"A single book struggles to balance on its spine; it pines for neighbors. Keep as many books as you have room for."

Mandy Brown, Ways of reading

"A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day."

Thoreau, “Walking” (via captives, via fyeahthoreau)

"My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."

Abraham Lincoln (via quote-book, via bookscakesnkisses, via booklover)

Flannery O’Connor by Christine Marie Larsen (via walkwhilereading)

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Terrific cover for a terrific book. A behind-the-scenes look at its creation is here. (via Snarkmarket)

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries, because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

Ray Bradbury

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Penguin repackages the classics, including Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Cranford, Jane Eyre and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Smiley writes:

They are beautiful, they are tactile, covered in cloth with embossed designs. When I invite my friends over, they look at the covers, flip them over, feel the deckle-edged pages, open them to see the typeface. One friend, busy and involved with the newest of new media, at once imagines herself reclining on a brown leather couch and reading “Jane Eyre” (578 pp., $20) at her leisure — 26 ounces, black covers embossed with shiny red leaves, a red ribbon bookmark twinkling from the bottom edge.

(via Jacket Copy)

(via booklover, libraryland, and samsaramotel)

"Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it’s the readers who build that world in their own minds."

Ursula K. Le Guin (via ilovereadingandwriting, via booklover)

A History of 16 Science Fiction Classics, Told In Book Covers →

io9 shows the varied covers a handful of science fiction classics have borne over the years. (They cheat a little — showing only English editions for some books, while others include foreign editions, which for some reason are much more lurid.) As can be expected, some of the covers are incredibly bad, but mixed in with the pulpy stuff there are some moments of true beauty (and then this,too).

This cover to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, designed by David Pearson, is probably one of my favorite covers of all time. (Via The Second Pass)

Are our novels being haunted by the housing bust? →

io9 observes that it seems everyone’s writing horror novels about economic downturn and how we’re all now holding onto houses bound up with tons of pain and economic insecurity. Somehow that all translates into ghosts and demons and all sorts of associated hauntings.

"There’s something inherent in the culture of reading and publishing that historically, perceptually, and financially makes it difficult for shorter works to succeed. If it’s true (as I think it is) that reading culture as we know it was born in the mid-Victorian triangulation of affordable mass printing, widespread literacy, and a middle class with a lot of leisure time on its hands, then it’s no surprise that the novel became the most dominant and popular literary form. The novels we read today aren’t the “loose, baggy monsters” that the Victorians read, but we did inherit a few of their prejudices: namely, we tend to associate heft with seriousness, while slighter volumes seem exactly that…slight. Printing technology also favors longer forms, as the cost of printing, say, Moby Dick isn’t that much more than that of printing, say, Billy Budd–and proportionally, as a ratio of pages to dollars, printing the longer work costs a whole lot less. Combine this with consumers’ unwillingness to fork out too much money for what looks like a lot less book, and–presto!–the profit margin on novellas can be perilously low."

Replacement Press Blog, talking about novellas

A clean well-lighted place for books →

A set of notes detailing some different approaches for bookstores to take as we embark on our wild and woolly journey into our 21st-century media landscape. A few ideas: creating something more akin to a library and cafe, or perhaps shelving books according to publisher — accompanied by stronger branding by publishers, resulting in each publisher creating more of an identity by the types of books it publishes. (via The Millions)

Frodo and the Great War →

This is fascinating: a summmary of a paper by John Garth that compares scenes and features from The Lord of the RIngs to aspects of the Great War that would have impressed themselves on the mind of a WWI soldier like J.R.R. Tolkien.