In the spring of 2006, John Unsworth taught a graduate seminar on “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers.” It led to one of history’s finest class projects–a browsable database of bestsellers, 337 in all. As with any bestseller lists, you’ll find a range of titles, everything from Thomas Wolfe to Tom Clancy, but click through and find that each entry includes an extremely detailed description of the book’s history (these were compiled by graduate students, after all); a mini-essay on its reception; images of covers, page layouts, and even some ads; and more. It is, in short, bibliophilic crack. (Thanks Craig)
Bibliophilic Crack
Feels so good being bad
For the last couple days #badwritingtips, a collection of hilarious writing tips to take your novel from typical to terrible, have been trending on twitter. The Guardian rounded up a few of their favorites. Perhaps this advice will help out the unlucky souls retweeted on working on my novel.
Appearing Elsewhere
Park Slopers, I’ll be reading tonight at 7 p.m. at The Community Bookstore on 7th Avenue, with our former guest contributor Joshua Henkin and some other folks, in celebration of the long running literary magazine Glimmer Train. It would be lovely to see some familiar faces, or new ones.
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Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: “I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character.”
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On Road Trips and Book Hoarding
“Driving hundreds of miles at a time… uncorked the forgotten joys of my undergraduate years—chief among them the fantasy that simply buying a book guarantees that it will get read.” Ted Trautman on going on a book-buying binge during a cross-country road-trip.
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Amazon Shows Off ‘Kindle for the Web’
Amazon is battling the multi-platform capabilities of Google’s new ebookstore with its new “Kindle for the Web.” The demo makes it look pretty easy on the eyes. Kindle books were already accessible on a number of mobile platforms. What’s new here is taking the Kindle capabilities to the PC.
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Migraine Memories
Writer and illustrator Allyson Hoffman reflects on how chronic illness impacts daily life and memory.
Ah, yes, the 20th-c Bestsellers Database! I always thought that was a great project. Funny story about it: I was a grad student at UVA when John Unsworth was there, and though I never took a course with him, I knew him fairly well from working at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, where he was head.
Just after he left UVA to go to UIUC, I got a techie position in the English department. (This was 2001.) One of my first tasks was contacting John to tell him that the woman who administered the English department server had decided to delete the 20th-c Bestsellers database and web site. The English department didn’t at all value it, apparently, which I thought was weird.
The thing was linked to all over the web, and of course moving it broke all the links. I always thought it was short-sighted of the UVA English department not to realize that keeping on their server with a UVA address would have been great publicity for them. But I suppose the University of Illinois justly deserves all that glorious Googlejuice! :)
Great class project!
@amandafrench
Seems like good ingredients for an independent Zotero reading group.