Category: words

“To fit all the books in the allotted space, the library will have to abandon its version of the Dewey Decimal System, in which shelving is organized by subject, in favor of a new “high-density” protocol in which all that matters is size. Books will be stacked by height and tracked by bar code rather than by a subject-based system, making for some odd bookfellows.”

“Amazon’s editorial director of books and Kindle Sarah Nelson described Groff’s language as ‘electric’ and praised her ‘ingenious plotting … fascinating and unlike anything I’ve read in years. … Our editor adored it.’ Reviewers were not as convinced.”

“The move has a practical effect: It extends the copyright from Jan. 1, when it is set to expire in most of Europe, to the end of 2050. Copyrights in Europe generally end 70 years after an author’s death. Anne Frank died 70 years ago at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, and Otto Frank died in 1980. Extending the copyright would block others from being able to publish the book without paying royalties or receiving permission.”

“This might all sound very precious, or very insufferable. But Horowitz is used to people feeling that way: It’s the same sort of criticism that’s long been levied at McSweeney’s, the indie publishing organization that Horowitz ran for the better part of a decade. The cabins expand upon the aggressively twee style that made McSweeney’s publications into bookshelf fixtures in Brooklyn studios and dorm rooms across the land, but the work Horowitz does in those cabins is anything but stale.”

“Both the poem and the prose piece deal with characters from Angria, a fictional kingdom that Charlotte created with her brother Branwell, and wrote about in several stories, some of which were originally scrawled in small handmade books.”

But Shakespeare isn’t responsible for confusion around the meaning of the battle: “Henry V, ‘a master of propaganda,’ controlled the message; victory at Agincourt validated Henry’s divine authority. From there, over 600 years, uncertainties have been compounded.”

“Tone languages are spoken all over the world, but they tend to cluster in three places: East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous communities of Mexico. Why there and not elsewhere?”

“The free stories are available at the touch of a button, printing out on rolls of paper like a till receipt. Readers are able to choose one minute, three minutes or five minutes of fiction.”

The problem is that they were rendered into tightly wound, fragile little chunks of carbon by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, which destroyed Herculaneum and its neighbor, Pompeii. But a combination of advanced imaging software and advanced particle physics might just be able to make the scrolls legible.