Delta Sierra

106 posts
Book-industry lifer.

The Part of Downton Abbey Will be Played by Highclere Castle

Ok, wipe the drool off your screen. The glorious house you’re looking at is Highclere Castle, being used as Downton Abbey in the tv series you might have heard of.

The current castle was built in 1842 by Sir Charles Barry, the architect who designed the Houses of Parliament in London. The property has been owned by the Carnarvon family since 1679. The site has had one house or another on it since at least 1086 – the date of completion of the famed Domesday Book, which records a house being situated there. Today, the Hampshire estate covers 1,000 acres. Continue reading →

Meet the Completists, the People Who Make Other Obsessive Collectors Seem Normal

How do used-and-rare booksellers make a living these days? The advent of eBay and Amazon has decimated prices in used-and-rare, as everyone and their dog has hauled books down out of the attic and put them on sale online, for a little extra cash. Books that would have gone for $5 in a bricks-and-mortar store are now available in their hundreds online for $1 + $3 shipping.

One technique real booksellers use to make a buckle here and there is to put together sets of books aimed at completists, book-collectors who like to have, say, every book ever written by a certain author.  Continue reading →

QOTD: Would You Survive the Apocalypse?

I love watching post-apocalypse movies, but sometimes I get to wondering: how useful would I be if I found myself living in a post-apocalyptic world?

As we see on The Walking Dead, there’s always washing and cooking to be done.  However, anyone able-bodied can wash stuff, and even if you can’t really cook you could peel potatoes, so there’d be an abundant supply of washers and kitchen-workers, so my abilities there wouldn’t necessarily make me worth feeding if things got tight.  I could teach the children, but then so could any adult who can remember a reasonable amount of what they learned in school.

I’m a good organiser, so maybe I could be the quarter-master.  Give me a room with some shelves to set out all the camp’s stock and I could mete it out like a sonofabitch. Continue reading →

Adventures in Old Paper: Collecting Ephemera

A 1914 pamphlet by Daylight Savings Time inventor William Willett. Part of his campaign to convince the government to legislate DST into effect.

Ephemera. Such a great word. Sorta sounds like the heroine of a bodice-ripper, non? “Lord Hunkley shook his fist at the retreating pirate ship and howled into the wind, ‘Ephemera! I will find you! Our love will never die!'”

But no. It means printed material that was never intended to last beyond its initial use. A newspaper, magazine, poster, a pamphlet, an auction advertisement, a bill of sale, a catalogue. Most of the print-run would have been thrown out once the auction was over, the concert had been given, the newspaper had been read.

Collecting ephemera is part of what is sometimes called the old-paper market. It’s similar to collecting rare books, except that books sit nicely on a shelf, but ephemera, which often consists of a single sheet of cheap paper, has to be filed flat, between sheets of permanent (no acid, no lignin, no sulphur) paper.

Continue reading →

QOTD: Is Your Garden All Put to Bed for the Winter?

If the ground hasn’t frozen yet, there are still things you can do in the garden in cold-winter zones. By cold winter, I mean areas where the ground freezes rock-solid for winter and doesn’t soften up again until spring.

Today’s theme: what to do with all those plants.

Plants that are in the dirt:

All the dead annuals should be pulled up out of the ground when they turn brown under the first overnight frosts. Leaving them in the ground all winter is asking to have mould and other diseases come spring.

Continue reading →