Fairy Tales

Lots of good stories and authors - everyone from Aesop to Mark Twain.

Political Fictions

Political Fictions, published in 2002, is a collection of Joan Didion's articles on the American political proces written for the New York Review of Books beginning in 1988. The central theme emerges in her introduction: "Half of the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application." This premise is self-evident to most everyone, never mind to a political cynic like me. An elite group sets an agenda which ensures that they will retain power and control and they enlist the malleable media to spin the agenda to the naive electorate. This notion may be stale but it's true.

Didion's prose is, as we have come to expect, impeccable and it kept me reading much longer than I would have been inclined to had anyone else written it. When I reached the last chapter, though, I'd had enough of the last century's US politics and put the book down. It always feels a bit like a defeat to leave a book unfinished. However, in this case, the defeat is a minor one. Only the hardcore political junkie could absorb such a heavy hit of campaign analysis without coming up for air. Read it in bits and pieces if you read it at all.

Pimp My Bookcart

We thought our "Pimp my Book Cart" contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a "Pimp my Book Trolley" contest Down Under in Australia (we're judging that one too).
Still, by last week we figured all the fuss had been just that, and that it was still going to be just a few contenders. But then a few days before the deadline, in a display of procrastination that impressed Bill, they started pouring in. We ended up getting over 100. Gene and I scrambled to organize and evaluate them
(thanks, iPhoto!). Several times at ALA we left our booth in the capable hands of our store manager Jana so that we could look at almost 400 pictures of book
carts that had been pimped up, down, in, and out.

Via Coudal

On the Road Book Covers

A neat collection via Coudal. I like this one from 1961.

Aspects of the Victorian Book

This site looks at production techniques and a variety of Victorian era publications (like the penny dreadful to the left).

Via Grow a Brain

Ten Most Expensive Books Sold in 2006

Abe Books sold these very expensive books in 2006:

1. Institutiones Geometricae
Albrecht Dürer
The first of Dürer's writings on art theory; this book formalised the new attitude to artistic creation found in Italy during the Renaissance. Sold for $25,000

2. Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
The special deluxe version has an original painting by the American abstract artist on its cover. Sold for $20,000


3. The Book of Antelopes
Philip Lutley Sclater
A first edition of four volumes from 1894 to 1900 featuring many illustrations by Joseph Wolf - one of the greatest animal portraitists of the 19th century. Sold for $17,500

4. Les Horribles et Espovantables Faictz et Prouesses
Andre Derain
A first edition from 1880, number 169 of 250, signed by the artist and illustrated with 142 hand-painted woodcuts. Sold for $17,000


5. Opere de divino poeta Dante
Dante Alighieri
A rare collection of Dante's work with woodcut illustrations and additional commentary. Sold for $14,347.21

6. Travels to the Source of the Missouri River and Across the American Continent to the Pacific Ocean
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
A second edition from 1815 of a highly collectable item of Americana. Sold for $12,500

7. The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint Exupery
A signed and numbered limited first edition of the children's classic from 1943. Sold for $10,450

8. Hypomnemata Mathematica
Simon Stevin
A set of Stevin's collected mathematical works in Latin - cosmography, geometry, statics, optics and miscellany. Sold for $9,500

9. (tied) SMS, Collection of Original Multiples
Duchamp, Man Ray, Lichtenstein, Christo et al
A series of paper portfolios from the leading artists of the 1960s, and one of 35 deluxe copies. Sold for $9,000

9. (tied) Flower Is
Robert Frank
A signed first edition of a very rare photography book published in Japan. Sold for $9,000

Ian McEwan's life takes twist with discovery of a brother

LONDON: He is known as an author of dark and tangled tales, where love sometimes endures and sometimes does not. But Ian McEwan, one of Britain's best-known novelists, has now found himself as a player in a true story that might have sprung from his own imagination.
The tale, first disclosed in a British provincial newspaper, relates the anguish of a wartime mother in 1942, handing over her newborn baby to strangers on a railroad station platform to
hide the evidence of a clandestine affair while her husband was fighting overseas.
The woman, it turns out, was McEwan's mother. The baby was his older brother, David Sharp, now 64 years old, whose existence the writer had not suspected for most of his life.

Hardest Novels to Film

With the release and critical success of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, an adaptation of a novel once considered impossible to film, what better time to look into the process of adaptation. Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.
While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult. There have been bad novels turned into good films (pretty much everything Hitchcock Made, The Godfather), and plenty of dull adaptations of good books (Dune, The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This). There’s also a few oddities, such as Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre self-referential adaptation of ‘The Orchid Thief’. But despite the film industry’s frenzy in snapping up adaptation rights, there remains a few novels many fear. More.

Via Presurfer

Literary Eccentricities

James Joyce [wiki] was nearly always seen wearing an eye patch, which was not mere accessorizing: He suffered from glaucoma throughout adulthood and eventually went completely blind. In fact, he dictated much of his latest book, Finnegans Wake, to his research assistant, Samuel "Waiting for Godot" Beckett.
But Joyce sometimes wore five wristwatches on one arm, which was mere eccentric accessorizing. He also asked his wife, Nora Barnacle, to sleep with another man so he could understand the feeling of being cuckolded, which seems a bit odd. (Nora declined.) Read more eccentricities

You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to die. But we both have to.

Elizabeth Kolbert on bedtime literature:

If, as Joan Didion famously put it, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all day, has had to be stuffed, quite literally, into his pajamas, may traffic in imaginative freedom and wonder, but it is still an instrument of control. I will read this to you, and then you will go to sleep. End of story. more

Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway?

You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.
It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months. More

Book/Cut Sculptures

Su Blackwell creates beautiful images.

Via Arbroath