There was a short post yesterday in the Good Questions section of the Apartment Therapy New York website titled How To Start a Book Collection?The post was from an interior designer whose client has a new apartment with a lot of bookshelves and no books. There were already over 100 comments to the article when I came upon it and most were less than the kind.Their goal: A book collection that is "based on his taste, but also be a great collection of classics and aesthetically as pleasing as the work that's gone into the rest of the apartment."A fair...
Another Amazon Outgrowth: The Penny Pinchers
It is no secret that Amazon and has single-handedly corrupted the entire bookselling industry.We have lost 50% of our open bookshops since the birth of online booksellingand it almost impossible for the 50% who are left to be price competitive.Interestingly enough, while the number of open bookshops have been cut in half the amount of people calling themselves booksellers has skyrocketed.Within this tornado little cottage industries have popped up trying to capitalize on the Amazon effect.There is the whole Scoutpal culture where a PDA device and the Amazon database combine to remove much of human element from handling and pricing...
My Potter Fantasy
Harry will die or he might live but as soon as that butter statue of Harry at the Iowa State Fair melts I say let's put this whole Potter thing behind us and move on.Please.Article in the Des Moines Register, Potter at the fair? You butter believe itThanks to Shelf Awareness for the lead
Pop-Up Comes Alive
The Pop-Up Music Video award goes to:ShitDisco for "OK"Awesome.Thanks to Popular Edge Book Arts Blog the blog of pop-up artist Carol Barton for the lead.
Rare Books, The Bookshop and Open Access
Joseph Campana's piece, Rare Books, appeared on the Kenyon Review blog last week. The jumping off point for Campana was the New York Times article on the closing of the Heritage Book Shop, one of the premier antiquarian book shops in the world.Campana recounts his first memories of encountering a rare book at his college library and how he is as "willing to make a fetish of rare books as the next person." Yet he ends the article by professing to have more of a sense of "ambivalence, not wonder" toward rare books.He then goes on to say that the...