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From Stephen Elliott
Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2011 Music Issue of the Believer Magazine is upon us. This year’s issue has got some unprecedented audible sensations, which I will relay in the following list:
1. Trey Anastasio of Phish is interviewed for this issue (did you know that’s rare?).
...moreThe Book of William — the new book chronicling the fortunes of Shakespeare’s First Folio, by regular Rumpus contributor Paul Collins — gets a nice brief writeup in the “Nonfiction Chronicle” feature of the NYT Sunday Book Review:
“Part antiquarian-book primer, part chronicle of literary curiosities, The Book of William is divided into five acts, each evoking a significant place and time in the First Folio’s colorful history…
“Weaved throughout are accounts of Collins’s amusing efforts to examine a handful of the 230 First Folios known to exist; he writes of the mixture of horror and delight he felt on discovering that ‘some Jacobean brat’ had doodled in a Folio’s margins.
...moreI’ve long been convinced—see my Village Voice piece from a few years back—that the eventual maturing of in-store Print on Demand technology could spell the end for chain stores in their current form. Chains rely on an insane system of return credits to wallpaper their stores on everyone else’s nickel; take away the need for returns or for massive retail spaces with huge physical inventories, and you pretty much take away the chain’s reason to exist.
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A neat find on eBay: someone’s in the last day of an auction on a Harry Stephen Keeler book with a letter from ol’ Harry himself tucked in. Keeler notes one of the more unusual uses for a bookstore that I’ve heard of: he found one of his own books (X Jones of Scotland Yard) in a second hand Chicago bookstore… “which was a front for an elaborate bookie joint!”
I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s:
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The best travel writing usually begins with an absurd proposition, so how could I not pick up an attic-sale book subtitled How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day?