You know how you go into a rare books library, or maybe an old used bookstore, and you step between the shelves and take a deep breath and there it is: that incredible old-book smell. To me, it always smells like leather and caramel and dust and sunlight, all blended together.
Turns out, [...]
adore this video of books arranging themselves by color. So why do I cringe when I read this?
For the spa in Philippe Starck’s Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, [designer Thatcher Wine] was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a “textural accent” to [...]
Perhaps it’s pure nostalgia, but here on the blog we’ve been keeping a running list of things we lose when a book moves from physical object to digital file: the dedications and notes on the flyleaf, the deckle edges, careful typesetting, artistic covers.
Here’s something else to add to the loss column: marginal doodles. [...]
Most of the news lately is about print publishers moving to electronic publishing. So it’s refreshing to hear about the opposite: short story website Five Chapters will soon begin publishing print books.
In January 2011, Five Chapters will publish three short story collections by Five Chapters alums: Nobody Ever Gets Lost by Jess [...]
erhaps our recent posts on e-books have you jonesing for an iPad or a Kindle. Or maybe they’ve made you nostalgic for a good old print hardback. Either way, here’s something else to consider: reading on paper is faster than reading on a screen.
The Nielsen Norman group (no, that Nielsen) found that reading [...]
Eye-catching covers? Yup. Marginalia? Check. Decorative deckle edges? Indeed. But if paper books disappear, we’ll lose something else. This xkcd strip says it all.
We’ve talked previously about what may happen to book covers as e-books become more prevalent. But the VQR blog has a nice post about another vanishing aspect of paper books: marginal notes, flyleaf dedications, and physical insertions.
Says blogger Megan Alix Fishmann, who works in a used bookstore:
Each receipt, torn article, and [...]
If all the recent talk about the iPad and the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing catfight has you longing for a simpler time, look no further than this ode to the deckle edge on The Millions:
Opening a book can already feel like opening a gift. Armed with a knife and freeing the pages and the story hidden [...]
