September 2009

25 September 2009

The World's Most Beautiful Libraries

I've loved libraries since I was a small child, and I find this collection breathtaking to behold.

Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

25 September 2009

I'm Not Convinced

"Gabriel García Márquez's seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the piece of writing that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years, according to a survey of international writers."

Guardian article

25 September 2009

Church Converted into Book Store

A stunning sight:

Design Top News

15 September 2009

The Dan Brown Sequel Generator

"Plug in a city and a sect, and our computer will do the rest."

Slate article

07 September 2009

Lies from a Publisher's Argot

An amusing article by Robert McCrum:

"First up, there's "Dan Brown Day". The trade anticipates the publication of The Lost Symbol, the long-awaited follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, as the ultimate bonanza, a cross between the dotcom boom and the Second Coming. Random House has printed an unprecedented 5.7m copies. But for civilians, it's just 15 September."

Guardian article

05 September 2009

The Ballad of the LongPen (TM)

"It was a dour, drizzly Scottish Sunday when Graeme Gibson and I set out from Cove Park on Loch Long en route to Dunfermline. The goal of our journey was a connectivity company called Exactive, from whence I was scheduled to sign books at Word on the Street, an outdoor book fair in Toronto. I'd be using the new, smaller, faster remote-book-signing LongPen™ device, invented by me; or such was the plan.

But plans gang aft agley, I reflected Burnsishly; for the LongPen™ - in an earlier, more spidery incarnation of itself - had given me a quease-making couple of hours at the London Book Fair the previous March. It was supposed to have signed from London to New York, and it did sign, scribbling merrily away in the wee hours of the morning. But then, when people came into the New York bookstore, it obstinately stopped."

Margaret Atwood's Guardian article

01 September 2009

Old New Novelists?

"Whenever I hear about a “new” novelist, they turn out to be in their 30s. Why is that? It seems like you hear about new musicians and actors and other creative people in when they are in their 20s."

Why New Novelists Are Kinda Old

01 September 2009

Is This the Future of Fiction?

"There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%."

Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard