides to carry secret messages all around the country. He wore his racing jersey emblazoned with his name and "neither the Fascist police nor the German troops risked discontent by arresting him." He also hid a Jewish family in his cellar and - I love this bit - led Jewish refugees towards the Swiss Alps himself by pulling a wagon containing a secret compartment, attached to his bike. He told police patrols that it was just part of his intense training. It's a fantastic story and much of it was only revealed after Bartali's death - he believed his actions were not heroic or worthy of remembrance:

"When people were telling him, 'Gino, you're a hero', he would reply: 'No, no - I want to be remembered for my sporting achievements. Real heroes are others, those who have suffered in their soul, in their heart, in their spirit, in their mind, for their loved ones. Those are the real heroes. I'm just a cyclist.'" (Storyville: Italy's Secret Heroes)

Photo: Bartali by CiclismoItalia. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

If you want to know more about Gino Bartali and Italian cycling, there's a great book in the Library called Pedalare! Pedalare!: a history of Italian cycling (found on the shelves at LN 6.6 FOO).

And for further reading: the Library subscribes to Bicycling Magazine and the Journal of Science and Cycling. You can access them for free through the Library catalogue.

Professional cyclists vs. a big dinosaur [infographic]

As the Grand Depart draws near, Tom Grady has uncovered some important facts.

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The book that didn’t win the Bailey’s Prize this week

Despite picking up the Pulitzer Prize this year, Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch lost out this week to a novel by first-time author Eimear McBride. McBride’s book, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, won this year’s Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize).

The Library has The Goldfinch on the shelves (at MB 83.9 TAR) but we also have another couple of interesting items that I stumbled across when looking for it.

Ever heard of Carel Fabritius?

Me neither, but he painted the picture that features in the novel and peeps out from the front cover of the book.

Photo of front cover from Library copy.

p. 26 Carel Fabritius: complete edition
with a catalogue raisonné Oxford;Phaidon, 1981

It’s hanging in the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in the Netherlands - coincidentally the same gallery that houses Johannes Vermeer’s famous Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was also the subject of a modern novel.

We have a complete edition of Carel Fabritius’ work in the Library and, courtesy of the York City Art Gallery Gift Collection, we also have a book on the work of his brother, Barent Fabritius. Carel studied under Rembrandt, and it seems he was a promising young artist until he was killed in a massive gunpowder explosion in the city of Delft in 1654.

And, in keeping with our theme, the National Gallery has a painting of what Delft looked like after the explosion.

The artist JMW Turner in Yorkshire

How many of you knew that the great landscape artist JMW Turner (1775-1851) spent time sketching and painting in Yorkshire?

York Art Gallery held an exhibition in 1980 that featured many of his works from around our area and we have the exhibition catalogue on the Library shelves. It’s only a slim booklet with black and white images but it makes for interesting reading. Turner painted scenes all over the county, including Ilkley Moor, Knaresborough and Whitby, and produced this beautiful painting of York Minster, viewed from the River Ouse, c.1815.

View of York Minster from the River Ouse
Image courtesy of www.william-turner.org  - click to enlarge

It's difficult to tell exactly where the artist must have been positioned for this view. Does anyone have a suggestion?

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Snow Storm, Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps 1812
Image courtesy of www.william-turner.org - click to enlarge

The picture to the left is Turner's Hannibal Crossing the Alps. According to William-Turner.org, the tempestuous backdrop of this famous scene is "reputed to have been inspired by a storm over Otley's Chevin while Turner was staying at Farnley Hall".



(For those readers who have completed the gruelling Boxing Day Chevin Chase run this information will come as no surprise.)

Mind the gaffe!

Many of you will be working on your dissertations right now (unless you really did get sidetracked by this). This is your chance to get your thoughts down on paper on screen and show the world what you know.

Photo: Word Nerd by Ryan Hyde. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

But how can you be sure you're expressing yourself perfectly?

You probably know the difference between illusion and allusion, but do you know your euphemism from your euphuism? Are you confident you know when to use fortuitous and when to say fortunate?


Well, don't worry, for help is at hand: the Library has plenty of guides to the English language. You can search MZE 140.3 on the catalogue for lots of examples, but my favourite is the no nonsense Mind the gaffe: the Penguin guide to common errors in English by R.L. Trask (MZE 140.3 TRA). In his introduction Trask says quite boldly:

Many other usage handbooks exist, but some of them are a little reluctant to lay down the law. They often tell the reader instead 'Well, some people prefer this, but other people prefer that.' I assume that you don't want to hear this. Instead, I expect, you want to read 'This is right, but that is wrong.' As far as possible, I'll try to say exactly that. This handbook adopts a much blunter tone than do most others. (p.2)

He does go on to moderate this statement (... or is that modify? aargh!) because he acknowledges that the English language is constantly changing, but Trask's approach is refreshing and his advice usually wise. Here are some typical entries:

• Meaningful - a vastly overused word, and one often used inexplicitly... (p.184)
• Methodology - a method is a single procedure for achieving some end. In contrast, a methodology is a set of conventional procedures, always principled and usually scientific or at least scholarly, for working in a particular discipline. The longer word is only appropriate in scientific and scholarly contexts, and it should not be used thoughtlessly as a fancy synonym for the shorter word. (p. 185)
• Comprise, consist, compose, constitute - these four verbs are very frequently confused, producing awful things like "The NATO forces are comprised of soldiers from eight countries"... (p.77)
• Simplistic - this is not a fancy word for simple… (p.260)

So if you're unsure whether you mean to say 'distrust' or 'mistrust', or if you're tied up in knots over whether to say 'due to' or 'owing to' then you might find this a very handy, light-hearted guide. (And for more of the same, I thoroughly recommend Lynne Truss' timeless Eats, shoots and leaves : the zero tolerance approach to punctuation - found at MZE 147 TRU.)

If you need more specific advice on structuring your assignment or developing your argument, then you could try dropping in at The Writing Centre in the Harry Fairhurst building, and for help with other study skills there is lots of advice in the University's Study Skills web pages.

And finally, even if you really can't seem to piece that dissertation together, whatever else you do don't try to fool anyone with this: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/. It won't end well.

Caravaggio - self-portrait as a severed head

Image from The complete paintings of Caravaggio London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1969

As we gradually catalogue more of the York Art Gallery Gift Collection, we’re beginning to unearth some real gems.

This image of David with the Head of Goliath appears in The Complete Paintings of Caravaggio and it’s noteworthy because the severed head - mouth agape, blank eyed, dripping blood - is actually a portrait of Caravaggio himself.

The artist was reportedly something of a firebrand: according to Michael Kitson’s introduction "[Caravaggio] is recorded as sometimes walking the streets... carrying a drawn sword in front of him, and he was often involved in fights, one of which (in 1606) ended in a murder and his subsequent flight from Rome" (p. 7).

You can find this painting hanging in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, or on page 63 of the book if you don’t have the airfare.

(Image and quoted text from The complete paintings of Caravaggio London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1969 found in the JBM Library at LJ 9.5 CAR Quarto Oversize Books)

Alan Ayckbourn: “Ever since I tried to retire things have got busier”

There was an interesting article in the Guardian this weekend about the dramatist Alan Ayckbourn, his long career and the revival of one of his plays at the National Theatre. 

The Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where Ayckbourn was Artistic Director from 1972 to 2009.
Photo: Scarborough: Stephen Joseph Theatre by Tobias Schiller. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

The University of York acquired Alan Ayckbourn’s archive in 2011 - it contains thousands of pages of material, including original manuscripts, handwritten drafts and plot diagrams, as well as photographs and a collection of letters “that reads like a Who’s Who of theatre”. Speaking at the announcement of the archive’s accession Sir Alan said:

“The archive is really about the writing process. The old method was my wife, Heather, at an old typewriter with me dictating from my handwritten notes. I always like to go to bed with a tidy script and, in the old days, I would trawl back through several pages of typing and blot things out with tippex or cover my scripts with arrows.

“I realised that what I was learning from others and from experience was valuable and I wanted to chronicle it. I hope the Archive is an extension of this. I think the Archive will be a fertile ground for ideas and inspire people to write.” University of York News and Events, 27 June 2011

The material is held in the Samuel Storey Writing and Performance Collection within the Borthwick Institute for Archives. More information on the collection and on the Alan Ayckbourn Archive Education project is available from the Borthwick’s website or by contacting them directly.