Who? you might ask. He was the guitar player for British rock band Queen, turned PhD from Imperial College in London, turned curator of stereoscopic photography. Talk about a renaissance man. I feel it is my duty as an archivist to share his book with you. That, and I love stereoscopic photography.

HuffPo article about Brian May

“At college, May was near enough to Christie’s to begin to build some expertise. He discovered the work of one “TRW”. To his great good fortune, learned that T.R. Williams was perhaps the most poetic photographer of the 1850s. Eventually, he rounded up a vast collection of these nearly forgotten images.

What Williams had done, May realized, was to freeze a small village in a magical moment — instead of reading about it in a novel by Thomas Hardy, you could almost literally visit it. That is, with the help of a viewer, you could feel yourself in the scene. And what a scene: a rural idyll, five minutes before the train comes to town, and mass literacy, and industrialization.”

As I flipped through the Amazon.com “look inside” feature for his book, reading his thoughtful introduction, I came across an image of Brian May and his white-gloved hands demonstrating proper photo handling. A rock star teaching the world about preservation! (Sort of.) The next thing you know, Old Spice Guy will be selling us on the idea of libraries. (And a reasonable facsimile here.)

Oh my!

In other “wish I was a librarian” news:
Secret. Vatican. Archives. Go ahead and let that sink in…
The pope wanted to be a librarian too!
Yeah, we’re that awesome!