Check out the Library Company blog to read our most recent Reader Spotlight:
Michele Navakas studies the cultural significance of coral. At the Library Company, she found Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children (Boston, 1889), which includes the story “Sea-Life” – featuring talking coral. The polyps explain the anonymous, self-sacrificing labor of building reefs to a starfish: “We are here to build, and building is all we care to do.” The author Jane Andrews discusses collective labor, but is strangely silent about oppression. #LCPFellowFriday
Andrews, Jane. The stories Mother Nature told her children.
Boston.
Lee and Shepard. 1889.
Illustration from James Dwight Dana’s Corals and Coral Islands (New York, 1872).