Stuff I like:
- Books
- Tiny things
Clearly Kakaner knows me well, because:
[muffled screaming!]
Miniature book necklace by Nico Paper Goods, sent to me by Kakaner. One more photo under the cut.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Book porn category.
Check out the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form (OEDILF) to learn some new words (offerings span Pre-A- through Em- thus far; estimated date of completion is currently March 5, 2039) and broaden your appreciation of the limerick.
e.g. (with unintentional ornithological theme)
emu
On our crest, with a roo, Aussies team you.
You taste best when we stew (it’s supreme!) you.
You can’t fly. You’re absurd.
You’re our fat old Big Bird,
Yet we love and esteem you, o emu.
(by rusty – who has also completed a series of wordplay-heavy entries on musical keys.)
doughbird
The Eskimo curlew, or doughbird,
Is a vanished-a-long-time-ago bird.
Had it kept on its toes,
As it froze in the snows,
It might still be a go-with-the-floe bird.
(by Stephen Gold)
—–
My favorite random language fact of the week, from a feature in The Believer magazine on pangrams, sentences including every commonly-used letter in a given alphabet (e.g. “the quick brown fox…”):
The Iroha, a perfect Japanese pangram (contains every kana once and only once) and typically Japanese meditation on life’s evanescence, became so famous that the order of its kana was used as alphabetical order up until the late 19th century. Cool. See its Wikipedia entry for the full poem, two translations, and lots of interesting history.
- E
And by eight, I mean news:
—–
Ah–! Art Student Hand-Illuminates, Binds a Copy of the Silmarillion; Tolkien fans across the world experience heart palpitations.
Check here for an interview with the artist, and larger images of his gloriously detailed work.
—–
And some incredible (belatedly posted, here) news for fans of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Since the release of the 1982 animated adaptation, Beagle had been denied payment of contractually due royalties for the film. At the beginning of August, Connor Cochran, Beagle’s business manager, sent this announcement:
“THE EIGHT-YEAR STRUGGLE FOR PETER’S LAST UNICORN RIGHTS IS OVER!
Really. No joke, no fooling. It’s over. And everybody won. [...] For now suffice to say that Peter has signed an agreement with ITV that (a) ends the whole mishagosh in a way that is great for him, and (b) great for ITV, and (c) great for LAST UNICORN fans everywhere, since now all kinds of things are going to be possible that could never be done before.”
This is news that I’ve been waiting to hear for years.
I’d been exploratorily rereading bits from The Last Unicorn, lately – exploratorily because I know I’ve been growing out of a lot of things that used to fill my head and make me cry. We’re safe; TLU still makes me cry. (It probably helps that I still feel completely unironically about unicorns.) I sound a little flippant, but it’s a deeply beautiful, wise, and timeless book. I don’t like recommending it willy-nilly because I know unironic books about unicorns and mortality and love aren’t everyone’s thing (even though it is sometimes ironic, too! and meta!), but consider this my sideways plea for more people to read it.
Hey, “unironic” and “unicorn” are almost anagrams. Coincidence? I think not.
Go to:
Peter S. Beagle: bio and works reviewed
The Last Unicorn comic #1 (2010): review by Emera
The Last Unicorn comic #2 (2010): review by Emera
Lame Duck Books
12 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA
“We are internationally known specialists buying and selling important modern books and manuscripts with an emphasis on rare literature and primary works in the history of ideas in English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and other languages. Our shop features the most significant selection of 19th and 20th century Spanish language literature in the world, as well as important holdings of 17th and 18th century English poetry.”
Significantly fancy-pantsier than the bookstores that Kakaner and I usually feel comfortable rummaging through, clearly, but a fun taste of the high life. You enter this basement bookstore through a hushed, minimalistic art gallery (unaffiliated); the bookshop itself is similarly hushed and artsy.
Kakaner thought their prices ran a little high, for the books with which we were more familiar, but we had a good time regardless ogling such volumes as a first edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, another Atwood volume (forget which – K, do you remember?) that contained a handwritten letter of hers, and this J. Sheridan Le Fanu novel…
…with a seriously charming dedicatory doodle for someone named Phoebe:
Continue below the cut for a couple more photos:
Date read: 8.1.11
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera
This is one of my most treasured finds from Readercon, picked up from the fantastic Somewhere in Time Books: Tanith Lee‘s 1988 limited-edition novella, with illustrations by Tom Canty. From the title and pastel cover I expected a tale of genteel swashbuckling, possibly YA; should have remembered that Lee never goes in for gentility. Elegance, yes – Lee is manically elegant – but never gentility.
Madame Two Swords starts in a familiar place for Lee: a sensitive, fearful, recently orphaned young woman in an early 20th-century alternate France is treated cruelly by both circumstances and humanity; her only spiritual sustainment comes from a book of poetry discovered in a secondhand shop:
“The blue cloth binding was quite pristine under its dust. It was a slender book, without lettering. I opened it out of curiosity.”
“The book was my talisman. Other girls wore crosses or medallions.”
The narrator is unemployed and evicted, and finds herself in dire straits, chased from one end of the socioeconomic spectrum to the other: too middle-class for hard labor, too unskilled to be a seamstress, too unwilling to accede to customers’ advances to be a waitress in the seedier cafés. At the extremity of her despair – enter Madame Two Swords, a black-eyed old woman of terrifying intensity, in whose museum-like house the narrator comes to some strange realizations.
In this France, the Revolution was sparked by the poet-demagogue Lucien de Ceppays in the city of Troies. This Revolution culminated in the execution of the original revolutionaries, including de Ceppays, by the fickle mob, and the occupation of France by a fearful British monarchy. Inhabitants now speak “Frenish” as often as French, and labor in a depressed economy overseen by a puppet government. The narrator’s talisman-book is, of course, a volume of de Ceppays’ work, and contains besides a haunting watercolor portrait of him. The story quickly sees her devotion to his image and memory moving beyond girlish fantasy.
The final supernatural twist, when it comes, is powerful in effect, in large part because of the supreme delicacy with which Lee constructs the fleeting image central to the revelation. There’s an also-delicate but definite touch of gender-bending, which I wish I could discuss in more detail without being spoilery, but suffice it to say that I liked how Lee addressed its implications, a lot. This is a story that makes use of deeply Gothic-Romantic tropes (duh, Tanith Lee) yet resists being just romantic; it’s fierce and intelligent and ultimately insists on the dignity of all of its characters.
And so my love affair with Tanith Lee continues! If you like Revolutionary France and cross-lingual puns and intelligent Gothic fantasy, if you love Tanith Lee and beautiful books, you might consider treating yourself to a copy of Madame Two Swords…
Two more photos (can’t help showing it off!) under the cut:
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: alternate history, book art, class, fantasy, gender, gothic, historical fantasy, photos
Book-repair station at the Strand in NYC; photo from when Kakaner and I visited together two years back.
One more photo of their upper (antiquarian) floor below the fold:
Tags: photos
Say farewell to Borders: “Borders to shut down for good after deal collapses.”
In a twist or knell or something or other, I received what will theoretically be my last-ever package from Borders yesterday, too.
Any Borders reminiscences to share? I just remembered that Borders was the first legit bookstore in my vicinity to stock manga; prior to that I’d scoured E. B. Games and, occasionally, Toys ‘R’ Us, to pick up single, frequently battered issues of Pokémon, Digimon, and some horrifically translated Gundam Wing. I think my first high-intensity exposure to manga (lots of it! all in one place! in a bookstore!) was a long, dazed afternoon in a Borders spent flipping through, among others, a CLAMP series that seemed really cryptic and creepy at the time, probably partly because the first volume was missing. I’m not going to say what series it was, just to preserve the imagined mystique.
Edit: This article does a great job of explaining what Borders’ closing will mean for consumers, publishers, and authors.
Tags: bookselling
[Pssst - Readercon 22 reports are in the works. Thanks to some sitey issues, we're holding off on really image-heavy posts for the moment; have an only moderately image-heavy post in the meantime.]
—
Date read: 7.18.11
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera
“Mice struggle to live safely and prosper among the world’s harsh conditions and predators. Thus the Mouse Guard was formed. They are not simply soldiers who fight off intruders: they are guides for common mice looking to journey safely from one hidden village to another. The Guard patrol borders, find safeways and paths through treacherous terrain, and keep the mouse territories free of predators. They do so with fearless dedication so that mice might not just exist, but truly live. In Fall 1152, follow the adventures of three of the Guard’s finest – Lieam, Saxon, and Kenzie – as they seek to uncover a traitorous plot against the Guard…”
In an obvious progression from my childhood love for Redwall, I’d been longing to read Mouse Guard for ages ever since I spotted its cover in a bookstore a few years back; Kakaner obliged me last week by thrusting the first two volumes into my hands. While the story is pretty much a throwaway (Petersen could really use an editor for grammar alone), the comic works purely on the basis of visuals and concepts.
Petersen’s figures aren’t very dynamic, but his panels are often beautifully composed, and his pairing of liberal hatching and stippling with a rich, autumnal palette creates delicious texture and depth. The climactic battle that spans the last chapter – heralded by a shift in the palette first to moody plum shades, then to an eerie, luminous red – is surprisingly dark and gritty; again the visuals are successful in generating drama and atmosphere despite lackluster storytelling.
And let’s be honest here: it’s SO. CUTE. Oh my god big-headed mice in cloaks. Oh my god tiny glassblower blowing tiny bottles. Oh my god tiny castle masonry and kilns and inkwells and… you get the idea.The scenes of everyday life in Barkstone, the town where the central trio uncover the anti-Guard conspiracy, and Lockhaven, the Guard’s fortified headquarters, pretty much had me spasming with glee; equally so the faux-historical tidbits and diagrams on mouse trades and settlements included at the end of the book.
Thanks for the conniptions, Petersen! I look forward to more in volume 2: Winter 1152.
Tags: animals, fantasy, high fantasy