The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.
It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.
At the time of its creation, it was intended as “an encyclopaedic summary of the world.”
Link. Previously on Neatorama: The [other] Largest Book in the World
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AbeBooks asked their booksellers to reveal what items they have found inside the books that pass through their hands. They reported many instances of discovering credit cards and banknotes, including this heartbreaker:
“A wealthy, elderly woman in my town died a few years ago and left a large book collection with many fine books, much of which wound up in my inventory. The remaining books went to a local thrift shop, including a microwave cookbook which, as it turned out, contained 40 $1000 bills. The book was purchased by someone from out of town who was idling away the time waiting for her ride. She took the money to a local bank to verify its authenticity and that was how we heard about it. She didn’t give a cent back to the thrift shop, either. A deeply frustrating experience for many, I can assure you.”
Other items have both monetary and historic value:
“Inside a volume, one of eight bought at a local garage sale, I found a charming child’s Christmas card with the inscription “Merry Christmas to Harry from …..(fairly illegible). About two years later while trying to decipher the signature, the name suddenly revealed itself….”from Frank Baum.”
Other dealers have found items such as a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a golf scorecard signed by Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, a diamond ring, and a variety of other odd and unusual items, including the inevitable… strip of bacon.
Perhaps most impressive is this report from Bookride:
Eight relief hand-coloured etchings [by William Blake] discovered by a book collector between the pages of an international rail timetable bought in the late seventies from a ‘North London book dealer’, and recently acquired by the Tate for £441,000. Apparently, the reason suggested as to why the dealer hadn’t bothered to check through the huge timetable before putting it out for sale was because it was so ‘ boring’.
What have you found? Or what have you lost? Do you use something odd as a bookmark?
Links to AbeBooks’ list and the Bookride report.
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Sumedicina is a short story by Jana Lange and Kim Asendorf told with the modern medium of infographics. It’s about a scientist who works for a biotech firm called Sumedicina, which secretly creates and unleashes viruses on the world — and then sells the only cures. The caption for the above infographic reads:
John has worked for 17 years at Sumedicina. His salary rose steadily. But with the increasing responsibility, his hair became measurably less.
The easiest way to read the story is to go to the link, which is the flickr set for the story, and view the slides sequentially.
Link via Fast Company | Official Website
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Ernest Hemingway once famously said that he could write an entire story in just six words – "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." (Before the age of Twitter, no less)
Inspired by that, SMITH Magazine invited writers, both famous and obscure, to write their memoirs in exactly six words, and published it in book form: Not Quite What I Was Planning
You can even submit your own at SMITH Magazine’s website. Some samplings there:
One week left of childhood. Anxious
Shoes perpetually untied. Yet rarely trip.
Lost fiance. Found self. Only eighteen.
Ten weeks pregnant, still my secret.
… and over at National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation:
Found on Craigslist: table, apartment, fiance.
I picked passion. Now I’m poor.
Yale at 16, downhill from there.
What’s your six-word memoir?
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Photo: GM/NASA
This week’s developments in technological advances, like General Motors and NASA’s Robonaut2 (cleverly and deviously nicknamed R2), and Google’s decision to team up with the NSA got GeekDad’s Curtis Silver wondering about truth mirroring the best of science fiction- and its predictions of an eventual machine takeover that will plunge humanity into mass enslavement.
While I was writing this I read an article about how Google has teamed with the NSA in order to help tighten up Google’s infrastructure when it comes to cyber-security. The layman would view that partnership as a natural evolutionary response to fight off the ever increasing cyber-attacks on companies such as Google. The slightly paranoid individual might view that as a sure sign big brother is looking over your shoulder. The slightly paranoid geeky individual simply views that as Skynet in the making.
Curtis cites the sci-fi classics Hyperion by Dan Simmons, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, and The Ship Who Sang by Anne McAffrey as prime examples “to uncover what other possible technological threats we might face in the future.” Read the article, and tell us what other stories might become reality soon.
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Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a classic children’s story first published in 1939. In this video the illustrations come from the classic text, but the text of the story has been modified slightly by the narrator (who is NOT Werner Herzog).
Via The Presurfer.
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I’m a little late in posting this, but it’s too awesome to pass: Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note has a copy of a 1905 letter sent by Mark Twain to a patent medicine salesman who tried to sell bogus medicine. Twain was furious to have received the pitch as he was recently widowed after his wife suffered heart failure:
Dear Sir,
Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.
Read the rest: Link – via The Litter Box
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In his monthly neologism challenges before he retired in 2004, Washington Post columnist Bob Levey famously asked his readers to send in new words made by taking existing words and adding, substracting, or changing one letter to yield a new definition.
A list of some of the funniest wordplays has since been circulating around the Net for years. For those of you who haven’t seen in before, Miss Cellania has quite a few:
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. [...]
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future. [...]
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
Link (Giraffiti by artist Nick Walker, photo by Luna Park)
More Bob Levey’s Neologism Competition at Fun With Words: Link
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Each post in this blog pairs a screenshot from a TV show with a literary quote. The pairings are astonishingly apt, at least for the shows I recognize, and there are a lot of them to go through. Link -via Metafilter
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The blog Women, Snakes and Stalkers features South Asian book covers from the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library. This commercial art is very much worth preserving and sharing! Link -via A Journey Round My Skull
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Inspired by the resume of Leonardo daVinci, I thought it would be interesting to post the resume of Sir James Murray. This passage comes from a letter he wrote when he applied for a position in the British Museum Library.
“I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes… With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.”
Remarkably, he was turned down for the job. Some years later he was appointed editor for the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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The Chaos is a poem often used to demonstrate how difficult it is to pronounce words in English, as the spelling and pronunciation varies so. It was written by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité, who first published it in 1909, then revised and lengthened it several times before his death in 1946. More lines were added posthumously. The Spelling Society published The Chaos in its entirety. Here are the first few (and the easiest) lines:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
The poem is now 274 lines long, meant to be read out loud. How much of it can you manage before mispronouncing something? Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
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Daniel Finkelstein of The Times has a list of ten decidedly odd books, including Toilet Paper Origami: Guests with Fancy Folds & Simple Surface Embellishments by Linda Wright. Others include a homemaking guide for goths and a book that questions whether or not the English are human beings.
Link via The Presurfer
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San Francisco is a city that has hosted and inspired many great writers. So artist Ian Huebert created an enormous map of that city filled with the words of novelists and poets who either wrote their works in those locations, or located their stories there. In the links, you’ll find a larger image. And at Strange Maps, you’ll find a list of every author and work mentioned.
Larger Image | News Story via Strange Maps | Artist’s Website | Image: San Francisco Gate
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Nothing can escape the prying eyes of Google Street View, including Waldo from the Where’s Waldo? book series. He was seen at 76 Putney High St, Wandsworth, UK by a Google Street View camera car.
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What if Shakespearean costumes were designed by an artist who drew superheroes? That would never happen, right?
In 1969, Sheldon Feldner contacted Marvel Comics, asking if one of Marvel’s artists would be interested in designing costumes for a production of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar by the University Theatre Company at Santa Cruz at the newly-built Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
As luck would have it, the Kirby family had recently moved to California, and Stan Lee recommended that Feldner contact Jack Kirby.
Jack Kirby {wiki} was the creator of such characters as Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. But he went to work designing not only the costumes but also a poster for the student production. His sketches, and some pictures of the actual costumes, are posted at the Kirby Museum. Link -via Metafilter
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Today would be Jack London’s 134th birthday. The man was not only one of the most popular writers at the turn of the last century, he was also one of the first writers to see his novels be turned into a movie. In fact, his novel, The Sea Wolf, was adapted into the first full-length feature film. Also notably, he was one of the first celebrities to use his endorsement to advertise a product –in his case, grape juice and dress suits. To honor this prolific man, let’s take a look at the life and times of Jack London.
Jack London never was certain of who his actual father was, although most biographers believe his dad was astrologer William Chaney. His mother, Flora Wellman, claimed that Chaney insisted she have an abortion and that when she refused, he refused all responsibility for the child and left the city. Flora shot herself as a result of her overwhelming depression. Although she survived, she was temporarily deranged, and after Jack was born, she gave him to an ex-slave named Virginia Prentiss. After Flora married a Civil War veteran named John London, baby Jack was given back to the her, but Virginia remained a strong maternal figure to Jack throughout his life.
When Jack was 21, he searched for newspaper reports of his mother’s attempted suicide and was able to research the name of his supposed biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, but William claimed he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent. He claimed Flora slept around and that she had slandered him when she said he told her to get an abortion. Needless to say, Jack was devastated.
Jack grew up very working class and was forced to educate himself in the public library, as he could not afford to attend primary school. He was mentored by Oakland public librarian Ina Coolbrith who became California’s first poet laureate later on. Jack referred to Coolbrith as his “literary mother.”
At only 13, Jack started working at Hickmott’s Cannery clocking in for anywhere between 12 and 18 hours per day. In an effort to get out of this difficult life, he borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a boat. He then started working as an oyster poacher. Within only a few months, his boat was damaged beyond repair and he soon started working for the California Fish Patrol to hunt down fish poachers.
A few years later, Jack started protesting and fighting for labor unions in Kelly’s Army. He was known for giving stump speeches on Socialism to eager-eared workers. Soon enough, he spent 30 days in jail in Buffalo on vagrancy charges. The experience disturbed him seriously and he later wrote about it:
“Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say ‘unprintable’; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them.”
He returned to California where he finally started school at Oakland High. It was here, in the school magazine, that he was first published. His first story was Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, a recount of his experiences as a sailor. While attending classes, he was inspired to become a writer when he read the book Signa by Ouida, which told the story of an unschooled Italian peasant who became a famous opera composer. He credited this book as being the seed of his writing career.
After high school, Jack eventually was able to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Unfortunately, the depression he began to experience after recently hearing from his father, paired with crushing financial circumstances, forced him to leave school only a year later.
Most people know that Jack London was part of the Klondike Gold Rush, as this was the setting for his most popular story, Call of the Wild. Not everyone knows that the main character in the story, a dog named Buck, was based on a dog that Jack’s landlords had lent to him while he stayed in Dawson.
While in the north, he developed a number of health problems, including scurvy, which eventually led to the loss of his four front teeth. The many hardships he faced during this period later served as inspiration for what is often called his greatest short story, To Build A Fire.
When Jack left the Klondike, he wanted to escape the difficulties of working class life and he realized his ticket out was his writing. Jack’s first work printed by a major publisher, To the Man On Trial, ended up almost causing him to quit as soon as he started because the publisher was so slow to pay and the pay itself was so low. His second published story actually ended up being his first paid assignment, as they actually came through with payment on time. Luckily, that second story’s payment gave him the motivation he needed to continue writing, he entered his field at just the right time, as magazine production (and subsequently, the market for short fiction stories) was skyrocketing due to new technologies that allowed for lower production costs.
Among the first stories he sold were Batard and Diable, which were two very similar stories about a French Canadian man who brutalized his dog, who then kills the man out of revenge. Those familiar with The Call of the Wild will recognize these plot lines as being fairly similar to the novel.
Jack’s first marriage was to a friend Bessie Maddern. The couple never actually had a romantic relationship together –even after their marriage. They agreed to be married because they believed they would be able to produce strong and healthy children. While they had a loveless marriage, things remained exceptionally cordial before the children came along; Bessie edited Jack’s manuscripts and helped him improve his writing. After they had children though, the relationship became strained. Jack complained that “every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won’t let me be in the same room with her if she can help it.”
Not surprisingly, the couple’s relationship ended in divorce. Jack’s next marriage was notably more successful, largely because it was based on love and not good genes. While his nickname for Bessie was “Mother-Girl,” his nickname for his new wife, Charmian Kittredge (pictured at right), was “Mate Woman.” With Charmian, Jack found more than a friend, he found a soul mate and a lover. She had been raised without prudishness and was very open to any and all of Jack’s lustful fantasies –this certainly helped keep Jack interested, as he was known for being a bit of a womanizer at the time.
Speaking of his true loves, Jack was enamored with the ranch he bought in Sonoma County in 1905, saying, “next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me.” Jack wanted his ranch to become its own money making enterprise and dedicated a lot of his time to growing and improving the farm. It wasn’t long before he started writing only to support his farm. His daughter, Joan, noted that after 1910, “few reviewers bothered any more to criticize his work seriously, for it was obvious that Jack was no longer exerting himself.”
While the ranch ended up being a failure, Jack was largely ahead of his time and would likely have thrived in today’s eco-friendly world. He was one of the first U.S. farmers to practice the concept of sustainable agriculture and designed the first concrete silo built in California. His home was designed and constructed by the finest Italian and Chinese stonemasons. Unfortunately, just before the mansion was completed, it was destroyed by fire. Nowadays, his ranch is a National Historic Landmark and part of the Jack London State Historic Park.
Many people, both past and present, have claimed London plagiarized much of his work. To some extent, the accusations were fair. When accused of basing The Call of the Wild on Egerton R. Young’s My Dogs in the Northland, Jack admitted that it was a “source” and he said he wrote a letter to the author thanking him for the inspiration. Jack even bought plots and novels from Sinclair Lewis and used them as his own.
The most damning case against him involved a chapter in his book The Iron Heel. Jack claimed that he based this chapter on a speech by the Bishop of London that he clipped from an American newspaper that he didn’t realize was actually an excerpt from an ironic essay by Frank Harris called “The Bishop of London and Public Morality.” Harris was angered by this use of his essay and he argued that he should receive 1/60th of all royalties for the book.
On the other hand, some of the plagiarism accusations against Jack were merely a result of his using newspaper stories to inspire his plots. A 1901 newspaper article criticized how similar his “Moon-Face” story was to Frank Norris’ “The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock.” London defended himself by proving that both stories were inspired by the same newspaper story. Soon, there was even a third similar story discovered to have been written about the same article. This one was published a year earlier.
When criticized for writing a story directly from a non-fiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, London argued that it was fair game, saying, “I, in the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature, used material from various sources which had been collected and narrated by men who made their living by turning the facts of life into journalism.”
Like most of us, Jack London was an extremely complex individual. As a result, many of his views seemed contradictory, even hypocritical. He was a life-long socialist, but was devoted to monetary pursuits. While he always looked to his black foster mother as a role model and worried about the white man destroying indigenous cultures, he also bought into Social Darwinism and eugenics. While he was a self-proclaimed alcoholic, he supported prohibition.
Jack died in 1916 of uremia. The kidney stones and dysentery he was suffering from at the time were extremely painful, so he was taking morphine, which may have contributed to his death. Because he wrote so many stories about people who killed themselves though, many people mistook his death for a suicide.
A decade later, a writer known as B. Traven started to become known as “the German Jack London.” This author kept his identity secret his entire life, which led to some people speculating that Jack actually was B. Traven. Some supporters of the theory claim that Jack faked his own death only to reappear as the German later on. Funny enough, Traven’s own widow revealed his identity after his death, but some conspiracy nuts still claim he was actually Jack London, while others claim he was actually Ambrose Bierce.
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I remember my favorite books from when I was a kid, and none of them covered such wide-ranging topics as these. See some of the strangest, funniest, and most disturbing children’s books ever.
I remember reading The House That Jack Built. I loved it. This book takes that same rhyming style and turns it into a ghetto-fabulous tale of the dangers of crack, from start to finish. It begins with the exploited South American workers in the coca fields and goes all the way to the streets of the inner city.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
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Writer Adam Bertocci imagined the movie The Big Lebowski as a play by William Shakespeare entitled The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski. From Act 1, Scene 2:
[The bowling green. Enter THE KNAVE, WALTER and DONALD, to play at ninepins]
WALTER
In sooth, then, faithful friend, this was a rug of value? Thou wouldst call it not a rug among ordinary rugs, but a rug of purpose? A star in a firmament, in step with the fashion alike to the Whitsun morris-dance? A worthy rug, a rug of consequence, sir?THE KNAVE
It was of consequence, I should think; verily, it tied the room together, gather’d its qualities as the sweet lovers’ spring grass doth the morning dew or the rough scythe the first of autumn harvests. It sat between the four sides of the room, making substance of a square, respecting each wall in equal harmony, in geometer’s cap; a great reckoning in a little room. Verily, it transform’d the room from the space between four walls presented, to the harbour of a man’s monarchy.WALTER
Indeed, a rug of value; an estimable rug, an honour’d rug; O unhappy rug, that should live to cover such days!DONALD
Of what dost thou speak, that tied the room together, Knave? Take pains, for I would well hear of that which tied the room together.
Fear not, for the Knave abideth.
Link via Nerdcore | Image: Wikimedia Commons
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AbeBooks (U.K.) has a Weird Book Room, which they describe as…
“…the finest source of everything that’s bizarre, odd and downright weird in books. We now have 101 crazy and strange titles about every oddball aspect of life you could possibly imagine and a few things you couldn’t possibly imagine.”
This assemblage is slightly different from the well-known Bookseller/Diagram Prize, which is awarded annually to the book with the most unusual title. In the AbeBooks room, some of the selections have rather prosaic titles, but unusual subject matter.
The example shown is The Teach Your Chicken To Fly Training Manual, in which “Using careful instructions, detailed diagrams and specially designed exercises to build up wing strength, Weekes guides you in training your chickens to take to flight.”
You can probably find something more to your liking.
Link, via Professor Hex.
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John Farrier’s post on Where’s Waldo prompted me to shine the spotlight on another series of puzzle-tastic find-me books that feature actual photographed objects.
The tableau of I Spy puzzles vary between scattered and seemingly similar objects to exquisitely staged snapshots of a closet, and even other worlds. Here’s one.
Photo/Artist Walter Wick came up with the idea of finding hidden objects in plain sight…by accident.
I was organizing screws, paper clips and other odds and ends. As I began sorting, I liked the way the objects looked spread out on my light box. After hours of careful arranging, I took a picture (left). This photograph of odds and ends was the spark that helped inspire the first I Spy book! But that would take another 10 years.
Photo: Walter Wick/I Spy
I Spy an anchor, 2 shovels, plus a sleeping man. Helicopter, knight, and a cooking pan. (That was all mine, anyone care to do better?)
Read more about Walter Wick here, and remember this video from last November? That’s him. And he apparently has a new book series called Can You See What I See? where he writes his own poem hints.
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Since 1987, illustrator Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? (Where’s Wally in the UK) books have challenged the pattern recognition skills of children and adults. In the many books featuring Waldo, Handford has occasionally hidden strange if not a touch scandalous images. Adrian Beiting of of the geekery blog Topless Robot has compiled nine of the oddities, such as an Aztec human sacrifice:
Link | Images: Chadwick House Publishing
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Every
year, Lake Superior State University publishes a list of overused words
that should be banned:
Word "czars" at Lake Superior State University "unfriended" 15 words and phrases and declared them "shovel-ready" for inclusion on the university's 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.
"The list this year is a 'teachable moment' conducted free of 'tweets,'" said a Word Banishment spokesman who was "chillaxin'" for the holidays. "'In these economic times', purging our language of 'toxic assets' is a 'stimulus' effort that's 'too big to fail.'"
Former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and friends created "word banishment" in 1975 at a New Year's Eve party and released the first list on New Year's Day. Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, media, education, technology and more.
Word-watchers may check the alphabetical "complete list" on the website before making their submissions.
Here are the 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselesness:
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The task for the architecture students from Trondheim, Norway was this: build a library for an orphanage in a village in Thailand using natural materials to fit in with the surrounding environment, with room for books, a computer, and 42 students of different ages.
Sami Rintala of Rintala Eggertsson Architects led the project, which resulted in a structure that is simple, elegant, practical and versatile. The library was constructed with natural lava stone from the site, plus concrete bricks, wood and bamboo, with natural ventilation and sunshades incorporated into the design.
Link: DesignBoom; all images courtesy of Rintala Eggertsson Architects
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Author Neil Gaiman contributed a story to Tor called “I, Cthulu, Or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126°43′ W).” As usual, Mr. Gaiman’s humor is fantastic and fun. (This little gem is from 1986.)
I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.
Those were the days.
Read the whole thing at Link.
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In this variation on Dr. Seuss’ classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rorschach from Watchmen punishes the people of New York City for their Christmas cheer. I’m not sure who the author is, but I’ve seen it vaguely referenced to the posters at 4chan — and I’m not about to go searching that site to find out for sure.
via Popped Culture
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The artblog A Journey Around My Skull has a compilation of unusual and surreal illustrations from children’s books of the Soviet Union. This image is from the 1989 book Hello, I’m A Robot Stanislav Zigunenko and illustrated by E. Benyaminson. At the link, you’ll see the first post in a series about such illustrations.
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We’ve previously featured Facebook status updates from the characters of Star Wars and DC Comics heroes. Now Jason Michaels of College Humor puts the characters of The Lord of the Rings through the same treatment. Five more at the link.
Link via Geekologie
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75-year-old Stanley Dudek found a book entitled “Facts I Ought to Know about the Government of My Country” among his mother’s possessions when she died in 1998. He didn’t know it was a library book at the time. Last year, he noticed the book was due back on May 2, 1910. On Monday, he finally returned the book to the New Bedford Public Library in Massachusetts.
“I didn’t feel I should keep it any longer. It belongs to the people and city of New Bedford, the government. felt it was my duty to get it back to the library,” he said.
Fortunately for Dudek, the fine on the book — about $360, he said, or a penny for each day overdue, which was the charge way back when — was waived.
“My blood pressure will probably go down now,” Dudek said.
The book, which was printed in 1894, was given to Dudek’s mother in 1922 when she arrived in the US from her native Poland. The library has no record as to who originally checked it out. Link -via Unique Daily
(image credit: Peter Pereira/The Standard Times)
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I guess that in scientific publishing, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The textbook Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin, featured in Tiger Woods’ recent SUV crash, has shot up the bestseller list. Its Amazon ranking has moved from 396,224 to 2,268:
Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was “delighted that anyboy’s reading my books. I just wish it was one that’s still in print.”
Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.
“It’s not a book you sit down and read from cover to cover,” said Gribbin, “you can dip in and out of it. Tiger Woods is absolutely my target audience. He’s busy, hasn’t got a lot of time, but wants to catch up on what’s happening in physics.”
We need to arrange for a celebrity to become embroiled in a major scandal while reading Neatorama.
Link via Radley Balko | Photo: Handout/Getty Images
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