Cook & Book is a of 9 bookshops connected
Attention Letterpress Printers: Remember Mutanabbi Street!
Make Books Not War. Sarah BodmanIn March 2007 a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. 30 people were killed and over 100 injured. What made this particular event stand out was that Mutanabbi Street was the center of the Baghdad bookselling world and the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. It was named after 10th century Arab poet, Al-Mutanabbi.To commemorate and protest this most violent form of censorship the Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition was created. It was founded by San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil and since April of 2007 they have been organizing...
Book in a Day
Beginning tomorrow morning a group of writers will collaborate on writing a book about London. They will have one day to write it!The entire book will be written online using Google Documents. They're calling it the 24hrBook Project and it is being sponsored by the folks at if:book, The Society of Young Publishers and CompletelyNovel.com.When the day ends a group of editors and publishers will swarm in to get the book into shape and ready for publication.In addition to the book being available to read online Completelynovel.com will have it ready to be printed on demand beginning Monday.An interesting idea...
ABC’s of Book Collecting: As Issued & As Usual
AS ISSUEDA term used to emphasise the original condition, as issued, of the book described, especially when some individual feature contradicts normal expectation; e.g. ‘edges trimmed, as issued’,‘stitched, without wrappers, as issued’, ‘half roan, as issued’. See advance copy.AS USUALA favourite qualification, among booksellers’ cataloguers, to the admission of some defect or imperfection which is, or can be maintained to be, so prevalent as to be almost normal among copies of the book described; e.g. ‘foxed as usual’, ‘lacks half-title as usual’, ‘Q4is a cancel as usual’, ‘spine faded as usual’.Previous ABC's of Book Collecting postsCarter, John & Nicolas BarkerABC's...
Happy Anniversary Billy Bookcase. OK, Maybe Not so Happy
Designer Gillis Lundgren and his progenyIn 1979 Ikea introduced the Billy bookcase. In 2009, there are over 40 million Billy bookcases sprinkled throughout the world. It is the best selling bookcase in the history of mankind. They're still producing over 3 million a year. Bloomberg has even begun an index tracking the cost of Ikea’s standard Billy bookshelf in 38 countries (in case you're wondering, it is currently cheapest in the United Arab Emirates and the most expensive in Israel.)In the UK, to celebrate Billy's 30th anniversary Ikea released some rather cool limited edition bookcases and other goodies that cater...