Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

Today, February 7th 2012, is Charles Dickens' 200th birthday! In honor of this event, and if you're a user of Flickr, we invite you to stop by our Dickens Word Search, now on our Flickr account. You can interact with the puzzle to help find the names of a variety of classic Dickens characters buried in a word maze. Happy Dickens Birthday, one and all!

Live Long and Prosper, Star Trek!

We celebrate the 45th anniversary of the first airing of the classic Star Trek series (September 8, 1966 NBC) today.

The libraries have always had a huge collection of Star Trek books, whether you're looking for non-fiction books about the various TV and movie incarnations in this series, biographies of the many actors involved in Trek history, or any of the hundreds of novels set in the Star Trek universe.

If it is the latter you are interested in, we've got our extensive Star Trek Reading List booklist -- which chronicles all of the known professionally-published and authorized novels and short story collections from the late 1960s to the present. This list is updated two or three times per year, and is hotlinked into the libraries' online catalog, so that readers can check on the availability of the titles that are locally owned.

Several of the Star Trek books (both fiction and non-fiction) have been reviewed on the Staff Recommendations pages of BookGuide over the past few years -- you can scope out some of those reviews on the Staff Recommendations Index (by reviewer); the main Trekker there is Scott C.

And don't forget, the libraries own DVD boxed sets for all five generations of Star Trek television series -- Classic Trek, Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise -- all that is missing the Animated series. You'll find hotlinks to all of those in our TV Tie-Ins booklist (scroll down to the Star Trek section).

To wrap up this blog entry, here are five Star Trek quotes associated with the Classic Trek series - the Kirk, Spock, McCoy era. Can you identify the episode or movie they come from?

1. "I didn't mean to say that the Enterprise should be hauling garbage. I meant to say that it should be hauled away AS garbage!"

2. "You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical, but it is often true."

3. "Brain! Brain! What is Brain?"

4. "I have been, and always shall be, your friend."

5. "I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space."

May you Live Long and Prosper! And remember..."Dammit, Jim. I'm a librarian, not a webmaster!" /sdc

Happy 120th Birthday, Agatha Christie!

This week marks the anniversary of Agatha Christie's 120th Birthday [15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976].

Agatha Christie, creator of Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy & Tuppence and more, is the best-selling author in the English language...world wide!

Stop in at the Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln this week to check out a classic Christie mystery on book or CD, watch an adaptation on DVD or VHS, or read a biography about this most fascinating mystery writer, whose real-life 11-day disappearance in 1926 focused international attention on her troubled marriage!

What is YOUR favorite Agatha Christie novel???

Happy Birthday, Weldon Kees!

Today, Feb. 24, is the anniversary of the Nebraska native, Weldon Kees' birth; he was born in 1914 in Beatrice. Garrison Keillor began his "Writers' Almanac" this morning with mention of Kees.

You can find out more information about Kees in our Nebraska Author Weldon Kees booklist, and on the web site of the Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors.