“In the ethereal world of digital media, printed magazines continue to offer something concrete, a tangible representation of a collaboration between editors, artists, designers and writers. And nothing embodies this collaboration like the magazine cover, which remains one of the modern age’s most widely consumed pieces of public art.”
Category: words
Why Are So Many Libraries Bad At Keeping Track Of What They Have?
“Across the country, in city art collections and special collections of public libraries, one-of-a-kind items are routinely misfiled, misplaced, lost or stolen. And sometimes, routine mistakes and slipshod documentation grow into a much more intractable problem, with large portions of public collections being managed by institutions who have no idea what’s in them and no full inventory of their holdings.”
James Joyce Fascinates The Chinese
“These days, if you ask about James Joyce – or ‘Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi’, as his name is transliterated in Chinese pinyin – in a Chinese bookshop you will be led to shelves lined with relevant volumes. The vast five-floor Xinhua bookshop on Wangfujing, a crowded shopping avenue just round the corner from Tiananmen Square, currently stocks no fewer than four different editions of Ulysses.”
‘An Argument Ends’: What We Lose When A Bookstore Closes
Adam Gopnik: “It is rarely the book you came to seek, but the book next to that book, which changes your mind and heart.” But, more than that, “restaurants, bookstores, cafés – on a grander scale railway stations, on a lesser one chessboards near park benches – are the sinews of civil society.”
Book Reviews Have Gotten Way, Way Nicer Than They Used To Be
“The magazines competed for the cruellest contributors but, as everyone knew, the most fearless wrote for Blackwood’s.”
Using Oral Histories To Write For Justice
Mimi Lok: “If you only see someone as a case study then it normally hones in on that instance or instances of where they had their human rights violated. It’s reducing that person to that moment of injustice. You are reducing that person’s whole experience. We want to do the opposite.”
Crowd-Sourced Piracy Gets Crowd-Sourced Chinese Novels Translated
“Vietnamese writer and translator Trang Ha condemned the conservatism of Vietnamese literature, and the paucity of good-quality fiction available to her compatriots. She was speaking in response to the increasing availability of Chinese novels in Vietnam – works which have often taken a convoluted and heavily mediated route to market.”
Legendary Long-Serving Librarian Of Congress To Retire
“James Billington, 86, is a Russia scholar who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 as the 13th Librarian of Congress and leader of the oldest federal cultural institution. In a video message to his staff, he said he will leave Jan. 1.”
Unknown Poems By Katherine Mansfield Found In Chicago Library
In the collections of the Newberry Library, a researcher discovered nearly 30 poems from the years 1909 to 1911, “the writer’s most painful and difficult period, the evidence for which she had later destroyed.”
No, Ursula K. LeGuin, Amazon Is Not Turning Literature Into Junk Food
Stephen L. Carter: “But now, according to Le Guin, Amazon’s quest for short-term sales is destroying serious literature. … I think Le Guin is half right – or, more to the point, she has identified the correct problem but chosen the wrong villain.”