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Books

Some biblio-visuals for a Sunday afternoon

I’ve been coveting the "Pogo" bookshelf, which secures to the floor and the ceiling on pogo-stick-like legs, ever since I saw it at the Bookshelf blog. I could really have used one for a room divider in my current apartment. An altered-book art roundup (spotted at the Library Success wiki, which suggests donating books to […]

Calling all technogeek book historians

One of the good things about this weekend’s conference was discovering common interests with fellow presenters. During one of those common-interest-finding conversations, I had an idea: “Wouldn’t it be neat,” I said, “if there were some kind of working group for people who work on both the history of the book and what’s happening with […]

Random bullets of science fiction

RIP, Arthur C. Clarke. I know I’ve blogged about it before, but, dear Reader, if you haven’t read his story "The Nine Billion Names of God," you absolutely must. I’m in the process of working my way through Cory Doctorow‘s entire oeuvre, mostly in podcast form. A hat tip to the friend who first recommended […]

Someday I’ll have one of these in my house.

I recognize the design flaw implicit in keeping books in places where they’re likely to get wet, but I still desperately want a Library Bath. The slanted back just makes it all the more appealing. (But it looks like it needs to be longer, so one can wash properly after soaking until one’s toes are […]

Greetings from New York

For the past several weeks I’ve been using my Fridays (which, in my work schedule, are the start of the weekend) to work on my project for the special collections class I’m taking. It’s a faux exhibit (i.e. we have to turn in an introduction and set of labels for an imaginary exhibit we’d like […]

UIowa’s Atlas of Early Printing

Fascinating: The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. While printing in Asia pre-dates European activity by several hundred years, the rapid expansion of the trade following the discovery of […]

Borges, lifelogging, and the web

Interesting convergence: On Sunday, NPR’s On the Media did a segment on Gordon Bell’s "lifelogging" project, and the consequences for human memory of keeping a digital record of everything one does. Interestingly, Clive Thompson, the second interviewee in the segment, mentioned both the potential for catastrophic loss of data (if your hard drive is your […]

Another for the to-read list

As I was scanning Salon’s recent review of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s latest installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, my eye was caught by a sentence that started thusly: In the course of the book, we encounter, among other things, a brief prose piece in the merged styles of P.G. Wodehouse and […]

The map obsession continues

I’m still on my "space and place" kick, and probably will be for quite a while: it has all the signs of becoming a productive research obsession. Among the latest manifestations: Someone recently drew my attention to Ecotone, a new literary journal out of the University of North Carolina. It deals with the concept of […]

Cataloging Jefferson’s library

Over at LibraryThing, someone suggested cataloging the libraries of famous people, and the project quickly snowballed into a collective effort to catalog Thomas Jefferson’s book collection. Anyone on LT can join in and claim a section of the catalog. I’m doing Pastorals, Odes, and Elegies, and have been deep in 18th-century editions of Theocritus and […]