Footnotes are a divisive bunch, for some readers they are pure annoyance for others they provide the opportunity to explore the source and offer a potential new window into something of interest. For Noel Coward reading footnotes was like 'having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.' In her piece for History Today, Anna Neima alerts us to the danger of digital footnotes as more and more of scholarly life moves toward the internet. Noting a study by digital library researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who surveyed three and a half million scholarly articles between 1997 and 2012,...
Jack Kerouac: A Birthday Salute
First Edition of the On the Road, 1957 Today is the birthday of Jack Kerouac. Best known as the father of The Beat Generation his spontaneous prose style changed the game, bringing a fresh approach to the novel. Kerouac's iconic status shows no signs of letting up. All is books are still in print and his masterpiece On the Road remains a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations. On his spontaneous writing style: Many of his books exemplified the spontaneous approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this...
It’s time for the ‘oddest book title of the year’ competition
Another year brings another shortlist of stunning book titles for Bookseller magazine's annual Diagram Prize for “oddest book title of the year.” Created in 1978, with Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice taking top honors, the Diagram Prize has become a yearly hi-spot providing guaranteed entertainment to us book folks. This years nominees are: Nature's Nether Regions by Menno Schilthuizen (published by Viking). Advanced Pavement Research: Selected, Peer Reviewed Papers from the 3rd International Conference on Concrete Pavements Design, Construction, and Rehabilitation, December 2–3, 2013, Shanghai, China edited by Bo Tian (Trans Tech). The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year...
Shredded: The Bookworks of Jukhee Kwon
Libro Libero, 2013 “I destroy books...But actually my work is positive. A discarded book is a dead book. I give it new life.” - Jukhee Kwon For artist Jukhee Kwon, a South Korean working in London, the book is where it all begins. “It’s freedom and excitement for me, trying to express what has been hidden inside the book’s closed covers. The book has its own story, its own energy.” Kwon works only with discarded books, painstakingly and meticulously cutting hundreds of pages to create her new objects. From La Scatola Gallery: The artist notes a personal and cultural narrative within her...
George R.R. Martin donates first edition of ‘The Hobbit’ to Texas University
George R.R. Martin, whose “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series is the basis for the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, has donated a rare first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) to Texas A & M University. Martin, whose archive is housed at Texas A&M, became enamored with the University and especially with the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives’ Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection during the 1970s while visiting for the AggieCon science fiction conventions. The cause for celebration? It is the five millionth volume acquired by the university! It will take it's place alongside a first edition...