Book as cigarette lighter The word "Blook" first surfaced as a word in 2001 when Jeff Jarvis coined it to represent a printed book derived from a blog. In 2006 the word was short-listed for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary and was a runner-up for Word of the Year. Now, thanks to Mindell Dubansky, it has a new meaning: objects made in the emulation of books, either by hand or commercial manufacture. Dubansky, who is head of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is waving the BLOOK flag on a new blog devoted to these bookish gems....
Shakespeare Altered: Imagining other looks for the Bard
Everyone knows who he is and everyone has an image in their mind of what he looks like. Now let's open our mind and enjoy a sampling of what Shakespeare would look like if... The wonderful site Érase una vez compiles a selection of images featuring some of the "most picturesque, comic, absurd or ironic" images of the Bard. From Top Gun to the Terminator here is Willie in all his glory. More images here: Hey, William, is that you? (The other faces of Shakespeare)
Rapper’s Delight: A Strong Vocabulary
click here for hi-res version Matthew Daniels has created a pretty nifty flow chart with Pop Chart Lab ranking the size of the vocabulary of today's leading hip-hop artists. Daniel explains the project: Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever. I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake. 35,000 words covers...
Mother book: The book that keeps growing and growing
Bell-Net Obstetrics wanted to come up with something special to give to expectant mothers. They hired the Japanese advertising agency Dentsu who then went to work and created "the world's first book that grows with mothers." The awarding-winning 3-D book features 40 pages, one for each week pregnancy. It provides sharp visuals of the both the process for the baby and the mother while also providing space for the mother to juornal about her experience. Each week the page on the right hand side grows while the left hand page deepens creating a perfect marriage! [youtube]http://youtu.be/sQwN_-JNr38[/youtube]
Book Design and the Native American Experience
Indian Horrors by Henry Davenport Northrop. Unsigned cover design. Imperial, 1891 The latest work from the scholarly side of the venerable Richard Minsky is Trade Bindings with Native American Themes 1875-1933. Minsky gathers together 120 books designed by many of the leading illustrators and book designers of the day. From kids books to captivity narratives to fiction and "fiction purporting to be truth, including a white missionary writing under a pseudonym as an Indian Chief, and a multiracial black man, son of a school janitor, writing as a pureblood Blackfoot Chief." Yosemite Legends by Bertha Smith. Cover by Florence Lundborg. Paul Elder, 1904 American Indian Dance Steps by Bessie...