Today marks the 164th anniversary of the publication of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens.First published in 1843 'A Christmas Carol' went on to sell 6,000 copies in 5 days! I am sure that would translate into bestseller numbers today.Though known as 'A Christmas Carol' the full title of the work is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas and was written by Dickens to raise money to settle some debts.The University of South Carolina Libraries has an online exhibit celebrating all the Christmas related books and stuff of Dickens. The exhibit is titled The Man...
Sweet Textualities
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested..." -Francis Bacon "Of Studies" (The Essays, 1601)Book Patrol is pleased to share another guest post from Charles Seluzicki.******************************Among the hundreds of confections crowding three full aisles in our local Dollar Store, two particularly attracted my attention:CANDICRAFT. Delicious Ink N' Paper You Can Eat! The packet contains one liquid candy filled pen and three pieces of candy paper in four flavors.AndTAFFYTOONS. This taffy bar with crunchy bits exclaims on its wrapper: "You can eat the pictures!"Think of the pedagogical possibilities: "You may eat...
Children’s Book Week
Children looking through window of Magnolia Branch Library, Seattle in 1943Since 1919 the week before Thanksgiving has been designated Children's Book Week. It is the longest running literacy event in the country.Beside all the hoopla and events planned across the country Children's Book Week has always been a showcase for poster art.Jessie Wilcox Smith did the first poster back in 1919. It was titled More Books in the Home and it was so successful that they used it for five years in a row!Here is a link to a list of the poster artists and themes since 1919.
Murder They Wrote
Over at the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal true crime and mystery author Harold Schechter shares his list of the top five books written about sensational murder trials. The piece is called "Killer Stories: Sensational murder trials are at their most transfixing in these works."The top five are:1. "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen (Knopf, 1998).2. "Dead Certainties" by Simon Schama (Knopf, 1991).3. "The Minister and the Choir Singer" by William M. Kunstler (William Morrow, 1964)4. "Compulsion" by Meyer Levin (Simon & Schuster, 1956).5. "Kidnap" by George Waller (Dial, 1961).Schecther provides a one paragraph synopsis of each...
Drink Books
Camper English has a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today on collectible cocktail books titled Bartenders shake and stir their way through cocktail history.English, who writes the booze blog Alcademics talks with Josey Packard, a bartender at Alembic in the Upper Haight who also studies recipe history and collector John Burton, owner and instructor of the Bartenders' School of Santa Rosa, about their interest in older cocktail booksHighlights:-The first known cocktail book is "How to Mix Drinks" by Jerry Thomas and was published 1862.-"Because of their proximity to sticky liquids, well-used cocktail books often don't hold up over time,...