1,729 readers of James Frey's concoction A Million Little Pieces will receive $15.82 each to soothe the pain they encountered upon finding out that Frey's book included a bit of fabrication.As part of the settlement, Random House has also agreed to include a warning in the book that not all portions of the book may be accurate. Does this mean they can still call it a memoir?In addition to the $27,348 to settle the claims Random House will pay $783,000 to the lawyers in legal fees, $432,000 for publicizing the settlement (basically an additional marketing expense) and $180,000 to be...
Words Divide, Images Unite: A Visual Language Celebration
We are a couple of weeks away from Utrecht Manifest's 2nd Biennale for Social Design and one of the main events is an exhibit titled Lovely Language: Words Divide, Images Unite honoring two of the titans of visual language, Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. These two pre-Tuftian kings of envisioning information created their own language of textless pictograms as a way of conveying quantitative information with social consequences. They called them Isotypes. "It was an organized attempt to use graphical design for the purpose of achieving changes in society, primarily through visual education of the masses, and especially by presenting...
Library of Congress Refutes Washington Post Article: Books are Not Missing They’re Just Not on the Shelf
The folks at the Library of Congress (LOC) got a lot of heat on Capitol Hill last week. Much of it centered around the Washington Post story, Materials Missing at Library of Congress, proclaiming that 17% of the material at the LOC is missing.Matt Raymond over at the Library of Congress blog shares with us the library's response via an article by Gail Fineberg in the internal LOC newsletter the Gazette titled IG's NOS Report Prompts Questions and Answers (IG = Inspector General; NOS = Not on Shelf). Excerpt is reproduced below.The library claims that all the missing material is...
The Day 300,000 Books Fell
"The top four floors of San Jose, California’s, eight-story Martin Luther King Jr. Library, which serves as the public library system’s main branch and the San Jose State University library, were temporarily closed to reshelve books after a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the city October 30."The building suffered no major damage but the building did intentionally sway back and forth to absorb the shock of the quake and as a result 300,000 books fell of the shelves!They are almost all picked up.American Library Association articleImage above of a bookstore after the Bay Area's 1989 Point Loma quake by J.K. Nakata of...
Rwanda’s Biblio Bus
Biblio BusThough traditionally an oral culture reading is increasingly on the rise in Rwanda and it is not an easy task providing access to reading material to its people. The cost of books and newspapers remain outside the reach of most Rwandans.The Biblio Bus is one of the 3B's. A project instituted by a group called Ishyo. The bus carries 4000 books in 3 different languages, Kinyarwanda, English and French, and is decorated by local artists.Currently the Biblio Bus visits schools and prisons only with the hope of eventually providing service to individuals.Students can borrow books for up to a...