VCU Libraries now offers bicycles for patrons to borrow for 24 hours. The bike loan program is a joint project of VCU RamBikes and  VCU Goes Green.

The project is designed to make getting across campus easier and faster for students who have occasional need of two-wheel transportation.

The bicycles are Sun Atlas coasters with foot breaks and without gears. 

There are four bikes available at James Branch Cabell Library and another four bikes available at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences.

• Bikes must be returned to the location where they were borrowed.
• Bikes are loaned for 24 hours; patrons can renew them for an additional 24 hours using My Library Record or by calling the service desk at either library (Cabell Library 828-1111; Tompkins-McCaw Library 828-0636).
  
• Overdue fines of $25 per day or portion of a day are assessed on bikes not returned by the date and time due.
• Helmets are loaned with the bikes, and are available in small/medium and large/extra large; both are adjustable.
  
• The seat height is also adjustable, and an Allen wrench (also known as a hex key) is available for patrons to use.
• Bikes are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
  
• Patrons are required to sign a waiver of liability statement before they can check out the key to the lock securing a particular bike to the rack in front of the library building.

This one-hour session will introduce faculty to this revolution in publishing of open access, peer-reviewed journals and demonstrate how to locate them in almost any discipline, as well as discuss the potential benefits of worldwide free access to faculty research. Options for faculty retention of copyright will also be discussed.

This workshop will be held in library classroom/lab 319 on the third floor of James Branch Cabell Library. No advance registration is necessary. Address questions to Dan Ream, or call 828-6545 for more information.

• The L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs offers a bachelor's of arts degree in homeland security and emergency preparedness. After introducing the B.A. in 2005, the school added a graduate certificate program and a master's program in 2007.
• The Department of Epidemiology and Community Health offers two tracks in its master of public health program, one focusing on public health practice and one focusing on epidemiology. Graduates are prepared to work on multi-disciplinary teams in government agencies at the state, federal and international levels or in service arms of private sectors.
• The Wilder School also houses the National Homeland Security Project, which researches policy and management related to security and preparedness, including assessing Virginia programs.   
• VCU is also uniquely situated geographically--in the military and intelligence crescent from the CIA in Langley to Arlington's Pentagon to Newport News' shipbuilding operations to Virginia Beach's massive naval installations. Located in the state capital, in a city that houses the Fifth District Federal Reserve and located just 100 miles south of Washington, VCU's central location offers students and faculty easy access to homeland security institutions and professionals.

"Cavemen in Space," "American Barbarian" and "Barbra in the Sky with Neil Diamonds" might sound like the punch lines to a bad joke, but to the folks at AdHouse Books, they're serious business.

Founded in 2002, the boutique publishing house has printed 45 art books, graphic novels and comic books. While it might be small, the Richmond-based company has established quite a name for itself in the comic realm. Books published by AdHouse have won almost every award in the industry, including honors from Domtar, Ignatz, Communication Arts, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, AIGA and two Eisner Awards for James Jean's "Project Recess 2: Portfolio."

Publisher Chris Pitzer says while the company could print five to six projects a month, it prefers to be more selective, usually releasing five to six books a year. "Hopefully the quality of our library reflects that," he says.

One standout from the AdHouse canon is "Afrodisiac" by Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg. The book is an anthology for a fictional blaxploitation character as he progressed from a newspaper strip and into the big time.

"It's a love letter to blaxploitation comics -- if they existed," Pitzer says. "That was a very proud moment."

"Afrodisiac" was nominated for an Eisner in 2010 for best humor publication. "The books are absolutely beautiful. Chris puts a lot of thought and care into the design of the book," says Cindy Jackson, an archival assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University's Cabell Library. "We've made a concerted effort to purchase everything AdHouse puts out."

The company's next release will be "Blue Collar/White Collar," a retrospective of Sterling Hundley's illustration and painting work. Hundley, who works as a professor at VCU and an instructor at the Illustration Academy, says that this will be his farewell to illustration work so he can focus on painting.

"It's a nice, tidy way of wrapping up one chapter and embracing another one," Hundley says. For 13 years he's worked as an illustrator, with work appearing in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic.

"I've always loved his work," Pitzer says. "It's always nice to see a creator who pushes his boundaries."

"Blue Collar/White Collar" gets its title from Hundley's transition from the blue-collar world of illustration into the white-collar world of painting. Wedged between the full-color pages of the book are sketches and notes made by Hundley about his work.

"I'm really pleased with what he's done with my property," Hundley says of Pitzer's efforts. "He really is an internationally recognized publisher. ... AdHouse produces some of the best artists' books that are out there."

AdHouse is breaking form this year, publishing about 10 books instead of the usual five. But don't expect Pitzer to have any big changes in mind for his publishing house. "We are a boutique, we are small press," he says, "but we're a juggernaut." 

• Good Muslims will begin to forever be slandered by extremists.
• I became a firefighter.
• I decided to join the FBI.

This National Library of Medicine exhibit offers a glimpse into the lives of 19th century practitioners in the Shenandoah Valley. 

The Henkel Family Correspondence collection (MS C 291; 1.5 linear feet) consists of 828 letters and is largely the product of Caspar C. Henkel's (1835-1908) life. This digital edition is divided into five-year blocks for ease of navigation and contextual narrative. The family was based in New Market.

Items dating before 1850 were written by ancestors of both Caspar and his wife, Margaretta. The bulk of the correspondence, however, is directly related to Caspar and Margaretta. Caspar retained letters written to him while he was away at medical school and in the field during the Civil War. Upon returning home from these extended absences, he also collected several letters he himself had written to New Market. He also kept letters written to him from his two brothers during their medical training and afterward when they lived and practiced away from New Market. Letters written to Margaretta from her sisters during the late 1860s and early 1870s are also included.

Unfortunately at some point before the Library's acquisition the segment of correspondence coinciding with the battle of New Market in 1864 was removed, leaving no accounts of the battle in this collection.

For more information

• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Methods in Enzymology
• New England Journal of Medicine
• American History in Video
• Classical Scores Library
• Classical Music Reference Library
• African American Music Reference
• Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online
• Berg Fashion Library
• International Bibliography of Art
• Stratfor
• The Left Index
• Alternative Press Index
• Index Islamicus
• Designinform
• Access Medicine
• Access Science
• Access Engineering
• Material Connexion
• SPIE Digital Library
• Grzimek's Animal Life encyclopedia
• Underground Comics & Graphic Novels
• World News Collection
• LWW Nursing Health Assessment Video Series

The article by Dale Brumfield:

Much has been written of Richmond's paranormal past, but 50 years ago, one particular Ghost spoke out against segregation, brutal local police tactics and the College of William and Mary's patronizing stranglehold on what one day would be Virginia Commonwealth University.

Nine issues of The Ghost were "published when needed" between February 1960 and August 1961 by self-described 20th-century scalawag Edward H. Peeples and his friend, transplanted New Yorker Richard Kollin. Arguably the city's first modern-era true underground publication, the Ghost was passed around the Fan and Richmond Professional Institute, known colloquially as RPI, at the height of the civil rights era.

The Ghost was launched out of Peeples' acute frustration with a bigoted racist philosophy dubbed the Virginia Way, coined by Douglas S. Freeman of the Richmond News Leader, supported by the Byrd political machine and endorsed through vitriolic pro-segregationist editorials by the News-Leader's James J. Kilpatrick; Virginians, as The Ghost proclaimed sarcastically, were able to "segregate like gentlemen," not like those "rubes in Alabama who give segregation a bad name."

"We feel that The Ghost should be provocative and 'newsy' and that it will become the overt voice of your wishes and desires of RPI and the Fan district," the 1960 debut issue announced. The magazine's primitive mimeographed layout belied its authoritative skewering of sacred Richmond cows, including the tacit acceptance of social injustices against women and blacks that largely had gone unchanged since post-Civil War days. "Challenging segregation and the Virginia way was our main goal," Peeples explained.

A varsity basketball starter, 1957 RPI graduate and self-professed "spy for the black community," Peeples participated in the infamous early '60s lunch counter sit-ins with other Richmond notables, including Doug Wilder and Edward Meeks Gregory. "I was never arrested," the Richmond native insists, "but I have been thrown out and fired from a lot of places, including RPI."

RPI -- the grandfather of Virginia Commonwealth University -- was considered a brash, blue-collar school -- "'College for the rest of us'," according to Peeples, and "a hotbed of slanderous stereotypes" according to the News Leader -- scorned in its own city and virtually ignored by W&M overseers. Embracing its reputation as a working-class upstart, RPI students maintained a strong sense of college pride while attracting a large number of Northerners, mostly because of the enormous respect that RPI art school founder Theresa Pollak commanded in New York.

After a post-graduation stint in the Navy, Peeples rejoined Richmond's counterculture in 1959, excited to be "connecting with the Richmond radicals -- both of them." He patronized the 900 block of West Grace Street, where -- according to The Ghost -- 85 percent of all Richmond's 1959 felony arrests occurred.

"The Village Restaurant was the gathering place," Peeples says, explaining that the communists, leftists, beats and artists all staked out their corners of the restaurant to pontificate on their pet causes. Nearby on that block was the Meadow Laundry and art gallery (where the Village Restaurant stands today) and the reopened Lee Theater: "The Ghost offers three hearty cheers to the Lee Theater opening, and particularly, for [Ingmar Bergman's film] 'Wild Strawberries.' We need the Lee Theater, and they need us." Also on this strip -- and a possible reason for the high number of arrests -- was the presence of a gay beer joint, Eton's. 

Peeples and his small number of like-minded radicals worked tirelessly to drive their egalitarian causes into the hearts of the Richmond aristocracy. "We were shakers, but not movers," he says, laughing, recalling an Adlai Stevenson rally organized in Monroe Park in 1960 that drew "about a dozen supporters" -- and sadly, no Adlai.

During its brief run, The Ghost was fearless in exposing racial inequities in college sports. One scheduled basketball game between RPI and Union Theological Seminary was "mysteriously called off" because there was a "negro player" on Union's team. "There is a vague policy," The Ghost opined, "enforced by some vague bureaucrat somewhere in the W&M administrative scheme, restricting RPI and Norfolk Division from competing against anyone but bright blue-eyed Aryans."

Suffocating rules enforced on female RPI students by dorm mothers was another thorny issue. The Ghost noted, "We still enjoy the puritanical delusion that a thick, gooey subterfuge of archaic rules will preserve chastity and repute." Women who served as army WACS weren't permitted to live in the RPI dorms, the mag reported. "It seems the administration feels these girls are much too worldly for OUR little women!"

A regular feature, "Les Gendarmes," charted the actions of the Richmond police. It featured a cartoon of a snarling police dog, along with a caption: "The Ghost submits this drawing to city council as a possible substitution for the present Richmond city seal." Some articles remind us that times haven't changed. One recalled how the police's "intolerant, tactless handling of noise complaints" resulted in students getting dismissed from the institute.

The editors eventually accepted future author and then-recent RPI graduate Tom Robbins into their fold. "Robbins was not interested in the social issues," Peeples recalls. "He just enjoyed savaging Southern culture. ... My friendship with Robbins ended when he said that using drugs was OK."

By August 1961, Peeples became heavily involved in numerous civil rights causes, including documenting the Prince Edward County school closings. Kollin, meanwhile, went back to Columbia University for his master degree (he died last year). This forced an end to The Ghost.

Peeples is now retired, as emeritus associate professor of preventive medicine and community health at VCU, but he remains as fiercely loyal to his alma mater as to the social causes he pursued more than 50 years ago. "Ed is one of VCU Libraries' biggest supporters and is a wealth of knowledge," says Special Collections archivist Ray Bonis, who maintains a large, collection of papers in the James Branch Cabell Library documenting Peeples' work in civil rights. This includes four surviving copies of The Ghost, housed in Cabell's Special Collections.

"We [in the movement] nailed and eliminated the de facto expressions of white supremacy. ... We took that as far as we knew how," Peeples says of the seminal tract. "We now ask this generation to kick democracy up another notch." S

Note:This article has been corrected from the print edition.

Art and science mix for painter and scholar Victor A. Yanchick, dean of the VCU School of Pharmacy.

His paintings will be on display during the fall semester through Nov. 23, at Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, 509 N. 12th St. 

Watercolor is the pharmacy educator's medium of choice, and work on display includes landscapes, pastoral scenes, still lifes and themes from the American Southwest. He started painting 11 years ago. A self-described lifelong learner, he said, "I wanted to do something totally different from what I do on a day-to-day basis. Painting is a way of expressing one's self."

Yanchick, who has served as dean of the School of Pharmacy since 1996, has been a leader on the national level as president of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. He studied pharmacy at the University of Iowa and received his Ph.D. in pharmacy from Purdue University. His wide-ranging interests in the pharmacy profession have included medication use in the elderly and inter-professional education. He has guided several programs through a time of rapid change with a personal commitment to improve patient care outcomes through advances and innovation in pharmacy education.

Yanchick donates his watercolors to help raise funds for student scholarships and philanthropic organizations.

For special accommodations, please contact Thelma Mack at (804) 828-0017 or mackta@vcu.edu.

For more information, please see the event website.