Category Archives: Book Column

The Book Bandolier

Book Bandolier

The Book Bandolier is one of those super simple, super nifty solutions out there that would be a good gift for any book lover. If you have ever carried more than two books at once I’d wager you’ve thought of something like this.

The adjustable strap is 2 inches wide and 21 inches long, with 6 pen/pencil/brush loops. That way you can carry a couple of books and highlighting tools without having to lug a bag or load up your pocket protector. I can’t tell what it’s made of. Bits of it look like faux leather, but I’m not sure. This book bandolier is made by a crafty person in San Francisco and is for sale via her Etsy site for $26. Very handy.

Barnes the Bibliophile

This article by author Julian Barnes has been making the rounds the past couple of days. I love this bit from the end:

“When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.”

The whole article is Barnes’ take on the future of reading, the future of the book and bookstores. Nothing super new presented in it. This one just has a well thought out personal take on things, without overly romanticizing, which makes it worth sharing.

 

Book Format definitions

Last week I finished David and Natalie Bauman’s Rare Finds. It does an okay job of explaining some of the more popular categories (Americana, Children’s Lit, Photography, etc.) that people collect (and some nice photography), but the really interesting stuff comes at the back of the book in the indexes, Frequently Asked Questions, Book Bindings and  More Resources sections.

One part that I want to share here is the bit on book formats. If you’re in the market for old books you will see many books’ sizes abbreviated as 4to, 8vo, 12mo and so on. You might also see the terms folio, quarto, octavo, etc. These all indicate how many time a printed sheet was folded in order to produce the pages in the book. So a quarto (meaning one-quarter) means that the original printed sheet was folded once in half and then folded in half again. This gives you 4 leaves (8 pages) all at one quarter of the original sheet.

So folio is folded once yielding 4 pages, quarto yields 8, octavo gives you 16 pages, etc. Now there was no standard size for the sheet of paper that printers started with, so there is some variance in how big to expect a book to be. But here is a handy chart of the average sizes found in older books, from page 73 of the Bauman’s book:

Again, their book is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bibliophile’s world, but it would be good for someone thinking about collecting or for a completist collecting “books about books”.

Book Review: The Information Diet

The Information Diet Book CoverClay Johnson’s The Information Diet (published by O’Reilly) is one of those books that I want everyone to read. It is very short. So it won’t take long. But it does get you thinking (and hopefully talking) about some very important points that many of us have not yet thought about.

In order for our country and culture to remain stable we must be well informed. Johnson does a good job of quickly outlining how and why we are becoming less informed these days. To be honest, half of the stuff he mentions – you probably already know, but you just haven’t thought about the implications. The “diet” metaphor isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Mainly because it’s not so much ‘counting calories’ but thinking about the quality of what you are consuming and where it comes from (hint: local is better in food and information.)

Things like ‘what’s the difference in getting your news via Facebook rather than straight from a new source’ or ‘just how much do CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Washington Post, NY Times alter a story/headline to make it “more compelling”‘ and so on. This is one of those books that you will read and then will find yourself bringing it up in conversations for the next two weeks. It helps that the author is so up front with his political leanings so that we know where things are coming from. It allows the reader to follow him honestly and listen to the causes of much of what is changing in the media landscape.

The book not only does a good job of quickly showing how our news sources alter and filter information for us, but it also begins to explain why. Which starts us down the path of trying to fix the problems. The last bit of the book does contain some concrete “how to”‘ information and a pretty strong call to action, with a companion website.

My only complaint is that this wake up call/manifesto is as short as it is. The call to action and tool set offered at the end would have been a little more compelling if backed by some deeper discussion. But then the book would have been longer… and thus, not as approachable. This is one I wish everyone would take an afternoon to read. It’s a solid 4 out of 5 for me.

(In the spirit of full disclosure I did receive this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.)