Galleycat alerted me to The Composites – a Tumblr – dedicated to police sketches of literary characters. It’s definitely my site of the day. Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, Keith Talent from London Fields, Edward Rochester (above) from Jane Eyre, Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, Emma from Madame Bovary….
The blog 101 Books writes about Graham Greene and eight-year-old Shirley Temple. The English author reviewed one of Temple’s movies and wrote this:
Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.
Blimey! I thought she just sang songs about the good ship Lollipop. 101 Books goes on to reveal how Greene wrote The Power And The Glory.
Books come in different shapes and sizes. They can be small or very big indeed. Quarto, duodecimo, octavo and elephant folio are just some of the terms you will hear used, and this video from my colleague Christi helps to demystify the jargon.
You can learn more about book sizes at the AbeBooks’ Book Collecting Guide.
Bobbs-Merrill existed in a bygone era of books. This company published L. Frank Baum, Ayn Rand and Irma S. Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking, but is largely forgotten now except by connoisseurs of the used book world.
Discover how a Midwestern company put a book into almost every household in America.
The year began brightly with an inscribed first edition of Ian Fleming’s debut 007 novel, Casino Royale, selling for more than $46,000. The book, published in 1953, remains one of the most desirable of all modern first editions.
The other sales on our top 10 most expensive sales of January list aren’t bad either with appearances from Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
I absolutely love the idea of World Book Night, in which booklovers and readers go out into their communities and give books to people.
Read:
The goal is to have 50,000 people give a book to a stranger or to people you might know but believe aren’t frequent readers. Go to a coffee shop, a hospital, a park, a church, a community center, an after-work party, a local school, or even just give them away on your daily train ride. WBN will give you 20 specially-produced, not-for-resale World Book Night editions to randomly give away. There are 30 titles to choose from for all types of readers. Basically, if you love any of the books included in the program, you can get free copies to share with others. The list includes:
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• The Stand by Stephen King
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
The purpose is to celebrate the love of reading, the love of a good book, and to share the ones we love the most. The full list of 30 books is a fantastic selection – some of my very favourites, and now I need to seek out the others on the list, of course. If you’d like to be one of the people giving out books, you have until midnight EST tonight, february 6th 2012, to register to give out books. Unfortunately, this is not available in Canada yet – only the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Ireland. But what a wonderful idea. If and when it makes it to Canada, I will do everything I can to take part.
(via BoingBoing)
Japanese photography is now one of the most vibrant genres in the rare book world. The photobooks of Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and others provide thought-provoking visions of Japan and beyond.
Shocking and often surreal, these are powerful books.
Enter a used bookstore and you will encounter the unique smell of old books. But where does that aroma come from? It’s down to science and the fact that books are full of organic material that reacts with the environment.
Learn more about book care at the AbeBooks’ Book Collecting Guide.
Boxing Legend Angelo Dundee, who trained Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, George Foreman and countless other champions, died yesterday.
If the rumors are true, the first words Ali ever spoke to Dundee, upon meeting him for the first time, were:
“My Name is Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. I’m the Golden Gloves champion of Louisville, Kentucky. I won the Pan American Games a month ago and I’m going to win the Olympics, and I want to talk to you.”
Dundee was with Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, for almost all of his early fights. He toured around the world with Ali, and became known as the best man to have in your corner during a fight.
He died of complications from a blood clot on Wednesday, February 1st, at age 90. But not before he attended Ali’s 70th birthday party, the month before, and caught up.
If you’d like to learn more about the career of Muhammad Ali, including his work and friendship with Angelo Dundee, the Taschen book Greatest of All Time (GOAT) is an unforgettable tribute, full of countless facts, anecdotes, articles, essays and some truly jaw-dropping photographs.
As someone who has often wistfully dreamed of opening my own bookstore (with a lovely soft couch-and-cushion section with story hour for kids, free coffee for grown-ups, and a leave-a-book-take-a-book section for swaps..), I enoyed reading this blog post called “25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore”. It further confirmed my suspicion that not only have I been wistfully dreaming of opening a bookstore, I’ve also been unrealistically romanticizing the hell out of the idea. Still, for all the pitfalls and drawbacks and foibles and pain, it sounds like something I’d like to do.
Here is the list, funny and insightful:
1. People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.
2. While you’re drafting that business plan, cut your projected profits in half. People are getting rid of bookshelves.
3. If someone comes in and asks where to find the historical fiction, they’re not looking for classics, they want the romance section.
4. If someone comes in and says they read a little of everything, they also want the romance section.
5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can’t think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks.
6. Kids will stop by your store on their way home from school if you have a free bucket of kids books. If you also give out free gum, they’ll come every day and start bringing their friends.
7. If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks. Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales. Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.
8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they’re really free, no matter how many signs you put out . Someone else will walk in and ask if everything in the store is free.
9. No one buys self help books in a store where there’s a high likelihood of personal interaction when paying. Don’t waste the shelf space, put them in the free baskets.
10. This is also true of sex manuals. The only ones who show an interest in these in a small store are the gum chewing kids, who will find them no matter how well you hide them.
11. Under no circumstances should you put the sex manuals in the free baskets. Parents will show up.
12. People buying books don’t write bad checks. No need for ID’s. They do regularly show up having raided the change jar.
13. If you have a bookstore that shares a parking lot with a beauty shop that caters to an older clientele, the cars parked in your lot will always be pulled in at an angle even though it’s not angle parking.
14. More people want to sell books than buy them, which means your initial concerns were wrong. You will have no trouble getting books, the problem is selling them. Plus a shortage of storage space for all the Readers Digest books and encyclopedias that people donate to you.
15. If you open a store in a college town, and maybe even if you don’t, you will find yourself as the main human contact for some strange and very socially awkward men who were science and math majors way back when. Be nice and talk to them, and ignore that their fly is open.
16. Most people think every old book is worth a lot of money. The same is true of signed copies and 1st editions. There’s no need to tell them they’re probably not insuring financial security for their grandkids with that signed Patricia Cornwell they have at home.
17. There’s also no need to perpetuate the myth by pricing your signed Patricia Cornwell higher than the non-signed one.
18. People use whatever is close at hand for bookmarks–toothpicks, photographs, kleenex, and the very ocassional fifty dollar bill, which will keep you leafing through books way beyond the point where it’s pr0ductive.
19. If you’re thinking of giving someone a religious book for their graduation, rethink. It will end up unread and in pristine condition at a used book store, sometimes with the fifty dollar bill still tucked inside. (And you’re off and leafing once again).
20. If you don’t have an AARP card, you’re apparently too young to read westerns.
21. A surprising number of people will think you’ve read every book in the store and will keep pulling out volumes and asking you what this one is about. These are the people who leave without buying a book, so it’s time to have some fun. Make up plots.
22. Even if you’re a used bookstore, people will get huffy when you don’t have the new release by James Patterson. They are the same people who will ask for a discount because a book looks like it’s been read.
23. Everyone has a little Nancy Drew in them. Stock up on the mysteries.
24. It is both true and sad that some people do in fact buy books based on the color of the binding.
25. No matter how many books you’ve read in the past, you will feel woefully un-well read within a week of opening the store. You will also feel wise at having found such a good way to spend your days.
It’s bed time, and you know you shouldn’t pick up the scary book you’re midway through, but you just can’t wait to find out what happens…
What is it about fear that can be so enticing, and keep us diving deep into the terror? How do writers weave words so skillfully as to conjure a primal fear response inside us, in essence tricking our brain into fearing what we know to be imaginary?
Proceed with caution. These are the books that fear built.
There’s nothing sweeter for an avid reader than a thick omnibus edition packed with three, perhaps four, titles from your favourite author. Getting to the end of one novel, and having a nice thick stack of pages left is a satisfying feeling.
Sink your teeth into Biggles, Nero Wolfe, Travis McGee, Simon Templar or something else from our omnibus selection.
Eastman Kodak, one of the giants of photography, has filed for bankruptcy protection, reports the BBC. Sad but not surprising news as they have hardly been a player in the digital age although I do have a very good little Kodak video camera for filming the children playing the fool.
Kodak has been around for 133 years and that means there is a wide selection of books about Kodak itself, books featuring Kodak’s cameras, adverts and catalogs, instruction books and even books written by founder George Eastman. Here are some Kodak books (and an antique camera!) from the collectible end of the spectrum.
The most interesting one is Through Jamaica with a Kodak by Alfred Leader. Published in 1907, this travel book sheds light on the era when photography was becoming available to ordinary people. The cover, which is eye-catching, is an early example of a photo being incorporated into a book’s cover artwork.
There are a couple of interesting books dealing with the company’s legacy – The Story of Kodak by Douglas Collins and History of the Kodak by Mina Fisher Hammer.
The oldest title in this selection of historic veterinary books was printed in 1756. In those days, man’s best friend was the horse and equine health was a vital area of medical science.
Once used by farriers, farmers and veterinarians, these books are now treasured by collectors. From hoof to tail, trotter to toe, these are the early animal care books the experts turned to. Enjoy.
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