 The Hand Drawn Map Association is “an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand.” The one to the left is by Richard Crappsley and called “From Home to Tube Station” (it’s a walk through London). The maps are great and the site has an RSS feed (and twitter) so you can get notices of new maps. |
This is the last in my recent flurry of new coaster designs… This set has 4 different designs (2 of each). See more here.
I picked up a copy of Kate Carlisle’s first book Homicide in Hardcover because it’s subtitled “A Bibliophile Mystery.” The heroine, Brooklyn Wainwright, is a book restorer in San Francisco. She grew up in a commune in Sonoma (run by Guru Bob) where everyone has improbably become millionaires. As the novel opens, she attends the opening of a local museum’s exhibit featuring her mentor’s latest project, only to find him shot and dying in his workroom. The book he’s been working on, a copy of Goethe’s Faust, is said to be cursed and “caused” more than one death. Brooklyn is asked by the museum to finish the restoration and she agrees thinking it might help her figure out who killed her friend.
The story moves along at a rapid pace, narrated by Brooklyn in a flippant tone. She portrays herself as independent and self-sufficient, but when the mysterious (and very handsome) security agent, Derek Stone, shows up, she turns into a giggling 12 year old with a crush. Book conservation and restoration and the promised bibliophile aspect of the book are unfortunately lacking and disappointing. There are also some odd inconsistencies: her mentor is supposed to be restoring the Faust and has 2 notebooks filled with his notes about it, but when Brooklyn gets the book, no restoration has been done on it…
So it’s really a cross between a romance novel and a crime novel, and a silly one at that. But I was looking for light reading in the evening, especially this week when I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup for winter in my yard and so tired about all I’m good for is propping my feet up and reading a silly book.
Faced with a new book, how do you decide whether it’s worth reading? I usually read the first couple of pages to see how fast I’m drawn in. I figured this was what everyone did, especially since for books available on a Kindle, Amazon lets you download the first chapter before you buy.
But maybe not — according to this website, “people in bookstores often read page 99 of a book to get a taste for the writing — to determine if they’d buy the book.” They go on to say
You walk into Barnes & Noble or Chapters, wander around, find a book that intrigues you and check out the cover artwork, the title and author, and the snippet on the back — all of which are, of course, crafted to sell. Then? Then the savvy among us flip to page 99 and read that whole page.
That’s where the quality of the whole book can be revealed. How can that be? Well, page 99 is a perfectly random page and likely not as overworked as the opening and ending. So it can reveal a lot about the story, the tension — basically, the writing — in about 25 seconds.
How about you? How do you decide whether to read a book? (By the way, the website mentioned above, while not live yet, is going to allow writers to upload their page 99s for readers to get a taste of their publications.)
I’ve added another Sherlock Holmes coaster set to my store. This one is printed in a rich brown and features a profile of the great detective and another quote from “A Scandal in Bohemia”
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
For sale in my shop here. The other coaster set, featuring an image of a gasogene and quote is here.
Many of my friends remember their first book arts classes very fondly — especially my friend Sharon. She took a class with Daniel Kelm that involved rivets and other metal closures and binding methods. My first class was with Kumi Korf, and I often return to the books I made in her classes for a jolt of inspiration.
Sharon recently sent me a link to an exhibition of Kelm’s work at Smith College called Poetic Science. There are lots of pictures of his binding work, including the one pictured, Capsicum Red, a collaboration with Tim Ely. His inventive bindings are always fun to look at and contemplate — especially the ones that move and can be reconfigured (there are videos of some of those, like this one here called Religio Mathmatica).