One area of the library is sometimes a bit overlooked: our Oversize Book collection. As the title
implies, these are large books that don’t easily sit on the regular book
shelves and so are relegated to a special section with more space. All are non-fiction and are on a number of
topics from NASCAR to cake decorating. Here
are some favorites:
Alphonse Mucha was born in what is now the Czech Republic and
showed talent as an artist at a young age. His big break came while he was in
Paris, working for a publishing house. The
noted actress Sarah Bernhardt called, requesting a new poster in honor of her
play and wanting it done immediately. Mucha designed the poster, which was an
immediate sensation. It proved so
popular that Bernhardt ordered several thousand copies and hired Mucha to
design future posters for her. Much of
his early work was for advertising or promotional purposes. It was bright, beautiful, and eye-catching. Once you have seen some of his work, his style
is unmistakable and still influences artists today. We have Alphonse Mucha: Masterworks which has some wonderful
examples of his works, beautifully reproduced along with his biography and
information about the individual pieces.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day is a
translation with photos of the Papyrus of Ani, the most complete such papyrus
to be found. Books of the Dead found in
Egyptian burials contained information that the deceased might need in the
afterlife: directions, spells, hymns to
the gods, and so forth. There is not one
definitive version. The original papyrus
of this one is housed in the British museum and was created for the Scribe Ani
and his wife Tutu. This book has a
translation of the papyrus by Dr. Raymond Faulkner with commentaries by Dr.
Odgen Goelet. Each page shows a section
of the papyrus with the translation below.
The artwork is lovely, and it is fascinating to see the
hieroglyphics.
Randall Munroe’s The Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is a
wonderfully informative book about, well, lots of stuff. There are graphics and words showing
everything from the Earth’s past to how they live on the International Space
Station. Munroe is accurate but also has
a sense of humor. For this book, he decided he was just going to use the most
common ten hundred words (the word “thousand” is not among them) so that people
would understand and not be led astray by jargon or unfamiliar words. I think
my favorite is the section on the sky at night with the wonderful names of the
constellations using those same common words:
“pretend flying horse,” “water animal with hand cutters,” and “little
dog.” Some of them sent me to astronomy
books to figure out what they were! In this same section, he offers tips about
stargazing such as the best kind of “looking glass” to use to look at space as
well as “put warm things over people” because it’s cold at night. Since I am
one of those who can never see constellations, I particularly enjoyed the aside
with the stick person looking at a drawing of a constellation named after a cat
and commenting, “Have the people who named this ever seen a cat?” This book is just plain fun and very engaging.
When it comes to illustrated books, you can’t go wrong with
anything published by DK. That certainly
goes for The Atlas of Shipwrecks & Treasure: The History, Location, and Treasures of Ships
Lost at Sea by Nigel Pickford. The book is divided up both by era and type
of ship; for example, the first sections deal with Bronze Age, Viking, and
Chinese Junks. Later sections deal with pirates, liners (such as Titanic), and
World War II wrecks. There are sections about specific ships, both with the
history of the ship and the history of the discovery and salvage, as well as
overviews of multiple ships in a time period. The second part of the book is
the gazetteer, with maps showing locations of various wrecks no matter the time
period as well as a list of ships.
These are just a few of the delights that await in the
Oversize collection. Check them out!
