Book Stuff
I love books. Here’s random stuff about books that I find and enjoy.
There’s not a whole of curation here. This will always be a mish-mash of stuff. My wildly scientific heuristic is, “OMG, this is neat…”
Ways to follow:
Chicago bookstore owner's tweet about customer's $800 return goes viral: 'Don’t do this to a small business'
A Chicago bookstore owner’s Twitter post about an “expensive” return has gone viral after she alleged a customer returned $800 worth of books that was used as temporary decor.
This is pretty low
Nope. Not joking.
The End of a Book World Mystery: A Suspect in Manuscript Thefts to Plead Guilty
Filippo Bernardini was arrested by the F.B.I. last year. He is expected to enter his plea on Friday, ending a yearslong saga that captivated the industry.
This was a thriller of a story. This guy terrorized the publishing world for years, by social engineering his way to getting unreleased manuscripts.
This is the “vanity sizing” of book reading.
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
Digital platforms are struggling, meanwhile a 136-year-old book retailer is growing again. But why?
I did not see this coming
Behold, the Kindle of the 16th Century
Just one of the “various and ingenious machines” of Captain Agostino Ramelli
I want one.
The Murky Path To Becoming a 'New York Times' Best Seller
Publishing insiders tell Esquire why they find “the list” so frustrating – turns out, it’s a data project full of contradictions.
Lots of intrigue here.
The only error here is that there’s never “too many books.”
I was tempted to follow this guy to see where he went.
Yes, yay books, indeed.
After First Contact, humanity was disappointed to learn that while the galaxy was full of space-faring species, there was no interstellar trade.
“No goods are worth the cost,” the aliens said.
They returned the next week.
“Those ‘books’ you gave us, do they have sequels?”
Best story ever.
Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books
Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and […]
An interesting argument. I also wrote about the value of physical books once.
This website will show you the current time in the context of a quote from literature. My math tells me they need to find 720 quotes, assuming they don’t separate a.m. and p.m.
A service that will show you the cheapest place to buy a book you want. I tried it on a couple books. The prices retrieved were absurdly low. I actually bought one the books I was testing with.
Found on a random wall somewhere in London.
A card on the wall at Prosperio’s Books in Kansas City.
A book tower at Prosperio’s Books in Kansas City
Wall of books in the lobby of the Stanford Court hotel in San Francisco.
Author and editor Hanya Yanagihara's jaw-dropping loft
Author and editor Hanya Yanagihara’s jaw-dropping loft. New York City, 2013. Architect, Steve E. Blatz.
How to nurture a personal library
An escape, a sanctuary, a place of pleasure, a memoir. Take these steps to ensure your library is just what you want it to be
Some genuinely practical – and good – advice here.
I’ve developed a decent layperson’s understanding of “what makes this movie work, shot-to-shot,” but I don’t have that for books. I’ll read two fairly similar genre books, for example, and one of them will absolutely click for me and the other won’t, but I don’t feel like I have a vocabulary for describing what it is that makes the writing in one of them “better” than the other. I would like to read some books that will help me develop a better ear for prose, give me tools for talking about what I like and don’t like, and help me feel like I can appreciate what a writer is doing in more detail.
On this theme, I enjoyed this book.
A friend sent me this. It’s Latin for, “Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.”
The fiction bestseller list of The New York Times between the years of 1931 and 2020. Each row of the dataset is a single “entry” on the list, that is, a single slot for a single week. Altogether, the dataset features just over 60,000 rows.
This is part of the Post 45 Data Collective. This data has been peer-reviewed and verified.
Being the dork I am, I wrote a script to do some calculations to the find the titles that had been ranked #1 for the most weeks (not necessarily consecutively).
My results (yes, the ALL CAPS formatting pains me too):
- THE DA VINCI CODE (59)
- WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (54)
- HAWAII (49)
- THE CAINE MUTINY (48)
- THE SOURCE (41)
- LOVE STORY (41)
- JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL (38)
- THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (38)
- TRINITY (36)
- THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (34)
42 Home Library Ideas You'll Want to Read In All Day
Stylish home libraries in many shapes and sizes, from living room reading nooks to rooms filled with floor to ceiling books and cozy seating.
They appear to have curated all of these from architecture and design sites. They include locations and links for them all. Some lovely designs there.
DDR Books is a local bookstore in Watertown, South Dakota. DDR Books sells new and used books and specializes in rare first edition books, along with books signed by the authors. Stop in or check out our selection online!
This is the best bookstore I’ve visited in the state of South Dakota, which is a little odd because it’s in a smaller city (pop. 22,000).
I had a lovely conversation with the owner, who was a local high school debate teacher for 40 years. He tells me that he and his wife had to expand their home four times to store their personal library of 14,000 books, in addition to the 50,000 they keep at the store.
He also tells me that he gets quite a few shoppers from the Twin Cities area, which is notable, because there’s certainly no shortage of bookstores there.
50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction.
Notable not only because it’s a book, and because it chronicles a type of interactive fiction that I spent a lot of time with as a kid.
Livraria Lello, Porto: The Famous "Harry Potter" Bookstore
Livraria Lello in Porto is one of world’s most beautiful bookstores. Here’s all you need to know when visiting this bookstore in Porto.
This is supposedly the bookstore that inspired Hogwarts. Legend says that J.K. Rowling was a frequent visitor to the bookstore when she was teaching English in Porto from 1991 to 1993. She wrote the first Harry Potter novel during this time.
The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
How a best-selling series gave young readers a new sense of agency.
A definitive history
Two podcasters set out to read every Agatha Christie book. It became much more than that
For six years, thousands of Agatha Christie enthusiasts across the globe have downloaded the podcast for what one listener described as a ‘joyfully geeky’ take on the Queen of Crime’s expansive canon.
Starts off as a simple podcast about a bookseries, but then takes an emotional turn.
The Booksellers
A film about the New York rare book world. Now available to watch at home on digital platforms.
This documentary convinced me to spend my retirement collecting books and to never apologize for that.
Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them
Do you have a habit of picking up books which you never quite get around to reading? That’s tsundoku.
They talk about it like it’s a bad thing.
Admont Abbey Is The Largest Monastery Library In The World, And Also The Most Beautiful
The beauty of the Admont Abbey library is challenging to put into words but that doesn’t mean we won’t try.
I teach a couple of university courses in Austria, so I have to go there every once in while. I should take an extra day and visit this place.
Abbey Library of Saint Gall
Discover Abbey Library of Saint Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland. This is not only one of the oldest collections in Europe, but also possibly the most beautiful.
Germany's Most Beautiful Libraries
Germany has an impressive literary history, so it’s no surprise it is home to six of the most beautiful libraries in the world.
Armchair Books ekes out its intense and blustery existence on Edinburgh’s hallowed West Port…ancient home of booksellers. In view of the castle, above the Grassmarket, it bakes under the torrid Scottish sun. The dangers are manifold; our overburdened shelves groan like masts in a squall, our threadbare and quasi-oriental rugs may distractingly catch the eye or foot. Books in the window may spontaneously burst into flames, and the Managers must be kept locked in at all times… Sporadically under feeble but sinister attack by the government, we struggle under goad of Fear, towards Beauty.
The stuff dreams are made of.
This Chinese Library Is Breathtaking, Even If the Books Are Fake
The beautiful swirling shelves are lined with thousands of fake books.
The “shelves” in the pictures are actually steps and benches. The actual books are in reading rooms.
Where Is All the Book Data?
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide – to make culture more equitable – we need to decode that data for ourselves.
CZur Shine Ultra Series
CZUR Shine Ultra( Pro) Scanner, 13-24MP Document Scanner, Max DPI 440, Portable USB Document Camera, A3 Large Format Book Scanner, Adjustable Height, Auto-Flatten & Deskew, Compatible with Windows & Mac OS
This is a scanner for books or other things that don’t fit a flatbed.
I am attending Buckingham Charter High School, where I am a 9th grade student. My collection has over 3,000 library cards, and growing every day! So, I hope you enjoy looking at my collection! Right now I am working on getting all the scans of the library cards up, so not all of the library cards are displayed yet.
I found this in a Hacker News discussion of how to keep a website online for 30 years. Someone used this as an example. The web isn’t quite 30 years old, so it’s not there yet but based on the domain and source code, I suspect the site dates from the late 90s.
I did a little searching to find the teenager who built it (he would be in his 30s or 40s now), but came up empty.
How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?
There’s a reason that some people won’t let go of their physical books – and a new term for it, “book-wrapt.”
Amazing article. I want to be “book-wrapt.”
Lyrical Ballad Bookstore Thread
Okay WOW. Just WOW.
My 19yo daughter found it. She found the labyrinthine magical bookstore that you thought only existed in stories. This place is WILD and clearly chock full of forbidden tomes that open portals to other worlds.
Get cozy and come with me on a magical journey.
A Twitter thread full of images of an amazing used bookstore in upstate New York: Lyrical Ballad. The store does not have a website, but the pictures are amazing. Here’s a web page about the store on the city website.
Welcome to Infinite Chapters […] On this website users create a story together. The story is made up of parts and each part has submissions by users. The top submission for a part is included in the story. Part one’s top submission will be the first paragraph of the story and so forth for other parts. Each part will stay open for a week, then it will be locked and cannot be changed. If a top submission isn’t decided the part will stay open for another week.
Note that the “chapters” are very small – paragraph-ish.
Looking for a book to read?
Find new books to read without judging the cover. Read first pages of novels without bias, and reveal the author and title if you’re hooked.
I tried this, but random book text without specifying a genre is not all that helpful. Tip: you can select “Covers” from the menu to see the covers, then click each one to see the front page (…which basically puts you back to what a Kindle Sample would do…)
A stairway to heaven.
I’ll allow this, because it makes the world better for everyone.