Books

113 posts

Whatcha Reading?

Let’s get this straight: This is not book club.

This is a book…discussion. I thought it would be fun to talk about what we’re all reading, so we can all open ourselves to new avenues of words.

I’ve always loved to read. I cannot remember not having a book in my hands.

My grandmother — Gam — had a stack of books by her bedside, bookcases filled to overflowing throughout her apartment, and boxes to catch the overflow.  She leaned towards authors like Belva Plain and Nora Roberts. But what I liked, as a little girl, where the two decades worth of Readers’ Digests stacked on the bookcase in the back hall.  “These are easy to read,” Gam told me, putting on her reading glasses, opening the old magazines, and pointing with her pink fingernails, always freshly polished.  “At the end of the stories, there are always these little jokes.” Continue reading →

Libraries Are Saving Your Tweets and Facebook Statuses

Ever think that Tweet or Facebook status or Crasstalk comment is just going out into the webosphere void to be swallowed up and eventually forgotten? In most cases we pray for this after a night of drunken internet ramblings. Or do you ever think you are just wasting your time writing into this void that gives you so little in return? Well fear not! You can now rest assured that many libraries are on the job making sure that your contribution to the “social memory” of our times is being preserved for future generations! Continue reading →

Ghost Writers at the Library of Congress

Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 (Spirit),
Oscar Wilde from purgatory, 1926.
– OCLC Connexion (Library of Congress authority file)

Recently I started a job that requires me to do some work with the Library of Congress database, using a program called OCLC Connexion. While generally as efficient as it is grey and austere, I was delighted to learn about one of its features that is not readily known to the general public.

Did you know that the Library of Congress (LC), which sets the standard of all library catalogs across the land, has a classification for ghost writers? And when I say “ghost writers,” I don’t mean your typical words-for-cash ghost writer, I mean actual ghosts! 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 →

Following “The F*cking Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel”

Writing a book is probably not something you think about doing 140 characters at a time. But that’s exactly what Dan Sinker did with “The F*cking Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.” He might not intended for his parody of Rahm Emanuel’s 5 month long mayoral campaign to become a book, but that’s what happened.

I originally read the @MayorEmanuel twitter feed in real time. It was one of the reasons I finally ended my boycott of twitter. The feed was hilarious then and it translated well as a book. The annotations in the book provided additional background of the characters featured in the twitter feed – both fictional and non fictional. Most tweets on their own are comedic gold, but read again in book form you can see the whole story come together. 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 →

For No Good Reason: The Slavoj Žižek Interview

Back in 2008, The Guardian interviewed Slovenian rock star philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I know this is three years old, but I don’t care. Something this good never gets stale.

Žižek is basically the grumpiest grump that ever did grump it up. I love him.

What is your earliest memory?

My mother naked. Disgusting.

What is the worst job you’ve done?

Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.

Is Absolved the Most Dangerous Book in America?

1 comment

On Tuesday of this week Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested four Georgia men in connection with a plot to unleash a terrorist attack on residents of Atlanta and several other US cities. The four men, all from Toccoa, Ga. and all over the age of 65, planned to unleash the biotoxin Ricin as part of a larger campaign to strike out at the federal government. The four men were fringe players in the right-wing militia movement.

The plot was well into the development stage by the time federal authorities stepped in after being tipped off by an informant in March. Lab equipment seized from one of the defendant’s homes tested positive for Ricin. The four men also had discussed assassinating government officials and blowing up government buildings. According to government affidavits defendant Frederick Thomas was recorded saying, “There’s no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal — murder. (…) When it comes to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die.”

Continue reading →

Rahm Emanuel: Public (Library) Enemy Number One

Oh hey, Chicagoans. How’s it going? Did you know that your sexy mayor plans to slash your public library’s budget, with plans to lay off about a third of your city’s librarians and paraprofessional library staff and reduce hours at most of the library’s 78 locations by eight hours a week? Yeah, that’s part of his plan to close Chicago’s $646 million budget deficit.

Continue reading →