Not what you’d call light reading (it weighs 62 lbs.), the World’s Most Expensive newly published book has just been released. It’s a velvet and marble-covered tome worth around $100,000. It was printed, chiseled, sewn, constructed in Italy and now resides at the New York public Library. It’s a portfolio/art study/biography of Michelangelo and took [...]

I am a HUGE fan of our library system here in Birmingham. They are great and very rarely do I feel let down. I’m betting the folks in Boston feel the same way about their library system too. Especially with the launch of their Open Library Scan-on-Demand program.
Here are the directions from their site:
…if it’s [...]

The Literary Review has released the shortlist for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award. The award is designed to
“…gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.
Here is the shortlist, in full:
James Buchan for The Gate of Air
Simon Montefiore for Sashenka
John [...]

BookTV has re-posted an appearance Bill Bryson did back in 2003 when he was traveling to promote his then-new A Short History of Nearly Everything. You’ll need the Real Player to watch, but he always makes me laugh.

One of Birmingham’s more eclectic literary spots is breaking out the guerilla tactics to help keep the doors open. Home to one of the best local collections of used books and staffed by volunteers, Greencup Books sponsors local music shows, reading and classes. Most of which bring in a few dollars in donations as best. [...]

Now, I’m no Alvin Lustig or Paul Rand, but does anyone at Amazon REALLY think these are the “10 Best Covers of 2008″ in all of the tens of thousands of books that were printed this year? Really?
I mean, there were some GORGEOUS covers done this year. Maybe Amazon’s editors just let some random number [...]

The numbers have been tallied and it’s official, reading makes you happy (or was it you are happy so you read?). The December issue of Social Indicators Research contains the results of a 30-year University of Maryland study which kept up with 30,000+ adults. Their findings seem to be pretty straight forward:
…unhappy people watch more [...]

BookFinds has a fun post on the”10 Best Changes of a Novel’s Title”. My favorite is #5…
5. Originally, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was titled “Catch-18″ but the year that he was going to publish his novel, Leon Uris published a novel about German-occupied Warsaw called Mila 18, so Heller had to pick another number.
I mean, who would [...]

There is a new search engine being developed, Reference Extract. It’s a search engine that gives preference to results tagged by librarians. So where Google and others are trying to remove the human part of the search equation, the folks at Reference Extract are trying to harness the expertise of all the card carrying MLS [...]

I have signed up for my first ever book challenge (I feel like a grown up blogger now). I’m tossing my hat in the ring for J.Kaye’s 2009 Support Your Local Library Challenge. Basically, I’m committing to borrowing and reading 25 books from my local library. I check out a LOT of books from the [...]