As a former teacher, I still worry about the potential deleterious impact of long summer vacations on student development. The infographic below outlines the importance of keeping children engaged in learning, or at least reading, over the summer months. If you have kids in your family, it’s worth the extra effort to encourage them to read. Now is the time for those unexpected book gifts.
The Mondadori Bookstore in Naples’ Vomero District has made it possible to spend the night surrounded by thousands of books. Under the name Mooks Bed & Books, the bookshop has installed two beautiful suites, each furnished with antiques and thousands of books ranging from 18th century antiquarian tomes to contemporary novels. One suite is named for my favorite Italian author, Italo Calvino and one is named after Sigmund Freud. If you are considering a visit to Napoli, check it out here.
With all of the hullabaloo about local literary star Walt Whitman’s 200th anniversary celebrations, I completely missed the fact that it is also the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. To celebrate the anniversary, Chronicle Books has published this splendid pop-up book version of Moby-Dick. This re-telling of the iconic 19th century American novel portrays key moments from the book with lincut artwork. The illustration by Gerard Lo Monaco and Joëlle Jolivert are accompanied by select quotations from the novel and page note offering context to the plot.
h/t Tom Gauld
Diehard Harry Potter fans will undoubtedly love the new Wizarding World-themed coffee shop just opened in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. Cleverly named Steamy Hallows, the kitschy cafe boasts a whole range of over the top decor, including floating candles to mimic the Great Hall at Hogwarts, bubbling cauldrons, broomsticks hanging from the ceiling, mandrakes, and quotes from the Harry Potter book series.
The menu features drinks with pun inspired names such as Basic Witch (a sea-salt-topped latte with a caramel drizzle) and Love Potion #9 3/4 (a coffee drink with espresso, mocha syrup, rose water, and a sprinkle of red sugar on top). And of course there’s a Butterbeer beverage, but the version at Steamy Hallows is topped with a dash of edible gold glitter.
Steamy Hallows is located at 514 East 6th Street in Manhattan, although the door says 514 3/4 . Probably not a destination for serious coffee fiends like me, but Harry Potter fans may be tempted.
Leave to the Danes to create a wonderful little free library and situated it on the waterfront in a popular public park. The Bryggens Bogskab (bogskab means book case) is the brainchild of two book -loving residents of the Islands Brygge neighborhood. Constructed of recycled lumber, the tiny library can be found in central Copenhagen at Njalsgade near the Havneparken.
The Bryggens Bogskab, which was installed in 2017,is maintained by local volunteers. Book borrowers are asked to take no more than three books at a time and to replace any books that they keep.
This recently discovered map of London from 1572 was created by the engraver Frans Hogenburg. Commissioned by the free-wheeling capitalists of the Hanseatic League,it provides a fascinating aerial view of the rapidly growing capital city. It shows that there was a large settlement north of the River Thames, but south of it was sparsely populated. The colorful map depicts many boats weaving their way down the river, which could only be crossed by the solitary Old London Bridge. Recognizable landmarks include the Tower of London, the Charterhouse Monastery and the old St Paul’s Cathedral, while Westminster is marked as ‘West Mester’. In a nod to a bygone age, bear baiting is shown in Southwark, and there are drawings of Queen Elizabeth figures around the map’s edges. The map is a rare example of an early printed map of London.
Here at TBTP World HQ we are big fans of The Folio Society’s beautifully executed reissues of literary classics and popular modern novels. They have a knack for putting together a stunning package and commissioning the right illustrator for each edition. As well as being fans of Folio publications, we are big time evangelists for just about anything written by the late, great Elmore Leonard.
The new Folio Society edition of Leonard’s much loved satirical crime novel Get Shorty is another hit. The publishing house was spot-on when they chose author Dennis Lehane to craft an original introduction for the book and selected illustrator Gary Kelley for the art. Here’s an bit of Lehane’s introduction:
A murder, a plane crash, a random mugging that wasn’t actually random, a heist that implodes, a child gone missing—these are staple inciting incidents of a lot of crime fiction. The event that clearly lights the match that leads to a race against time to stop the conspiracy, solve the homicide, get out of town before the net closes in, or find the child.
Here’s how Get Shorty starts: the mobster Ray ‘Bones’ Barboni ‘borrows’ the leather jacket of a loan shark (and diehard movie geek) named Ernesto ‘Chili’ Palmer. Chili retrieves the jacket by punching Ray in the face which leads, a dozen years later, to (stay with me) Chili investigating the faked death of a Miami dry cleaner, which brings Chili to Las Vegas not long before he shows up in the study of a B-movie Hollywood actress named Karen Flores to threaten a deadbeat producer, Harry Zimm, who leads him into the movie business, where he attempts to leave loan-sharking behind and become a producer—along with Harry and Karen—of the film Mr Lovejoy.
That, my friends, is an Elmore Leonard beginning. Where other novels zig, Leonard’s zag. Plot is not a series of bricks built upon bricks to erect a formidable edifice but a loose collection of steps one or two primary characters take down a path that crosses another path that leads to a building with a room where more people are gathered. When one of those characters goes out the back door and down a fire escape, the original character follows and enters an alley which leads to another path which winds further away from that first path, which nobody remembers anyway because it’s, like, ten paths back. In other words, Elmore Leonard’s plots feel less like plots and more like life.
Get Shorty gets so much right about Hollywood: the endless jockeying for status that afflicts everyone from studio heads to parking valets; the heartless consequences of aging in a town that adulates youth; the feeling that everyone has a script in their head, ready to pitch. (Not long after I moved out here, I ran into a nun who, seconds after she found out what I do for a living, pitched me her movie idea.) But Get Shorty gets nothing as right as it does the childlike love most of the people in the movie business have for movies themselves. You can’t successfully satirize something unless some part of you loves what you’re satirizing, and Leonard— at the time of Get Shorty’s writing, a victim of a fresh string of odious film adaptations—somehow retained his love of movies. Most of his books are peppered with references to cinema, as the characters try to find the line where their movie-influenced personas meet their true selves. But if the persona has been in play long enough, who’s to say the person is more real? In Leonard’s view, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we are all creatures of ceaseless reinvention. It’s not only an acceptable way of comporting oneself, it might be our cultural birthright. To be born in a celluloid age is to be born with one’s myths arrayed all around one, as easy to touch as one’s own skin (which the myths often become). Chili Palmer, the loan shark on a journey to reinvent himself as a film producer, is as much an Everyman for today’s world as Walter Mitty was for his.
Travel Between The Pages 