Category Archives: Book Talk

Birmingham, Book Talk, On the Web

Birmingham and Books

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Earlier this week Bhamterminal ran an interview I did. It was with one of the more prolific online contributors here in Birmingham. Dystopos (as he’s known online) founded the Bhamwiki, started the all seeing Magic City Flickr Group and started the Deep South book discussion group on LibraryThing. While on his journey to chronicle all things Birmingham, he has quite naturally become a good book collector, with an ever expanding collection of Birmingham, Alabama centered books. All of which has afforded him a unique perspective on the Magic City and its history.

The article appears in its entirety, (with a book photo by Dystopos) after the jump.

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Book Talk, On the Web

One-minute Critic

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Here is a fun little palce to visit from time to time… it’s a site displaying short videos of librarians reviewing and recommending books they have read. All the videos are 60 seconds or less. Finding book recommendations  online is nothing new, but it is fun to see the people behind the review and with the videos it’s fun to see just how much fun they are having producing the 60-second spots.

I  can’t remember where I ran across the site, but I think I read that they started the One-Minute Critic reviews as part of a bigger program and the reponse was big enough that they just kept going. Their site says that the videoa are produced and maintained by the Fort Vancouver Regional Library up in Washington state.

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk, On the Web

Bad bookcover blog

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I ran across Judge a Book By Its Cover this weekend. It’s a public librarian’s blog that features the worst book covers in the library. Pure torture, if you ask me. There are some really bad covers out there. Ugh! Not sure I can check in too often. After visiting that one I always have to click over to Henry Yene See’s blog to cleanse my palette and calm down. His covers are great and his work is fun to follow because he posts everything from concepts through final work.

But that first blog kind of runs along the line of the Boston’s Museum of Bad Art (which is home to the immortal Lucy in the Field with Flowers).

Book Talk, On the Web

We share no books

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I have never read a book that Thomas Jefferson did. What a bummer! Not one! I was hoping for at least one, but alas, Jefferson read too many French books (or maybe I don’t read enough).

I know this thanks to 17 volunteers over at LibraryThing who cataloged all 4,889 books that Jefferson owned. VERY cool! They even entered all of the third President’s book reviews. The collection these folks spent four months cataloging is the own Jefferson donated to the US after the British destroyed the Library of Congress during the War of 1812. It’s a pretty cool catalog and author cloud to peruse to see what all Jefferson collected.

The libraries of Tupac Shakur and Mozart have already been completely entered.

Other famous folks are slated to ‘join’ LT, including  Ernest Hemingway, John Adams, William Faulkner, William Congreve, Adam Smith,  Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

I wonder what one book (outside of the Bible, they all seemed to own the Bible) all these people owned?