Next up, familiar:

While I wasn’t aiming to publish this photo in conjunction with the Tour de France, it’s a happy coincidence. For me, being in the saddle of a bicycle is a very comfortable and familiar place. My father is a lifelong cyclist and raised me to ride.

Nicole, a Mojave desert native, wrote about her image that, “the reason I was looking for a Joshua Tree today at the [Berkeley] botanical gardens was that I wanted to take a photo of one for a familiar themed diptych.  This was the closest thing I could find.  I think there are actually a few plants that look like this around in my neck of the Mojave, though.  So it is familiar in that way where something is really close to the thing you’re thinking of, but not the actual thing.”

Miss Grace and Kellee’s summer idylls are posted here. Next week we will turn to “dust”.

It’s a bittersweet departure because of the fun I’ve had, the skills I’ve learned, and the connections I’ve made. First, credit for how enjoyable it’s been should be given to the people I work with: Christina, who for my months as an intern was my roommate in the Corsi Digital Lab, and then, when she went on maternity leave, the reason I had a professional opportunity; Becky, who is funny, lively, takes long runs in the rain and taught me a lot about life sciences librarianship (taxonomy!); and most of all, my supervisor, Danielle, who has patiently taught me how to handle the Academy’s historic materials, how to curate an informative archival display, and all sorts of digital asset management details they never get to in library school. I appreciate the patience they’ve shown in teaching me the rigging of the good schooner Academy.

Working in the Academy’s archives is quite an adventure. These aren’t dry and dusty collections; I learned about Alvin Seale, a headstrong turn-of-the-century scientist and adventurer who scoured the South Pacific for feather cloaks and cannibals; the great matriarch of botany Alice Eastwood and how she rescued specimens in the midst of the 1906 disaster; and scientific explorers like Rollo Beck and Templeton Crocker and their high-seas voyages to the Galapagos and beyond. I spent weeks delving into our materials on the arctic north and became an accidental expert on pelagic sealing, the Pribilof Islands, and the strange things that happen in the Bering Sea.

But all this was temporary, and I’ll be moving on. Fortunately, the skills I’ve learned are not.

My image in this week’s “temporary” diptych is the iconic orange band that’s been around my neck since last summer, the one that I’ll soon be giving up.

I used a printing service called Moo to make my cards, and one of the options they offer is to print a photograph on the reverse side (fantastic print quality, by the way — I’m very happy with the results).

I chose six different images, all taken by me.

The one in the upper left is a photo of the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, which was one of the first things I posted on this blog and the background image on my twitter feed.

The second image, upper right, is a little more personal to my family. In the late 1920s and early ’30s my grandfather was a marionetteer, and the image is a detail from the letterhead of his company, the Domino Marionettes. The surviving collection of his handcrafted wooden puppets — a mix of billy goats, characters from Greek myths, and Punch and Judy handpuppets — is one of our most treasured family possessions.

The third and fourth photos were both taken in the printing press room of UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. I find the iconography of print — both in its historical context and the newer, digital iterations — fascinating, so I took a few photos during a Lissten-sponsored tour and chose to use these two on my cards. One is the stack of type trays, the other is a page laid out ready for printing.

The fifth photo, on the lower left, is the first image I used in the ongoing Diptych project. It’s actually a photograph of the penguin tank at my erstwhile place of employment, the California Academy of Sciences. Obviously, there are no penguins in the photograph — it’s just an abstract image meant to capture the concept of “water”. The sixth photo, on the lower right, is a spinning sand table at San Francisco’s Exploratorium (I recommend going to their webpage and pressing the button. The one they tell you not to press).

Full size images — plus an uncropped version of my grandfather’s letterhead — are available on flickr.

If you’re wondering, the record in the picture is Spencer Krug’s experimental Moonface EP. Download the digital version (for free! legally!) and let it invade your dreams. Oh, and Miss Grace’s “Loud” is just about the loudest photograph in the history of loud photographs. Listen up over here.