All posts by trav

At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.

Back at it

Well that was relativley painless. Those folks over at WordPress sure are smart. All went according to plan and I even installed one of those “math comment field” spam blocker deals.

Let me know if it gives you any trouble.

While all this was backing-up/updating I watched the New York Times Book Review tour that aired on BookTV this past weekend. Pretty cool if I do say so. That would be a most awesome job to have. Did you see the pile of books that will never appear in the pages of the NYTBR? HUGE!!!! They said they get some 1,000 books submitted per week and only review 30-40 per weekend. Wow.

Makes me want to go read So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid again.

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!