Becoming a Power Reader This Summer

Your child can be a Power Reader this Summer at the Santa Fe Public Library.

This FREE program is designed to help keep up reading skills over the summer months. Children meet with a reading friend three hours a week at the library to be encouraged to read and to be coached in reading.

WHO: Children in grades 2nd through 6th can sign up to be paired with a reading friend, aged 14 and up. WHERE: Southside and La Farge Branch Libraries. WHEN: Reading friends will meet two or three times a week between July 9th and August 17th.

REGISTRATION: On-going, beginning IMMEDIATELY!! Call 955-2828. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Children’s Department at the Southside Branch Library, 6599 Jaguar Dr. (955-2828)

Sponsored by Buckaroo Ball, Santa Fe Community Foundation and LANL Foundation

We can't resist showing you this wonderful picture of Markie Scholz and some of her Dragons are Too Seldom puppets, taken at Southside Library during the program on June 22nd. No-o-o-o, the reader Buddies won't be as cute as Markie and the puppets, but they'll probably be as much fun to hang out with...

Every Book Is New

Lazy, hazy days of summer reading. Everyone should experience it. What did I read when I was a child? It was a summer tradition to re-read Little Women by Louis May Alcott and cry over the loss of Laurie and death of Beth. And read every new Nancy Drew and Childhood of Famous Americans biography. It was hammock- reading under old walnut trees that sometimes dropped a green walnut into the hammock. My mother had taught in a one room school house and she supported the idea that reading was an acceptable escape from chores until the cows had to be milked.

But what entices kids to read today? Charlotte’s Web’s popularity has been enhanced by a movie, The Borrowers still live under the floor, Ramona the Pest still gets into trouble, and Nancy Drew has been resurrected as a movie. But what to recommend that is "new." Ask a librarian—they read, review and order hundreds of the newest, best, most fun and award winning books. But when it comes to kids, every book they find is new, it just may be "old" to us. I once was in a library where a young patron exclaimed, "Oh a new Louisa May Alcott book!" She didn't know and didn't care that the author had been dead for over 100 years, the book was new to her.

New New Really New

We've just refreshed the Just Added to the Database list. The most curious thing on the list is yet another new title by V. C. Andrews, who died in 1986, and whose subsequent career gives the notion of a 'ghost writer' a literal slant. According to Wikipedia, novelist Andrew Neiderman has been writing the V. C. Andrews titles since her death. His own website doesn't mention this parallel career, but only features the thrillers written under his own name. We have a couple of them.

There are a number of local interest titles just added: Jimmy Santiago Baca's Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande ; Strawbale Home Plans ; and Acequia : water-sharing, sanctity, and place by Sylvia Rodríguez. And perhaps Julia Alvarez's book, One Upon a Quinceanera, will also call particularly to New Mexico interests. There are a couple of foodie titles, Alice Waters & Chez Panisse : the romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brilliant making of a food revolution by Thomas McNamee ; Slow food nation : why our food should be good, clean, and fair by Carlo Petrini ; a great many political titles as there have been continuously for the past several years; and some interesting new fiction.

A lot of the titles on this list are only at Southside Library, and until just now would have been hard to get hold of. But as of Monday you will be able to place holds directly on those titles, and ask to have them delivered to the other two branches.

Eight Weeks of Music on the Plaza

A week from today is the kickoff for Santa Fe Bandstand 2007. Free music on the Plaza at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 6-8:30 PM Mondays-Tuesdays-Wednesdays &Thursdays, from July 5th through August 23rd. The full schedule for the noon and evening performances is available from the Santa Fe Bandstand website.

The press release is full of good information:
"Outside In Productions and the City of Santa Fe are pleased to announce the unparalleled musical event of the season: Santa Fe Bandstand 2007.

"Beginning Thursday, July 5th there will be free live music on the Community Stage at the Santa Fe Plaza every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings from 6 to 8:30 p.m. and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m.

"This eight-week long music festival will run through August 23 with 79 free performances featuring some of the finest Blues, Latin, Country, Rock, Reggae, R&B, Jazz, Bluegrass, Folk, Americana, Alternative, Hip-Hop, Native and World Beat Music that New Mexico has to offer. We are also pleased to announce the inclusion of national touring acts. This year’s music on the Plaza will also be highlighting a different non-profit community based organization each evening.

"Major Funding of Santa Fe Bandstand is by The City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, The Frost Foundation and The McCune Charitable Foundation. Other funding is provided First National Bank, Jackalope, IAIA Museum, El Farol, Fusion and The Santa Fe Community Foundation.

"Santa Fe Bandstand is produced by Outside In and a steering committee that has strived to include a wide range of performers who represent the diversity and wealth of talent of the music scene of this region.

"Outside In is a nonprofit, community-based group established in the spring of 1995, to bring free, live performances, presentations and workshops to people confined to shelters, residential treatment facilities, nursing homes, correctional facilities, and any other institutions or human services programs where people would otherwise not have access to the arts. The Youth with Promise program presents free weekly guitar, dance, & visual arts workshops to juvenile offenders in detention and on probation, to at-risk youth in shelters and residential treatment programs and other underserved youth in the community.

"Sponsors include Comcast, The Cowgirl Hall of Fame, The Santa Fe New Mexican, KBAC 98.1 and Hutton Broadcasting, Santa Fe Community TV Channel 16 and AM 810 Que Suave. Sound is provided by Keith Martin of Signal Path Audio.

"Outside In would like to give special thanks to the City of Santa Fe Parks and Police Departments for their assistance with set-up and security on the Plaza and Miguel Castillo of Santa Fe Audio Visual for the lighting of the Community Stage and to Sam Adams and David Goldberg for the photographs in our program guide, Jeanne Arnold for the graphic design and Maggie Duval of maggiedot.com for Website design."

The Bunny-Slipper Option

Thirty percent of all catalog searches which come in off the Web are done between the hours of 9 PM and 10 AM. It pleases us to think about people sitting at home in their bunny slippers, at midnight and at 5 AM, rummaging around the catalog: searching for books and videos, reading reviews, placing holds, searching the magazine databases, planning their next trip to the library.

P.S. Before I bought my first computer (it was a used Tandy), I read shopping advice that said to make a list of what you wanted the computer to be able to do. Item #1 on my list: access to library catalogs in the middle of the night.

Magic Magic Magic

Wednesday, June 27th and Thursday, June 28th.
Jamie O'Hara — "The Magic Guy"

Main Library — Wednesday, June 27th, 10:30 AM
Southside Library — Wednesday, June 27th, 2:00 PM
La Farge Library — Thursday, June 28th, 10:30 AM
La Farge Library — Magic Class, Wednesday, June 27th, 7:00 PM
Please register for the class — 955-4863

Fire In The News

The local news this morning was telling us about a fire on the Santa Fe National Forest northwest of Taos, the Double D fire. As of this morning, the New Mexico Fire Information site tells us, "The fire initally made significant wind-driven runs through live trees and old fuelwood slash but fire activity settled down in the overnight hours. No structures are currently threatened with the nearest structure being two miles to the southeast."

We have had an easy fire season so far up here in Northern New Mexico. Conditions have been moist enough for controlled burns, there are no recreational use restrictions in effect, and—anecdotally speaking—this is the first fire of any size here in the North to catch the attention of the news media.

PS (Later) One of our readers pointed out that Taos blogger JH Farr has a nice photo of the Double D fire as seen from a distance.

Magic Show

Next on the Summer Reading Program is Jamie O'Hara "The Magic Guy", performing at 10:30 am at the Main Library's Childrens' Section. He is also doing a magic class at La Farge at 7 pm Wednesday. (Registration is required for the class at 955-4863.) Don't miss his exciting and surprising entertainment.

Craft Programs, and More Stories

There are two more rounds of craft programs for elementary age children as part of Summer Reading:
Animal Masks - children will have a choice of a variety of masks of animals such as dogs, cats, and birds that they can make in keeping with our theme: Paws, Claws, Scales and Tales. Registration is required for these programs. We begin registration one week before the program.

• Thursday, July 5th , 1:00 pm, La Farge Library
• Friday, July 6th, 10:30 am, Southside Library
• Wednesday, July 25th, 2:00 pm, Main Library

Making Wizard Hats. Wizard-hat making will happen after Uncle Dave Barskey tells his special stories in celebration of the release of the final Harry Potter book.

• Southside Library — Friday, July 20th, 10:30 AM
• Main Library — Friday, July 20th, 2:00 PM
• La Farge Library — Saturday, July 21st, 10:30 AM

Other programs which have been added to the summer schedule:

Saturday, June 30th.

Mike McCartney as Indiana Bones

tells legends, folklore, and tales.

La Farge — Saturday, June 30th, 10:30 AM

Main Library — Saturday, June 30th, 1 PM

Southside Library — Saturday, June 30th, 3:00 PM

Saturday, July 14th

Music Together featuring Devi Borton, by Fam-Jam

A Special Program for Children, newborns to age five

Actively experience and create musically diverse songs, chants, improvisational and guided movement activities, and instrumental jam sessions. The class will be led by an outstanding certified teacher who brings both a musical background and knowledge of child development to the class, providing parent education. Most of all “Music Together” is about having fun, learning through play, and discovering the joy of family music.

11:00 am to 12 noon

Southside Library, 6599 Jaguar Drive, 955-2828

For more information about Summer Reading, go to the Summer Reading page.

Southside Library Needs Volunteers

Southside needs volunteers!
We need shelvers!
We need help processing books!
We need help with children's programs!
Southside library hours are:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 12-8
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 10-6
If interested, please call Christina Dunkin @ 505-955-2823
Leave your name and phone # with a message

Email Box Filling Up Again...

...except that just lately a lot of our randomized librarianly input is coming from twitter. We've mentioned Twitter a few times, but have a hard time explaining to people what it is. Try David Free's presentation, Welcome to the Twitterverse, created for the Social Software Showcase at the ALA annual convention. We set up a twitter login and added a few librarianly Friends to it, so you can see it work. Sort of. Traffic is light right now as a lot of the librarian population of the US, maybe 20,000 or so of them, are in Washington, DC, at the moment for the American Library Association convention.

One of our readers sent us two links about reducing the amount of electricity your electronics consume (and therefor the amount of carbon emissions you cause to be produced): a software called CO2 Saver, and a New York Times article, Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet. Another reader sent us historian Lewis Lapham's then-and-now blog, part of Lapham's Quarterly.

What else? If you hate the neologisms that have come along with network technology, you are not alone, as this funny article points out. The New Mexico State Library has started blogging!! Their first post went up this morning. Geeks may want to watch David Weinberger's presentation at Google about his new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. The PubLib email list has spent a lot of time lately discussing video game addiction, apparently more of a problem elsewhere than we find on our own public internet machines; someone today came up with an article on the subject (1).

Bye Bye Bye Dewey Bye-Bye. At the beginning of the month, the new Perry Branch of the Maricopa County Library district opened after a flurry of news stories. (1)(2)(3). They are not using the Dewey Decimal System to organize the books, but rather a system based on the bookstore industry's subject divisions. The Public Libraries email list discussed it endlessly beforehand. After the opening, silence. So far we have not seen any first-hand reports, from either librarians' or library users' points of view, on how well it is working.

First Day of Summer

What better way to spend the hot, hot days of summer than in the cool Library. Read a good book or see one of our Summer Reading Programs. A new program happens every week and you can pick a library or time that suits you.

Craft Program Today

Register for the Main Library Crafts Programs:
Today, Wednesday June 20th - 2pm - Beaded Animal Bracelets
Wednesday July 25th - 2pm - Masks
(Class is limited so registration is required)

More Puppets Coming On Friday

Summer Reading is off to a good start with puppets and more puppets. Our next show is Markie Scholz and Dragons Are Too Seldom

Southside Library — Friday, June 22nd, 10:30 AM
Main Library — Friday, June 22nd, 2:00 PM
La Farge Library — Saturday, June 23rd, 10:30 AM

'What's New' Lists

Last week we updated the What's New lists.

This time there's some interesting new fiction, such as Haruki Murakami, After Dark ; Sherman Alexie, Flight ; Susan Vreeland, Luncheon of the Boating Party ; Rick Moody, Right Livelihoods : Three Novellas ; Annie Dillard, The Maytrees.

There are non-fictions with entertaining titles (and subtitles: we could do a whole blog post on seductive subtitles): Almost human : making robots think by Lee Gutkind ; The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb ; The cigarette century : the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America by Allan M. Brandt ; Colors of Provence : traditions, recipes, and home decorations from the south of France by Michel Biehn ; Dreams of Africa in Alabama : the slave ship Clotilda and the story of the last Africans brought to America by Sylviane A. Diouf ; The Lonely Planet guide to the middle of nowhere ; Why beauty is truth : a history of symmetry by Ian Stewart.

Ok. Better stop. There's vast numbers of yummy non-fiction, new audio and movies, and so on. Many of these titles have just been ordered and are not here yet; but you can place holds on them. If you are browsing the lists, don't forget to click on the cover image or "Summaries, Reviews, Etc." for reviews, tables of contents, and lots more information.

Summer Reading Program: off to a great start

Ollanta Wascher pins up the first reading log for the Main Summer Reading Program. This is the week to bring in your first log, get an incentive and another log and keep reading!

The Authors Guild/Simon & Schuster Flap

We were waiting to post this in hopes of more recent developments in the flap over Simon & Schuster's revision of their standard contract language, which would in effect keep books 'in print' forever and keep the publisher rather than the author permanently in control of the copyright (1)(2)(3)(4). But it looks like there has been nothing new since the June 1 posting at the Authors Guild, indicating that S&S may soften its stance.

Recycle Your Old Phone Books

The City's Public Information Office has announced the locations for phone book recycling.Recycle Your Old, Unwanted Phone Books!"It's time for the City of Santa Fe Solid Waste Management’s annual phone book recycling program! Every year, the City of Santa Fe sets up bins around the city to collect old phone books. Please bring your old, unwanted phone book to one of the following locations:

• The Buckman Road Recycling and Transfer Station or BuRRT (pronounce Burt), 1686 Paseo de Vista.
• La Farge Library, 1730 Llano St.
• Montoya Building, 535 W Cordova Rd.
• City of Santa Fe Solid Waste Management, 1142 Siler Rd.
• Ft. Marcy Sports Complex, 490 Washington Ave.

"

Remember Eris?

Back in April, both Pluto and Eris, the ninth and tenth planets, were redefined as a new class of solar system object, "dwarf planets". Recent official calculations have demonstrated that Eris is actually 27% larger than Pluto--definitely both the largest known dwarf planet and the largest known Kuiper Belt object. The NASA image below shows Eris and her moon Dysnomia.

Summer Reading News from the Southside Library

From the Southside Children's Room: Most of us are doing everything we can to encourage kids to spend more time reading this summer. Sometimes the most challenging part is finding the perfect book to help a child learn the true joy of reading. A website that Southside Children’s Librarian, Lydia Wren, finds helpful is Nancy's Keane's Booktalks Quick and Simple. It gives summaries of many of the best books for kids. You can search by topic or age.

The kick-off for the Summer Reading Program was a resounding success with a terrific performance by Paul Glickman, the Puppet Man! Be sure to stop by the Children’s Room at any of the branches for a schedule of free summer programs!

Tangible Pleasures

One of the pleasures of working in the library is the occasional opportunity to handle armloads of beautiful new books. The stack illustrated below was bought with a memorial donation; carefully selected, they will end up with bookplates honoring the person being remembered. But for the moment there they sit, delicious, crisp, and new.

What Are You Reading?

One of our readers sent a list of what he is reading just now.

Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart.
By Sorrow's River by Larry McMurtry.
The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O'Brian
Postmodernism by Fredric Jameson
Bloody Sam: The Life and Films of Sam Peckinpah by Marshall Fine
Barefoot On A Drawing Of The Sun by J.J. Blickstein
Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

How about you? Send us a list of what you're reading.

New magazine looking for child authors and illustrators

Launch Pad: Where Young Authors and Illustrators Take Off! is a new magazine devoted to publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and artwork by children ages 6-12. They are looking for creative works about the following themes: Animals, The Ocean, Fairy Tales & Fantasy, Heroes, Mysteries & Sports. Any children in that age group interested in being published should check out Launch Pad Magazine for their guidelines.

RefQ: The Origin of Our 'City Different' Nickname?

Someone called the reference desk to ask when the nickname 'City Different' came into use. Who invented it or made it official?

According to Chris Wilson's The myth of Santa Fe : creating a modern regional tradition, as the city was developing its Plan of 1912, it was influenced by a city planning movement called 'City Beautiful' (1)(2)(3), which was then at its height around the country. Wilson explains, "Remarkably Santa Fe was not only the smallest comunity with a City Beautiful plan, but its Plan of 1912 broke significant new ground by combining the standard emphasis on architectural homogeneity with a local revival style... Soon the chamber of commerce was promoting Santa Fe not as another "City Beautiful," but as the "City Different." (Wilson, p. 122). The Plan "defined the Santa Fe style with which to create a harmonious historical appearance to attract tourists." (Wilson, p. 236) We asked the Southwest Room at the State Library, and they asked the Chamber of Commerce. Simon Brackley at the Chamber thinks that they adopted the slogan somewhat later than Wilson's date, around 1920.

This isn't the first time this question has come up. We're going to put the information in our 'Hard-to-Find File', so it's easier to find next time...

Not Too Late To See The Puppet Truck

Summer Reading launched with a bang today. Paul Glickman's Puppet Truck was at the Main Library in the morning, and at Southside in the afternoon. You have another chance to catch these wonderful characters in action: the truck will be at La Farge branch at 10:30 AM on Thursday morning. For information on other programs, see the Summer Reading page.

...And All the Ships At Sea

One of our readers sent us an entrancing, if irrelevant here in the deep desert, ship-tracking website. Another sent a link to videos about the work of artist Julius Popp, an intersection of typography, electronic bits, and the Net on a very large scale.

China is blocking flickr. Privacy International has ranked the privacy practices of various internet service companies. (These two links come via Steve Cohen's LibraryStuff.) In another bit of loose thread from the techie world, on the Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries email list traffic has been heavy, verbose, and largely incomprehensible. Most messages at the moment are coming in under the subject line "Purposes of classification & Information imperialism." Can't read 'em, so can't give you a thumbnail sketch...

The 11 universities in the Big 10 Conference have signed an agreement with the Google Books Library Project. Publishers Weekly also reported on the development. Earlier, one of Google's own blogs gave a take on their several book projects.

For a last bit of fun, 'Research points the finger at PowerPoint' will warm the heart of conference attendees and students everywhere...

New Mexico Mysteries (and the Wider West)

We've been bringing the New Mexico Mysteries page up to date. There isn't a lot that's different in the top sections of the page—no terrific new series set in New Mexico that we know about— though the established authors continue to add to their strings, and Sandi Ault's Wild Indigo is pretty popoular (is it going to be a series?).

Down the page, the mysteries set in the states of the Wider West, there is a larger number of new authors and titles. Plenty of new (and new-ish) mysteries coming out of Colorado and Wyoming. Craig Johnson, C. J. Box and Clinton McKinzie have all come along in the last few years and immediately built a following. The same is true of Arizona's Jon Talton.

We single out mysteries in part because collectively we read more mysteries, especially series mysteries, than anything else. Whether you look at the list of titles with the most holds at any given moment, or at each year's most popular authors, the high proportion of interest in this one particular genre is clear. We could write an analogous post about Italiam mysteries, or Scandinavian mysteries, or...

Tornado Near La Cienega

We're told there's a tornado moving up I25 past La Cienega.

Paws and Claws, Scales and Tails

Summer Reading is finally here! Come to your local library, (starting Monday), and sign up for reading fun. Program schedules are available online on the Summer Reading Page or at the library. The kickoff program is Paul Glickman and his famous Puppet Truck. Join us at the Main Library — Wednesday, June 13th, 10:30 AM , Southside Library — Wednesday, June 13th, 2:00 PM and La Farge Library — Thursday, June 14th, 10:30 AM.

The Kitty vs. the Notebook

Sorry. It's just too cute. The creator is artist Matt Coats.

Manyholds

Here is the list of the dozen or so titles with the most holds on them. The full list on the web page, Books You're Willing to Wait in Line For, will be updated in the next day or so, but this is the headline news for June:

• A Thousand splendid suns / Khaled Hosseini
• The good husband of Zebra Drive / Alexander McCall Smith
• Harry Potter and the deathly hallows / J. K. Rowling
• Simple genius / David Baldacci
• The Overlook / Michael Connelly
• Obsession / Jonathan Kellerman
• Bad luck and trouble : a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child
• Invisible prey / John Sandford
• The Yiddish policemen's union : a novel / Michael Chabon
• The sixth target / James Patterson
• Body surfing / Anita Shreve
• Whitethorn Woods / Maeve Binchy
• Animal, vegetable, miracle : a year of food life / Barbara Kingsolver
• The Secret / Rhonda Byrne
• The assault on reason / Al Gore

We are getting more copies of several of these titles. Then the waiting time will decrease rapidly.

Dürer, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Kokoschka, Pisarro...

So many thrillers have been written around this premise. Now, in real life, "Looted Paintings Found in Nazi Dealer's Safe" (1)(2). I bet we'll hear lots more about this.

The Elephants (?what elephants?)

There are always some large bronze castings by Peter Woytuk on the lawn at Ghost Ranch in Santa Fe. We went out to get pictures of the elephants yesterday, because every second person you mention them to says "What elephants?"—even if you are driving past right then and the elephants are in plain sight. A truck and a crane were removing the tall sculpture which had been on the corner of Paseo de Peralta and Old Taos Highway. Someone said that that piece had been bought, and that a couple of the bulls would be coming back in its place.

As may be just hinted in the picture at the right, yesterday noonish was the moment that everything in Santa Fe was as green as it gets. Every last cottonwood leaf and ornamental locust tree entirely fresh and singing a song of summer.

Local Blog RoundUp

Local comics artists Bram and Monica Meehan have a post about their comics creators group's exhibit at North Fourth in Albuquerque on their blog Going to New Mexico. We have two of their Raised by Squirrels spy stories in the library system. Science historian George Johnson's not-quite-a-blog Santa Fe Review continues to offer excellent photographs and posts about local issues, especially about water.

We've made some new discoveries. Santa Fean Ottmar Liebert has a blog. The Santa Fe Reporter's editorial staff has launched a blog to track Bill Richardson's presidential run, Blogging Bill. Joel Gottlieb has a photo blog, Unofficial Taos, and there's also Taos Experience. There's M. J. Hinton's Ah Wilderness, presently featuring news about Chaco.

A lot of the blogs we might like to keep following seem to have drifted to sleep. Sheriff Greg Solano's blog is still ticking, as is J. H. Farr's Farrfeed from Taos. There's a long blogroll on New Mexico Magazine's website. If you find anything really entertaining out there in the way of local blogs, let us know and we'll put them in the next roundup.

Champion Circulators

Last week we had to weed out a really beat up copy of A Trap for Fools by Amanda Cross. This book managed to circulate 117 times before being sent to book heaven... So we ran a little search to look for items with really amazing survival rates, and found that there are other books with even more circulations than the Amanda Cross book; and that no book measures up to the running-around activity of the videos and DVDs. Those really pile up the numbers.

Champion books:
Shy Charles / Rosemary Wells ; "E" is for evidence / Sue Grafton ; Death of a snob / M.C. Beaton ; and the grand champion book item, Horton hears a Who! By Dr. Seuss. Can there really be a copy of Horton Hears A Who with 176 circs and still alive?

For videos, the nearly-immortal bits of tape include
The Brothers Karamazov ; Catch-22 ; Joseph Campbell and the power of myth : with Bill Moyers ; In love and war ; Annie Hall ; To catch a thief ; and an audio tape of The long goodbye by Raymond Chandler.

Alianza Federal De Las Mercedes - 40th Anniversary of the Courthouse Raid

News stories locally have been pointing out that tomorrow, June 5th, is the 40th anniversary of the armed raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, by Reies Lopez Tijerina's Alianza Federal De Las Mercedes. The radio program Latino USA this week featured an extensive documentary on the subject.

We do have several books directly about the Alianza, and some clipping files dating from those days and stored in the Southwest Room reference cabinets. Tijerina has an autobiography, and there is a recent book, King Tiger: the religious vision of Reies Lopez Tijerina. Other pertinent reading would be about the Tierra Amarilla Land grant, other works about land grant history in New Mexico, Roxana Dunbar's study Roots of Resistance : land tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel's The contested homeland : a Chicano history of New Mexico and probably other material in general works about chicano (or latino or hispanic) political movements.

New Sunspot 960

Spaceweather.com has a knockout photograph of a big sunspot just now appearing over the limb of the sun. We can expect 960 to be active, with flare eruptions that disrupt shortwave communications, etc. The image at right comes from NASA's SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory .

As usual, we are entranced with the imagery of the universe that the web puts casually under our fingertips. One of our twitter friends posted a link to a pair of fascinating videos of the sun in the vicinity of a sunspot. Who knew we could know... well yeah, the scientists who are making it possible know. Thanks for sharing.

Maps for Map Lovers

One of our readers—the one who sends map links—sent us a New York Times story from last fall about vintage maps, "When Maps Reflected Romance of the Road". It has some rather nice illustrations, images of road maps from the first half of the twentieth century.

We are particularly pleased that this came up, as we have had a copy of the "Official 1940 Road Map of New Mexico" on our desk for a couple of years. Now is its moment to shine. Click for larger images:

A lot of now-major highways were still gravel (or dirt) in 1940... The map will be in the vertical file, if you want to take a look at it. Ask at the reference desk.