February 22, 2013 On the Shelf DFW: the Trading Card, and Other News By Sadie Stein David Foster Wallace: the trading card. While you’re at it: pro-book desktop wallpaper. On bribing librarians, and other ways to discover new books. Speaking of libraries: here is what Auden checked out of the New York Society Library. (How many titles can you decipher?) James Patterson and, oddly enough, the Duchess of Cornwall are teaming up to encourage fathers to read to their children.
February 21, 2013 Video & Multimedia Anaïs Nin on Heroes By Sadie Stein February 21 is the anniversary of Anaïs Nin’s birth. In the following film, Nin discusses Lou Andreas-Salomé and Friedrich Nietzsche.
February 21, 2013 History Happy Birthday, Telephone Book By Sadie Stein On this day in 1878, the world saw the first telephone directory. The twenty-page book, which listed the numbers of phones in New Haven, Connecticut, instructed users not to “use the wire more than three minutes at a time, or more than twice an hour.”
February 21, 2013 First Person Essex Girl By Zakia Uddin We traveled from East London in a Zipcar, beating the traffic bound for Lakeside, the out-of-town shopping center. The pier car park was sparsely filled with cars. Abandoned in a corner was a statue of the Virgin Mary the size of an umbrella stand. Out of season, the Essex archipelago lures only the most hardened. By October, the weather is spitting and icy, and its landscape is too bleak and monotonous to qualify as ruggedly beautiful. A Wikipedia entry had told us there are nineteen islands off the coast of Essex, most of them owned by the British Ministry of Defence and contracted to private companies testing ammunitions. The individual entries were nearly all stubs, waiting to be filled in. An archipelago struck a curious exotic note in a place associated mostly with commuting, military test sites, and, most recently, “constructed reality” television. American import Jersey Shore inspired The Only Way is Essex, a show similarly centered on the intricate love lives of pneumatic people living in an area derided for being culturally bankrupt, despite its proximity to one of the most exciting cities in the world. Jersey’s Essex County was even named after the UK’s own historical Essex, in 1683. Maybe there’s no need to make analogies between the UK’s Essex and anywhere else because its reputation is internationally bad, and we don’t defend it. The county town Chelmsford, where I was born, was voted eighth best place to live in the UK on the prerecession property-porn show Location Location Location. Residents promptly rang in to call it soulless; flashy on one hand and tedious on the other, like a nouveau riche neighbor with dull preoccupations. Read More
February 21, 2013 On the Shelf Emoji Classics, and Other News By Sadie Stein Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes, that’s The Grapes of Wrath.) The Royal Mail is producing a series of (quite lovely) Jane Austen stamps. Tolkien’s cover designs. A heartening series of people shopping for books around the world. “‘Bookseller,’ say the books. ‘Can we do the Harlem Shake?’ ‘No!’ I shout. ‘There’ll be no novelty dances here. You’re better than that.’”
February 20, 2013 Arts & Culture Golden Books By Sadie Stein While we can’t pretend to have actually asked the question, “What if best-selling albums had been books instead?”, we can all agree that the answer, from British designer Christophe Gowans, is brilliant. (We’d suggest The White Album, but, well.)