“I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here….”So begins Hanff's now legendary correspondence with the staff of a small London bookshop called Marks & Co. The BBC made it into a television play in 1975, Hollywood covered it in 1975 & 1987 with Anne Brancroft playing Hanff and Anthony Hopkins and Judy Dench playing the Noel's.Leigh Buchanan has a piece on Jewcy titled " Good Book Hunting: The writer who taught me about obscure objects of desire". It is her homage to Helen Hanff and...
Internet 1.0: The Mundaneum
In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two Belgian lawyers, established the Repertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU).Their goal: To develop a master bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge.They designed a classification system called the Universal Decimal ClassificationAfter seeing what systems were out there, like the Dewey Decimal and the British Museum systems, Otley realized that their weakness was their inability to go any further than getting the reader the one book they were looking for. He was thinking Hypertext.For the 1910 World's Fair in Brussels the pair created an installation entitled The Mundaneum. A "city of the intellect" that was...
The History of Financial Speculation: A Collection Hits the Market
This is what your brain looks like on stocks:Christopher Dennistoun, a British antiquarian book dealer and stock trader, has a amassed what arguably could be the largest collection of printed material on the history of the stock market and financial speculation.There are over 700 items in the collection including:-a London jobber’s sheet published in 1698 by John Castaing “at his Office at Jonathan’s Coffee-house” that posts the prices of marketable securities all over Europe, from Hamburg to Cadiz.- The 1898 book “The Game in Wall Street and How To Play It Successfully” which offered one of the first stock charts,...
The Chinese Paper Trail
Chinadaily.com ran a story a couple of weeks ago titled "China Wages War on Piracy". As you would expect "Pirates and bootleggers in China produce 120 million counterfeit audio and video products" a year and cause all sorts of havoc for record and movie companies. What was a surprise to me is that these pirates also publish "500 million unauthorized books a year".For a little perspective, that would be almost 3,000 copies of each of the 172,000 new books that were published in the U.S. in 2005Liu Binjie, vice director with the General Administration of Press and publication, said "the...
The Latest Advances in Papermaking and the Fiber Arts
Introducing 'The Great Elephant Poo Poo Paper'25 odorless sheets from a single turdHow to do it yourselfFor more information visit the Poo-tiqueAlso don't forget that panda and sheep poo work too!And don't worry if all this poo paper kills you because now you can be buried in a paper casket."Ecopod is a revolutionary design in coffins made from naturally hardened, 100% recycled paper." Available in 2 sizes and 6 colors.The world is getting greener one sheet at a time.courtesy of Boing Boing