Reading Copy

There was a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the activities one can undertake when stranded on a plane trip without any books.

We’d barely cleared Italian airspace, though, before the screen in front of me - and every other one on the plane - froze, flickered and then displayed something that looked an awful lot like Microsoft’s dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Every video channel went dead; every audio channel went silent. For the next half hour the crew tried to reboot the entertainment system half a dozen times, and finally gave up.

Entertainment-wise, we were on our own.

It is an interesting quandary, and readers from Shelf Awareness have been writing in with their own solutions…

Jane O’Connor, editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers, offers yet another literary time killer:

Write the alphabet down one column. Pick a phrase from newspaper, book, airplane mag, whatever. Then pair the first 26 letters of the phrase with the alphabet letter. For example, if the phrase was “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy . . .” your letter pairs would be: AT, BH, CE, DQ, EU, and so on. Then try to come with a famous name for each pair: Arthur Treacher (of Fish and Chips), Bob Herbert (of the New York Times) and so on. Fun to play competitively. Set a time limit. You get one point for a name that another contestant has, two points if you’re the only one with the name.

It sounds like a fun game, and sounds a lot like one I play with friends on road trips. You start with an authors name, “Charles Dickens” and the next player in line has to say an authors name starting with the final letter of the previous author “Sylvia Plath”… then “Harold Pinter” and so on. The rule is you can’t repeat an author twice, and usually we play high stakes - If you can’t come up with an author, or if you repeat, you have to buy the next round of coffees (if we are driving, if we are at the pub its a different game all together)

It may sound easy but there’s a skill in the game, such as trying to work in authors with the last name FOX, because there are only so many blokes named Xavier…

Popularity: 19% [?]

Movie star Nicholas Cage can now carry on with the rest of his life… after dog stealing slurs were revealed to be unfounded. Kathleen Turner says sorry for getting it wrong in her autobiography - Send Yourself Roses: My Life, Love and Leading Roles.

I simply can’t imagine life as a celebrity.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Fact-checking and spelling are important - an 11-year-old kid versus The Smithsonian. Guess who wins this one?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Over in the UK, there are several stories this morning….the Orange Prize for Fiction is paying a price for recruiting a flakey celeb as a judge. While at The Bookseller magazine, If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start with your Legs has won the oddest book title of the year award - I don’t think its an odd title. And in Harrogate in the Republic of Yorkshire, a rare Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, has turned up at a charity shop reports the local paper.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Phone books may be slowly going the way of the Dodo but many people still find them useful and several more make millions selling advertisements in them. The Slate article I just linked you to also mentions the novelty factor of looking up your favourite authors or celebrities in an old volume (Bram Stoker on Victoria-1436 or P.G. Wodehouse on Kensington-4150).

We also did our own bit of research on phone books and found that genealogy researchers and history buffs have been known to pay top dollar for old directories.

Popularity: 33% [?]

The Australian pointed us towards a book we missed on our weirdest travel books poll, Roadkill by Len Zell is a 102 page pocket guide to identifying and dealing with expired Australian species.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Today, the 45th anniversary of the Hula-Hoop, beckons us to think of some wacky idea that will make us rich. Check out this out-of-print gem for advice on How to Create Your Own Fad and Make a Million Dollars.

Popularity: 15% [?]

A few months ago we asked AbeBooks visitors to vote on the world’s weirdest travel books

Popularity: 27% [?]

Yesterday, I was the supermarket across the road from the office when I saw man buying Spam, but it wasn’t just any tin of Spam - it was a 70th anniversary tin. The customer and the checkout assistant began discussing the cultural impact of Spam on the world and I felt like I had stepped into an alternative universe.

Of course, there are books about Spam….

Spam: A Biography

Spam: The Cookbook

It appears the actual anniversary was last year so how long had those tins been there?

Popularity: 21% [?]

The Bookseller magazine has announced its shortlist this year’s books with the oddest titles.

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues;
How to Write a How to Write Book;
Cheese Problems Solved;
If You Want Closure in Your Relationships, Start With Your Legs;
People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood
I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen.

I don’t need to say a word but like the cheese one.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Someone took the time to compare the SAT scores and the ten most popular books at every college (on FaceBook). And while as the creator points out correlation does not equal causation - the results are interesting.

Popularity: 28% [?]

When nothing else will do, sign it in blood!

Finally I can get started on my own interpretation of the Necronomicon.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Dictionary wallpaper!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Some crazy Spaniards have put up a statue of Ken Follett. Why?

Popularity: 15% [?]

A 17th century book believed to be bound in the skin of a priest executed for treason appears to bear a “spooky” image of his face on the cover, according to the auctioneers who are selling the book.

Sid Wilkinson, from Wilkinson’s Auctioneers in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, who will be selling the book on Sunday, said he could see the Jesuit priest’s face peering out from the cover. He said: “It’s a little bit spooky because the front of the book looks like it has the face of a man on it, which is presumed to be the victim’s face.”

From The Guardian

Popularity: 21% [?]