CELEBRATING CONFUCIUS

Today, September 29, is always Confucius Day.  An online search will suggest lots and lots of ways to celebrate the life of this great philosopher.   Bullis Room volunteers suggest that you stop by and take a look at some of the philosophy books in the collection. Here are two that we spent some time with:

The Story of Philosophy:

The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Author: Will Durant 

Publisher: Garden City Publishing Co., Garden City, NY, 1927

and

Introduction to the Study of Philosophy

Author: William Torrey Harris & Marietta Kies

Publisher: D. Appleton, New York, NY, 1873

Will Durant's book gives concise accounts of the lives and ideas of many great philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and Nietzsche.

And Introduction to the Study of Philosophy addresses the subject of morals and moral sentiments, the classification of the sciences, and the philosophy of laws in general.

So ... when you're in the library today, we suggest you take a few minutes with one of these books or some of the many others on the shelves in the Bullis Room. 

HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD BOOKS

This week as we thought about another year coming to a close, we took another look around the shelves in the Bullis Room and wondered how many of these books are at least a century old.  A quick search identified a few books published in 1912, and we were interested to see what people were writing about a hundred years ago. Here's a list of some of them:

Aristotle, on the Athenian Constitution

 by F. A. Kenyon published in London

Howney's Cookbook

by Maria Howard, published in Boston

History of London

by Helen Douglas Irvine, published in New York

Self-Propelled Vehicles...Automobiles

James Homans, published in New York

Butterfly and Moth Book

Ellen Robertson Miller, published in New York

New York State Museum, Report of State Botanist 1912 (Mushrooms)

Published in New York

So now we know some of the things people were "into" way back when: cooking, constitutions, self-propelled vehicles, butterflies and moths, mushrooms, and London history. Wonder what people will be writing about in 2112...???