Harry will die or he might live but as soon as that butter statue of Harry at the Iowa State Fair melts I say let's put this whole Potter thing behind us and move on.Please.Article in the Des Moines Register, Potter at the fair? You butter believe itThanks to Shelf Awareness for the lead
Pop-Up Comes Alive
The Pop-Up Music Video award goes to:ShitDisco for "OK"Awesome.Thanks to Popular Edge Book Arts Blog the blog of pop-up artist Carol Barton for the lead.
Rare Books, The Bookshop and Open Access
Joseph Campana's piece, Rare Books, appeared on the Kenyon Review blog last week. The jumping off point for Campana was the New York Times article on the closing of the Heritage Book Shop, one of the premier antiquarian book shops in the world.Campana recounts his first memories of encountering a rare book at his college library and how he is as "willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person." Yet he ends the article by professing to have more of a sense of "ambivalence, not wonder" toward rare books.He then goes on to say that the...
Censored Book
Censored BookBarton Lidice Benes26.7 x 20.3 12.71974Book Tied in Rope, nailed, gessoed and painted"I was once on a train to Philadelphia reading a biography of Nixon, and I started scratching it out as I read it, and by the time I got to Philadelphia I had scratched the whole book out. After that I started nailing books shut and tying them up."The piece appeared in the 1990 traveling exhibition Book Arts in the USA curated by Richard Minsky.Thanks to Deeplinking and his post Book Art All-Stars
Recycled Underwear and the Spread of Literacy
"And when the underwear was worn out, it provided a steady supply of material used by papermakers to make books."That's the word out of the recently held International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in Northern England.Marco Mostert, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who is was one of the conference organizers goes on to say:The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags...These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is...