Feb 23, 2009
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq by Fernando Baez (Atlas & Co., 2008)
From the publisher:
“Impressive. . . The best book written on this subject.” —Noam Chomsky
A product of ten years of research and support from leading American and European universities, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books traces a tragic story: the smashed tablets of ancient Sumer, the widespread looting of libraries in post-war Iraq, the leveling of the Library of Alexandria, book burnings by Crusaders and Nazis, and suppressive censorship against authors past and present.
See also: Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History by Lucien X. Polastron| Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity, edited by James Raven [review]
Feb 20, 2009
This is the rarest of Brautigan’s books. Four are currently listed on ABE, ranging from $395 (for an incomplete set) to $1,250.
pleaseplantthisbook.com explains:
Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book in the Spring of 1968. It consisted of eight packets of garden seeds, each printed with a poem, all gathered in a small folder.
A version is at pleaseplantthisbook.com. Although the cover of the folder (above) appears to be an actual scan, the packets with verses look like digital facsimiles rather than scans.
The Brautigan Bibliography and Archive has lots of info here, including what appear to be scans of the actual packets (scroll to the bottom of the page). The scans are tiny, and clicking on them won’t make them bigger, but if you right-click on any of them and choose “View Image,” you’ll see a larger version.
Feb 20, 2009
Robert The’s artistic medium of choice is the book. The object above is an actual book. (Funny that I stumbled across his work the day after finding out that famed literary biographer Lyndall Gordon has titled her upcoming bio of Emily Dickinson A Loaded Gun.)
Robert The’s website
“The Book Art of Robert The, Cara Barer, and Jacqueline Rush Lee” [Quarterly Conversation]
Feb 4, 2009
Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service is “an experimental non-commercial project to archive and re-publish public domain works.”
Let’s say you’re going through the more than half-a-million public-domain books available as PDFs at Google Books and the Internet Archive, and - being from the old school - you think how great it would be to have a certain rare old book in actual book form: a printed, bound, softcover object you can hold. This service lets you do that. They say the price ranges from $5 to $19.
[ADDED:] Almost 4 million different titles can be printed this way.
{via Open Access News}
Jan 21, 2009
Poets & Writers magazine highlights the work of artist Richard Baker, who paints still-lifes of books.
“As physical objects they are powerful fetishes, icons, containers of every conceivable thought and/or emotion,” Baker writes. “We cart them from home to work on our commutes and they accompany us on vacations. We move them carefully packed in boxes from one domicile to another, from one phase of life to another.”
“As our personalities are changed (or not) by them, so too do they absorb impressions of our lives,” Baker writes. “Each book becomes its own unique individual, most especially true of the lowly paperback.”
Over at GOOD magazine’s blogs, Anne Trubek ponders what they mean.
Jan 14, 2009
ABE has posted a gallery of books (all available for purchase, natch) bound in unusual materials, including rubber, burlap, sharkskin, silk, gold, wood, and brass. Below, python skin binding on Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny by Oliver W. Holmes.
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