Here’s a great list from Maria Popova (brainpickings.org) list: “7 Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature.”

It’s quite a list of literary names, isn’t it?  I for one am very much looking forward to some day making my kids read James Joyce, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde. Start with the children’s books, and we’ll work our way up from there.

I’ll guess that Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats is the least obscure famous-author-kids-lit book on this list (and the Twain one might be the funniest). The most interesting to me is going to have to be James Joyce’s  The Cat and the Devil – “about the cat of Beaugency and a moral dilemma, a classic fable narrative mixing Irish wit with French folklore, shaken and stirred with Joyce’s extraordinary storytelling.” If  used copies were selling for $80.00+, I’d  be very tempted to add this one to the personal library.

I’ll always have a special fondness for Virginia Woolf, so worth mentioning –

“Virginia Woolf’s The Widow and the Parrot is, roughly, a tongue-in-cheek moral story about kindness to animals and though Quentin, Woolf’s older nephew, bemoaned it as a disappointment and “a tease…based on the worst Victorian examples,” devoid of Woolf’s typical subversive humor he had hoped for, it remains a sweet reflection of character, her taking the time to contribute to a small family pet project in the heat of her literary career.”

We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie has an excellent rundown of this Virginia Woolf-penned children’s book; with some enjoyable Virginia Woolf trivia: “What might have been more startling than the text even, was the revelation shown in a reproduction of the first page of the holograph, that Woolf was the story’s first illustrator.”

From FlavorWire: “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World” –

“We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia.”

Sure, now is a particularly apt time to wonder about the fate of bookstores in general. I’ll admit that I buy a lot of my books online — but for the sheer pleasure of serendipitous discovery, online bookstores are a completely different experience from the physical bookstores that we know and love.  I have some fond memories of Shakespeare & Company in Paris. El Ateneo Grand Splendid (pictured, left) really  is something.

And for what it’s worth, The Last Bookstore in the Old Bank District of Los Angeles is a personal favorite. There’s something about leafing through used books (more on that thought later) that makes for a more personal encounter with those old books:

“The name was chosen with irony, but it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as physical bookstores are dying out like dinosaurs from the meteoric impact of Amazon and e-books.” 

Here’s a book about books worth checking out, courtesy of Maria Popova at Brainpickings.org (“Books: A Living History“).

I spend a lot of time thinking about books as a form of information technology. Thinking about the present and future of books necessarily means thinking about its past — all 2000 years or so of it — and Martyn Lyons’ book covers a lot of ground.

What do we mean by ‘book’? I prefer a more encompassing sort of definition, similar to this excerpt from Books: A Living History – 

“Defining the book itself is a risky operation. I prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and so I offer a very loose definition. The book, for example, does not simply exist as a bound text of sheets of printed paper — the traditional codex with which we are most familiar today. Such a definition forgets two millennia of books before print, and the various forms that textual communication took before the codex was invented.

A traditional definition based only on the codex would also exclude hypertext and the virtual book, which have done away with the book’s conventional material support. I prefer to embrace all these forms, from cuneiform script to the printed codex to the digitized electronic book, and to trace the history of the book as far back as the invention of writing systems themselves. The term ‘book’, then, is a kind of shorthand that stands for many forms of written textual communication adopted in past societies, using a wide variety of materials”

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Selectism.com (“Martyn Lyons’ “Books – A Living History”“) has some excellent page previews of Books — A Living History.

I am utterly fascinated by bookshelves. Specifically, other people’s bookshelves. Whenever I’m visiting someone’s home for the first time, my eyes always seem to find their way to the bookshelves. I can’t help it. And yet, there’s always that sneaking sense that I’m meddling a bit more than I should be, by taking a peak into someone’s inner life in the form of books.

Leah Price has an enjoyable essay on bookshelves which articulates some of that meddling feeling when we sneak peaks at those bookshelves (The New York Times: “The Subconscious Shelf“). The books we and other people tend to display can sometimes be quite a personal thing: “To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.”

Part of it might be self-motivation (“I’ll read this … eventually”), part of might be vanity on our parts (“Check it out: I read Proust!”), and maybe the motives are equal parts deception and self-deception when it comes to those displayed books that we’ll honestly never read:“We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

Part of the appeal of bookshelves to me is that it can be a private and surprisingly revealing look into someone’s internal life — either how that internal life is, or how they hope it might be — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that we are all to some extent the things that we choose to read. And now, social reading websites such as GoodReads.com or even the “Books” we decide to list on a Facebook profile are very much a part of that projection of the bookish shelves we want to show to the rest of the world.

“Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personas. They can serve as a utilitarian tool or a theatrical prop. For a coffee-table book of my own, I recently toured a dozen writers’ book collections. Gazing at the shelves of a novelist whose writings lie dog-eared on my own bookcase, I felt as lucky as a restaurantgoer granted a peek at the chef’s refrigerator.”

Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan) may really have been on to something with his book handling service idea. I’m really thinking of bringing this idea back. And I think I’d call it, “Already Read Books” –

“In the 1940s, the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien proposed a “book handling” service for clients who liked the look of a well-stocked library but lacked the time or ability to read its contents themselves. If you joined his book club, O’Brien explained, “we do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is ready-rubbed, i.e., subjected free of charge to our expert handlers,” at a series of different price points:

“Popular Handling — Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark. . . .

“Premier Handling — Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each. . . .

“De Luxe Handling — Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark (3 percent discount if old Abbey programmes are accepted), not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors.”

We took a look at Melville House’s HybridBooks earlier (“What are ‘Hybrid Books’?“), and the New York Times provided a closer look at the reading experience: “The Book Beyond the Book“.

“The electronic element comes in with the ancillary material. The last page of the Melville edition directs readers to a Web site, where they will find an 1852 map of lower Manhattan: a recipe for Ginger Nuts, a biscuit that plays a role in the narrative; lengthy excepts from Emerson and Thoreau; a contemporaneous classified ad for a scrivener; and similar material.

“Basically, we decided to mimic our own reading process,” Mr. Johnson said “When I read a great classic, if I like it, I want the experience to somehow continue, so I will pursue more information about the writer, or the setting, or some aspect of the plot’s background. (Dueling? What’s up with that?) My mind wanders, imagining what the world of the book looked like. And so on. Now we have curated exactly that kind of material, and it allows you to linger in the world of the book, to understand more about it — to simply luxuriate in the world of the book longer. It’s something more than just the book, but something very much ‘of’ the book. This seems very innovative to me at the same time that it seems kind of an obvious innovation.”

Here’s something to think about: “Should eBooks Be Distinguished From Books?” (eBookNewser)

Sure, it’s a question for ebook-obsessives and publishers to think about now. But, it’s not all that far-fetched to think about how that distinction might seem less and less clear as time goes on (after all, remember that too-cute video with the toddler was confounded that a paper magazine didn’t work like an iPad?) –

“This, in and of itself, points out that the stigma of an eBook over a print book. Aside from the obvious, eBooks being short for electronic books, Archer raises a bigger issue. Should eBooks be distinguished from their print counterparts?

Maybe and maybe not. Unless the format changes the experience as enhanced eBooks do, then a book is a book, be it paperback, hardcover or digital.”

Should there be a distinction? It’s worth some discussion. The fact that such a question can be asked is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, there are some who may well think a book is a book is a book. And, on the other hand, there is of course a pretty set distinction between books and ebooks, and I don’t necessarily see that changing any time soon. But, still.

A wonderful video from the folks at Toronto-based Type Books. If you love  books, it’s quite worth the two minutes to check it out.

I think I spotted Jose Saramago and Umberto Eco on those parading bookshelves.

Maria Popova at BrainPickings.org adds a nice thought on the appeal of spot-motion videos –

“(One thing that’s always drawn me to stop-motion as a storytelling medium, particularly such labor-intensive executions, is the peculiar, paradoxical way in which it bends our relationship with time, at once compressing its scale and making its passage all the more palpable.)”

It’s a well-done, Fantasia-like bit of bookish fun:

Here’s a sneak preview of my December 16th 2011 visit to Authors@Google, on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. Lots of fun.

Check out our newest addition to The Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series: Arrested Development and Philosophy.

If you’re like me and something of a rumors junkie when it comes to Arrested Development: The Movie, you’ll also want to catch up on some pertinent bits from The New York Times and NPR, which you can visit here and here.

(And in case you missed it: The New Yorker’s “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About “Arrested Development”)

And here’s a nice review of Arrested Development and Philosophy, courtesy of brainpickings.org. And even better that it comes from one of my favorite Twitterers (@brainpicker)!

I just love stuff like this. Have you ever wondered why books (and, by extension, e-reading devices) are the size that they are?

For some historical perspective regarding that question, courtesy of Wired: “The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It’s Not What You Think)” –

“It’s easy to figure out why e-readers and tablets are the size that they are: They’re all about the size of paperback books, whether trade (iPad) or mass-market (the Kindle 3). Some oversized models, like the Kindle DX, are closer to big hardcovers. But why are books the size that they are? It turns out it’s because of sheep. Sheepskin, to be exact.”

Parchment, by virtue of its availability and durability, has a long history with book-making (here’s a nifty BBC video on how parchment was made, for those that are interested). Since 1 sheep >>>>> 1 sheet of parchment, a sheet of parchment was thus the size of a sheep. Book-size naming conventions derive from the number of folds of said sheep skin:

• “Fold a sheet of parchment once (two leaves/four pages per sheet) for a folio; if you fold sheets of paper once without a cover, you’ve got a tabloid.
• Twice for a quarto (8pp/s), the size of a big dictionary or big laptop;
• Three times for an octavo (16pp/s), a hardcover or Kindle DX;
• Four times for a duodecimo (24 pp/s), a trade paperback/iPad
• Four times (a slightly different way) for a 16mo (yes, they gave up), aka mass-market paperback/e-reader;
• Five times for a 32mo, aka notepad/old-school smartphone sized
• Six times for a 64mo, or as Erasmus called it, a Codex Nano.”

“The question then becomes, I guess, why were medieval books the size they were?  And the answer to that is simple: medieval books were the size they were because medieval sheep were the size they were.  Remember, paper wasn’t the original medium for page-creation.  Medieval books were constructed of parchment, which is a fancy word for sheep or goat skin (and primarily sheep skin, because there were a lot more of them around) …”