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 is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.

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

Of course, would be much cooler to “assiduously match Bond car for car, road for road, meal for meal, drink for drink, hotel for hotel.”. The UK Guardian’s Jon Ronson tried to do just that:

“For copyright reasons,” she says, “it’s essential you make it clear you’re following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren’t actually James Bond.”

There’s a silence. “OK… I’ll make that clear.”

[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 they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema.

Not mentioned? 40% just want a bigger bathroom.

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 could keep one occupied for days.

Scene from market life with butchers.

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

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 it did to books. In the tower he installed a succession of printers, employed to translate his manuscripts into more permanent versions; most left before long, complaining they hadn’t been paid. In the house he stored the fruits of his acquisitional forays at home and abroad: a process already out of hand when he was at Oxford, and rampant forever after. Mostly bought with money he had not got: bills were left unpaid for years – at least one unfortunate bookseller went bankrupt because of it.

(The comments at the end are worth reading as well.)

Meanwhile, Bookhunter is an entire graphic novel now available online that is perhaps more exciting but distinctly less, well, accurate. But how can you not love a comic book that contains the following: “I’ve dated dozens of Caxtons in the lab. We can just check its rubrication against the BAL entry.”

[The latter via my friend Chris. Thanks!]

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 component of the book. It is no longer ephemeral; long live the book jacket.

Stud!

Lego builder!?

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 United States.

How Minneapolis used books to revitalize a neighborhood.

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 FAO Schwarz ca. 1893. No luck yet tracking down a complete copy. I’d buy one in a second.

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