Love these two galleries of vintage scholastic book covers. Anybody wanna hit the bookmobile after recess?[Via.]
Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm
Theodore Dalyrmple has a wonderful appreciation of books and bookstores in the current New English Review:Orwell says that the tops of books in such bookshops are the place ‘where every bluebottle prefers to die,’ and this preference, being biological in origin, has not changed in the meantime. The dust of old books, and ‘the sweet smell of decaying paper’, still have a peculiarly choking quality that catch one in the back of the throat. And second-hand bookshops are still one of the few indoor public places where a person may loiter for hours without being suspected of any serious ulterior...
"I’m a man with a mission in two or three editions."
At the risk of making this a music kind of week, in celebration of of MTV's excellent MTV Music website, which archives most every video ever made in a slick and uncluttered interface, I offer my favorite book song of all time:Elvis Costello |MTV MusicWhat are your faves?
"On the Road" to Chicago
yard sign in North SeattleBarak Obama's election night party in Chicago's Grant Park is expected to draw close to 1 million people.The folks at FiveThirtyEight shared this last night:“And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.”– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
Princeton – Bloomsbury
Princeton is a band from Santa Monica, CA who released their debut EP Bloomsbury this summer. The four-song disk is - as they explain - "based on the lives of four members of the influential Bloomsbury intellectual collective of the early 20th century. The songs are about Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey." The whole disk can be streamed from their Myspace page (and available for a mere four bucks from iTunes). It's fun stuff, bound to appeal to the bibliophilic: clever, catchy, lush and literate. They remind me of Vampire Weekend (with whom they've performed),...