Love Your Bookstore

Posted on November 8, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

This week marks the launch of Love Your Bookstore, “the first and only retail holiday that celebrates all brick-and-mortar bookstores during the holiday season.” The event, which runs from November 10 through November 16, features the Love Your Bookstore Challenge. Book buyers go into a bookstore and “take a picture of the book you are most excited to gift this holiday season or a book you love or want to receive”–or a picture with a local indie bookseller. Pictures should then be posted on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #loveyourbookstore. The participants who post will be entered to win “bookish prizes” and are encouraged to challenge three to five friends to “go love their favorite bookstores too.”

One of the Love Your Bookstore organizers, Dominique Raccah, publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, said last week that the response has been “overwhelmingly inspiring” and includes a range of partners “signing up every single day.”

On its website, the campaign wrote: “As a booklover, bookstores have shaped you, whether you were a child learning to read or an adult looking for connections through the written word. We want to celebrate bookstores from coast to coast because we know that booklovers are in every city in the country. From Kodiak to Key West, from Seattle to Sarasota, there are readers everywhere! Celebrate your favorite bookstore by posting a photo from inside the store with a favorite book (or bookseller!) and use #loveyourbookstore in the caption to share the love!”

You can find more information and materials at Love Your Bookstore’s website.

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Seeing Philadelphia in 1845

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

 Philadelphia: City Sights for Little Folks features illustrations of things you could expect to see on a journey through town in 1845. The title, which offers brief descriptions and occasional rhymes, was surprisingly written for children. The book was printed via stereotype, a  method of printing  developed in the 18th century to keep up with the rapidly rising demand for books.  With traditional handset type, printers ran into issues when numerous copies of the same text were needed in quick succession.  With movable, hand-set type the compositor had to arrange each word letter-by-letter on the press bed; when dealing with multiple machines running the same text, this method leaves room for lots of errors, and also requires huge volumes of standing type.  A stereotype is a metal cast of multiple forms of type, which can then be used on a press instead of a hand-assembled form.  That way, printers could use several stereotypes to print the same text quickly, without a huge need for more inventory or staff. Thus, this book is an interesting window into history.  It provides a child’s-eye view of Philadelphia in the mid-19th century, and also embodies a printing technology that was very popular and significant at the time.

 

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Analysis of the Memoir

Posted on November 6, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

h/t Tom Gauld

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Word on the street : VOTE

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

This past week street artist Joe Boruchow has been encouraging Philadelphia residents to get out the vote with wheatpastes around town.

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Read More Books

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic,” the cosmologist Carl Sagan once said. “It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.”

 

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Bookstore Tourism : Vancouver

Posted on November 3, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

I haven’t spent as much time as I’d like in Vancouver, but the last time that I passed through I managed to pop-in at some of the city’s best bookstores. Fortunately, Travel Between The Pages follower Markus H. sent us a post on some of his favorite literary haunts.

Macleod’s Books on West Pender Street is a labyrinthine treasure trove for book lovers in downtown Vancouver. There are thousands of secondhand, collectible, and antiquarian titles literary spilling off the crowded shelves and piled everywhere throughout the packed bookshop. If you go, be prepared to devote hours to browsing.

Kestrel Books is a beloved community institution in beautiful laid-back Kitsilano that stocks everything from “Archie comics to medieval manuscripts” and more. When you visit, you will know why it has been named the “Best used Bookstore” in Vancouver more than once. Be sure to say hi to Ruby the bookstore cat.

Just up the street from Kestrel. Banyen Books and Sound has been the place to go in Vancouver for books on spirituality, philosophy, religion, music, and art for nearly 50 years.

Tanglewood Books is another Kitsilano favorite for secondhand and hard to find out-of-print titles. There’s a great selection in every imaginable genre from art to zoology. You’ll quickly see why it has been a “Best in Vancouver” winner.

Canterbury Tales Bookstore has been a fixture in East Vancouver’s Drive community for more than 20 years. It’s a great choice for used books, but they also offer all new titles at a 30% discount. If Canterbury Tales doesn’t have what you’re looking for, they will order any title and still give you 30% off list.

The Paper Hound has only been around for about five years, but it has quickly built a devoted following due to the well curated selection of new, used, and collectible books. They are open daily in the heart of downtown.

Spartacus Books is a collectively run, politically oriented shop that focuses on progressive reading material and environmental action. Largely staffed by dedicated volunteers, the bookstore has a surprisingly good selection of titles on politics, art, philosophy, gender issues, poetry, and ecology. It’s a good place to find magazines and journals, and also to meet like-minded locals.

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Summer in Iceland

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

Each year, Ólafur Már Björnsson produces a video compilation based on his summer travels and hikes around his native Iceland. His photography covers some areas rarely seen by tourists and only accessible to serious backcountry hikers. This year’s video already has me planning my next trip to Iceland.

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Bram Stoker: Library Miscreant

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

I have been a fan of Bram Stoker’s creepy classic Dracula ever since my first reading as a child. Here in Philadelphia, we are fortunate to have a fascinating collection of Stoker’s notes for the book at the wonderful Rosenbach Museum and Library. But I was surprised to learn that in his background research work on the novel the author transgressed basic library etiquette.

Researchers at the London Library have used the author’s original notes and outline to pull books from the library’s collection that Stoker accessed during the 1880s. They have identified books that he defaced with annotations and underling. The video below describes some of the writer’s most appalling misuse of the texts. You can read more about Stoker’s misdemeanors at the London Library website.

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William S. Burroughs gets spooky

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages, or Häxan, is a Swedish-Danish film that is a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and silent horror cinema, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Christensen’s vision was unique, basing his film on non-fiction works, mainly the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century treatise on witchcraft he found in a Berlin bookshop, as well as a number of other manuscripts, books, illustrations and treatises on witches and witch-hunting . Häxan was envisaged, as stated in the opening credits, as a “presentation from a cultural and historical point of view in seven chapters of moving pictures”. While the film’s format is centered on its dramatic scenes portrayed by actors, the first chapter, lasting 13 minutes, is a different story. With its documentary style and scholarly tone — featuring a number of photographs of statuary, paintings, and woodcuts — it would have been entirely novel — a style of screened illustrated lecture which wouldn’t become popular till many years later. Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was actually banned in the United States, and heavily censored in other countries. In 1968, an abbreviated version of the film was released. Titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, it featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and dramatic narration by the always spooky and unnerving William S. Burroughs.

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A Halloween Thriller

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Brian D. Butler

Tom the Dancing Bug 1410 gaslight

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