Tag Archives: books

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.

New Releases, Type

Stylin’ stamps

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The USPS has long been cranking out stamps designed specifically for collectors. Now they are releasing some with a great eye for design. I have to agree with the Theorist that these Eames stamps are high on the want list!

But I have to say I also dig this short sheet of vintage black cinema posters. I like the typography and boldness of some of the colors.

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?

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk

Covering the covers

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Across the pond, The Financial Times is running a periodic “check in” with current book covers. They’ve only picked 4 so far, but the insight from the news staff as been fairly good. They actually take the time to discuss some of the designers influences and frames of reference for each of the covers. I hope they keep it up.

What’s fun is that they are not just reviewing the covers of new releases. So you never know what might turn up. So far, the Molloy cover is my favorite. Very Alvin Lustig. And they say the spine has no title, author or publisher emblem, which would seem to make it one of the more useless jackets designed.