Librarything Local is wonderful, though there seems to be a bug with the' favorite this venue' link. I've added Seaford, Lewes and the University of Sussex libraries. No Lewes bookshops are listed, yet.
In the case of libraries, it would be good if there was the possiblity to link to online catalogues, or clumps of catalogues
At first I was nervous about this. Secret Santa arrangements are not my sort of thing. But the more I though about Librarything's Santathing, the better I thought the idea was.
It works thus: participants register and undertake to buy a book to the value of $20 (that is to say about £9.80) to another librarything user picked at random. Amazon take care of the distribution, which is guaranteed for Christmas, and privacy is maintained.
So I've signed up. Do so too, the deadline for registering is noon on Thursday Eastern time, that is to say 5 p.m. GMT
Update" I bought a present that I hoped would please my designated recipient and was delighted to receive from my anonymous benefactor Aelian's Historical Miscellany.
Technorati Tags: librarything, secretsanta
I heard Steven PInker speak last night, and his speech was rich and fast, and defied reporting. His disquisition on the psychology of swearing was pure delight, as was his discussion of the predominance of Steves in his age-group, mentioned à propos of project Steve. He made me think about prepositions and tenses, which I've always found difficult. I did wonder about one thing, though: he said that prepositions are binary, that is to say, on/off, to/from. I think they're more complicated, at least I think that's why I've always had trouble with them in foreign languages, particularly in German and Greek. Here, for connoisseurs of aischrologia, is an article of his in The New Republic: Why we curse: What the F***?:
Technorati Tags: languages, psychology
Next year will be an anniversary for two of the more worthwhile and less commercialised book awards, the fiftieth for the Carnegie Medal for children's books and the seventieth for the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration in a children's books. To mark this CILIP, who appoint a panel of children's librarians to decide on the awards, are asking readers to vote for their favourite books from the list of past winners.
There's a form at http://carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/carnegiegreenaway70/nomination70.asp but to use it visitors have to chose from a drop-down list. If, like me, you would prefer to browse a full list before making your choice, there are lists at http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/carnegie/list.html for the Carnegie medal and at http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/green/list.html for the Kate Greenaway. I'm voting for Arthur Ransome's Pigeon Post for the Carnegie and Anthony Browne's Gorilla for the Greenaway.
Technorati Tags: bookawards, carnegie, kategreenaway
How wonderful! Librarything has a new feature, Unsuggester, which predicts the books least likely to be shared by readers of a title. To quote, "Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest".
I tested it with Marx's Capital for which it un-suggested mostly trashy fiction, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, for which it gave a list largely made up of religious works.
Postscript: Tim on the Librarything blog has brought together many blog discussions on Unsuggester, incuding mine. I had not realised that the links to Unsuggester's unsuggestions were durable, so you may see the Marx ones here, and Lady Chatterley's here.
Technorati Tags: ladychatterlyslover, librarything, marx
Or the Man Booker prize, as we must call it. Sponsors become twitchy and disagreeable if they aren't given their full and proper titles.
It's here. I would like Howard Jacobson to win.
These are William Hill's prices, not that I'd bet on anything so culturally valuable and significant:
Mitchell, David: Black Swan Green 5/1
Carey, Peter: A Love Story 6/1
Waters, Sarah: The Night Watch 7/1
Unsworth, Barry: The Ruby In Her Navel 8/1
Jacobson, Howard: Kalooki Nights 10/1
O' Hagan, Andrew: Be Near Me 12/1
McGregor, Jon: So Many Ways To Begin 12/1
St Aubyn, Edward: Mother's Milk 14/1
Grenville, Kate: The Secret River 14/1
Murr, Naeem: The Perfect Man 16/1
Lawson, Mary: The Other Side Of The Bridge 16/1
Lasdun, James: Seven Lies 16/1
Hyland, M J: Carry Me Down 16/1
Robertson, James: The Testament Of Gideon Mack 20/1
Messud, Clare: The Emperor's Children 20/1
Matar, Hisham: In The Country Of Men 20/1
Edric, Robert: Gathering The Water 20/1
Desai, Kiran: The Inheritance Of Loss 20/1
Gordimer, Nadine: Get A Life 25/1
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There's a piece on LibraryThing in the new CILIP Gazette, not online though. It seems that awareness of LibraryThing and interest in how it might work with library catalogues is growing more and more in the world of institutional as well as personal collections, and exciting interest in this great profession of ours; witness this piece and the development of the Librarythingthing Firefox extension.
You can see my LibraryThing collection through the link in the sidebar, or here.
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From yesterday's Guardian, Publishers unite against Google, a story on Google Book Search.
"Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller, says publishers are tempted to back Google in its partner programme because there are no devices in much of the world on to which a scanned book could be downloaded so the threat posed is limited. But that could change.
"Now you can search the text but you still need to buy the book," he says. "However, in less than five years' time an application will almost certainly be invented that makes leisure reading a more comfortable experience in digital format. So if you agree in principle that Google can scan anything it likes from a library, and feed it into its search engine, then it effectively becomes the backlist publisher and starts to destroy the basis of your business."
If this is true, if backlists are the basis of publisher's business, they've looked after them badly. Take the case of Patrick Hamilton, an author of some significance, yet at the moment I think only Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky and Hangover Square are in print.
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Reading Ferdinand Mount's review of two books on Mosley in the latest London Review of Books, I noticed a mention of Arnold Leese, vet, author of the One Humped Camel in Health and Disease, and leader of the Imperial Fascist League. Leese was typical of the bizarre and sinister world of British fascism; Mount also refers to Lord Lymington, " a ubiquitous figure in Fascist circles of the 1930s, whose English Mistery movement advocated selective breeding and unpasteurised milk and regarded the decline of the feudal system as the greatest misfortune to have befallen the English people" or "Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the Girl Scout known as ‘Man-Woman’[...]and Valerie Arkell-Smith of the National Fascisti, a transvestite who spent many years masquerading as ‘Sir Victor Barker’." P G Wodehouse found in Mosley the inspiration for the character of Sir Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts in the Code of the Woosters.
When I ran the RCVS Library, we had a copy of Leese's privately-published autobiography, Out of step : events in the two lives of an anti-Jewish camel-doctor , a work of considerable craziness. In it he denounces Mosley as a "kosher-fascist', feeling him to be insufficiently committed to the extermination of Jews. In 1948, after his conviction for harbouring escaped German POWs, members of the SS, an unsuccessful attempt was made to strike him off the RCVS Register. I searched the College archives to see if there was any detail to explain why the attempt failed, for in those days vets who had any sort of brush with the law, including fairly trivial driving offences, were frequently struck off. Apart from the bare facts, there was nothing to shed any light.
His work on the camel was, I was told by more than one vet, scientifically very sound, and the above-mentioned book on the dromedary remained the standard text for a long time. It is at first sight puzzling that someone like Leese should have had any scientific ability whatsoever but, as Mount remarks of Mosley in his review, "...while interned, he read Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle and Freud – which shows that the redemptive power of literature has its limits, because he emerged utterly unrepentant."
Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism by Stephen Dorril London: Viking, 2006 0670869996
Hurrah for the Blackshirts: Fascists and Fascism between the Wars by Martin Pugh London: Pimlico, 2006 1844130878
Librarything now has a fascinating enhancement, a page where one can see all the recently added books, or, as Tim Spalding, the power behind librarything describes it, a LibraryHypnotismThing.
"I find it hypnotic, both fascinating and will-depleting at the same time. I hope you do too". he says. I certainly do.
My librarything may be seen here.
Technorati Tags: cataloguing, librarything
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