Klingon as a First Language

BoingBoing has the story. It's of a father from Minnesota who spoke Klingon to his child for the first three years of his life. That bears repeating - a father spoke Klingon, and only Klingon, to his child until the age of three.

For some Klingon propoganda:

The Very Best in Bad Sex Writing

Who is going to win the coveted prize this year? Philip Roth? Paul Theroux? Nick Cave?

From the piece...

The Pulitzer prize-winning Roth makes the line-up for The Humbling, in which the ageing actor Simon converts Pegeen, a lesbian, to heterosexuality. The Literary Review singled out a scene in which Simon and Pegeen pick up a girl from a bar and convince her to take part in a threesome. Simon looks on as Pegeen uses her green dildo to great effect. "This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be," writes Roth. "There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze."

'Roth is very anxious about his description of sex," said Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review of the extract. "Why write of a scene that repeatedly features a green dildo, 'this was not soft porn', unless you're worried that it might be taken as such - in this case, with sentences like 'then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts...', the worry seems justified. But it's the overcompensation that qualifies this passage for the award – the totems and shamans are an attempt to convince us that Roth's leering is actually giving some vital anthropological insight."

A History of Science Fiction Classics...

told through its book covers.

From the post on io9...

A single book can inspire a wide range of covers, and sometimes those covers can be works of art themselves. We look at some classic science fiction novels and the various covers they've worn throughout the years.

We've collected various book covers from a number of classic science fiction novels to see how different artists have interpreted the same book. The covers are sometimes surprisingly pulpy, others are elegantly minimalist, and still others are variations on the same theme.

Top Twenty Book Covers of the '00s

The Book Cover Archive Blog tries valiantly to pick the best dust jackets in the last ten years.

Pictured above: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, with illustration by Erich Lessing and designed by John Gall.

One of the Greatest Creations of 19th Century American Culture

Welcome to the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

From the piece in The Wall Street Journal...

Because books were such a familiar and natural component of Furness's upbringing, he did not sentimentalize them. When his contemporaries set about designing libraries, they tended to treat them reverently, as if they were a shrine for sacred objects. But Furness knew that books were active, useful, even incendiary things—the antebellum abolitionist tracts that his father wrote had brought repeated death threats.

Frank Furness's building, then, was perhaps the only library to treat the act of reading as an active and dynamic enterprise. The building is an engine of active thought, divided into four separate volumes, each serving a different function and assuming a different shape. Most dominant is the stairhall, rising to 95 feet and isolated from the library proper so that the sound of footsteps would not penetrate the main reading room (a problem that classical libraries, with their central stair, never quite resolve).

Photo by Margie Politzer.

The French Town That Can't Let a Bookstore Die

Welcome to Poligny, a town of book lovers.

From the piece in the Washington Post...

Just off the town square, a few hundred feet down La Grande Rue, a bookstore has been dispensing culture and entertainment to the people of Poligny for 150 years. Over the generations, residents said, it has become part of the landscape, a place where children tarry on the way home from school and their parents duck in to pick up the latest novel.

That's why, when the shop looked as if it would have to close this spring, a group of townspeople put up cash to form a little corporation, capitalized at $70,000, and bought the lease to keep it running. As a result, the New Bookstore reopened two weeks ago with a coat of fresh paint but a familiar mission: to be a haven where people feel welcome dropping by to buy a ballpoint pen or browse for books.

The Sporting Life in Books

AbeBooks has a beautiful little collection of sports books to take a gander at.

In Cold Blood - FIfty Years On

Truman Capote's masterful In Cold Blood is fifty years old. The Guardian takes another look at the book and the slaughter of a family in Holcomb, Kansas.

From the piece...

Four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." That was how Truman Capote summed up the murders with somewhat greater drama, referring to the four Clutter victims and their two attackers who died later on the gallows. After reading a short newspaper account of the killings, he decided to make the 1,700km journey from his home in New York to Holcomb to chronicle the impact of terrible violence on a small community. The result, six years later, was In Cold Blood. It propelled him to household fame and fortune, and in the process ensured that Holcomb was put on the map, and changed forever, in ways that many of the townspeople did not – and still do not – appreciate.

It is hard to think of any murder case involving six relatively unknown individuals that has captured so many imaginations. In Cold Blood has sold millions of copies and been translated into 30 languages. It was made into a black-and-white film of the same name in 1967 and there was a colour remake in 1996. The story of how it came to be written became the 2005 movie Capote, followed by Infamous the following year.

The Dutch Literary Tradition

Is there such a thing? Indeed! Eurozine takes a look at the writing of the Netherlands and contemporary Dutch literature.

From the piece...

Does the Netherlands have any great literature to boast of? This question is often put to me when I am abroad. So who then are the doyens of that Dutch literature? Many of the people I talk to are unable to name even a single writer from the Dutch-speaking world. Erasmus, Spinoza, Anne Frank – it appears that none of these are directly associated with the Netherlands, even though Erasmus lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, and Het achterhuis [The diary of a young girl] was written in an Amsterdam house overlooking a canal.

Anyone wishing to sketch a picture of Dutch literature of the past fifty years must look at five major writers: Willem Frederik Hermans, Gerard Reve (both now deceased), Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, and Hella S. Haasse.

Jon's Writing in Vintage Seattle

I recently wrote about the fabulous Fox Theatre that was on 7th and Olive in Seattle for Vintage Seattle. I hope you enjoy the small piece here. And for more images of the grand building, you can visit the University of Washington's image collection here.

A Feminist Reading List

Ariel Levy offers it in The New Yorker.

From the brief piece...

It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the piece I wrote, but as long as we’re talking about feminist memoirs, I highly recommend Andrea Dworkin’s, “Heartbreak.” I think it is her best book, certainly her most accessible. It is the perfect antidote to the myth that Dworkin was a simplistic thinker—and writer—who thought that all sex was rape.

Now this is really a stretch, but just by the by, I think my favorite biography of a feminist icon is Nancy Mitford’s unbelievable “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Oof, that’s a good book.

The Bible - X-Box Edition

Thou shalt play games.

Quote of the Week

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
- Chinese Proverb

Gene FOXP2

It's that gene, that single solitary gene that separates chimps and us in regards to speaking abilities. We can, they can't. It's because of the gene FOXP2. UCLA scientists discuss it here.

From the piece...

"Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans," said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells.

"We showed that the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 not only look different but function differently too," said Geschwind, who is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London."

Robert Mankoff - The Big Think Interview

The cartoon editor of the New Yorker is a wealth of knowledge on all things comedic:

I've Lost My Library Card!

More, at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Friday's Poem

Dorothy Parker's "General Review of the Sex Situation":

I Can Tell By the Pixies...

Letters of Note, which day after day has some incredibly interesting posts, had a post the other day on Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was an avid spiritualist and believed in faeries, actual faeries, and the like. He wrote a letter to a girl who had taken a "photograph" of a faerie.

A Novel Crime Cure

The BBC recently looked at how reading classic literature can help those in prison from reoffending.

From the piece...

Mr North says literature also helped addicts and other sick people.

He said: "Literature is an incredibly broad thing and heals all of us all the time.

"We're interested in how you deliver it in a highly charged way to get a result."

Mary Stephenson, formerly writer in residence at Channings Wood prison in Exeter, said she had seen at least two prisoners change after reading classic novels.

"It made them realise they weren't thick or stupid and they were just as much an audience for that kind of writing as anyone else.

"That gives them a great boost and a lot of them started to do education."

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and the modern adventure novel Touching the Void by Joe Simpson all resonated with offenders in different ways.

Why Writers Define the First World War

There's an illuminating post in The Guardian (without question one of the best book sites on the internet) about World War I, the literature it spawned, and how those on the firing line recorded their experiences of it.

From the piece...

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant bestseller around the world. It is the one book that provided a continuing market for the others mentioned here. It spawned a new literary movement in books condemning the war, making the style suddenly fashionable in the late 20s, just as books about teenage vampires are today. It also inspired the first great war film which set the tone for what would follow. Future conflicts – the second world war, Vietnam, Iraq – would all inspire more great celluloid than pages.

The first world war was the first time war was seen and understood by writers, by a whole generation of them, who didn't see it remotely, through chivalrously tinted lenses but in the mud and the blood and the shrapnel. Before the real dawn of cinema and after the birth of literacy, the first world war is the only war that must be read to be understood.

The Smell of Books

Double-Breasted Dust-Jacket has an interesting post about a new study that was done about the smell of books. Called "material degradomics" - analyzers can tell the age and condition of a book by sniffing it.

The Antiquarian Book Market in Mexico City

It's a good one, notes the Los Angeles Times. Travel to Mexico City and there are treasures to be found, partly because most book collectors look to the United States or Europe for their books, secondly because oftentimes the bookstores owners in Mexico don't use the internet and price their books at lower prices because of it.

From the story...

You don't have to read Spanish to love these bookstores. There is an incredible range of old, odd books in English (as well as in French, German and Italian) scattered throughout the shelves. In Bibliofilia, a Donceles bookstore that specializes in rare, antique and out-of-print books, a 1960s Manual for Refrigeration Mechanics, a first edition of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" and the 1866 "History of the United States" in four volumes illustrated with steel engravings are for sale at about a third the price of what they could fetch north of the border.

In general, the price of antique, out-of-print and rare books in Mexico City is cheap compared with the prices in the U.S. and Europe. Collectors outside the country often don't know what's available in Mexico, and booksellers here may not use the Internet to find out what prices are elsewhere. This, of course, gives the informed, or just lucky, book buyer a real advantage.

Although good deals can be found on blankets spread out along the avenues around the city, in the well-stocked bookstalls on the traffic islands in the Roma, Condesa and Coyoacán neighborhoods or at the weekly flea markets, the dozens of used-book stores lining Calle Donceles, with upward of 1 million books on sale and prices often as cheap as on the street, are still the place to go for one-stop used-book shopping.

Jonathan Ames - The Big Think Interview

Photography and the Private Library

The Private Library has an extensive series of posts in regards to collecting books on photography.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX

Happy reading and go out and start taking some pics.

The Donkey Library

The Great Comic Book Heroes

Not only do they fight crime, they're good for your kids. In the Telegraph, there's a story about how comic books are good for children, about as good as any other type of literature the tot may read.

From the story...

"Any book can be good and any book can be bad, to some extent. It's up to the reader's personality and intellect. As a whole, comics are just another medium, another genre.

"If reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or comprehension, readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic and cultural conventions."

William Carlos Williams and His Burnt Book

Bookride has a groovy post about poet William Carlos Williams's first book, Poems. Most all of them burnt up, save nine. Obviously, due to their rarity, they're a little expensive. The post continues with discussions of other famed books and libraries going up in flames.

Do Women Write "Female" Poetry?

This is a question asked recently by The Guardian.

From the story...

Many of the poems in my next book are influenced by the artist Helen Chadwick, whose early work made much use of images of her own body – until a change in the late 1980s. She wrote: "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body ... It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft." I think I am in love with the word "deft", which seems to me to describe exactly how a poet should be – but apart from that I was intrigued by the idea of art that might not declare gender. When I applied the idea to poetry I saw how prescriptive we can be – particularly as readers – in our assumptions about the influence of gender on writing.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent – and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

Pictured above: Poet Carol Ann Duffy.

The Carbon Footprint of Reading

Are e-books greener than regular books? Bookseller.com has a discussion about it.

From the piece...

Eco-conscious consumers face these sorts of dilemmas every day, the sort of electric handdryer versus paper towel debates (on that one, Al Gore recommends neither but waving your hands around in the air). But with the Amazon Kindle now available in the UK and the e-book market certain to rise, a vexing question UK consumers will certainly be asking themselves is this: are e-books greener than print?

As often with these green debates, the answer is less than certain. A few recent reports from the US fall heavily on the "e is greener" side. In August, a study by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year.

Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would "result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year"—the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books.

ASL Shakespeare

ASL Shakespeare. How cool is that? The ASL Shakespeare Project began in 1999 at Yale University. A team of four people, two deaf, and two hearing, came together to translate Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into ASL. This core team was later joined by other Deaf performers. It took over a year to translate and videotape the full play. Then the translation was produced by the Amaryllis Theater in Philadelphia.

The Gutenberg Bible at Yale University

Dr. William Whobrey, Assistant Dean of Yale College and Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literatures discusses Johannes Gutenberg, Yale's copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and the significance of the invention of moveable type. Enjoy the illuminating podcast!

How to Kick Writer's Block Musically

The ever entertaining Chuck Klosterman presents twelve albums that kick writer's block, via Flavorwire. Oddly absent from the list - Peter, Bjorn and John's album Writer's Block.

Jane's Predecessor

You've heard of Jane Austen. But have you heard of Maria Edgeworth? The Second Pass illuminates you.

From the piece...

Maria Edgeworth might be the most important nineteenth-century novelist to have gotten lost in the twentieth. Like Fanny Burney before her and Mary Shelley after her, Maria was raised in the home of a famous father. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was an amateur scientist, a man of letters, and an “improving” landlord who returned from England to Ireland in 1782 with his thirteen-year-old prodigy of a daughter. Under his tutelage, at a tender age she was already conversant with the works of Adam Smith, but her literary education was also remarkable. She read widely and went on to write in many genres, sometimes in partnership with her father. In particular, she developed the new form of “national tale” in a series of novels about Ireland that inspired Walter Scott to try something similar for Scotland. The result was the Waverley novels. She was an innovator in domestic fiction as well, and her influence on Jane Austen is palpable.

Jane Austen remains pretty damn popular these days. The Morgan Library & Museum actually just started a new exhibition, "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy."

Quote of the Week

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling

John Irving on Big Think

Big Think, one of my new favorite websites, interviews the author of The World According to Garp. You can watch the full interview here.

Rejoice for McSweeney's

They're always so damn wonderful. Their latest issue is a tribute to the wonder that is a newspaper. It looks pretty awesome.

How to Write a Great Novel

As I'm in the opening throes of National Novel Writing Month, I, certainly, am not really writing the Great Novel. I'm thinking too fast and the grammar errors. Oh my!

That's not to say I can't write a great novel. You can, too! The Wall Street Journal asks top authors (like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker) how to write one.

From the piece...

Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. "The hardest thing is always the first sentence—that is painful," says Mr. Pamuk, whose book, "The Museum of Innocence," a love story set in 1970s Istanbul, came out last month.

Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.

Mr. Pamuk says he writes anywhere inspiration strikes—on airplanes, in hotel rooms, on a park bench. He's not given to bursts of spontaneity, though, when it comes to plot and story structure. "I plan everything," Mr. Pamuk says.

Photograph by Doodlehead (found on Flickr).

Friday's Poem

Jamaica Osorio's "Kumulipo," performed for President Obama at the White House:

Grammar in Rhyme

The Beinecke Library's website always has something fun to peruse. On their blog, Room 26: Cabinet of Curiosities, they recently put up Walter Crane's Grammar in Rhyme. You can see the whole book online at their site.

The Book That Changed Your Life

Which was it for you? It might not even be your favorite book, just one that altered who you are in some way. This American Life dedicates a show to books.

For me? I don't know if I could pick one, though Twenty Love Poems and Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda makes an impression.

How Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play

Intriguing magazine article title, isn't it? It's an intriguing magazine article in Time Magazine.

From the piece...

Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor at the University of London, came to his conclusion after using plagiarism-detection software — as well as his own expertise — to compare writing patterns between Edward III and Shakespeare's body of work. Plagiarism software isn't new; college professors have been using it to catch cheats for more than a decade. It is, however, growing increasingly sophisticated, enabling a scholar like Vickers to investigate the provenance of unattributed works of literature. With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings. "With this method we see the way authors use and reuse the same phrases and metaphors, like chunks of fabric in a weave," says Vickers. "If you have enough of them, you can identify one fabric as Scottish tweed and another as plain gray cloth." (No insult intended to Kyd.)

Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was Tragediz’d by any Company of Tragedians

Groovy title, isn't it? It bears repeating - Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was Tragediz’d by any Company of Tragedians. It was written by Henry Carey. How on earth did it get the title Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was Tragediz’d by any Company of Tragedians? Gary Dexter fills us in.

Dutch Covers

Care to look at kid books from Holland dated 1810 to 1950? BibliOdyssey has it covered.

If the Dutch don't thrill you, perhaps the Polish do? Kid books from Poland - get pumped.

100 Essential Reads for the Lifelong Learner

The list, care of Online School.

Pictured above: Rodin's "Thinker."

Four Obstacles to Writing

The fun artwork of Tom Gauld.

Marvel Comics is 70 Years Old

What better way to celebrate than learn 70 interesting tidbits about the comic book giant, via the Telegraph?

Here are a few tidbits to tempt your palate...

6 The Seventies Fantastic Four cartoon series was missing the Human Torch, not because NBC executives feared he would inspire children to douse themselves in petrol, strike a match and shout "flame on", but because the rights to the character belonged to Universal Studios. Universal would not allow NBC to use the Torch so he was replaced by a cute talking robot named H.E.R.B.I.E

7 Casablanca Records helped to create the X-Men hero Dazzler. The record label, which produced hits for Cher, Donna Summer and the Village People, had approached Marvel with the idea of a Disco super-hero that they could cross promote. According to Marvel editor Louise Simonson, Casablanca said, "Hey, you make a singer and we'll create someone to take on the persona." However, the collaboration proved fraught and ended with both parties walking away from the deal.

8 Marvel went bankrupt in 1996. The financier Ron Perelman bought Marvel for $82.5 million in 1989, putting up $10.5 million of his own money and borrowing the rest. After taking the company public he went on a buying spree, hovering up trading card companies and taking a controlling interest in a toy company. It was a bad move - the trading card and collectible market tanked - and Marvel became swollen with debt. In 1996 Marvel missed an interest payment, putting it technically in default. Perelman offered to rescue Marvel by injecting $350 million but only if Marvel creates more shares and gives them to him. Carl Icahn, a bondholder and corporate raider, buys Marvel's bonds and vows to block Perelman. Marvel then filed for Chapter 11 protection in the bankruptcy court.

9 Pet Shop Boys singer Neil Tennant once worked for Marvel. Between 1975 and 1977, Tennant was an editor at Marvel's UK division, a job that required him to anglicise American spellings and indicate when the more scantily dressed superheroines needed to be redrawn decently.

For giggles...

What to Write Next

Colson Whitehead, for The New York Times, has a writerly piece about his writing process.

From the humorous essay...

I recently published a novel, and now it’s time to get back to work. If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. A flashy and experimental brain-bender, or a pointillist examination of the dissolution of a typical American family? ­Generation-spanning door-stopper or claustrophobic psychological sketch? Buncha novellas with a minor character in common? To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!

The End of an Era

Wonders and Marvels, fast becoming one of my favorite sites, has a small essay about the death of Victor Hugo (whose bust above was done by Rodin), the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, amongst other pillars in the literary canon.

From the piece...

For four days, the nation held its breath, waiting and praying that the poet would recover. When death finally claimed Victor Hugo at around 1:30 a.m. on May 22, men and women throughout the nation joined together in a shared display of grief and respectful devotion the likes of which none had seen. To contemporary observers, the event marked nothing less than the end of the nineteenth century.

Léon Daudet, son of the popular writer Alphonse Daudet, Jeanne Hugo, the beloved granddaughter of Victor Hugo, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, were among the more than two million people who filled the city on June 1 to watch as Victor Hugo’s body, carried in a pauper’s coffin, wound its way through the city streets.

Victor Hugo and the values he incarnated had served as a powerful point of reference for generations of Frenchmen; his passing, when Léon, Jeanne, and Jean-Baptiste were all teenagers, marked an important turning point not only in their lives but in the history of the nation.

These three families—Hugo, Daudet, Charcot—represented the best of what France had to offer: integrity, success, Republican fortitude, and even genius. Now, with the death of Victor Hugo and the new century looming ahead, these three adolescents were faced with the daunting challenge of making names for themselves in a changing world, their very personal quests for self-discovery increasingly bound up in the great debates of the day.

A Slideshow Tour of the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book

A Slideshow Tour of the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book from Steve Vinik on Vimeo.

George Orwell's Bookshop Memories

George Orwell worked at a used bookstore at a point in his life. He wrote about his experiences.

From the charming piece...

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return.

Near Priceless Ansel Adams Glass Negatives Found at a Garage Sale?

Yes. No. Maybe. KSDK has the story.

Living on $500,000 a Year

William Quirk, in American Scholar, takes a look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns to reveal what it says about the famed author's life and the times he lived in.

From the piece...

What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.

Until the Hollywood years (1937–40), Fitz­gerald handwrote his income tax returns. During the Hollywood years, the returns were prepared by accountants and typed. He, of course, kept his ledgers by hand. Regardless of how they were transcribed, the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald—how he lived and how he struggled.

The ledger for 1919 shows earnings from short-story sales of $879, an amount below that required for a tax return. But the next year Fitzgerald was suddenly rich. In 1920 he earned $17,055 and paid $1,444 in taxes—an overall effective tax rate of about 8 percent. Fitzgerald sold 11 short stories to magazines for $3,975 and four short stories to the movies for $7,425; he received $6,200 in royalties from This Side of Paradise. The novel, published in April 1920, went through printing after printing, totaling 49,075 copies—more than any of his other novels during his lifetime. His royalties between 1920 and 1923 came to $13,036, which, again, was more than the royalties from any of his other novels.

The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns.

19th Century Dust Jackets

Have an interest in dust jackets from the 1800s? You're not alone.

From the blog by Mark Godburn...

From the record of surviving examples in the Unites States, Great Britain and Europe, it is clear that publishers' jackets were widely issued on new books by the 1870s and probably by the 1860s or fifties. They may have been common before 1850, at least on certain types of books, but there are not enough surviving examples before mid century to say so for sure. What is certain is that these fragile and rarely saved covers had an earlier and wider use than generally understood, and they were often more colorful and carried more artwork and advertising than previously thought. They appeared in two distinct forms in the nineteenth century, each with its own variants, and they played an important role not only in book protection but in bookselling.

Before the 1820s, there was little occasion for publishers to issue dust jackets for bound books. For centuries, books were sold as unbound sheets to buyers who ordered and paid for their own bindings. Other books were sold in temporary bindings of paper or cloth which were replaced with leather or vellum after purchase. Temporary bindings did not need the protection of dust jackets, and few book owners wished to cover their permanent bindings with jackets. Bookbinding was an art form and the bindings were meant to be seen.

Pictured above: Pastoral Poems, the earliest known illustrated jacket (from 1859).

The Cultured Traveler

The New York Times travels to rare book libraries that anyone can visit and see some amazing treasures.

From the story...

But these books are not just for scholars. They are also on view for the average visitor, albeit one with a decided interest in the sciences who makes a pilgrimage to western Missouri, where the sprawling red-brick library sits majestically on a 14-acre urban arboretum just a five-minute walk from Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The Linda Hall (pictured above) is among dozens of libraries across the United States that house dazzling collections and often mount eccentric exhibitions but largely remain unfamiliar to the public.

“What is fun is to become aware of these marvelous libraries that, though open to the public, are not well known and are filled with wonderful treasures,” said Robert S. Pirie, a prominent book collector who lives in Manhattan and has his own library of several thousand volumes.

Quote of the Week

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
- Christina Baldwin

Started Your Novel Yet?

You'd better get cracking. I shall start soon. A daunting task, 50K words in a month, but I will do it (maybe), writing about a father and her daughter stuck on a ride at Disneyland. There may be more to it than that. I don't think I could write 50K about how awful it is to hear "Yo ho ho ho," on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride 1,385,835 times (easy novel word filler though, just repeating "Yo ho ho ho" over and over again).