Beautiful, unusual, and compelling book images: another blog that long-ago should have hit the blogroll. Now remedied.

[Read more →]

Alberto Manguel on his library:
My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one […]

[Read more →]

A bit steep, but they’ll ship to the US.

[Read more →]

Okay. I admit it. I have never actually read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Don’t get me wrong - I love the movies (even the bad ones), but somehow I’ve just never gotten around to picking up any of the novels on which they’re based. For the hundredth anniversary of […]

[Read more →]

The Telegraph UK on home libraries:
[A]ccording to a new report - The Changing Face of British Homes, compiled by insurers Legal & General - more people would like a library or reading room in their home than either a home cinema, gym or music studio. In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said […]

[Read more →]

The Digital Scriptorium
is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.
Just the highlights […]

[Read more →]

Publisher Faber & Faber have a fantastic Flickr photostream. Highlights include images of scarce catalogs and ephemera, archive and publicity shots of their authors, and a cover gallery from their 20th Century Classics series.

[Read more →]

Not sure. But I want some for my daughter’s bookshelf.

[Read more →]

From the UK Guardian this rather damning portrait:
For much of the 19th century this was the home of Sir Thomas Phillipps, 1st baronet, whom the world called a bibliomaniac, though his term for himself went still further. Vello-mania, he called his condition, because it ran as much to the purchase and hoarding of documents as […]

[Read more →]

The Accidental Bookseller is a weblog of Hélène Lefébure who lives in the UK and posts strips based on her life, including many from her job at a bookstore. Sharp and clever.
Meanwhile, Bookhunter is an entire graphic novel now available online that is perhaps more exciting but distinctly less, well, accurate. But how […]

[Read more →]

The University of Otago has an informative online exhibition, STRAIGHT JACKETS: The Art of the Book Jacket –
This exhibition offers an overview of the early history of the book jacket. It also highlights the design and artistic aspects of book jacket production, and importantly, raises the viewer’s consciousness on what is now considered an integral […]

[Read more →]

Politician!
Stud!
Lego builder!?

[Read more →]

The city tried to rebrand the area as a technology corridor, but not a single dot-com materialized. Instead, three nonprofit organizations formed a partnership in 1999, bought three adjacent warehouses and renovated them into Open Book, which says it is the largest — if not the only — literary and book arts center in the […]

[Read more →]

This brilliant book (I’m working on the exact title) utilizes levers, bellows, and whistles to create what surely must be one of the first children’s books to incorporate sound. The video is a little grainy, but tons of fun.
UPDATE: The book appears to be untitled, but some poking around suggests it was published by […]

[Read more →]

Nice short comic [click image above for complete strip] from Eastern Europe about a bookseller who has every book in the world “except one.”

[Read more →]

Via Kottke this morning, I was able to watch this excellent documentary on Gutenberg’s press, produced and starring writer/actor Stephen Fry:
Stephen’s investigation combines historical detective work and a hands-on challenge. He travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and early media entrepreneur. Along the way […]

[Read more →]

First, a hep Flickr set of some great vintage pulp. And to mark the anniversary of one of the most prominent of the small lit mags, thirty years of Granta covers.

[Read more →]

In the bookstore this past weekend with my daughter, I came across the new reissue of Don Freeman’s classic picture book, CORDUROY. It includes eight pages of extra materials — unused sketches, background on the inspiration and history of the book, etc. But the coolest parts are the facsimile drafts and letters tucked […]

[Read more →]

Is this a new trend, promoting books like movies? I hope so, if these two examples are any indication. I LOVE this pop-up book and must get one when released:

Available for pre-order from Amazon
And finally, check out this wicked-cool trailer:

Johnny Bunko trailer from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.
I don’t need this book, but this […]

[Read more →]

Sixty years of Pelican covers. Very cool.

[Read more →]