With the pleasures of solitary reading under attack by social reading websites and book clubs, Last Gasp Productions is pitching a new reality show, Meet the Readers.Reality shows are only nominally about their subject. They are mini-dramas, each episode with something at stake and intra-group conflict that will be resolved - for the time being - by story’s end.The premise for Meet the Readers is deceptively simple: A disparate group of book lovers is marooned in Malibu, forced to live together in a small, cozy villa overlooking the Pacific, the washer and dryer kaput. The group is a mix of...
Murder, Mutilation, and Rats: Portrait Of An Archive And Library
A Keeper of London's Secret History: The Entrance To The National Portrait Gallery.A sensational shooting, vandalism by a hatchet-wielding suffragette, and an all-out war on rats. These are some of the surprising events revealed in the newly cataloged archive of the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery. In February 2010, the gallery made public previously secret files covering the 150 year history of its Heinz Archive and Library. The gallery has simultaneously begun a digitization program to create an online, searchable database of those records. Archivist Charlotte Brunskill said: "There are some fascinating stories in our archives and we are making...
Modern Theater Begins With This Woman and This Extremely Rare Book
Hroswitha presenting a book to Emperor Otto I, with his niece,the Abbess of Gandersheim, in attendance.Woodcut by Albrect Dürer.She was a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony during the tenth century, highly educated, and the best Latin writer of her era. Her fame rests upon six “comedies” that resurrected the ancient drama and became the foundation for theater as we know it today.Hroswitha von Gandersheim (c. CE 935-1002), the nun-poetess also known as "The Mighty Voice," and "The Nightingale of Gandersheim" was a very special woman, a sister who became the mother of modern drama.Her plays, originally in manuscript,...
Iranian Used and Rare Book Store Just Like the Old Days – A Mess!
Dewey died trying to decimal this system.Each week, the Daily Telegraph in Great Britain holds a travel Big Picture competition, and last week Alby Ball of Harrow, Middlesex, won a Nikon Coolpix S640 camera, worth £249.99 ($396), for this photograph of a well-stocked bookshop in Shiraz, Iran.Lovers of old book shops in the West will fondly recall this as once being a common sight; now, alas, lost to the Internet. Book lovers of a certain stripe will recognize their living room.
Dark Days In The City Of Light
Paris, 1910 At The Onset Of The Flood. (All Images Courtesy Of Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris.)One of the world's most uniquely beautiful cities is nearly destroyed by a catastrophic natural disaster. Images of entire neighborhoods under water, desperate residents struggling to survive, and landmark buildings swimming in swirling water hit newspapers around the globe. Sounds like New Orleans under seige by Hurricane Katrina, doesn't it? But this description also fits Paris in January 1910. The Bibliotheque Historique de la ville de Paris has opened a new exhibit of over 200 photographs, postcards, maps, and newspapers documenting a...