Honoré de Balzac: The Patron Saint of Coffee Coffee is the name of the essay and it appears in Anne Fadiman's new book At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist published by Alan Lane in the UK.Fadiman is fully caffeinated the entire time she is researching and writing the essay, sharing the same caffeine buzz experienced by the literary giants who populate her essay.Who knew that it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance," who first summoned a chemist to see what the magic ingredient...
Book Collecting Juice
Timothy Taylor has a great piece in the December issue of The Walrus titled Unlimited Editions: a collector's obsession of award winning books. Taylor profiles John Meier of Vancouver, B.C. whose collection of the Governors General Award winners trumps that of the Canadian government. A fascinating read, sprinkled with bibliomania, espionage and Howard Hughes .Upon first seeing the collection Taylor says:And then I saw them, looming in the grainy half-light. Custom-built glass-front bookcases from floor to ceiling along every available wall, every shelf full, the colours of a thousand spines seeming to rustle in the darkness. And in the same...
The Reading Reading Light
Little Man With a Book Reading LightPolished zinc-plated arms and legs with a 40 watt bulb as the body.From Black and BlumRuns about $45.Went from cool to weird in a minute when it started to look too much like a Little Man With a Book in the Bathroom Reading Light.Thanks to The Puget News for the lead
City Council Does the Right Thing: Increases Library Funding by $2 Million
It seems everywhere you turn library budgets are getting slashed. In some cases the budgetary reality it's so ugly that the management of public library services is being outsourced to private companies.But here in Seattle things are a bit different.The Seattle City Council has adopted a $2 million increase for The Seattle Public Library’s 2008 materials budget.They already know that libraries matter. In 1998 the citizens of Seattle voted overwhelmingly for the "Libraries for All" bond measure, a $196.4 million infusion to build new, and remodel existing, branches citywide. This is where the money for the Rem Koolhauss designed Central...
Another Amazon Innovation: Free Content For a Fee
As the media shower for Kindle enters its second day the blogosphere remains saturated with Kindle related posts.Forget the design, forget the compatibility issues, forget the price tag, the glaring day after issue is the potential copyright problems around the Kindle offering paid subscriptions to blogs that are otherwise available to all for free on the internet.I emailed Ron Hogan of GalleyCat fame after I realized that he was unaware that GalleyCat was available as a Kindle blog subscription for $1.99 a month. In a post yesterday he was relating author Seth Godin's experience with Amazon and Godin's decision not...