Keeping it simple, stuff from the interwebs that I feel like sharing.
Reading
Better
Bookshelves (Incidental Comics), though I admit I am of the school of
shelving that doesn’t go for artistic display preferring as much shelf
footage as possible.
Leading to an excellent post by
Jonathan McCalmont asking Why
Do People Buy Books They Don’t Read? I want to come back to this post at
some point and talk more about it.
Winter in southern England. Snow.
Travel chaos. The usual amazement professed that we have had the same amount of
snow as we did this time last year. Sigh. So, here are five
books … about snow (Reading Matters) to which I would add Miss Smilla’s
Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg and Moominland Midwinter by Tove
Jansson.
Other Cool Things
Carleton Watkins, the first
person to actually photograph the Yosemite Valley. Photos here and here.
Bonus
time-lapse video of Yosemite now (io9)
Plant
galls! (Kuriositas)
Death
masks of the famous (Kuriositas). All men, so let us redress the
balance with L’Inconnue
de la Seine, and in particular the Radiolab podcast about
her.
Vintage
astronomical illustrations (Retronaut)
More vintage
space illustrations (Dreams of Space)
And more
(Dreams of Space)
And even
more, these by Lucien Rudaux, the first illustrator to produce accurate
pictures of the moon and Mars (io9)
The
Ghosts in the Living Room, a fascinating analysis by Adam Curtis of
the way in which Ghostwatch was shaped by the rise of the suburban
poltergeist and its reporting on tv, and the response to Ghostwatch
itself.
Series of East London
scenes by Noel Gibson (Spitalfields Life). Would love to have seen these in
the flesh.
Spitalfields
Market Nocture – beautiful black and white photos of the old Spitalfields
Market (Spitalfields Life)
World Fair,
Paris, 1900 (How To Be a Retronaut) Click through to the links to the rest
of the set, and on to the archive at the Brooklyn Museum.
Cartoon Column
Robocat Returns
(Savage Chickens)
Just read the McCalmont piece and while I think he has some great points he also misses some less philosophical reasons.
ReplyDeleteFor example, you might buy some books now, even though you know you might not read them for several years (or more!) because now you can afford them and they are available but in two years time neither of these are guaranteed to be true (many books have an appallingly short shelf-life.)
Or it may be that you are in a place where certain books are readily available (e.g writers that are published by small presses that you only tend to see at conventions.)
A final reason off the top of my head is also about being a good supporter of writers. I've been told several times recently that sales during the first few weeks of release have a disproportionately high impact on whether the writer will be retained by the publisher, so you may be buying books by authors you like because you want to make sure they keep being published!