This is Asaf Hanuka's amazing illustration of the Google Book Monster which appears on the cover of this month's issue of California Lawyer. It accompanies Tom McNichol's feature story on GBS, Saving the World from Google.click to enlargeThe Library Copyright Alliance has released this dizzying chart outlining all the legal possibilities that still remain. They have named this maze; “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement."Looks like there is still a long way to go before this one is settled.Thanks to Brave New World for the lead on the diagram.
Penguin to Publish Apocryphal Boswell MS on Samuel Johnson?
Samuel Johnson in 1775, by Joshua Reynolds, reading, with no little consternation, Boswell's unpublished, other biography of him.With the emergence of monsters reimagined into classic literature – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea-Monsters, and the upcoming Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – it’s easy to forget that during full moons, Samuel Johnson, the most distinguished man of letters in English history, grew hirsute, lustful, and howled. Samuel Johnson, Werewolf?No. As told by his amanuensis, James Boswell, it is the book he dared not publish in his lifetime from a manuscript long thought apocryphal or lost, The Other...
Purdue Library Celebrates Wind Beneath Earhart’s Wings
George Palmer Putnam and Amelia Earhart, circa 1935. (All photos courtesy of Purdue University libraries.)The modern "manufacturing" of celebrities involves finding a camera-friendly face and figure with a charismatic personality, plus an indefinable personal magnetism, and using the power of mass media to create an overnight sensation. Result? A legion of people famous for being famous. Accomplishment is no longer a prerequisite for stardom: savvy promotion trumps talent. But a new exhibit at Purdue University's Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center proves this phenomenon existed far earlier than the advent of "reality T.V." America's most famous female...
Art Center To Fill Acres of Books Site
A rendering of the proposed Art Exchange project.(Photo credit: Rodolfo_M)When Acres of Books, the legendary used and rare book shop that for seventy-four years provided Southern California book lovers and literati with a place to get joyously lost in and, ultimately, became a designated cultural landmark, closed in 2008 the grief was profound.Acres of Books in Long Beach, CA, at the time of its closing in 2008.Now, the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency Board has approved the final environmental impact report allowing Art Exchange, an art-driven facility where visitors can watch local artists create, buy art and attend classes, to be...
Books in the Street: ‘literature versus traffic’
all images © gustavo sanabria"We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word." is how the Spanish design group luzinteruptus frames their latest installation.luzinteruptus, known for their illuminated installations in public places, placed 800 lighted books on Water Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City.The installation, 'literature versus traffic', takes an "urban space conventionally reserved for speed, pollution and noise" and transforms it...