Category Archives: Book Column

Typography Scarf

Baby, it’s cold outside! While this typography scarf isn’t the most insulating, it’s certainly a gift a book lover would appreciate. The entire scarf is made up of uppercase letters and assembled in a jumble.

Typography Scarf

It looks pretty nifty. It looks to be only available overseas (but they do ship to the U.S.). And it also goes out of stock very very fast. So if this typographic scarf is something you want, check back often and be ready to pounce. They also have a place to enter your email to be notified when it’s back in stock.

The Uppercase Scarf retails for  £48.00 which is around $80. Not bad for a truly unique gift for the book lover in your life.

Book Events: Jan. 19th-Jan.26th

Things are starting to pick up around town. There are a lot more author events and book events appearing on calendars around Birmingham. Looks like 2014 is getting under way!

Here are three events this next week that would be of interest to book loving folks in the area:

January 23rd from 10 a.m. until 12 p.m. – Theresa K. Thorn, author of Noah’s Wife will be speaking and signing at the Vestavia Hills Library.

January 23rd from 2 p.m. until 5 p .m.  – Gus Mayer will host a book signing with Jane Weitzman who will be there talking about her new book Heart & Sole, which focuses on shoes and clever “art shoes.

January 25th from 2 p.m. until 3:30 p.m. – author Robert Inman will be at the Pelham Library signing copies of his latest book The Governor’s Lady. Inman will be signing any of his books… but you have to bring your own copies! The library will not have books there to sell.

Ten Books that Stayed with You

There is a neat thing going on over on a network of Tumblr book blogs where they are sharing Ten Books That Stayed With You. It all started on this site and hasn’t lost any steam. Lots of good books being mentioned.

I like the idea of “don’t think about this too hard” and “take a photo of the ones you have near you”. I don’t Tumbl (or is it Tumblog? How do the cool kids say it?) so I thought I’d just post mine here as I can’t find a way to jump in without being on Tumblr. These are ten books that I have found myself quoting or sharing more than others. There are a couple of others as well, but I borrowed those from the library. So they were cut from the running simply because they weren’t available for the photo shoot.

ten books that stayed with you

In no specific order:

    • Kavalier and Clay by Micahel Chabon
    • The Secret History by Donna Tartt
    • The Information Diet by Clay Johnson
    • Book Business by Joseph Epstein
    • The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
    • Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
    • So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid
    • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
    • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
    • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

How about you? Do you find you have books that have stayed with you?

Reading Technology in Education

A friend sent me this photo in an email:

reading technology

After Googling around it looks like it comes from a soon-to-be-released book Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age. The book seems to be about technology and schools and reading technology and education, but I’m not sure.

That’s a great find though. No doubt the same argument was made when slide rules gave way to calculators. And of course books to Nooks and iPads.

Though there has been some interesting research lately on how well reading technology devices serve kids and in what areas they fail the students. I wonder what these studies would have turned up had they been conducted when the chalk and slate were abandoned?

Not too mention that with the glut of books in the late Nineties (and Harry Potter) it wasn’t un-heard of for the publishing industry to run out of paper for a bit.

Maybe this principal from 1815 was onto something. Ain’t technology grand?