Books

Library World Records is back online

The website for Library World Records, the Guinness Book of World Records for libraries and books is now back online.

Library World Records is fascinating book first published in 2004 after research work began on the book in 2002. The book was further extensively updated in a second edition in December 2009. Library World Records provides hundreds of intriguing and comprehensive facts about ancient and modern books, manuscripts and libraries around the world.

A much bigger brand new 3rd edition of the book is being researched at the moment and further details of this brand new edition will be revealed on this website around winter 2012.

Link:
http://www.lwrw.org.uk/Page1.htm

Godfrey
BSc, MSc.
London, Britain.

Book printed in ink that vanishes after two months

We’ve seen a few innovations that have offered a twist on traditional reading habits, from offering short works by new authors based on the duration of train delays to a temporary edible book made of pasta and a smokeable book with pages made from rolling papers, printed with the lyrics of rapper Snoop Dogg. Taking elements of both of these ideas, Buenos Aires-based bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia has released El Libro que No Puede Esperar – which translates as ‘The Book that Cannot Wait’ – an anthology of new fiction from Latin American authors printed in ink that disappears after two months of opening the book.

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This is reminiscent of William Gibson's book Agrippa

There was an article about Agrippa just a couple days ago: Picking Up the Pieces of William Gibson's Self-Destructing Poem

WMMS-FM Holds Fifty Shades of Grey Book Burning

Along with the July 18th evening news broadcast on WOIO-TV reporting that Cleveland has a population where 69% of residents are illiterate, word was also posted to the station's website about a book burning held in the suburb of Westlake relative to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Caveat lector

'Sunny Chernobyl': Beauty In A Haze Of Pollution

In some of the dirtiest places on Earth, author and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell found some beauty. His book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, tours the deforestation of the Amazon, the oil sand mines in Canada and the world's most polluted city, located in China.

Blackwell says his ode to polluted locales is a bid for re-engagement with places people have shrunk away from in disgust.

Full piece on NPR

Couple Has Saucy Spat Over 50 Shades of Gray

Daily Mail UK reports on a not quite lethal assault with HP Brown Sauce.

A man has appeared in court after taking revenge on his girlfriend who refused to stop reading the erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey - by squirting sauce all over her face.

Raymond Hodgson, 31, was charged with common assault after being appalled to discover that his partner of five years, Emma McCormick, had been reading the racy book.

Carlisle Magistrates’ Court heard how their tiff over the book escalated to the point where Hodgson, from Carlisle, Cumbria, decided take to his own saucy revenge.

LeBron James, open book: Star credits reading for making him calmer during playoffs

"Turns out there's nothing whatsoever feigned about LeBron's one-man book club. Nobody's paying him to read (although it's OK for folks to be paid to lose weight on TV). He's not doing product-placement favors for any author buddies. Simply, LeBron James decided before the playoffs he would be best served if he stopped watching hour after hour of sports on television, and got off the Internet, and stopped tweeting, and stopped reading Twitter."

Read more at ESPN.com.

46 Pages

Book: 46 Pages - Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the turning point to Independence

Thomas Paine, a native of Thetford, England, arrived in America's colonies with little in the way of money, reputation, or prospects, though he did have a letter of recommendation in his pocket from Benjamin Franklin. Paine also had a passion for liberty in all its forms, and an abiding hatred of tyranny. His forceful, direct expression of those principles found voice in a pamphlet he wrote entitled Common Sense, which proved to be the most influential political work of the time. Ultimately, Paine's treatise provided inspiration to the second Continental Congress for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. 46 Pages is a dramatic look at a pivotal moment in our country's formation, a scholar's meticulous recreation of the turbulent years leading up to the Revolutionary War, retold with excitement and new insight.

46 Pages

To Lure ‘Twilight’ Teenagers, Classic Books Get Bold Looks

Publishers are dressing classic novels like “Emma” and “Jane Eyre” in sexy new covers, hoping to appeal to the young-adult readers who made “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” so popular.


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Dawn Powell’s Diaries for Sale on the Internet

If it weren’t for Tim Page, the diaries of Dawn Powell wouldn’t be worth much. Mr. Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former music critic at The Washington Post (and before that a frequent contributor to The New York Times), has pretty much single-handedly engineered a revival of interest in Powell, a New York novelist greatly admired by critics like Gore Vidal and Edmund Wilson, but whose career, even during her lifetime, was always in need of a jump start. When she died in 1965, most of her 15 novels were out of print. She was buried in a potter’s field.

Starting in 1991, Mr. Page, who had discovered Powell by accident while reading a review in a collection of Wilson’s criticism, set about rekindling interest in her writing.

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