Aleksandr Isayevich SolzhenitsynGrowing up in Brooklyn in the 1960's has had its advantages for sure but one of the major side effects are the linguistic challenges one faces as they head into the world with a Brooklyn accent. There remain some author's names to this day I have trouble pronouncing.Enter TeachingBooks.com's Author Pronunciation Guide.Here you can can listen to brief recordings of authors and illustrators introducing themselves. Each begins with "Hello my name is..." There are hundreds of author's and illustrators in the database.In addition to learning "correct pronunciations of hard-to-pronounce names" one also gets to hear the authors reveal...
Book Letters
Here's some cool book love out of the Stockholm design firm Byggstudio.An Alphabet:and a vectorized font:Thanks to Swissmiss for the lead
The Google Books Settlement: The Monster and the Maze
This is Asaf Hanuka's amazing illustration of the Google Book Monster which appears on the cover of this month's issue of California Lawyer. It accompanies Tom McNichol's feature story on GBS, Saving the World from Google.click to enlargeThe Library Copyright Alliance has released this dizzying chart outlining all the legal possibilities that still remain. They have named this maze; “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement."Looks like there is still a long way to go before this one is settled.Thanks to Brave New World for the lead on the diagram.
Books in the Street: ‘literature versus traffic’
all images © gustavo sanabria"We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word." is how the Spanish design group luzinteruptus frames their latest installation.luzinteruptus, known for their illuminated installations in public places, placed 800 lighted books on Water Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City.The installation, 'literature versus traffic', takes an "urban space conventionally reserved for speed, pollution and noise" and transforms it...
Obama Mesmerized by Book on Moses
Last evening, after enduring what seemed like 7 taxing hours at the health care summit, President Barack Obama returned to the White House to preside over the ceremony for the 20 recipients of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal.Winners included Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Frank Stella, architect Maya Lin and Elie Wiesel.Among the humanities honorees was historian Robert A. Caro who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In his remarks Obama mentioned that he had read Caro's book when he was 22...