Rare (and not so rare) — Joel Kral‘s fabulous collection of book covers on Flickr (via Monoscope):
These are some of the rare (and not so rare) books that I have collected over the past 13 years. They range from graphic design, architecture, art, typography, illustration, skateboarding, graffiti, etc.
Literary Fibs — “Miserable writerist” Charlie Brooker responds to the claim that 65% of us lie about the novels we’ve read in a bid to impress people:
The… irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren’t worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn’t bothered turning up)
Shelved Books — “A blog dedicated to the cover that never happened” by designer Kimberly Glyder.
Day to Day Batman — Chip Kidd, the self-described “Indiana Jones of Forgotten Japanese Batman Comics”, talks about Bat-Manga! on NPR (pictured above).
Isn’t that enough? — Jeff Gordiner, Editor-at-Large at Details magazine and author of X Saves the World, interviewed at The Raleigh Quarterly (via@RonHogan):
Other than Philip Roth, though, almost everybody’s writing too much. Blogs, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook status updates —there’s a wordy data glut going on, and it’s made me more reverent than ever of strategic silence. I’m fond of the J.D. Salinger approach — just evaporating from public view. Is it wrong that Salinger hasn’t left us with 30 or 40 books?
Snooty British traditions and New York brashness — the National Post talks to Nicole Winstanley about Penguin Canada’s new imprint Hamish Hamilton Canada. This is the 4th installment of the Post‘s ‘The Ecology of Books’ series. Part one is about literary agents, part two looks at literary journals, part three is a fascinating profile of McClelland & Stewart’s Ellen Seligman.
The Periodic Table of Typefaces — (pictured above)
And finally, Alan Taylor has launched ‘meta-blog’ Big Picture Notes to accompany the Boston Globe‘s brilliant photo blog The Big Picture. Great stuff.