Resources of the Week: Meet Me at the Fair
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

If you’re both an avid reader and an avid Internet user, you already know how one medium can vastly enrich your enjoyment of the other. For example, through the magic of social sites like LibraryThing, you can easily discover books you are likely to enjoy based on books you already own or have read. And, of course, when you read an really excellent book and want to find out more about the relevant people/places/events and so forth, it’s almost second nature to hop on the Internet and start digging around.

While we’re really not in the business of recommending books here on ResourceShelf, I recently read one that I enjoyed enough to foist on my friends, colleagues and one of my sons — Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. When you click that link, on Random House’s website, you get this description:

Their fates were linked by the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it; serial killer Dr. H. H. Holmes used it to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel, designed for murder. Both men left behind them a powerful legacy, one of brilliance and energy, the other of sorrow and darkness.

Here, then, is your ticket to the greatest fair in history—a place where incredible dreams came to life alongside darkest nightmares.

This is a true story that reads like a compelling suspense novel, thanks to the awesome research and literary skills of the author. The publisher’s website is aesthetically pleasing and very informative about the 1893 World’s Fair, also known as the World’s Columbia Exposition of 1893, celebrated in this interesting site from the Paul V. Galvin Library Digital History Collection, Illinois Institute of Technology.

As Gary knows, my number two son Patrick (15), is a serious history/trivia junkie. As he started making his way through this book, he became curious about the entire concept of World’s Fairs, so we poked around a bit online to see what was “out there.” Plenty, as it turned out. Wikipedia, as you might expect, runneth over with information about World’s Fairs. But we especially enjoyed browsing A Treasury of World’s Fair Art & Architecture, a digital archive from the University of Maryland Libraries.

This digital collection represents a sampling of artifacts from the rich and varied World’s Fair Collection at the Architecture Library, University of Maryland (UM). Although limited in size, this collection is unique for its broad coverage of many fairs and expositions. We invite you to explore the collection by searching for specific images, exploring virtual exhibits, and reading informative essays.

The Exhibits portion of the site is a work in progress. Currently, it offers an entry point to World’s Fair Overview: 1851-1970, “a virtual exhibition gallery for each international exhibition in the collection from London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 to the Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan.” Another section of the site offers a collection of “Essays on the Material Culture of the World’s Fairs,” originally written for a seminar, World’s Fair: Social and Architectural History. These are keyword searchable; choose a specific fair from the dropdown menu or search all fairs. You can also browse via a table of contents.

The entire collection itself is searchable. Checkboxes allow you to search images, essays or both. A series of dropdown menus allow you to restrict your search to a specific fair, type of content (e.g., landscape, buildings) and/or format (e.g., advertisements, lithographs, souvenirs of various types), and provide boolean options.

• Read a detailed description of the World’s Fair Ephemeral and Graphic Materials Collection.
• See a slideshow of the World’s Fair Special Collection.
• Read an interview with Patti Cossard, Curator of the University’s Art and Architecture Library, in which she describes the World’s Fair exhibit. (You can also listen to an expanded version of the interview or download it as a podcast.)
• Read the University of Maryland news office press release about this exhibit.

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+ The Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), based in Paris, is the official sanctioning body for World’s Fairs and related events.
+ According to Urso Chappell, a San Francisco artist and graphic designer, the United States allowed its membership in the BIE to lapse in 2002 “after two consecutive years of non-allocation of funds by the American congress.” He advocates that membership funding be restored, “particularly since it is only $25,000 per year.”
+ Chappell maintains ExpoMuseum, an attractive and well-organized online museum devoted to World’s Fairs. The chronology-based navigation is clever and intuitive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 and is filed under Resource of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.