Here’s a neat list posted by the folks at Publisher’s Weekly; it charts the current most popular books in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Sweden.
It’s pretty interesting to see how many titles are from this side of the pond. But also how many titles from over there that we all have read over here. I guess nothing is as universal as a good story.
Nut what’s with the Czech Republic’s non-fiction selections? Not even a cookbook could make the list?
The Alabama Book Festival is April 21st!
I can’t tell you how much fun we had at last year’s inaugural event! And it wasn’t due to all the free books and swag we picked up. There were some great authors speaking last year. So far the list seems much longer this year.
I see that Southern-super-brain-historian Wayne Flynt will be speaking. So that’s one I’ll have to see and (even better) Amos Kennedy has already committed to hauling his letterpress equipment back down there (like he did last year). His table was right next to the UofA Book Arts people. It’s fun to watch cool people do cool things.
Mark your calendars!
This upcoming Friday, Irma Boom will accept the award for “The Most Beautiful Book in the World” at the Lepzig Book Fair. It’s for Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, that Boom designed last year.
Here is a fantastic article that ran this weekend about Boom and her work. I want to call Boom up and find out exactly, word for word, what she says to convince publishers to go these “unorthodox” routes. Because I fail miserably every time I try.
Maybe forwarding that article to every publisher I have ever worked for would be a goo dfirst step… What publisher wouldn’t want to be known for having “The Most Beautiful Book in the World”?
One Google engineer is viewing the world via a new lens: books. Not atlases, per se, but all books. As posted over on the Google BookSearch blog, he built a little app to scour every book in the Google database and pinpoint every geographic location mentioned.
The results are pretty cool and historically telling, as he lines it up by decade. The color intensity of the pinpoint indicates how frequently it’s mentioned in books over the past 200 years.
I keep going back and forth on the whole “Google digitizing every book” debate. But I think this is a pretty cool use of the data. It seems the older I get, the cooler nerds get. Or maybe they’ve always been cool?
