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Bookishness: Week of January 16, 2012
027.471 meets 641.874 The Toronto Public Library Foundation aims to recruit a younger set of donors with the New Collection, a membership program for Torontonians under 40. The $300 solo membership ($500 duo) provides members with invitations to special events throughout the year (or, as the National Post puts it, “parties and booze”), after-hours tours of library…
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Bookishness: Week of December 19, 2011
Independent bookstore lovers unite Book and bookstore lovers spent much of last week raging at Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo’s essay on the superiority of Amazon over independent bookstores. The piece, a response to Richard Russo’s op-ed on Amazon’s recent thuggish price-check promotion, decries bookstores as user un-friendly (user!?) and “mistakenly mythologized.” Not surprisingly, bookstore…
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Bookishness: Week of December 5, 2011
On the couch Rather than plumbing the depths of your subconscious, look, perhaps, to your bookshelves. Bibliotherapy offers a literary cure for what ails; after an in-depth conversation about a patient’s reading life, the bibliotherapist prescribes a reading list meant to address the patient’s “area of curiosity or concern.” Bibliotherapy is offered through Alain de Botton’s London-based School of…
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Bookishness: Week of November 28, 2011
No sleep please, we’re novelists We’ve entered the final days of National Novel Writing Month. Particpants have until Wednesday night at 11:59:59 to finish the mandated 50,000 words that will mark their works as novels according to the people at NaNoWriMo. Anyone needing inspiration for these final laps might want to try Written? Kitten! (via Huff Post Books), or, for…
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A Book is a Book
The other day at work I had an impassioned conversation with a customer over what characterizes a book – that is to say, a solid, tangible, paperbound object – versus an e-book, that increasingly popular digital commodity that is poised to take over the world of literature, if it has not already done so. One…
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Charms of the Indie Bookstore
1. Knowledgeable staff People who work at independent book stores tend to be actively involved in book culture. They attend launches and readings, keep up-to-date on book news and reviews, and many also work in publishing. Some of them may even be friends with local authors. They are your fellow readers, and may remember…
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How to Make $100,000 and Infinite Units of Charm
The Victoria College Book Sale—one of the great used book sales put on annually by University of Toronto colleges—is a fine example of how to make $100,000 in a single weekend while turning out vast quantities of enchantment and love. Outside the slick infinity of Googlebooks there is a world of heavy old paper things…
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Bookishness: Week of October 4th, 2011
-“Imagine: you’re better than James Joyce; you end up like Miles Kington.” So says Guardian columnist Ian Sansom, reflecting on Flann O’Brien’s understated literary legacy. October 5th marks the 100th anniversary of the Irish comic author’s birth — celebrate with a bicycle ride and a re-read of At Swim-Two-Birds. –iBooker: Visitors to Apple’s iBookstore (included…