Nigel Burkwood over at Bookride has the wrap up of the auction of the library Annette Campbell White held at Sotheby's in London.The Recap:The sale grossed about £1.3 million. About half a million less than the top estimates.25% of the lots did not sell.Many of the dealers present were the same one who had sold Ms Campbell the books in the first place.The London trade gossip was "that the stuff had all been bought too recently and was in less than fab condition."The attendees were mostly male though Jeannette Winterson was spotted in crowd and active.Many lots went to an...
The Librarian: Hollywood Style
The documentary film from Overdue Productions "The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film" will premier in a couple of weeks at the ALA Conference in Washington, D.C.Here's the trailer:It is the first full-length documentary film to focus on the work and lives of librarians, offering "a unique and charming blend of film clips, humor and critical analysis of the popular image of librarians." The film weaves interviews with real librarians with "movie clips of cinematic librarians."This trailer focuses more on the interviews with librarians (after all the film is premiering at the ALA Conference) but I can't help...
Readings For Money and Books For Free
You get a sneaking suspicion reading Ceclia McGee's piece in the New York Times "A Way to Give Authors a Lucrative Second Platform" that the model for author readings has changed drastically and that the free in-store author reading is endangered.Many of the major publishing houses have set up in-house speakers bureaus which now hire out their authors to various groups and businesses for a fee which includes travel expenses.Why are they doing this? The publishers say "they are responding to common industry trends: fleeting tastes in mass-market books, shrinking shelf lives in bookstores, disappearing book review sections, and the...
More Trouble In Bookland For Oprah
Today was a big day in Oprahland. It was the day that reclusive author Cormac McCarthy confided in Oprah during his first ever television interview.A man who is barely seen in public, was asked during the interview if he "cared that millions of people were now reading his words" and replied "in all honesty I have to say I really don't," was now confiding in Oprah.It gets better.The Chicago Reader is running a story by Julie Rickert claiming that one of the books heavily promoted by Oprah in her post-Frey world, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, "appears to contain at...
Shelf Talk: The Sorted Books Project of Nina Katchadourian
Since 1993 Nina Katchadourian has assembled more than 130 "book clusters" for both private libraries and public collections.She gets there by "culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves."The photo above is from a group of clusters titled BookPace she did for San Antonio collector and art patron Linda Pace.She has also created clusters for the journal of art and poetics...