News from the Collective

For Open Access Week 2020 we invited our authors to share their thoughts on the topics of equity, accessibility, open knowledge and open access publishing. Continue reading to find out what they had to say.

The small, specialized audiences characteristic of academic publishing are all the more restricted  when book prices escalate.  Authors reconcile themselves to poor sales by reciting the names of their distinguished publishers.  But is that compensation for burying one's work?   Traditional publishing risks becoming vanity publishing. Open access is the liberating alternative:   making books available freely to everyone,  it enables ideas to circulate.  This is  the promise of the web.  Let's see what difference it makes.  

David Weissman, author of 'Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will'.

An inclusive approach to knowledge is crucial for the empowerment and enfranchisement of people everywhere. Inclusivity facilitates the accessibility of knowledge while also affirming the diversity of knowledge. This is a key factor in the book 'Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing', edited by myself, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. Based on a unique workshop that took place at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia in October of 2018, the book includes a diverse array of perspectives on human-Earth relations, traversing Indigenous languages, contemplative awareness of nature, evolutionary complexity, Confucianism, Shamanism, Hinduism, storytelling, imagination, and more. Coordination and collaboration across different ways of knowing is crucial for humans to learn how to live together peacefully, justly, and sustainably, as one species inhabiting one planet. When the time came to find a publisher for this eclectic and inclusive collection of essays, one of our contributors (Mark Turin) suggested working with an open access model, which seemed entirely appropriate, especially considering the subject matter of our book. After all, what use is writing about inclusivity if the book itself is not inclusive in its accessibility? We wanted a publisher with high standards for academic integrity and book design, and we happily went with the initial suggestion from our colleague to contact Open Book Publishers. With their approach to open access publishing, we were able to produce a book that enacts the very inclusivity that it expresses, celebrating the diversity of knowledge as it is distributed across the living Earth community.

Sam Mickey, co-editor of 'Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing'.

Lindenwood University is committed to Equity and Inclusion and the use of open access resources is central to that strategy. We have seen that financial and physical barriers exist in preventing underrepresented populations in higher education from successfully  matriculating. Traditional and non-traditional students that work full-time, have families and obligations are limited by their circumstances with regards to attending traditional on-campus classes and are conscious of the rising costs of education. Open access  resources allow those in rural or urban areas to have a quality education and access the same information as those students who are able to gain access to physical resources on college campuses.

James Hutson, author of 'Gallucci's Commentary on Dürer’s 'Four Books on Human Proportion': Renaissance Proportion Theory'.

Open Book Publishers has been a wonderful Open Access venue for me to share my work globally.  Commercial publishers have shown little interest in translations from Yiddish.  This is unfortunate, because there are literally hundreds of books - fiction and nonfiction - that would interest a wide reading audience.  I am delighted that two of my translations, Bernard Weinstein's  The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories of 1924, and Nokhem Shtif's The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-1919: Prelude to the Holocaust of 1923, are now available on the web and have found homes in hundreds of libraries.

Maurice Wolfthal, translator of 'The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust' and 'The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories'.

In the world of open access (or its opposite), there is one constituency that I feel is poorly served: the community of freelance researchers. There are resources that are only available through institutions and that are therefore difficult to access for those who have no institutional affiliation. In some cases, this is reasonably easy to overcome: many public libraries subscribe to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for example, although even then, it depends where you live. Other resources are simply impossible to use: for example, some years ago I was researching seventeenth-century travellers, and needed to make constant use of Early English Books Online, which is a wonderful collection. However, there is no facility for an individual to access it – even if you are prepared to pay: it is only available through academic libraries. It is available in the British Library, of course, but that may be very inconvenient for people who live a long way from London. I found this hugely frustrating. Surely it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility for the publishers of such resources to put in place a subscription system for individuals, or even a ‘pay per view’ arrangement? In the case of Early English Books Online I have raised this, but was met with a non-negotiable no.

Lucy Pollard, author of 'Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century'.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

by William B. Bonvillian

When my brother, John Bonvillian, an emeritus faculty member at the University of Virginia, died in 2018, he had just put the finishing touches on the capstone project of his academic career in psychology and linguistics – the Simplified Signs Project.   Simplified Signs are a manual sign communication system for individuals with special needs.  It is designed to be particularly simple – far easier to learn and use than a traditional sign language.   It was my brother John’s wish that his lifelong project be made available to the world in a form that would allow his new sign system to be used freely and creatively by anyone who needed or wanted it.

My brother’s wish seemed like a bit of a pipe dream at the time of his death, but I promised him I would do my best.  At that dark moment I couldn’t imagine that I would find such a competent and enthusiastic partner in Open Book Publishers to share my brother’s vision of free and open access to his work.  In August of 2020, together with my brother’s stalwart co-authors Nicole Kissane Lee, Tracy Dooley and Filip Loncke, Open Book Publishers published Simplified Signs:  A manual sign-communication system for special populations.

The Simplified Signs Project, which occupied my brother and a small army of dedicated students and faculty at the University of Virginia for the previous twenty years, involved the development of a sign communication system that was truly simple:  simple to use because the signs represent concepts that can signify multiple words, simple to formbecause the signs do not require sophisticated hand shapes or movements and simple to remember because the signs look like what they mean. My brother began the project with the idea of helping individuals with special needs who have difficulty mastering speech or a traditional sign language, but over time interest in the project expanded to include many other uses such as communication across language barriers, in medical settings, in foreign language study programs and even communicating with babies.

The Simplified Signs Project consists of two parts:  a scholarly volume on the history, uses and research about signing and sign language, and a lexicon of approximately one thousand signs presented as drawings accompanied by descriptive text.  I wanted to honor my brother’s scholarship by publishing with the imprimatur of peer review and a solid academic reputation, but I also wanted the lexicon to be presented to the public promptly and for free (or at least for a very affordable price.)

While I easily found a traditional academic publisher that was enthusiastic about publishing my brother’s work, after many months there were still no peer reviewers identified and the publisher could give no firm time commitment about a publication date.  Perhaps more importantly, the traditional academic publisher wanted to hold the copyright in the published work and to charge an undefined but predictably hefty price for access to the material.

When I found and began working with Open Book Publishers fresh air and sunshine enveloped the project.  Open Book promptly found two very rigorous academic reviewers, it edited well and expeditiously, it designed and typeset a beautiful pair of volumes and it published them in less than 12 months.  And most importantly, Open Book made Simplified Signs available to the public for free under a Creative Commons license that allows users to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and even to make commercial use of the text provided appropriate attribution is given to the authors. This, we felt, would greatly help in spreading the simplified signs.

Already others are making tutorials to teach the Simplified Signs and videos are in the works.  Open Book has fulfilled my brother’s wish beyond his dreams, and it has delivered his gift to the world.  Open Book made it possible to give you John’s signs.

This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free. Please, click here to access Vol. 1 and here for Vol.2.

Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts students have not only occupied their university, they have now redesigned the university completely and started new ways of teaching with their ‘experimental teaching republic’.

Earlier this October, nearly 100 students occupied their university after the right-wing national government of prime minister Viktor Orband transferred ownership of the public university to a private foundation and appointed a new board of trustees, without an open and public vacancy, made up completely by government associates, and therefore stripping the university’s power completely.

When the new academic year started in November, students and teaching staff left the traditional ways of the education framework and have started a self-proclaimed ‘experimental teaching republic’. This new form of education is based on a free way of teaching, which aims to consist of a common creative process – without being bound to institutes, fields of studies, a course catalog and attendance lists. The new board of trustees currently has no influence on the university and its members and associates are denied access.

The Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts is not the only university affected by the right-wing national government of prime minister Viktor Orband. The Central European University (CEU), which was founded in Budapest by George Soros, Hungarian-American philanthropist and investor, in 1991, was forced out of Budapest because of its dual legal identity, as it was registered in both New York State and in Hungary. A new controversial law Orband initiated in 2017 demanded that foreign universities must have a “parent” university in their country of origin. Other elements of the reform included the privatisation of 13 state universities that are placed in the hands of government associates – such as the Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts. This month, Europe’s top court ruled that Hungary broke EU law when they forced CEU to shift most activity abroad.

The Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts protest has been supported by theater groups, students, actors and university faculties in Hungary and around Europe. The Institute of Network Cultures thinks autonomy in educational institutes is extremely important and supports innovative and experimental forms of education. The Institute of Network Cultures supports the Budapest University of Theatre and Film Arts in this process and stands with them in solidarity.

Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data
International Symposium
22 October – 12 November, 2020
Hosted by Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/events/contagion_design

Organizers: Gay Hawkins and Ned Rossiter

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Across a program of four weeks of discussion and debate, this event explores the current conjuncture through these vectors to address issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? The aim of this event is to explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate?

This event organised by the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University includes speakers from the ICS together with national and international colleagues.

Please note: there are 4 events held over a 4-week period. The details of each event are included below, including the links to register. You may register for all or some of the events. Please register separately for each event you would like to attend.

Full pdf of the symposium program can be downloaded here.

Migration and Labour
22 October, 11:30am – 1pm
Register on Eventbrite: https://tinyurl.com/yyyhns6s

Chair: Brett Neilson
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘Economic Informality and Democracy in India at the Time of Covid-19’
Joyce Liu, ‘What Comes After the Lockdown? A New Wave of Nationalisation and the Local Divide’
Anne McNevin, ‘Temporal Contagion as an Antidote to Renationalization’

Contagious Mutualities
29 October, 4–5.30pm
Register on Eventbrite: https://tinyurl.com/y6x2brga
Chair: Katherine Gibson
Stephen Healy and Declan Kuch, ‘Contagious Mutuality: Spreading Postcapitalist Possibilities’
Peter North, ‘Building Back Better in the UK or Back to Work?’
Teppo Eskelinen, ‘Redefining Community in Nordic Countries After the Pandemic’

Habits of Contagion
4 November, 4–5.30pm
Register on Eventbrite: https://tinyurl.com/y4yto3jo
Chair: Tony Bennett
Franck Cochoy, ‘On the Art of Burying One’s Face in a Band: How the Sanitary Mask Encounters the Habits of Laypersons and Experts’
Ben Dibley, ‘Demophobia and the Infrastructures of Infection’
Gay Hawkins, ‘Social Distance: Security, Suggestion, Insecurity’

Data Contagion
12 November, 11am – 12.30pm
Register on Eventbrite: https://tinyurl.com/y5ed2lb6
Chair: Ned Rossiter
Mark Andrejevic, ‘Biometrics “at-a-distance”: Touchlessness and the Securitization of Circulation’
Rolien Hoyng, ‘Datafication and Contingency in Circular Economies’
Orit Halpern, ‘Resilient Natures: Algorithmic Finance, Radical Events and Ecological Models’

Cross-posted from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics

While many aspects of our lives and activities have slowed down during the COVID pandemic, this has not been the case with open access! The OA initiatives tracked through this series continue to show  strong growth on an annual and quarterly basis. Important milestones are being reached, and others will be coming soon.

Highlights

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists over 15,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals, having added 379 journals (> 4 per day) in the past quarter, and now provides searching for over 5 million articles at the article level.

A PubMed search for “cancer” limited to literature from the past 5 years now links to full-text for over 50% of the articles.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now cross-searches over 8,000 repositories and will soon surpass the milestone of a quarter billion documents.

Anyone worried about running out of cultural materials during the pandemic will be relieved to note that the Internet Archive has exceeded a milestone of 6 million movies in addition to over 27 million texts (plus audio, concerts, TV, collections, webpages, and software).

Analysis of quarterly and annual growth for 39 indicators from 10 services reflecting open access publishing and archiving (Internet Archive, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, Directory of Open Access Books, bioRxiv, PubMedCentral, PubMed, SCOAP3, Directory of Open Access Journals, RePEC and arXiv) demonstrates ongoing robust growth beyond the baseline growth of scholarly journals and articles of 3 – 3.5 per year. Growth rates for these indicators ranged from 4% – 100% (doubling). 26 indicators had a growth rate of over 10%, 15 had a growth rate of over 20%, and 6 had a growth rate of over 40%. The full list can be found in this table.

Thank you to everyone in the open access movement for continuing the hard work that makes this growth possible.

The open data edition is available here:   

Morrison, Heather, 2020, “Dramatic Growth of Open Access Sept. 30, 2020”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/AVBOW6, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V2 

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.  

Cite as: Morrison, H. (2020). Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2020. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2020/10/dramatic-growth-of-open-access.html

Questions

[1] I want to know your thoughts about the multiple profiles that depict you with specific word-associations and comparisons with other (Swartz / Piratebay / Napster / Megaupload / Wikileaks / Snowden / Manning, etc.) (punished) projects/public personas historically and culturally related with online piracy in USA. Even when you pointed out the problems of some of these profiles on your personal blog/s in the past, is crucial to address and insist about media development and treatment around your name in a wide spectrum in recent years, simply because that could trigger more attentive-branches about reductive misconceptions or elaborated images that some people may have about you.

I’ll take two cases as examples, a mainstream profile-feature published by The Verge in 2018 and an article from Nature in 2016 titled Paper piracy sparks online debate, both are highly cited/added in platforms and social media channels to identify and introduce people to your work, but at the same time both also developed specific agendas, avoiding open support (and probably legal threats or loss of sponsorship), is media output really engaging Sci-Hub’s aims and copyright enforcement accusations with the proper treatment?

[2] In the last three decades, ideas and activities associated with the word hacker were transformed radically, from being originally conceived in the background of programming-jargon, to get prosecuted with ‘illegal stickers’ ruled under the law, is a similar trend in which legal apparatuses label common words or compounds used in sharing networks and open knowledge activities as criminal-by-association in regards to free access and text-private-property. Conveniently, is an alarming reminding of the protective measures used in the Medieval Ages to prevent book-theft that you referenced in your text Анафема!, phantom-language for speculative punishment.

Why do you think these legal tactics under the argument of >capitalist loss< have been opportune to try to slow down sharing networks and archival repositories?

[2a] Do you consider these measures, like the legal prosecution directed by Elsevier to cease Sci-Hub in 2015, are similar reminiscences of Middle Age’s curses in the sense of status protection < via knowledge in XXIst century capitalism?

Here’s an extract of the actual complaint:

This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for: (1) copyright infringement under the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.); and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18.U.S.C. § 1030, based upon Defendants’ unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works. Defendants’ actions in this regard have caused and continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier and its publishing partners (including scholarly societies) for which it publishes certain journals.

[3] Is fascinating how the tense relationship between USA and Russia during Cold War plays an important precedent in the public eye to generate plots and theories about the origins and intentions of Sci-Hub on copyrighted territories (even though you repeatedly insisted that Sci-Hub is a project you started in 2011), these theories suggest a plethoric range of prospects, from a fully state-funded project by Russian Intelligence, to an ongoing investigation directed by the US Justice Department that targets Sci-Hub as an undercover espionage-project.

What is your response to these accusations?

What is behind the constant emergence of conspiracy plots toward Sci-Hub?

[4] In 2016 Marcia Mcnutt (former president of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote a column for Science Magazine, My love-hate of Sci-Hub in which she argues that downloading papers from Sci-Hub could create collateral damage for authors, publishing houses, universities, fellowships, science education, among other areas. The love-hate scenario Mcnutt paints is nonetheless confusing for the debate she wants to open about corporate knowledge inside institutions, since, the whole text leaves serious cracks in her depiction of the publishing system’s function. Accidentally in the same text, she evidences a chain of normalized exploitation towards researchers in her community by not rewarding them in this excerpt:

“Journals have real costs, even though they don’t pay authors or reviewers, as they help ensure accuracy, consistency, and clarity in scientific communication.”

If access means power and power is fueled by elevated amounts of money, what are the standards of politically correct access to information aiming for, if not capital accumulation? Sci-Hub proposes a deep change into the file-share landscape.

[5] Sci-Hub’s bounder-less pirate distribution is generating not only scientific capital but also cultural capital, knowledge-availability never experienced before. Language barriers aside, the capacities for scientific development in countries with research shortages may have a significant growth in the next ten years thanks to Theft Trade Communication.

In a presentation you made this year about the mythology of science titled The Open Science Idea you showed an unexpected statement: modern science grew out of theft.

What is the nexus between cognition, communism, and theft inside your studies about the cultural history of science?

If Sci-Hub could release an official theft-ethos, what it would contain?

[6] Is also worth noticing the high contrast amid the graphic assertions from Elsevier and Sci-Hub and what each one represents and stands for in regard to power and information. I’ve always wondered about Sci-Hub’s logo genesis, because in this case the graph-isms go beyond the symbolic.

[7] I’m curious about the links and connections generated in the Master’s Program in Linguistics/Biblical Languages you were part in 2017, in a series of texts you’ve shown interesting readings about mythology, knowledge, theology and the ancient roots of copyright and intellectual property. You’ve been compiling information from figures like Колумба (or Saint Pirate), Hermes and antique repositories like the Library of Ashurbanipal to highlight one common denominator, the systematic exclusion of the premise “spread the word” and the consequent copy_paste counter-measure techniques to unlock this information_s.

Now that you discovered attractive routes to study information patterns and similarities through history, what is your future-vision to redefine file-sharing in an established .net regulated consumption landscape?

[8] We are in the middle of important changes at institutional, corporate and cultural levels in the context of Open Science and info-access, in June of this year MIT ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new contract, and recently the University of California also renewed negotiations launching open access resolutions with the dutch company. At the same time, many universities are inaugurating new protocols and initiatives to ensure wide and free access for academic resources.

Do you consider the recent measures taken by academic organizations are enough to abolish the paywall-economy?

[9] Earlier this year you were nominated for the John Maddox Prize by Fergus Kane after almost ten years of navigating into heavily corporate waters with Sci-Hub, one curious detail about the award is that it has support from the international scientific journal Nature, Nature’s news team covered Sci-Hub’s legal battle in New York courts with unfavorable handling.

What is your approach to this nomination and how significant could be for Sci-Hub’s potential?

Reference:

[1] Karaganis, J. Shadow Libraries (1st ed., p. 6). The MIT Press.

By Jan M. Ziolkowski

The Brooklyn-born R. O. Blechman, Bob to his intimates, qualifies officially as a nonagenarian on October 1, 2020. This blog post, despite being candleless and cakefree, celebrates the occasion, with more than enough social distancing to satisfy the strictest epidemiologist.

It fêtes the birthday boy by putting a little of his genius before a new generation, while simultaneously refreshing the memories of preceding ones about some of his achievements that may have slipped their minds.

In nine decades, this artist has produced an oeuvre in which the slim book entitled The Juggler of Our Lady stands out as the first and foundational masterpiece—"surely the ground plan for everything that came after,” in the words of Maurice Sendak. Its creator has innovated at every step, while at the same time evidencing consistently a less-is-more minimalism that stamps his work immediately as both typically mid-century modern and unmistakably Blechmannian.

The volume was brought out in 1953, a year after Blechman graduated from Oberlin College. Through a schoolmate, he received an introduction to an art director at the trade press Henry Holt & Company. Among other items in his portfolio he displayed a graphic story from his undergraduate years. In response, he was urged to devise something suitable for the Christmas market. A friend of his suggested Anatole France’s The Juggler of Our Lady, with which Blechman immediately familiarized himself. For context he consulted Will Durant’s bestselling Age of Faith, then a mainstay of popular history on the Middle Ages. He roughed out a draft in one night and delivered the completed form a few days later to the publishing house.

In Blechman, the hero has the new name of Cantalbert. After failing to impress the world through his juggling, the charmingly hapless performer enters a monastery in search of spiritual fulfillment. Yet his simplicity and lack of education make him a fish out of water. A series of crises reaches a head when the monks offer the gifts of their talents before a statue of Mary. In a Merry Christmas miracle, Cantalbert elicits from the Mother of God positive acknowledgment for his juggling.

The latest reprint, published in 2015, bears the subtitle The Classic Christmas Story. Those four words are not as straightforward as they appear. For starters, the subtitle of the first edition and its reissue in 1997 was A Medieval Legend. Sure, the next page identifies it as “A sort-of Christmas story.” Yet the narrative did not originally have its seasonality baked into it, not in its medieval original and not in Anatole France’s short story either.

To complicate matters even more, we could consider that its author is Jewish by background. If the book is a Christmas tree, its trimmings are wonderfully odd: a foreword by Jules Feiffer, who calls it a “miniature masterpiece,” leads into an introduction by Maurice Sendak. This triumvirate points not to England of ye olde or Europe of yore, but to Manhattan in the full swing of the American century.

To tack back to the subtitle, The Juggler of Our Lady has a much harder time passing muster as a classic in the changing cultural canon of the twenty-first century than it did from the fin de siècle through the first half of the twentieth. When Blechman composed his proto-graphic novel, Anatole France’s story belonged the bedrock for French instruction in the U.S. Adapted for American audiences, the tale was performed on the radio each December in multiple versions.

Now that nearly seventy years have passed, French has long lost the prestige and preeminence that it formerly possessed among foreign languages, Anatole France’s literary stature and Nobel prize have gone forgotten, and the holiday broadcasts have become a thing of the past. The story shows its greatest vitality in children’s literature, but the best-known iteration by the late Tomie dePaola dispensed with the formerly familiar title in favor of The Clown of God.

For all the hurdles that have been raised, my bet is confident that Blechman’s The Juggler of Our Lady will live on. For one thing, his creation helped to bring into being a thriving genre. A graphic novel, by its very nature, depends upon relating a series of events in a text that can sustain and be sustained by illustration. In this case, the storyline has at its heart the importance of following a passion—and an urgent need to stand out and accomplish something. The juggler is at once sublimely humble and supremely ambitious, and the drawing is complex in its simplicity, just as the calligraphy is rock-steady in its waviness.

Another factor favoring the book is the marvelous nine-minute animated short that was released in 1957, likewise entitled The Juggler of Our Lady. It fills out the story by alluding to the Cold War, the Korean War, and McCathyism; it takes cartoon art to altogether new heights; and, to boot, it benefits from voiceover by Boris Karloff, after his heyday in horror films but before the animation of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Though not often viewable with the wide-screen or color quality of early prints, it richly rewards those who can find it online or otherwise. Go, YouTube!

The same return for effort holds true for every bit of Blechmania that can be found in print or in animation.

Anyone who watched television in 1967 will recall with a smile or even a laugh the commercial in which to advertise Alka-Seltzer a stomach was interviewed about its digestive suffering. From around the same time were interstitials for CBS and the 1966 Christmas message for the same television network. Turning from TV broadcasts to magazines and newspapers, those old enough will remember our artist’s lines across later decades to the present. Think for instance with joy of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the cover of The New Yorker of April 29, 1974, with grief of them in The New York Times op-ed page of September 14, 2001.

Now is not the time nor this the place to embark upon a catalogue raisonné of everything Bob Blechman has given us, but instead to express best wishes for continued productivity—so that at least for him we can consider the third decade of the twenty-first century the nifty nineties. More than ever, the world needs his fierce integrity, along with his relentless care about words and images.

Smiles and wisdom will not fix all ills in this time of pandemic—but they do the soul good.

Photos free so long as attributed: see http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/keys/2018_DC_Blechman_181103

Read Jan Ziolkowski's six-volume set, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity (2018), freely accessible to read and available to buy at Open Book Publishers.