Life in the cloud can have its consequences. Remember back in 2009 when Amazon unilaterally decided to remove copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers Kindles due to a copyright issue. And what if we suffer a prolonged power outage? Or god forbid the Kindle becomes obsolete? How will ever be able to access our ebooks? Thanks to Jesse England and his E-Book Backup project we now have an insurance policy. Says England of the project: E-book backup is a physical, tangible, human readable copy of an electronically stored novel. The purchased contents of an e-book reader were easily photocopied...
Art & Sole: Wild shoes for a good cause
“You can take me out of Manhattan, but you can’t take me out of my shoes!”- Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) Sex and the City If shoes are your thing no doubt you've heard of Stuart Weitzman. With retail stores across the U.S.A. and with its shoes sold in over 70 countries the brand is on top of the luxury footwear heap and "has earned a worldwide reputation as the embodiment of great American Style." Since the first shop opened on Madison Avenue in New York in 1995 Jane Gershon Weitzman, Stuart's wife and "sole mate", has been commissioning artists to create fantasy shoes...
May Day in Print
Happy International Worker's Day! Here are two recent bookseller offerings to wet your radical appetite. First an e-list from Lorne Bair (pdf) featuring 19 choice items on the struggle: and a catalog from Eureka Books featuring 50+ items including a lot of photographs of Cesar Chavez.
Poetry in the Title
National Poetry Month continues with a title mash-up salute to 'poetry.' From a collection of 47 issues of Poetry Magazine, all featuring the poet Billy Collins as a contributor, to the first volume, 12 issues, of the seminal literary magazine The Poetry Review published in 1912/13 here's 10 with poetry in the title. All selections for 'Poetry in the Title' come from the booksellers of the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA), an organization dedicated to promoting quality independent online bookselling. Billy Collins in Pieces P ...
The original painting of one of the most iconic book images, “The Bookworm,” might be sold
It came to the Milwaukee Public Library in 1972 from the collection of René Von Schleinitz. It was the only item from his "significant collection of German steins, figurines and genre paintings" to go the library. The rest was donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum, including other images of his featuring readers and scholars. Now the library is seriously considering an offer of $400,000 from an undisclosed party for the painting. It is called Der Bucherworm "The Bookworm" and was painted by Carl Spitzweg around 1853. It is by far Sptizweg's most famous work and has become one of the most well-known biblio-images...