Roller Derby is back and its packing a literary punch.My friend and fellow bookseller Charles Seluzicki took in a match in Portland last week and shares this:Anyone who has ever seen a women's flat track roller derby game knows the mixture of high camp theatricality and hypnotic sport. It is the last place you would think of in terms of literature and books. But scrolling through the on-line register of roller derby names reveals a recent trend in names that reference books and literature. These derby identities function as both acts of hommage and in-your-face persona of fun-loving menace.The following...
Kindlemania Begins, Some Expect a Short Run
Amazon has officially thrown it's hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?Some are not so sure.In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design "a thing of unsurpassed ugliness." and its "failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom."David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the "F word" as Rothman calls...
Shelf + Books =
The "Equation Bookshelf is a simple idea to divide things in priority order... put together the books that you need immediately or more important between(parentheses)! Set others between [square brackets] and {braces}."Created by the Brazilian design firm Estudio BrederThanks to Lu Terceiro for the lead
The $750 Library Card
It looks like that's about how much it will cost to be a member of the London Library.The library, founded in 1841,was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle who wanted (and needed) an alternative to the Reading Room at the British Museum. "The true university of these days is a collection of books,' said Carlyle.He asked his friends to help and they did:John Stuart Mill chose the books on political economy,William Gladstone picked the ecclesiastical history.Thackeray kept the books.George Eliot became a member, andDickens hung out at the library while researching A Tale of Two Cities.It is now the largest private...
A Rogue Bookshop Appears and the Books Are Free!
Free Books! was how the snippet on Shelf Awareness began.The MailTribune of Southern Oregon ran a story on a new bookshop in Medford, Oregon "Ideals in Action. Book Exchange offers free books and runs on online sales."The shop is called the Rogue Book Exchange and their tagline is: Have a book, leave a book - want a book, take a book."It's a free, nonprofit bookstore and we pay the rent by online selling about one in 50 of the books that people give us." says Jenny Hamilton who owns the shop with here husband.An intriguing model to say the least...