So a decade ago, hack advertisers needed to make everything cyber-this and i-that.  Fifty years ago, everyone was selling a Space-whatsit, and a hundred years ago it was all radium-whatever.  Radium Razor Blades! (I’m serious.) But let’s say it’s 1848: now how do you make yourself the product of the future?

Wonder no more.  It’s …more

The next time you get into a debate over the value of a creative writing MFA, try this handy visualization exercise: imagine that everyone involved is wearing a monocle. …more

Very happy indeed about this: the Guardian is reporting that an “826 London” is in the works. The project founders have a blog here, and the first planning meeting was just a few weeks ago:

The NY Times recently reported that Verizon wants to get rid of phone books in New York: …more

Some books are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and apparently others have greatness thrust upon them in the form of an Amazon gift card.

This hasn’t gotten much play yet outside of California news blogs, but it should. When GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner’s memoir (Mount Pleasant: What Happened When I Traded a Silicon Valley Board Room for an Inner City Classroom) hit the NY Times bestseller list last month, not a few people were puzzled; as a new posting on the San Jose Mercury news blog puts it, “No. 5 on the Times’ best-seller list? According to local bookstores, it wasn’t even selling well in the Bay Area.” …more

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the most incoherent book title of 1907: …more

A New Scientist Histories column from ’05 noted that the last really huge volcanic eruption led to the invention of the bicycle: …more

From Harper’s, 1886: …more

There’s no way to embed it here, alas, but the Times of London has video of the newly discovered 1896 film that appears to be Australia’s first movie:

“Patineur Grotesque shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera.”

From Peter Parley’s Annual for 1865: “peaceful combat, without the horrors of actual warfare.” It’s… …more

Robert Darnton has a great post over at NYRB on precursors to blogging: …more

(Thames Tunnel as it appeared on Friday, via Flickr.)

Oh, how I wish I was in London this weekend… …more

Check out the slideshow of Victorian photo-collage over at Slate…

Last year I noted in Slate that Amazon’s been having it both ways for a while on state sales taxes — not paying any where they were not due, and not paying any even where they were due: …more

I find this Wikipedia category weirdly fascinating: List of Las Vegas Casinos That Never Opened.

A sample: …more

Terrific news in last Sunday’s Times of London:

“MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring….Many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer. Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books — now all digitised — are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.”

Penny dreadfuls and dime novels were basically disposable literature, so they can be absurdly difficult and sometimes outright impossible to track down — this is a wonderful development.

Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders. …more

For some reason this hasn’t attracted much notice nationally, but this last week the San Francisco Bay Guardian won a whopping $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices by VVM-owned SF Weekly. But because VVM was apparently too cocky to post bond before the case, now the Bay Guardian can start seizing VVM assets from pretty much anywhere it likes in the 16-paper chain.

It’s already grabbed SF Weekly’s delivery vehicles…

NPR has a terrific piece this week on the Loudness War — as mourned/explained by this YouTube video.

As a drummer, hearing every part of the kit and every single beat rammed to the front of mixes is as depressing as… I don’t know, probably as depressing as Auto-Tune abuse is to singers. Anyway, NPR has Bob Ludwig on hand to explain — he’s mastered pretty much every classic album you’ve heard of, ever — and the historical context of 45s makes this an especially fascinating look at the phenomenon.

(Hildebrand chocolate card, c. 1900)

I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a brief history of aquatic pedestrianism: …more

I wrote a New Scientist piece earlier this year on the nearly criminal foot-dragging by Detroit over safety advances made by pioneering engineers in the 1950s and 60s, and that sad pattern seems to have been repeated… with cell phone companies.

An excellent piece of historical digging by Matt Richtel in the Times: …more

I’m on a NPR Weekend Edition segment about Shakespeare’s First Folio this weekend; Scott Simon and I ventured into the vault of the Folger with library director Gail Paster.

It’s very rare that they let anyone into the underground vault — it literally has a giant time-lock door — so we were lucky indeed to have a look at such treasures as this Folio cheerily defaced by a girl in the 1720s: …more

I love that a book like this needed to exist in the first place — an 1859 guide to creating architect’s models out of paper:

…more

A charming find on eBay: a 1927 guide on How to Play the Cinema Organ published at the exact moment that talkies were about to rub out the profession. The Jazz Singer came out in October of that very year.

Teen hysteria, courtesy of the February 14, 1925 issue of the New York Evening Journal: …more

…con-men have thought of first.

Wandering through Old Bailey records, I found an 1889 investor scam worthy of a dot-com: …more

Via Daily Dish, an amazing hand-tinted 1899 Lumiere film of a Serpentine dance.

An odd ‘un in the Guardian about a new study in this month’s Psychological Science: …more

The Times carries an obituary to spelling reformer Ed Rondthaler, who passed away at age 104. He’s the man I described in a Believer piece last year as the last living link to the movement’s Edwardian zenith.

From his obituary: …more

Round 2:

VS.