How To Read An Expensive Rare Book (A Cautionary Tale)

One word: Carefully.No, two words: Very carefully.Upon receipt of the three-hundred year old rare book you just paid $22,000 for (but haven't yet sent the check), inspect it with delicacy. Examine the hinges (inner joints) by gently - and only partially - opening the upper board and then the lower board. Please do not wildly open the book as if it’s the Yellow Pages and you’re frantic to find a plumber.Hinges and joints firm, as advertised by the dealer, with only three small distressed spots along the upper hinge? Excellent!Now, what better way to celebrate your new acquisition than by...

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Bookchase: A board game for the book set

Remember your Trivial Pursuit days? Waiting patiently for your chance to answer a question from the Arts & Literature category. Or those times when you made up your own rules and just read the questions from that category.Enter Bookchase. It's billed as the world's first board game about books.Here's how it works:The first one to collect six books, one from each category, and get home wins! Of course there are hazards along the way like dropping your books in the bath.You can collect books by answering questions, visiting the library or landing on various other lucky spots on the board.The...

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Old School Daze Book Jackets Updated, Now Hip n’ Cool

Book City Jackets' Artist Series 2, groupRemember those plain Kraft brown paper dust jackets from grammar and junior high school? (Your memory may have to stretch back to the 1950s-1960s).Book City Jackets' Standards grouping: Fiction, Non-Fiction, FavoriteWe used to have fun doodling on them, drawing, writing notes, declarations of everlasting love, paeans to rotten teachers, doggerel, and all manner of personal expression.Book City Jackets "Fiction"They, alas, fell by the wayside, along with the mimeograph machine, replaced by DJs with school logo and branded characters. Glossy-coated, they were impossible to write on or customize.Customize to protect and serve!Book City Jackets, founded...

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The Food Librarian’s Got A Bundt (Or 30) In The Oven

As much as we here at Book Patrol love the written word, let's face it: man does not live by books alone. So thank goodness for The Food Librarian and her bountiful, beautiful baking blog. Mary (No last name. This woman has a unique talent to rival Voltaire, Homer, or Saki. She don't need no stinkin' last name.) is a librarian somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area. Like her literary namesake, Mary Poppins, our Mary knows that just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. The medicine in this case being a lot of nice plugs for...

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When Did Walt Disney Write A Christmas Carol?

Disney's A Christmas CarolWalt Disney has gotten a bad rap.We now know that “The Great Homogenizer,” who, as master of The House that Mouse Built, rose to fame by smoothing out the difficult and potentially offensive edges to any story he came into contact with lest anyone's sensibilities be injured, led a double life.Recent advances in forensic bibliography, as reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Dubious Literary Scholarship, have definitively proven that Walt Disney was an honest-to-gosh litterateur.Walt Disney's Mary PoppinsLong thought to be a mere animator (though he, in reality, didn’t do much, if any, of...

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