“Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.” Lauren Young writes in Atlas Obscura about the phenomenon of bibliomania, “a dark pseudo-psychological illness” that afflicted upper-class victims in Europe and England during the 1800s. And for a first-hand account of more contemporary book theft, read John Brandon on his high school pastime: “The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in.”
Biblio-klepto-mania
Lay Down Your Arms
Growing up, I was always taught that chickens lay eggs and people lie down. Since then, I’ve always been irritated by that verb’s misuse. But maybe it’s time to settle down and relax. Maybe, as Kathryn D. Blanchard argues, it’s time to stop “clinging to values that no longer serve their purposes.”
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Hobbit House Hunters
The Oxford home where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy is on the market for a cool $6 million.
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Allison Parrish’s Generated Novel
Two years ago, Allison Parrish produced a diary of an expedition through “fantastical places that do not exist.” The twist? The diary was generated by a computer program, which extracted more than 5,700 sentences drawn from Project Gutenberg and later recombined at random by “switching out grammatical constituents.” An extract of the finished work, interspersed with Parrish’s nonfiction essay, can be read here.
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Table 4 2014
The Table 4 Writers Foundation was founded in memory of Elaine Kaufman, a larger-than-life literary personality and hostess who supported NYC writers at her restaurant for many years, and awards grants to promising writers for unpublished work. The 2014 winners have just been released, and their prizewinning work can be read online. There will also be a gala in honor of the winners on April 30 in NYC, and tickets can be purchased here.
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Express Reading
Short stories will now be available in vending machines — i.e., the future of literature.
I shipped five cartons of books from San Diego (home, at the time, to some world-class secondhand book shops) to Berlin… I had some hand-trembling finds in the shops of that city. As each carton arrived I was summoned to customs. The fifth carton arrived in the form of an ominous grey sack provided by the US postal service: the carton had somehow burst en route. It wasn’t until I’d unpacked all the cartons and gotten the books on shelves, a few days later, that I noticed that nineteen or twenty books were missing… and almost all of the missing books were written by Anthony Burgess. My Burgess collection was wiped out, along with several airport-purchased paperbacks of so-so crap I’d used to get through various flights. International shipping book thief with widely variable taste!