McGill University is joining the ranks of educational institutions that are digitizing their rare book collections for mass consumption (via Rare Book News). On the whole I tend to see these projects as a positive move towards making antiquarian and obscure scholarship available to a much larger group than might otherwise be able to make [...]
The Guardian’s Clive Sinclair has posted a great top-10 list of westerns. Until last year, the western was a genre blind spot for me. I had never really considered the western. I was dimly aware of my grandfather having had a large collection of Louis L’Amour paperbacks, but I hadn’t read any. Last year though, I [...]
Long synonymous in the West for the middle-of-nowhere, Timbuktu has a fascinating history as a crossroads where Malinke, Berber, Islamic, and French cultures met, mingled and clashed since before the Middle Ages. A recent article in Der Spiegel (via Bookninja) describes efforts to preserve “an enchanted Aladdin’s Cave” of thousands of manuscripts and documents representing [...]
There are many examples online of stories about “things found in books“. It’s a particularly appealing topic for booksellers, because of the added interest of a kind of lottery fever. For example, we once considered purchasing a large lot of books from an ex-seller who tried to sweeten the deal by talking about the crisp [...]
Back at the end of February, I wrote briefly about the influential Mervyn Peake and his novels, poetry and art. Enter the Octopus recently posted a wonderful excerpt of a new book by the perhaps equally influential Michael Moorcock entitled LOVERS: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A personal memoir. I love the unabashedly hero-worshipful tone of [...]
The better-half and I have just returned from a much needed, if brief, vacation to Ohio and upstate New York. I don’t really have anything book-related to share—I did some scouting, but came up empty-handed—I’m just looking for an excuse to share the photo above. This picture was taken from the hotel room we stayed in [...]
