How real books have trumped ebooks

The title says it all - the popularity of the e-book has slowly diminished since 2014 and the physical book has made a resurgence.  I, myself, have always favoured the physical book - whether hardback, paperback, softcover - over the e-book. I just find them more user-friendly.  I don't have an e-reader, I use my laptop - so for me, holding the book in my hand is more convenient and more conducive to reading.

Here's what Alex Preston has to say on the issue in the Guardian:

Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere.

The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages.

Whether the physical book goes the way of the hand-illuminated manuscript, an object of merely historical interest for all its beauty, or whether this ancient piece of technology is here to stay, we should all be celebrating the work of the designers and publishers who have responded to the gauntlet thrown down by ebooks with such aplomb.

We should also recognise that the most beautiful books of the last few years have also been some of the most brilliant and inspired. The care and attention lavished on those intricately illuminated medieval volumes said something important about what was written inside them, the value of the words within, and this is no less true today.

read entire article here @ the Guardian

Once upon a time: a brief history of children's literature

Shockheaded Peter c.1917

Adults have been writing for children (a broad definition of what we might call children’s literature) in many forms for centuries. Little of it looks much fun to us now. Works aimed at children were primarily concerned with their moral and spiritual progress. Medieval children were taught to read on parchment-covered wooden tablets containing the alphabet and a basic prayer, usually the Pater Noster. Later versions are known as “hornbooks”, because they were covered by a protective sheet of transparent horn.

Children’s books still contain moral lessons – they continue to acculturate the next generation to society’s beliefs and values. That’s not to say that we want our children to be wizards, but we do want them to be brave, to stand up for each other and to develop a particular set of values.

We tend to see children’s literature as providing imaginative spaces for children, but are often short-sighted about the long and didactic history of the genre. And as historians, we continue to seek out more about the autonomy and agency of pre-modern children in order to understand how they might also have found spaces in which to exercise their imagination beyond books that taught them how to pray.

read entire article here @ the Conversation

‘Sex and the Constitution’

Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Sex & the Constitution, guest blogs at the Washington Post, discussing the attitude of Ancient Greeks to sex:

I thought it might it interesting in this piece to elaborate a bit on that observation and to give you at least a glimpse of that world. The following is a brief excerpt from the chapter in “Sex and the Constitution” on “The Ancient World” 

From the sixth to the fourth century B.C., Greek culture attained its most impressive achievements in literature, philosophy, politics, science and the arts. The Greeks of this era generally eschewed the legal enforcement of moral or religious notions of “right sexual conduct.” Classical Greek morality and law focused not on sexual sin, but on whether an individual’s conduct was harmful to others. To the ancient Greeks, eros was a primal force that permeated all facets of life.

read entire blog post here @ the Washington Post

About the Book:

Beginning his volume in the ancient and medieval worlds, Geoffrey R. Stone demonstrates how the Founding Fathers, deeply influenced by their philosophical forebears, saw traditional Christianity as an impediment to the pursuit of happiness and to the quest for human progress. Acutely aware of the need to separate politics from the divisive forces of religion, the Founding Fathers crafted a constitution that expressed the fundamental values of the Enlightenment.

Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers

William Bole reviews Joel Whitney's "Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers" for History News Network:

Whitney writes how the Central Intelligence Agency covertly spawned a worldwide network of media outlets, especially literary magazines, during the Cold War. The CIA used these outlets to further its geopolitical goals—an exercise in cultural diplomacy, or “soft power” in today’s lingo, as distinct from the agency’s hard power that included assassinations, coups, election-related bribery, and other intrusions. The general outlines of this story have been known for decades, but Whitney is clearly hoping to amp up the indignation over what he considers an historic disgrace. In particular the “literary CIA,” as he styles it, blurred the lines “between criticism, journalism, and the needs of the state; between aesthetics and the political requirements of the Cold War.”

read entire review here @ History News Network

The Fixers Who Buried Old Hollywood's Biggest Scandals

The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine by EJ Fleming

Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little-remembered even there, but as General Manager and Head of Publicity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, they lorded over all the stars in Hollywood’s golden age from the 1920s through the 1940s—including legends like Garbo, Dietrich, Gable and Garland. When MGM stars found themselves in trouble, it was Eddie and Howard who took care of them—solved their problems, hid their crimes, and kept their secrets. They were “the Fixers.” At a time when image meant everything and the stars were worth millions to the studios that owned them, Mannix and Strickling were the most important men at MGM. 

Through a complex web of contacts in every arena, from reporters and doctors to corrupt police and district attorneys, they covered up some of the most notorious crimes and scandals in Hollywood history, keeping stars out of jail and, more importantly, their names out of the papers. They handled problems as diverse as the murder of Paul Bern (husband of MGM’s biggest star, Jean Harlow), the studio-directed drug addictions of Judy Garland, the murder of Ted Healy (creator of The Three Stooges) at the hands of Wallace Beery, and arranging for an unmarried Loretta Young to adopt her own child—a child fathered by a married Clark Gable. Through exhaustive research and interviews with contemporaries, this is the never-before-told story of Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling. The dual biography describes how a mob-related New Jersey laborer and the quiet son of a grocer became the most powerful men at the biggest studio in the world.

read article here @ Atlas Obscura on not just Mannix and Strickland but also Fred Otash, who took on the role in the 1970s

A century of holy heroes

Peter Standord reviews Eamon Duffy's "Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants & the Conversion of England" for the Spectator:

The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and quickly deprecates the very word Reformation as an ‘unsatisfactory designation concealing a battery of value judgments’. Instead, he sets out to investigate what he characterises as largely a series of homegrown reformations and counter-reformations.

So far, so sensible, but the process of reduction is then taken a step further. Duffy’s ability to shape his scholarship to a wide audience is well known, shown to dazzling effect in The Stripping of the Altars, his groundbreaking 1992 account of the rude good health of late medieval English Catholicism before Henry VIII’s version of the Reformation. Here, however, he offers not a single narrative, but rather a series of 14 essays that range, apparently randomly, from Thomas More’s publication of Utopia in 1516 to George Fox’s founding of the Quakers in the late 1640s.

read more here @ the Spectator, @ the Guardian, and @ the Telegraph

The most famous book set in every state

Whether you come from the California coastline or the snowy forests of Maine, reading a book set in your home state can make you feel a warm nostalgia for that beloved place.

After scouring the internet and surveying our colleagues on their picks, we rounded up the most famous book set in every state in America.

read the full list here @ Business Insider

May Additions

May is witnessing some new activity in the Library with some new and some new old items being added to the ever-burgeoning shelves - mayhap it is time to invest in more shelving ...

So, in no particular order, here are the latest tomes to be added:

• King John : Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris
• William II : The Red King by John Gillingham
• The King's Revenge : Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History by Michael Walsh & Don Jordan
• The Flower of Chivalry : Bertrand du Guesclin and the Hundred Years War by Richard Vernier (I have been wanting this biography for some years now, and when I went to purchase it some months ago, it was out of stock - so this time, snapped it up)
• The Men of the North : The Britons of Southern Scotland by Tim Clarkson
• The Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age by Tim Clarkson

Also added:

The Lady of the Lake by Andrzej Sapkowski (the others  in "The Witcher" series were added some time ago)

Thanks to technology, my phone reminded me in a timely manner (ie: before I left the area) that my local branch of the Municipal Library was having a book sale (an event I put into my phone calendar some weeks prior and then promptly forgot), and five dollars later I walked out with a box containing the following:

• The Courtesan's Lover by Gabrielle Kimm (forgetting I already have a copy)
• Poirot's Early Cases by Agatha Christie (even though I have the full set of Agatha Christies's works in hardback)
• The Book of Australia Great Trials by  Jeremy Stoljar
• A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam's Life in Politics by Graham Freudenberg
• Her Highness the Traitor by Susan Higginbotham
• Perdition: The Crusaders' Last Stand by James Jackson
• Children of Light: How Electricity Changed Britain Forever by Gavin Weightman
• Street Fight In Naples: A City's Unseen History by Peter Robb

Hope everyone is enjoying their reading this month!

Rare Caxton Print Found

Pages printed more than 500 years ago by William Caxton, who brought printing to England, have been discovered by the University of Reading.

There are no other known surviving examples of these two pages anywhere in the world, from a book believed to have been printed in London in the 1470s.

The pages had been "under their noses" unrecognised in the library's archives.

Erika Delbecque, special collections librarian at the university, described the find as "incredibly rare".

The two pages, with religious texts in medieval Latin, were produced by Caxton at his pioneering printing works in Westminster - and are now going on public display for the first time since they were sold from his print shop in the 15th Century.

According to The Independent, librarians at the University of Reading recently found two pages from a priest’s handbook called Sarum Ordinal or Sarum Pye, which had been pasted inside of another book to reinforce its spine. A librarian working to restore that book noticed and pulled out the pages from the priest’s handbook; they date to between 1476 and 1477.

Read more here @ BBC News and @ Atlas Obscura