Chances are you’ve bragged about the size of your library. The number of books you own is a point of pride for many readers. But at what point does collecting books — which few people would say is a bad thing– turn into a problem? At what point, in other words, does it become hoarding? Pair with: Rebecca Rego-Barry on hunting for rare books at college library book sales.
Bookshelves Ten Feet High
“Filmmaking is an adventure. Treat it as such.”
Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin discusses the lessons he’s learned over the past year. He also gives a shout out to Underground, a film by Serbian director Emir Kusturica. Elsewhere, Zeitlin shares some of the music, books, and movies he’s been enjoying of late.
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The PhD Pyramid Scheme
The Economist has a pretty damning look at the global state of academia, particularly as it pertains to the enormous numbers of PhDs being churned out, the cheap labor they represent, and the comparatively few full professorship gigs available to them.
Another Self-Publishing Triumph
Self-published novelist Kemble Scott debuts at no. 5 on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list with The Sower, following a limited hard-cover release to Bay Area independent booksellers by Numina Press, who acquired the book after Scott’s initial e-book upload to scribd.com in May. According to Publisher’s Weekly, “The Sower has had one of the most unorthodox publishing trajectories in these changing publishing times.”
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Just Another Mason
In general, we think of translators as people whose job, briefly summarized, is to create elegant texts out of works in foreign languages. But J.R.R. Tolkien, in his translation of Beowulf, set out to do something different. The Lord of the Rings author published a translation that he kept intentionally clunky. Why? In his telling, he did it to better imitate Old English.
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Me and my husband have a library at home almost full of books. On every trip that we make it is a policy to bring a book back home. I don’t think we’ll have a problem using the stairs as a bookcase when the library is full. I don’t believe in the phrase: “I have too many books” … There is and always will be space for books around us; it’ll never become hoarding to us :)
My parents are always nagging me about all the books I have. He doesn’t read much, and she has me check a book out from the library if she wants to read something specific. Neither of them care that I want books mostly to have the information, and many of my books are either the only copy I’ve every come across, library sell-offs (negates the “borrow it from the library” argument) or both.
Still, it’s annoying they take up so much space. I’ve compared late 20th-Century printings with 19th- and early 20th-Century copies and concluded modern publishers put a lot of unnecessary whitespace in their page design. And then they’ve got the balls to whine about production costs. Must think everyone buys books by the yard.