Tiny Libraries. We have a number of the micro-versions in the neighbourhood, they seem to get quite a bit of usage.
Tag: books
The Daughter as Detective. A bibliophile tries to understand her father through his favorite Swedish mystery books.
I don’t know why it’s so frustrating that my dad refuses to say or even think about why he likes the things he does, when his preoccupations run so deep and are so consistent.
Station Eleven 📚
Station Eleven by Emily Mandel.
I really enjoyed this book. Almost couldn’t set it down. Would definitely recommend picking up a copy.
Don’t wear gloves when you handle old books. From the British Library:
Whenever a manuscript is featured in the press or on television, we inevitably receive adverse comments about our failure to wear white gloves! The association of glove-wearing with handling old books is in fact a modern phenomenon, and one that has little scientific basis.
Essentially, we recommend that it is preferable to handle manuscripts with clean dry hands.
We were told the same thing when I studied book design at Reading. Gloves tend to cause more damage than they prevent. It’s one of those things that looks nice in photos.
Broad Band 📚
I just finished reading Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans (h/t @boop). I thoroughly enjoyed it, and learned quite a bit. I’m also a sucker for computing history, and remember things like gopher, so your mileage might vary.
American War 📚
American War is the first novel from Omar El Akkad. If you’re into dystopian sci-fi, I’d definitely recommend picking up a copy. His prose can be a bit of a slog at times, but worth seeing through. The world building is amazing, I found myself wanting to know more about it.
Full disclosure: Omar is an old friend, so I might be a tad biased. He has always been a prolific wordsmith, and one of my favourite writers, so I’m super-stoked that the book has been well received. Go Omar!
Alice illustrated by Dali
The University of Iowa’s Special Collections posted some photos from their copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Salvador Dali. I had no idea this existed, definitely going to need to see a copy of it at some point. You can see the illustrations on Retronaut, but there’s something to be said for seeing them in the original context.
Online Book of Kells
If you’re unable to make the trip to see it in person, Trinity College Dublin, has a digital version of the Book of Kells available for viewing.
SASS for Web Designers
The latest from A Book Apart’s magnificent series of books, Sass for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm.
I started using Sass and Compass last summer. It has probably been the biggest thing to happen to my web development style since the transition from table-based to pure CSS layout. Just bought the book this week and am super stoked to read it.
The book as a device
The Internet Archive is now archiving physical copies of books.
As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.
Recognizing that a book is just another device is important. It’s way too easy to make all sorts of cute analogies and comparisons between books and the digital world, so I’ll avoid it. How our society consumes words and images is bound to shift, but the book will still be here in fifty years.