Ian Kahn of Lux Mentis today on his blog confirms what I had been hearing in the rumor mill: that Fine Books and Collections will cease publication of its print magazine. Apparently there are plans to continue it as a web-only venture. This will be a real loss.
New Book on Mysterious Map-Maker
Washington Post review of John Hessler's The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio - How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance.But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren't known for certain.Waldseemueller...
Flickr: Old Scholastic Book Covers
Love these two galleries of vintage scholastic book covers. Anybody wanna hit the bookmobile after recess?[Via.]
Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm
Theodore Dalyrmple has a wonderful appreciation of books and bookstores in the current New English Review:Orwell says that the tops of books in such bookshops are the place ‘where every bluebottle prefers to die,’ and this preference, being biological in origin, has not changed in the meantime. The dust of old books, and ‘the sweet smell of decaying paper’, still have a peculiarly choking quality that catch one in the back of the throat. And second-hand bookshops are still one of the few indoor public places where a person may loiter for hours without being suspected of any serious ulterior...
In Defense of The Kindle
Virginia Heffernan in the NYT Magazine:I can’t seem to put it down. It’s ideal for book reading — lucid, light — but lately it has become something more: a kind of refuge. Unlike the other devices that clatter in my shoulder bag, the Kindle isn’t a big greedy magnet for the world’s signals. It doesn’t pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It’s almost dead, actually. Lifeless. Just a lump in my hands or my bag, exiled from the crisscrossing of infinite cybernetworks. It’s almost like a book.