The story of the day is from the UK’s Daily Mail….
A multi-millionaire businessman is facing jail for stealing hundreds of pages from rare ancient books worth £500,000 to store in his personal book collection. Iranian-born Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, expertly cut the pages from treasured travel chronicles stored at the British Library in London and Oxford’s Bodleian for eight years without anyone noticing.
If you want to find out more about a book thief who simply couldn’t help himself, then read A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes.
Congratulations to Peter Matthiessen, whose latest novel Shadow Countryhas won the 2008 National Book Award for fiction. All four winners were delighted and honoured to be nominated, let alone selected as winners. But it was especially satisfying for 81-year-old Matthiessen, whose first brush with the National Book Award was in 1966.
Matthiessen, 81, had some words of wisdom for his fellow nominees. He reminded them that when he didn’t win the award in 1966 for his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord, someone told him, “Oh well, you’ll be back.”
“I was encouraged,” Matthiessen said. “I want to tell all those guys … they’ll be back. They’re wonderful writers. They’re going to be back. I just hope it doesn’t take them 43 years like me.”
A town unfortunately named Forks, just across the border from us in Washington, is under going a revival thanks to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. Meyer set her teenage vampire tales in Forks. Shame she didn’t use Moose Jaw in Canada or Puddletown in Dorset.
“Twilight” has quickly turned this soggy spot that gets 12 feet of rain a year into a strange tourist destination full of teenage fans. And with the coming release of a movie based on “Twilight,” townspeople are bracing themselves for an even larger influx.
“It’s amazing for our town, nobody could have anticipated any of this,” says Mike Gurling, who works at the local Chamber of Commerce.
Remember rock-band Metallica (and others) moaning about users downloading their songs for free on Napster, and all their court orders and whining and all that? Well, leave it to the men of Monty Python to have a different take on things - and a sense of humour.
There are countless Monty Python videos up on Youtube already, without authorization, but rather than having a snit about it, the surviving Pythons have decided to join ‘em rather than try to beat ‘em, Yahoo news said today.
“Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands,” they said. “We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell.
“But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube,” they said.
This time of year usually finds me standing outside a shop, shaking my fist at the tinsel-strewn display inside and lamenting the commercialism of a holiday that seems to come sooner each year. But for some reason, this year I feel downright festive. It could be that I’ve adopted a tradition of my own - shopping primarily online - to help me avoid rabid shoppers and tinny Christmas carols.
Regardless, I’m looking fondly forward to the holidays. Traditions at the Beth house include reading/watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which we’ve done since I was a little girl, so I’m considering getting my mum a collectible copy, because if there’s one joy I take at the holidays, it’s making Mum’s eyes well up with nostalgia. For a similar reason, I’ll be looking for used copies of books she read to me as a child, like Old Black Witch, which is now out-of-print and becoming scarce. It has a recipe for blueberry pancakes in it, which I remember making with my mum when I was about six. I’m also thinking of getting her something both special, and sure to become more valuable - a signed book from one of her favourite authors, like Ian McEwan or Jose Saramago. Sadly, collectible Jane Austen is well beyond my means, but it would be great to see her face.
Christmas morning is generally spent lolling about and listening - often to Christmas music like a holiday jazz CD I made them a few years back, or Vince Guaraldi (think the piano music Snoopy dances to in the Peanuts cartoons). But I recently heard an audio story from Stuart McLean that was hysterically funny, and then discovered that the Vinyl Cafe has a Christmas collection, which would be fun to hear as a family. David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, one the funnier things I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, is also available in audiobook format.
Even though Michelle Obama has yet to move into the White House, and Clinton and Palin fell short of their political goals in 2008, Bluewater’s president, Darren Davis, thinks the three women have forever changed US politics.
“They’ve changed the way people look at government,” he said. “Nobody ever thought there would be a female president. Nobody ever thought there would be an African-American first lady. Nobody ever thought there would be a female vice president, aside from Geraldine Ferraro. (They’ve) really changed society, so in 2012 we really could have a female president.”
The book will follow Michelle Obama from her youth on Chicago’s South Side to her career as a lawyer, through the 2008 presidential campaign and Election Day.
Interesting news from the Man Booker camp. The Booker Prize Foundation has linked up with Georgetown University and its entire freshman class of about 1,600 students, no matter what they are studying, will be required to read a designated novel from the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Forced reading - excellent. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to put these sort of laws into place.
The Guardian takes a look at the books you read before you could read, picture books. My first favourite books that I can remember were Alligator Pie and of course Where the Wild Things Are….
80 years ago today, the Colony Theater in New York aired a black and white cartoon of a spunky (and much angrier than Disney’s modern Mickey!) mouse and his railway adventures. That cinematic debut, called Steamboat Willie, was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to have sound. As such, November 18th is widely considered Mickey’s birthday.
So…happy 80th, Mickey! Glad to see you mellowed some with age.
Meanwhile in the Rare Book Room on AbeBooks.co.uk, we have a feature from Rare Book Review magazine about E Nesbit. As a child I never read The Railway Children but I loved The Phoenix and the Carpet.
Check out the latest feature in the AbeBooks.com ‘Rare Book Room - collecting modern photobooks written by Scott Brown, editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine. Lots of great recommendations.
A dentistry guide written by the dentist to King George III, detailing painful methods such as using pliers on crooked teeth, is to be auctioned reports the Daily Telegraph.
In a series of gruesome insights, the guide details how teeth should be straightened using gold wire. If that fails, the alternative was to “break the teeth into order by means of a strong pair of crooked pliers”.
He urges youngsters with milk teeth to “chew upon coral, wax and suchlike bodies” to deter decay. And he points out that “the boyish custom of carrying a table or chair in their mouth is as dangerous as it is absurd”.
