Category Archives: 21st century

Straight Line Designs Makes Cotsen a Flying Monkey

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With the polar vortex fast approaching, time for something heartwarming!  There is something new in Bookscape to look for when you next visit.

Here’s the story.   There was a small disaster shortly after we moved back into Cotsen this April.  Without any warning, the mast and sails of the pirate ship sailing across the Kite Wall collapsed and fell to the floor.  No one was hurt, thank heavens… The bad news was that our Jolly Roger was past repair.  The good news was that we would have to work with our good friends at Straight Line Designs in Vancouver, Washington to create a new figure.

It would be a monkey flying on a magic book.   We talked and Judson sketched. The wind-blown hair was Minjie’s inspired idea.  Dana’s suggestion that the monkey would  ride cross-legged so he wouldn’t fall off taking sharp turns in mid-air was adopted as work progressed.

Pattern pieces for all the parts…

Danielle hard at work carving the monkey out of a special kind of Styrofoam that is light but strong and can be painted.Several color schemes for us to consider, none of which seemed quite right.

 Danielle convinced us that the monkey really wanted to be purple.  Andrea talked her into a rosy pink for the fly book’s boards.

A special crate was built to ship the monkey to Princeton and he arrived safe and sound exactly twenty-four hours behind schedule.  But It takes more than that to stop Judson and Danielle from installing a purple monkey on time.  Danielle got on her hands and knees to make a tracing so that monkey would be placed perfectly on the wall, right where the pirate ship had been.

Attaching him to the wall wasn’t as easy as Danielle is making it look here. This was taken before she discovered that it was going to be necessary to drill through metal to secure the figure so it wouldn’t fall down. 

Here he is, floating between the dragon and the fox.

 

 

 

 

Grindelwald’s Wand, Brexit for Babies, and “Out in Oxford:” A Busman’s Holiday in England

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The allee of wands near Peter’s Hill. There are two young ladies collecting contributions to Lumos, the  international non-governmental charity founded by  Rowling to end the institutionalization of children.

On the walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral via Peter’s Hill towards the Millenium Bridge over to the Tate Modern, I passed through a sculpture installation promoting the next installment of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

A detail of the wand at the head of the left rank.

A detail of the wand’s base.

The visit to the Tate Modern concluded with an obligatory visit to the children’s section in the main museum gift shop.  This political satire masquerading as a Ladybird book caught my eye.  Ladybirds are the British equivalent of Little Golden Books, but they never made it across the pond to America.  The book’s preparation is supposed to have been overseen by Dr Idiculous Bluff, emeritus proponent of Bloviation at the UKIP (the University of Knowledge in Practice).  The authors, J. A. Hazeley, N. S. F. W. and J. P. Morris, O.M.G. also wrote Cheese and Onion or Salt and Vinegar: A Nation Divided–by crisps. 

Exiting the European Union will preserve the tight little island in the North Sea…  Incidentally, all the illustrations were selected from actual Ladybird Books.

Thanks to Brexit, the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary are guaranteed full employment, at least until the terms of leaving are worked out.

Naturally the British ruling classes support the will of the common man expressed via the ballot box.  The lord in the hot pink waistcoat looks as if he was repurposed from a Prince Charming in some Ladybird Cinderella. Never apologize, never explain, because there will always be an England, right?

The selections in the Tate Modern’s gift shop was a lot more edgy than its literature for visitors, which consisted of floor plans and gallery guides.  For something completely different, I had to visit the  Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where I picked up a copy of this guided tour across the University of Oxford’s collections.

With prefatory notes by Stephen Fry and Richard Bruce Parkinson, the twenty-four-page illustrated brochure highlights two objects or creatures that connect LGBTQ+ to their history on display at the Ashmolean, the Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Bodleian Library, the Museum of the History of Science, the Botanic Garden, and the Bate Collection.  The alternative natural histories are especially fascinating in the way they raise ideas about gender and sexual activity.