I have work to do…

so the site will be off and on all night tonight. The spammers apparently have my number. I haven’t been this ticked off in a long time.

I just deleted 290 comments, carpet bomb style. So if I trashed your comment, I’m sorry. I hope you’ll keep coming back to check us out.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly and we’ll be up and running in the morning.

Top-notch tour

Here is another great idea for a blog! The Independent Bookstore Photo Gallery posts visitors’ pics of their favorite local independent bookstore haunts. They even post a little write up about each place. It’s sort of a super-flickr group or something. Should be fun to keep up with.
We’ll be contributing Reed’s Bookloft and The Alabama Booksmith shortly.

The blogosphere could use a little southern lit love!

Words from wayback

The kind soul over at Tech Ramblings from the Rare Book Trade turned me on to World Wide Words.org.

This is a fascintaing site! It’s chock-full of tidbits and nuggets about word history and development. Lots of fun facts to memorize, just in time for the holiday party season! Maybe my wife won’t be too embarassed when I share that “January 5th was referred to as Old Christmas Day, back when the world was settling on a calendar”. That’s a nugget I picked up from this exhaustive article.

It’s as much fun as reading Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue.

Good stuff!

Just finished…

Christopher Morley’s 1918 The Haunted Bookshop.

As always, my thoughts are cross-posted here and on LibraryThing.

This was an enjoyable book. It’s very “classic”, in that American Movie Classics Channel Jimmy Stewart kind of way. Everyone is soooo polite and proper. Everyone blushes and women drop their handkerchiefs.

The whole WWII-era spy plot is a bit flat. True, I was always wondering what was going on, but I almost didn’t care, that’s not what kept me turning the pages. The few spots of book talk made it worthwhile for me. There’s a part where the owner of the Haunted Bookshop (which has no ghosts what-so-ever) meets with all the other crusty educated book-ish types around a roaring fire with their pipes and some toddies.

Continue reading Just finished…

Books, Publishing and Birmingham