Weirdest Book Titles

Posted on November 8, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

The shortlist has been unveiled for the 2026 Bookseller‘s Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The award was conceived in 1978 by Trevor Bounford and Bruce Robertson, co-founders of the Diagram Group, as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The winning title is chosen by members of the public via an online vote, and a winner will be named on November 20. This year’s shortlisted titles are:

Play Naked: Puta Economies Against Olympic Dispossession by Amanda De Lisio
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, edited by William J. Buxton
The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan by Rajyashree Pandey
Queering Economics: Reimagining the Dismal Science by Michael E Martell & Leanne Roncolato
Joan and Roger Alive in the Afterlife: More Than Two Years Later, Joan and Roger Continue to Appear Every Time I Turn on the SLS Camera, and They Communicate with Us by Jeremy Spillane
Six Dead German Composers and How They Got That Way by Robert Bakos

There is no prize for the winning author or publisher, but the traditional “passable bottle of claret” will be awarded to the person who nominated the winning entry.

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Saturday Matinee

Posted on November 7, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Ink Spill is Micheal Maslin’s site about New Yorker Cartoonists: News, History, and Events. He should know; since 1978 he’s been one of them. He blogs about the current issue but his site has an index of all their cartoon artists, plus an amazing library of all their book covers, and much more.*

Readwise announces Readwise Books. “We’ve built Readwise Books: our very own ebook store and app. In simple terms, you can think of it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps, where you can buy, read, and track books.” Seems like a promising project.

Close.city is an interactive map designed to help you find neighborhoods in the United States that are within a short walking distance of amenities like supermarkets, public transportation, cafes, co-working spaces, bookstores, and other facilities. It’s useful when searching for a hotel, Airbnb, or apartment that’s near the kinds of places that are important to you.

Charles Bukowski // “Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you.”

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Diamond Views

Posted on November 6, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Twice per year around February and November, anyone close enough to see Mt. Fuji can witness Diamond Fuji, a natural phenomenon when the rising or setting sun aligns perfectly with the mountain’s peak. When the conditions are just right, the sun’s rays then pan outward, giving the appearance of a shining diamond ring nestled on top of Japan’s highest mountain. This stunning phenomenon is next predicted to happen on November 8 around 4:30 p.m.

Any relatively tall spot in the Greater Tokyo Area is prime viewing to catch a glimpse of Diamond Fuji, On my first stay in Tokyo, I had serendipitous views of Mt. Fuji every day from my 43rd floor hotel room.

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le retour des libraires

Posted on November 5, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

In 18th century Paris the Palais Royal housed booksellers in the galleries under the arcades and a new exhibition next month hosted by Les Enluminures will celebrate this heritage.

Le Retour des libraries au Palais-Royal will run at the Les Enluminures‘s new location at 21-22 Galerie de Montpensier in the Jardin du Palais Royal from November 26 through January 6, 2027. It will feature Parisian antiquarian booksellers Librairie Chamonal, Librarie Paul Jammes, Librairie Patrice Rossignol, and Librairie Clavreuil as well as the Librairie Alain de Grolée-Virville which was for many years located in Galerie de Montpensier. Each will present one book representative of their specialisms.

 

Accompanying them will be the Librairie Delamain, the oldest existing bookstore in Paris and also once housed in the Palais Royal, which will present historic archival material relevant to the Palais Royal. Engravings of the Palais Royal in the “age of the booksellers” will be displayed in the exhibition space.

Items on show will include:

  • Girolamo Aliotti’s Gratulatio ad Pium II pro foelici ac secondo ex Mantuana peregrinatione reditu, Dialogus de optimo vitae genere deligendo, and De monachis erudiendis (Florence, 1460) from Les Enluminures
  • Atlas Geographique Statistique, Historique et Chronologique des Deux Ameriques et des îles adjacentes  (Paris, J. Carez, Verdière, Bossange, 1825) from Librairie Chamonal
  • Hieronymous Tochtermann’s Schriften Buch (Augsbourg, 1744-1747) from Librarie Paul Jammes
  • Etrennes Mignonnes curieuses et utiles, with several additions and corrections, a set of five volumes (Paris, Veuve Durand, 1760-1773) from Librairie Patrice Rossignol
  • Jean-François Blondel’s Fête publique presented by the City of Paris on the  occasion of the marriage of His Royal Highness the Dauphin, on the 13th of February MDCCXLVII (Paris(?), 1747) from Librairie Clavreuil
  • Le Breton (Hector, seigneur de la Doinmeterie), heraldic manuscript on paper (France, 1621(?)) from Librairie Alain de Grolée-Virville
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Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious

Posted on November 4, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

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Does the book end happily ?

Posted on November 3, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

 

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tale of the hapless adventurer

Posted on November 2, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

This week Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift turned 300. Published on the 28th of October 1726, the tale of the hapless adventurer, Lemuel Gulliver, and his travels among the lands of giants, floating islands, and talking horses have entertained audiences for centuries.

 The University of Liverpool has launched a digital exhibition, Gulliver’s Travels: Before and Beyond, to mark the book’s tercentenary. The exhibition uses items from the University’s Special Collections and Archives and was curated by a team of colleagues across the Department of English and the Cultural Heritage Service.

The exhibition places the book within an expansive timeline split into three sections that draw out its rich history and enduring legacy. The first section explores the literary and scientific texts that came to influence Swift’s unique vision, from Homer’s giants in the Odyssey to the tiny world opened up by the invention of the microscope in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). The second section examines the immediate historical and political environment that Swift satirised in Gulliver’s Travels. The third section looks at the productive influence of Gulliver’s Travels on the development of the wonderful worlds of science fiction.

You can explore the exhibition here: Gulliver’s Travels: Before and Beyond – University of Liverpool Digital Heritage Lab

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Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)

Posted on November 1, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“Up in Illinois, we’ve forgotten what it’s all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, tonight, heck, they’re forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that’s lonely. That’s really sad. But here– why, shucks. It’s both happy and sad. It’s all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it’s almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that’s no mind, they’re THERE. It’s like holding hands at a séance with your friends, but some of the friends gone.”

― Ray Bradbury

 

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Where Halloween and Hanukah Intersect

Posted on October 31, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

You will probably be surprised to discover an unlikely connection between the popular Pagan holiday celebration of Halloween and the ancient Jewish Festival of Hanukah. The improbable link connecting the two holidays stems from a word often associated with Halloween that has linguistic etymology stretching across millennia and continents.

Throughout the Halloween season one frequently encounters stories that incorporate the term macabre  which can mean “focused on death”, “evoking horror”, “gruesome,” or “ghoulish”. But macabre, a loanword from French, is not related to any word, French or otherwise, that means “death” or “horror” or “gruesomeness.”

Before macabre was macabre, it was Macabré, a Middle French word that, according to the OED, first appeared in Jean le Fèvre’s Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says “Je fis de Macabré la dance” — apparently his claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. There is some dispute about the origin of Macabré, but Merriam-Webster considers it settled:

We trace the origins of macabre to the name of the Book of Maccabees, which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament and in the Protestant Apocrypha. Sections of this biblical text address both the deaths of faithful people asked to renounce their religion, and the manner in which the dead should be properly commemorated. In medieval France, representations of these passages were performed as a procession or dance which became known as the “dance of death” or “dance Maccabee”; the latter was spelled in several different ways, including danse de Macabré. In English, macabre was originally used in reference to this “dance of death” but then gradually broadened in use to describe anything grim or horrific.
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Visit Estonia

Posted on October 30, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Visit Tallinn has given a new spin on Estonian cultural heritage, with a tourism video pairing traditional folk dance with hip-hop to bring the country’s identity to a new audience.

Born From Culture features Tallinn University’s folk dance ensemble Soveldaja performing to American rapper Future’s ‘Mask Off’, alongside Estonian accordion music played by Ernst Valdmaa.

The ad offers a surprising mash-up, with traditional choreography set against a contemporary soundtrack to reframe folk dance for audiences who might otherwise scroll past it. Accompanying the film is the message: “Times can change. The Estonian spirit does not. Some things just run in our blood.”

The tourist campaign also taps into a broader shift towards tourism advertising that sells destinations through their distinctive personalities and cultural quirks. For Estonia, the juxtaposition of folk dance and hip-hop offers a way to communicate the country’s enduring cultural identity without presenting tradition as something frozen in time. Instead, the video positions heritage as something that can evolve alongside contemporary culture, with local performers and musicians remaining central to the story.

NB: if the video fails to open in your browser, please click HERE

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