Official website of the author
“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue…”
— Samuel Johnson, Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751) (source) (click that link at your peril — a fella could get lost in a place like that)
Matt Kish, whose bio says he is not an artist, is rereading Moby-Dick while creating a drawing for every page. I love this one, for page 109: “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” (View full size here.) Details about the project are here, including an index of the drawings. For the record, Matt’s edition of Moby-Dick has 552 pages. Go, Matt! (via)
Letterpress printing is the craft invented by Gutenberg five hundred years ago: printing one page at a time using moveable type that is literally pressed into the paper. It is still practiced, apparently, by the Firefly Press of Somerville, Mass. Obviously the switch to digital books has everything to do with efficiency and nothing to do with beauty. Still, it is worth pausing to think about what we lose in the move from pages to pixels.
Stieg Larsson’s detective character, Lisbeth Salander, the “girl with the dragon tattoo,” was apparently inspired by Pippi Longstocking. According to a former work colleague,
Stieg got the idea for the character Lisbeth Salander after a discussion during a break from work. They were talking about how different characters from children’s books would manage and behave if they were alive and grown up. Stieg especially liked the idea about a grown up Pippi Longstocking, a dysfunctional girl, probably with attention deficit disorder who would have had a hard time finding a regular place in the “normal society,” and he used … those characteristics when he created Lisbeth Salander.
More clips from this interview here.
Jonah Lehrer on the neuroscience of how our brains process the words we read and how that process will be affected by ebooks:
… most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don’t feel as “effortless” or “automatic” as old-fashioned books. But here’s the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
Interesting: the technology of ebook readers will improve, but so will our brains’ ability to use them.
“The bestseller in fiction took a precipitous turn in the 1980s towards what might be termed the ‘throwaway read,’ a novel with a shelf life of yogurt.”
— Nina Siegal (via)
Will Google Books, the audacious attempt to digitize every book ever written, have the perverse effect of making books — and ideas — less available, less ubiquitous, less free? Will copyright laws require that most of the books written in the last century be excluded from the new digital online library? Is this progress? This is Lawrence Lessig speaking at Harvard two weeks ago. Lessig’s presentation runs about 28 minutes followed by a 15-minute Q&A.
