"You've been tagged in a note on Facebook."Everyone on that social networking site--and at this point who isn't?--has read this message with a mixture of flattery ("My online friends want to know more about me!") and dread. ("Who the heck has time for this stuff?").A popular note is entitled "The ABC's of Me," a straightforward trip through the alphabet, each successive letter revealing, theoretically, a fascinating fact about the friend. I must confess I never completed this work-out, throwing in the towel at the end of Round 2 with the letter "B."For any librarian, of course, "B" is for for...
Book Art Meets Book Design : Cara Barer Hits the Covers
In his post at Galleycat, "Cover Trends: The Book as Art Object" Ron Hogan points to two recently published books featuring the book photographs of Cara Barer on the dust jacket.On the same day as Hogan's post the New York Observer ran a piece entitled "The New Thing: Books Without Jackets " which looks at some new releases that are forgoing the dust jacket and using the boards as the canvas. "At a time when there are other forms that people can buy books in, it becomes more important than ever for the physical book to look really attractive," says...
She Collects Shoes, He Collects Books
Oh, the perils of posting - and discovering that the posts are actually read.On Tuesday, I wrote about a friend and book collector who was considering tapping into his retirement savings to buy highly desired rare books. I feared for his sanity - and that’s not all: I privately extended an invitation to him to sleep on my couch after his wife found out about the plan.After posting the article, This Is Your Brain On Books, and alerting him to temporary room and boarding availability when his wife kicks him to the curb, I received the following response from him:“My...
Booktopia: Paju Bookcity aims to ‘Recover the Lost Humanity’
Is it a dream? Is it real? Have we found Heaven on Earth?It's called Bookcity and it's located 30km outside of Seoul, South Korea. It is a city built upon a foundation of books. It's planning and construction guided by "the principles of book making that we use everyday. Book making is similar to architecture in that it takes pains to design and if the design is not satisfactory, one begins again from scratch"It's goal is to concentrate the publishing industry in an "eco-friendly industrial city"Here are a few nuggets from their website:-From the beginning, the Bookcity project was planned...
The Scarce First Edition in Yiddish of “Hashish” (1911)
In a recent column, This Is Your Brain On Books, I briefly discussed Fritz Lemmermayer’s Haschische (1898) and the Yiddish translation published in 1911 with its stunning and evocative cover illustration. It is the only drug-themed book to ever appear in Yiddish.Book people of all faiths and faithful tongues have since been hounding me to reproduce that illustration. The original is in color; all I could access was an image in black and white. It remains, however, an intoxicating feast, made all the more dramatic by Yiddish's use of the Hebrew alphabet, which visually lends itself so well to this...