Anybody else remember Moby Books? They put out adaptations of classic lit for kids, and the coolest thing about each chunky little book was that the right-hand page of every single spread was an illustration.

When I Googled “Moby Books,” I expected to find at least one site obsessively devoted to them, with a complete listing of titles, cover scans, interior scans, maybe even interviews with the illustrators, a history of the company (kind of like this site devoted to Big Little Books, or this one that zealously chronicles The War of the Worlds) … but there’s almost nothing. Not even a Wikipedia entry. The only info comes from Book Safari, which sells “vintage series books”:

This paperbound series of adaptions of the classics were similar in style to Whitman’s Big Little Books of the 1930’s and 40’s. These tiny books measure 5.5 inch by 4 inches and feature an illustration on every other page. The artwork depicts the action described on the facing page. At least 41 titles were available in this series during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. The books were published under the Moby Books logo by Playmore, under arrangement with Waldman Publishing Corporation. In 2002, selected titles were reissued by Playmore without the Moby Books logo.

I’m cobbling together this little page as placeholder, a reminder … hopefully it’ll spur a fan of the series to put up a full site.

Sources for images: ChildScapes.com, The Lady Jane Grey Internet Museum, War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection, The Time Machine Project

The HarperStudio blog has posted “The Top Three Stupid Things Publishers Do (According to an Independent Bookseller)“:

I met Praveen Madan, owner of Booksmith in San Francisco, and asked him for his “top three stupid things publishers do.” Here’s his response:

1. Publish too many bad books, get your sales reps to stuff the channel with too many bad books, and then complain that returns are too high
2. Not realize that, like other intermediaries, publishers are heading to extinction unless they learn to add value
3. Suffer from the illusion that after being in the publishing business for decades without a consumer brand, they can suddenly wake up and become meaningful brands in consumers’ minds

HarperStudio’s senior editor adds the top three stupid things that indie booksellers do, and a lot of readers have chimed in with further stupid things in the comments section.

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}