The Moby Dick Collection

W. O. Pettit is a book collector who collects one title, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  He has over 175 editions that he writes about on his blog The Moby-Dick Collection.

Photo credit: All Over Albany

This week the New York Times reviewed Nathaniel Philbrick’s book Why Read Moby-Dick? and they used Mr. Pettit’s book covers to present a slide show of the visual interpretations of Melville’s classic.

There is a nice interview of Mr. Pettit at All Over Albany
that explains his collection and it’s raison d’être.

The Providence Athenaeum has been obsessed with Moby Dick for awhile now (see our Hark! The White Whale! series) and our current exhibit has three foreign language editions, generously on loan, from the Moby-Dick Collection of W. O. Pettit! Further synchronicity: Nathaniel Philbrick spoke at last Friday’s Salon on Why Read Moby-Dick?  Oh Athena!

Japanese ed.

Boston Book Festival This Weekend

The 3rd annual Boston Book Festival is on Saturday, October 15th. It will include a street festival held in Copley Square (right in front of the Boston Public Library), as well as a series of panels held in the surrounding buildings. All admittance will be free, though you can purchase tickets to reserve a seat for some of the more popular panels. I’m planning to attend the Far Out Fiction panel, though with 33 options there should be something for everyone.

How Can You Hate Reading?

There is a Facebook page titled I Hate Reading with 446,142 likes. How can this be? AbeBooks has created an antidote:

“Here at AbeBooks – we love books. We have a passion for books and this video shows it. Created by Lindsay Thompson, an account manager in our Victoria office, this video illustrates all the wonderful things about books. This is our official response to the ‘I Hate Reading’ Facebook page, if you love reading as much as we do comment or like this video. Long live the book. ”

Check out AbeBooks.

Thanks to Stephen’s Lighthouse

Travel Books

The Athenaeum has been on vacation for the past two weeks and although I didn’t physically travel, my online travels produced some interesting lists of travel books. From the Irish Times we have books with get up and go ; from the  Telegraph, the 20 best travel books ; and from National Geographic Traveler we have the ultimate travel library.  Enjoy!

Flipbacks

Everyone is trying to re-design the book. The latest version, available in Europe from Hodder & Stoughton, is called a flipback book.

Hardbound but light because of the tissue paper thin pages, and a little larger than the size of an iPhone, they are positioning themselves as the analog alternative to an ebook reader. Hum, maybe we’ll buy a couple for the Athenaeum.

via Fine Books & Collections Blog

Summer Reading Lists

Recently I came across some unusual summer reading lists. John Horgan of Scientific American has created two lists of classic science books that seem both intriguing and accessible. Next there is an equally eclectic list of economics books compiled by Geoff Riley at Tutor2u*and The Atlantic has created a list of “10 essential books for a thought provoking summer”. This is not your everyday beach reading! Finally, the most comprehensive and contemporary lists are provided by NPR. Enjoy.

Thanks to Brainiac

 

Harry Potter Comes to an End

Had to post this promo for the last film. It includes the actors first screen test and clips from the previous films.

Thanks to Galleycat

Quantitative Literature Analysis

Franco Moretti, an English professor at Stanford University, has been working to refine a new method of looking at literature. By entering the digitized text of Hamlet into a specialized program, a quantitative view of the play can be constructed, allowing a new perspective to be gained on the text. The data from the search was used to create a series of charts, detailing character interactions with one another. This view provided several surprising details, including the fact that every character who speaks to both Hamlet and Claudius (with only two exceptions) dies by the end of the play, which Moretti refers to as the “region of death,” pictured below. While attempts at quantitative analysis of literature is nothing new, I’m pretty hopeful that this new push will make a larger impact.

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Making Books, Then and Now

The following 1947 video from the Library of Congress has re-surfaced and is making the rounds of  the Internet:

I hope you’ll watch it from a cultural point of view. Note the number of people required to do the job, and that they are mostly men. The process is long and painstaking but the ratio between human and machine is balanced.

Now watch print-on-demand vendor Espresso produce a paperback book in  minutes:

No humans necessary except to select the work to be printed. The precision of this machine, that is slightly bigger than a photocopier, is astounding. They call the Espresso Book Machine “the ATM of books”.  It is another blow to traditional publishing.

But, never fear, bookmaking is still art and humans still make them by hand as this video shows:

(YouTube has over 1,000 videos like this on bookmaking)

Thanks John

Books, Furniture, Decor? No Books

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has a collection of  posts and pics on displaying and living with books. Under the picture of the bathtub bookshelves:

he’s listed previous posts, each with an interesting concept of what a bookshelf could be. His latest list comes with this image:

and contains a link to “Bookshelf Porn”–rooms for books, by booklovers.

This is not to be confused with those designers who choose books to match an interior design scheme, for clients who have no intention of ever reading the selected books once they own them. Here is that chilling New York Times article by Penelope Green.

Thanks to John and Christina