Dumb stupid list
Grow up, Esquire .
A list from BrownStudies
Books and movies.
“In the Nostalgia District”
The Brady Bunch in in a townful of use-book stores.
From a title page
A Funk & Wagnalls logo.
Review: Mary Norris, Between You & Me
Part memoir, part free-ranging meditation on matters of usage, this book draws on the entire person.
A is for Artichoke
Sally Rightor Parks’s A is for Artichoke (Pasadena: Water Works, 2014) is a book of fifty-two paintings, two for each letter of the alphabet.
Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams
“He was always telling us, ‘Go to the library.’”
Daniel Berkeley Updike on style
Moore to Updike to Grolier to Aldus to Aldo.
Marginalia
Exhibits of marginalia.
A call-number surprise
The Book of the Courtier, and just two books away on the library shelf: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
Cubicles in publishing
A book editor speaks: “Having a door and a window is starting to feel like having a car and driver.”
Bob Conant on bookselling
”People realize if they want books to continue, they have to support bookstores, and they have to support publishers.”
Getty Publications Virtual Library
Free PDFs!
“Pat talks to teenagers”
“For your own future enjoyment I say go bowling, or to a basketball game, or watch a good TV program (like the Pat Boone Chevy show!), at least for a while.”
Reading, before and after
An excerpt from Andrew Piper’s Book Was There.
Reading surveilled
The act of reading itself is becoming data.
Organization man?
Three photographs found in a paperback copy of William H. Whyte’s 1956 book The Organization Man. Was the man in these photographs an organization man?
An Aldine House title page
Art by R. W. A. Rouse.
A Bodley Head title page
Art by E. H. New.
Bodley Head catalogue
Art from an 1897 catalogue.
Stoner FTW
John Williams’s novel Stoner has been named Waterstones’s Book of the Year.
Recently updated
An update to a post about book designer Guy Fleming.
On e-reading
Nicholas Carr on e-book sales going flat, Verlyn Klinkenborg on the appeal of print.
積ん読 [tsundoku]
“The act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”
WCW for young readers
“A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2008), is the work of a writer and an artist with a genuine feeling for Williams’s work.”
Department-store Shakespeare
In 1965, a suburban department store’s book department carried at least one work of Shakespearean criticism.
Penguin Random House
I think Penguin House would have made a better name. Or Random Penguin, better still.
Bernard Waber (1921–2013)
He wrote and illustrated the Lyle books.
E. L. Konigsburg (1930–2013)
Author of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Brookline Booksmith blog
“I am happy to discover that one of my favorite bookstores, Brookline Booksmith, has a blog: brookline blogsmith.”