BPL: "Cool and Collected" exhibition.

Among the items of the Boston Public Library's "Cool and Collected" exhibition that you can see online at Flickr:

• Scrapbook of Houdini memorabilia: see pages here, here, here, and here

• 1895 ad for Houghton Mifflin

• 1916 season pass, Boston Red Sox

About the image: Houdini poster, ca. 1909. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

New Poe exhibition in Boston.

As noted by PhiloBiblos, "The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston" opens at the Boston Public Library on December 17th. The festivities kick off with the latest chapter of the Great Poe Debate as to what city can claim the tortured writer as its own.

About the image: Edgar Allan Poe, NYPL

Boston remembers: The 1919 police strike.

Tonight the Boston Public Library hosts a panel discussion on Boston's police strike that began on September 9, 1919; sparked looting and other extreme forms of unrest; and catapulted then-governor Calvin Coolidge onto the national political stage. The strike was recently featured in Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. Further details on the library event here.

About the image: "Aid and Comfort," by the Chicago Tribune's John T. McCutcheon, 1919.