BibliophileBullpen

birthdays •
1554 - Philip Sidney, English courtier, soldier, and writer (d. 1586)
1667 – Jonathan Swift, Irish writer and satirist (d.1745)
1835 - Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), American writer (d. 1910)
1874 - Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canadian author (d. 1942)
1907 - Jacques Barzun, French-born historian and author
1947 - David Mamet, American playwright

off the rack • Yahoo! Inc., owner of the second- most used Internet search engine, is resisting a subpoena from rival Google Inc. seeking documents to aid its legal battle with the publishing industry over book scanning.

worth reading • Powell’s Kevin Sampsell has a syndicated piece coining some exciting new literary terms such as Litrosexual: someone who prefers books to sex. Why would anyone prefer THAT?

link checks • I did a quick check to make sure all the links in the sidebar are still active – and I removed any blogs that haven’t been updated in the last 30 days. If you want you blog added or put back or are a Bibliophile List member and want your store added, please email me.

obit of note • Art Cop author Robert Volpe, a retired NYPD detective renowned for tracking down art fraud and theft

site to see • BibliOdyssey has some marvelous images from a parchment manuscript identified as ‘GKS 1633 4º: Bestiarius’ in the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen.

video update • Stay Tuned I am working on another video for this weekend.

GREAT AUTHORS POT BELLY FIGURES

Author! Author! Give your favorite English scholar a little dose of literature for the holidays. These mini marble figurines have secret compartments (in their bellies, of course) for stashing tiny treasures. The original statuettes are carved in Gloucestershire, England – then each piece is cast in crushed marble and hand-painted. All of them come with booklets explaining their history.

Price: $18.00
Item:: 15188
Material: crushed marble
Size: 2.5″ H

How come I am the last person to hear about stuff like this? Gotta get me one.

Ever wonder what green eggs and ham really taste like? They’re yummy. And now everyone can whip up a batch for themselves using this fabulous cookbook. Filled with simple, scrumptious, wacky recipes for such foods as Cat in the Hat Pudding and Moose Juice and Schlopp, this unique cookbook will have the whole family hamming it up in the kitchen. Each recipe is accompanied by the original verse that inspired it, and the pages are laminated to protect against getting splatters of Sneetch Salad, Oobleck, and Solla Sollew Stew. ISBN: 0679884408

In honor of Louisa May Alcott’s birthday we have added many Alcott items to the Bullpen Cafepress store.

Little Women (1869)
Little Men (1871)

Did you know that Louisa May Alcott’s
home Orchard House is open to the public.
Neither did I and it’s not far from me . . . I’m such a lazy sot.

I was up all night with a very sick 8 week old kitten and this morning’s vet bill was $200. So, I suddenly and miraculously found myself with a boat load of new energy. I spent the rest of the day cataloging books and creating a lot of new images for the Bullpen Cafe Press store. I added dark colored t-shirts, more blank journals and book bags and a some really nifty images of famous authors on postage stamps. More will be coming as I scan more into the PC. Check it out. Please feel free to request something. Designs made from US postage stamps since ’78 or copyrighted images are not eligible.

calendar •
1876 - In an article for the Atlanta Constitution, Joel Chandler Harris first uses the pseudonym Uncle Remus.

1966 -Truman Capote throws a landmark party, his Black-and-White Masked Ball, at New York’s Plaza Hotel, inviting a who’s-who of personages from the world of entertainment, politics, literature, and art. Truman always claimed he invited 500 of his friends and made 15,000 enemies.

birthdays •
1628 - John Bunyan is born (d.1688)
1757 – William Blake, British poet and artist (d. 1827)
1881 - Stefan Zweig, Austrian writer (d. 1942)
1896 - Dawn Powell, American writer (d. 1965)
1907 - Alberto Moravia, Italian writer (d. 1990)
1915 -Yves Theriault is born (d 1983)
1944 - Rita Mae Brown is born.

cookies • Novels by William Boyd, Neil Griffiths, Mark Haddon and David Mitchell are all up for newly renamed Costa Book Awards (neé the Whitbread Prize)

small world • Bulgaria will seek to join the European digital library in 2007 and the World Digital library in 2008. Over 6 million copies of books, periodicals, archive documents, photos, maps, music and films will be accessible at the European Digital Library via Internet by 2010.

btw • The late great Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box monologue was released today on DVD for $11. This is the story of Gray’s attempt to write a novel. In his first person account of writing and living, and dealing with success while trying to be successful. YOU WANT THIS.

cookies • Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist won the first Pergola Award conferred by Mexican booksellers.

better late • Three century old occult book Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (1719) by German Alchemist Georg von Welling has finally been translated from 18th century German into English.

skoobe • The Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of old Hebrew texts announced that over 11,000 old Hebrew books and other works of Judaica are freely available and fully searchable (including in the original Hebrew) online at the Society’s website, www.hebrewbooks.org.

site to see • Literary Stamps blog got its first fan email, well it was fan-ish email after they pointed out a grevious typo. So, of course I wasted a few hours today loading up some more stamps, if you want to take a gander. . .

obit of note • Bebe Moore Campbell Dies at 56

gotcha game • the Google plagarism police are at it again, Ian McEwan is fighting accusations of copying phrases and sentences in his novel Atonement. Something tells me this retro-editing thing is gonna get very ugly.

birthdays •
1898 - Fredric Warburg, publisher and author (d. 1981) the British publisher who backed George Orwell’s Animal Farm when other publishing houses rejected it,
1907 - L. Sprague de Camp, American sci-fi and fantasy author (d. 2000)
1909 - James Agee, American writer (d. 1955)
1937 – Gail Sheehy, American writer

calendar •
1582 – William Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway
1726 – Jonathan Swift gleefully writes to Alexander Pope about initial reactions to the newly published Gulliver’s Travels, including that of an Irish Bishop who called the satire “full of improbable lies.”
1965 - Ken Kesey hosts the first “acid test” at the home of Ken “Intrepid Traveler” Babbs. Kesey and Babbs were classmates in the Stanford creative writing program, taught by Wallace Stegner and others – also in the program were Robert Stone, Wendell Berry, and Larry McMurtry.
1970 - Fearing that he will not be allowed to return home Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes that he cannot go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize.

something old • 1657 the Rough Guide to Europe: James Fraser’s 3 year extensive travel diary of 17th century Scotland, England, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Holland, recently rediscovered by Aberdeen University will finally be published. (via Philobiblios)

something new • Margaret Atwood comments on Richard Powers Echo Maker for the New York Times Review of Books.

snip snip • apparently the Google plagiarism detectives are on the case, Winston Churchill was a closet science fiction fan who borrowed the lines for one of his most famous speeches from HG Wells, says new research.

folks for fairer fairs • A small but growing number of schools want Scholastic Books consumerism out of school book fairs. Parents and educators say Scholastic carries too many books and other items featuring cartoon and movie characters that are thin on literary merit and novelty pencils, calendars, posters and other paraphernalia are more about turning children into consumers than it is about encouraging them to read. I can see that.

obit of note • William Diehl at 81, author of Primal Fear

MF Corwin is one of the art book binders who displays their creations on their Flickr account and I thought this one was stunning.

*SEE? i told you I was gonna start making up my own holidays.

calendar •
1841 – 1st date in James Clavell’s novel Tai-Pan

1862 – On meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, President Abraham Lincoln remarked “So, this is the little lady who made the big war.” yeah, like it was all HER fault.

1864 - Lewis Carroll sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Alice Liddell as an early Christmas Present.

1865 - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll published in US

1928 - Philip Barry’s Holiday, premieres in New York City

site worth seeing • Complete text of Alice in Wonderland complete with Arthur Rackham illustrations. (via Artpassion who also sells such as posters)

lost n’found • Yale’s long missing Lewis Carroll letter found on eBay and recovered. The seller claims the chain of custody wound through our unsuspecting friends at Whitlock Farm Booksellers.

mitzvah • Retired journalist Roger Mudd has donated his 1,500 volume collection of 20th-century Southern writers to Washington and Lee University,

worth hearing • from NPR Talk of the Nation spends an hour mulling over the question “What is a classic?”, in honor of the Everyman’s Library 100th anniversary

cookies • The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced yesterday that James Gunn will be honored as the next Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. (via Sci Fi Bookworm)

banktoaster • another timewaster - Scribble, a flash game where you draw lines to keep the blots from falling to their death.

event • the Salon International de la Bibliophile, will be held for the first time in Brussels from Dec 7-10. Via Rare Book Review blog.

Woman’s body found behind bookcase

POSTED: 7:46 p.m. EST, November 25, 2006

NEW PORT RICHEY, Florida (AP) — A woman’s body was found wedged upside-down behind a bookcase in the home she shared with relatives who had spent nearly two weeks looking for her.

A spokesman for the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office said Mariesa Weber’s death was not suspicious. Family members said they believe she fell over as she tried to adjust the plug of a television behind the bookshelf.

Weber, 38, came home October 28 and greeted her mother, then wasn’t seen again. Her family thought she had been kidnapped and contacted authorities. Family members scoured her room for clues but found nothing, although they did notice a strange smell.

Late one night Weber’s sister went into her bedroom and looked behind a bookcase, where she saw the woman’s foot. Using a flashlight, the family saw Weber was wedged upside-down behind the unit.

“I’m sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her,” her mother, Connie Weber, told the St. Petersburg Times. “And she’s right in the bedroom.”

Both Weber and her sister previously had adjusted the television plug by standing on a bureau next to the shelf and leaning over the top. Her family believes Weber, who was 5-foot-3 and barely 100 pounds, may have fallen headfirst into the space.

“She’s a little thing,” her mother said. “And the bookcase is 6 feet tall and solid. And she couldn’t get out.”

The sheriff’s office said Weber appeared to have died because she was unable to breathe in the position she was in.

I didn’t post this because I found it that amusing . . . personally I found it fairly frightening.