Hostage-taker demands:
$100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.
From Time.

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In a box of books I bought the other week, I found one of the strangest little items I’ve encountered in quite a while. It’s a promotional booklet used by Johnson & Johnson to advertise their 1953 marketing program for drug stores and pharmacists.
And the flier stars…monkeys, apes, and other primates.
?!
As pharmacists.
!?!?
With […]

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Not really book related, but just great and hilarious pieces of writing…
Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits:
Q: You’ve always enjoyed the connection between fashion and history…talk to us about that.
A: Ok let’s take the two piece bathing suit, produced in 1947 by a French fashion designer. The sight of the first woman in the minimal two […]

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…But I certainly didn’t expect it to shorten my life.

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Well, he is:
John might look like a man possessed when he is watching football but, in reality, he is yet another Portsmouth curiosity. It is rather bewildering to find him going about his day job - he is an antiquarian book dealer in the pretty market town of Petersfield.
“People look at me and think I […]

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When “a large advance induces a good writer to extend a successful series beyond its natural span.”
From: 7 Reasons Why Scifi Book Series Outstay Their Welcomes.
[via]

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“I am the type who steals books because I am poor and I like to read.”
More self-delusion here.
[Via PhiloBiblos.]

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The home of interesting bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them.

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Janet Maslin gives a rave review to fibber James Frey’s newest novel, and does so in the style of the novel itself, a trick that has a long history at the Times.

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“Dad, you know why I like books about knights and princesses and fantasy things? Because they make me feel like I want to go to those places even though I know they’re not real. I like that feeling. Do you know what I mean?”
I do, sweetie. I know exactly what you […]

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New book (apparently only out in the UK) on Samuel Beckett’s early years as a college lecturer based on student’s donated notebook:
Beckett believed himself to be a poor lecturer; he felt, as he put it, that he could not teach others what he did not know himself. But his students saw things differently. Rachel Burrows, […]

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Here’s the noir great, suggesting his publisher vary the standard protection clause that typically appears on a book’s copyright page, in this case his fifth Marlow novel The Little Sister:
The people and events in this book are not entirely fictional. Some of the events happened, although not in this precise time or place, and certain […]

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The Associated Press reports:
The legal sparring involving the cache — apparently discovered in a file cabinet decades after they were written — was settled in January but no one will say where the trove of documents is now.
[…]
Stephens Mitchell, who died in 1983, directed much of the archive to the University of Georgia’s rare books […]

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Glossary of bibliographic information by language.
[Via Patricia @ Marbury Books via Bookfinder Insider.]

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[T]he tensions of last year’s charges against the Strand by three African-American women still reverberate. It was only a year ago that the charges prompted the Strand’s union (United Auto Workers Local 2179) to post this notice: “It has come to the attention of the local that racial discrimination is occurring at Strand Bookstore. If […]

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Encyclopedias?
Textbooks?
Travel guides?

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Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King’s Men.
Hilarious. [Via Boing Boing]

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Some miscellaneous links I’ve been meaning to post, but haven’t gotten around to. First, the 33 1/3 Odyssey is “one reader’s quest to read all 55 (and counting) of these things, and to scribble some impressions of each.” Bauman’s Rare Books (in a simply brilliant move, in my opinion) opens a branch in […]

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Coudal Partners is running a fun (if slightly hipster-ish) contest to “mash up the name of a book with the name of a band.” My favorite examples include:
A Million Little Pixies
Oliver Twisted Sister
Horton Hears The Who
The Maltese Falco
There’s dozens and dozens…

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Ian, I see your strangely mesmerizing video of making ones own vacuum tubes and I raise you one oddly beautiful and poignant video of melting chocolate bunnies by Sander Plug.

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