Category Archives: On the Web

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).

Birmingham, News, On the Web

Scavenging for books

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I’ve heard of book scouting. Ever since reading John Dunning’s Booked To Die I have romantcized that I could amass enough book-knowledge to make a living squeezing every last undiscovered rare volume from local bookstores. But, I haven’t quit my day job yet… but this great article in the NY Times is one of the first times I’ve heard of book scavanging as a living.

I can’t imagine going through the trash here in Birmingham and finding enough discarded books of value to feed yourself. Which is about all the money the two guys featured in the article need, because they are homeless. What a quirky turn to the story. I’m not saying them being homeless is a good thing, I’m just saying that it made for an interesting news article.

It also tipped me off to Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, which I had never heard of. But is now on my list, as the author uses these street salesmen to address the “Broken Windows” strategy/theory of cleaning up a neighborhood, which our new mayor has just begun to employ across Birmingham.

{via BookChase}

Birmingham, Events, On the Web

Photos for Project Mockingbird

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We have plugged the Birmingham’s 2008 Big Read Project Mockingbird a few times already. Now organziers are flexing the ir Web 2.0 muscles and asking for help from the immensley productive Magic City Flickr Group. Basically, the call went out for photos of events, people or anything that related to project Mockingbird or the book To Kill a Mockingbird.

So if you have any pics sitting around, just upload them to any Flickr account and tag them “projectmockingbird”, so the libraries can parse them to their sites via widgets.

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?