Casanova Was A Librarian

What do Casanova, Pope Pius XI, Benjamin Franklin and first lady Laura Bush have in common? At one time, all were members of the librarian profession. While librarians are often stereotyped as quiet, shy ladies who wear their gray hair in a dignified bun, that doesn't reflect the variety and diversity of today's library professionals. As of 2004, 159,000 people in the United States held the job of librarian. Although only 18 percent of that number was male, the median age for librarians was a young 47--far from the gray-haired, bun-wearing ladies of our imaginations! From pick-up lines to bumper stickers, this volume takes a light-hearted look at the many facets of the librarian occupation. Beginning with statistics, it enumerates gender divisions, personality types, salaries and educational requirements for various types of librarians including public, academic, school and special librarians. Other topics include specific occupational health risks, job-related recreation and novelty gifts for library professionals. Instances of librarians found in prose, poetry, film and musicals are also discussed.

Illuminating the legend that Giacomo Casanova singlehandedly created in his famous – and at times infamous – autobiography, The History of My Life, this book provides a timely reassessment of Casanova’s role and importance as an author of the European Enlightenment. From the margins of libertine authorship where he has been traditionally relegated, the various essays in this collection reposition Casanova at the heart of Enlightenment debates on medicine, sociability, gender, and writing. Based on new scholarship, this reappraisal of a key Enlightenment figure explores the period’s fascination with ethnography, its scientific societies, and its understanding of gender, medicine, and women. Casanova is here finally granted his rightful place in cultural and literary history, a place which explains his enduring yet controversial reputation as a figure of seduction and adventure.

What do Casanova, Pope Pius XI, Benjamin Franklin and first lady Laura Bush have in common? At one time, all were members of the librarian profession. While librarians are often stereotyped as quiet, shy ladies who wear their gray hair in a dignified bun, that doesn’t reflect the variety and diversity of today’s library professionals. As of 2004, 159,000 people in the United States held the job of librarian. Although only 18 percent of that number was male, the median age for librarians was a young 47—far from the gray-haired, bun-wearing ladies of our imaginations! From pick-up lines to bumper stickers, this volume takes a light-hearted look at the many facets of the librarian occupation. Beginning with statistics, it enumerates gender divisions, personality types, salaries and educational requirements for various types of librarians including public, academic, school and special librarians. Other topics include specific occupational health risks, job-related recreation and novelty gifts for library professionals. Instances of librarians found in prose, poetry, film and musicals are also discussed.

“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” (Huffington Post)—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni. And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life. Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” (Kirkus Reviews).

Award-winning translation of the complete memoirs of Casanova available for the first time in paperback. In volumes 5 and 6, Casanova brings his flight from the Inquisitor's prison in Venice to a happy conclusion. Exiled from Venice, he goes to Munich and Paris, where he establishes himself as a cabalist, makes a fortune in Holland, helps start the French State Lottery, goes on to Switzerland where he meets Voltaire. Because every previous edition of Casanova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, the literary world considered it a major event when Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text was published in six double volumes between 1966 and 1971. Trask's award-winning translation now appears in paperback for the first time.

The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu, this ambitious book develops the first systematic model for understanding the production, circulation, and valuing of literature worldwide. Casanova proposes a baseline from which we might measure the newness and modernity of the world of letters--the literary equivalent of the meridian at Greenwich. She argues for the importance of literary capital and its role in giving value and legitimacy to nations in their incessant struggle for international power. Within her overarching theory, Casanova locates three main periods in the genesis of world literature--Latin, French, and German--and closely examines three towering figures in the world republic of letters--Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner. Her work provides a rich and surprising view of the political struggles of our modern world--one framed by sites of publication, circulation, translation, and efforts at literary annexation.

An erotic, comedic, and compulsively readable historical novel depicting the beguiling Giacomo Casanova as he looks back on a life of love and ribald adventure In Count Waldstein’s far-flung Bohemian castle, an aging Casanova spends his days as a librarian cataloging the count’s extensive collection of books. Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Ever the storyteller, Casanova instead dedicates himself to his own writing, for which the young servant Laura Brock serves as an endlessly fascinated audience. He recounts to her his greatest escapades—from romances in a Venetian convent to the seduction of an entire harem to the triumphant amassing (and subsequent loss) of a fortune in Paris. Enlivened by the French Revolution and the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment, Casanova’s latest exploits prove he still possesses an intellectual vigor and insatiable curiosity. Even old age can’t keep this legendary libertine—who corresponded with Voltaire, discussed flight with Benjamin Franklin, and whose life and writings inspired artists as diverse as Mozart, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Hesse—from causing trouble. Rich with eighteenth-century European social, political, and religious history, Casanova in Bohemia is an energetic and erotic portrait of Western literature’s most beloved lothario, whose hedonism was matched by his creativity and wit.

It is unknown what happened to the final volumes of Casanova's manuscripts; did the author die before the work was complete, were they destroyed by himself or his literary executors, did they fall into bad hands? We do know, however, that Casanova finally succeeded in obtaining his pardon from the authorities of the Republic, and he was able to return to Venice, where he exercised the honourable office of secret agent of the State Inquisitors-in plain language, he became a spy. Eventually he left Venice, finally settling in Paris where he became librarian at Count Wallenstein's Castle of Dux, near Teplitz, and there he spent the remaining fourteen years of his life.