I saw this over the weekend and tried it out myself. It’s called Wordle and is a pretty neat way to get a stylish snapshot tag cloud of your own site. You get to control the fonts used and colors and have a little control over the layout. Who knew that I talked about banned books so much?
{hat tip goes out to ericlee.us}
I ran across this photo over on the Freshome site and had to share… all it’s lacking is a pot of coffee and my rear-end on the couch. What a perfectly small reading spot.
It’s Buy a Friend a Book Week! This week is one of the four per year weeks where bookish types around the globe target a friend and plot which book to buy for them. bwahahaha! (that’s my October/Halloween laugh.) You can click on over and see what all the hub-bub is about (even on Twitter) and slap some BAFAB week icons on your site. But most importantly… pick someone… and buy them a book.
This week is also Banned Book Week as organzied by the American Library Association. Lots of libraries having events this week and the ALA has gone all social media with their Facebook and MySpace pages.
But WOW let me tell you how shocked I was at some titles included on page Amazon coughed up listing all the books that have been “banned or challenged in 2008”. Now, not having The Joy of Sex in a high school library, I get. And thinking that middle school library goers shouldn’t be digesting Sebold’s Lovely Bones, I grant you.
But banning Huck Finn? The Giver? Of Mice and Men? from high school or community libraries? For real? I’ve seen Hardee’s commercials that violate more social mores, in 18 seconds, than all three of those classics combined. Oh well. That’s reason enough to read a banned book (or explore one on Google’s Banned Books page)!
Matt Taylor won the Penguin cover design competition we mentioned last week, for Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World. Congratulations to him! It is, no doubt, one of the cleanest and well executed designs submitted, with some very complex imagery…
It’s almost too much. The synopsis just seemed to call for a simpler more representative image. But then my skills as an illustrator are often challenged by sitting in the floor coloring with my two-year-old.
Thanks to BDR for spilling the beans on the winners (because I sure couldn’t find any updates online). Click through to see the runners-up and such, too.
