BibliophileBullpen

The Bullpen Store is now carrying Bumper stickers, though as of this moment I have only designed six. The little ditty to the left was suggested by G’Jim Arner out at the Wyoming Mercantile and Book Ranch. Makes me wish my truck had more body rot I could cover. Please email me your suggestions regardless of how pithy, smutty or silly you may think they are – winners as always, will be whomever makes me snort Red Bull out of my nose. And the prizes will be whatever I have lying around the office.

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1600 - Thomas Dekker’s realistic Elizabethan comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday was first presented.

1603 - Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was presented at the royal palace of Hampton Court.

1660 - Samuel Pepys wrote the first page of what will become the most famous diary in the world. He kept it in code so his wife could not read it.

1785 - London’s oldest daily paper The Daily Universal Register (later renamed The Times in 1788) was first published.

1811 - James Fenimore Cooper, 21, marries Susan DeLancey in Mamaroneck, New York, where Cooper is attempting to farm.

1818 - Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is published.

1831 - William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator The Abolitionist newspaper.

1833 – The first issue of Knickerbocker Magazine is published, in New York City

1834 - Frederick Douglass “On the first of January, 1834, I left Mr. Covey, & went to live with Mr. William Freeland, who lived about three miles from St. Michael’s. I soon found Mr. Freeland a very different man from Mr. Covey. Though not rich, he was what would be called an educated southern gentleman. Mr. Covey, as I have shown, was a well-trained negro-breaker & slave-driver.” from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave.

1849 - The New York Public Library is incorporated, with Washington Irving, William B. Astor, Jr., Doctor J. G. Cogswell and others as trustees. It contains over 20,000 volumes.

1854 - Sir James Frazer is born in Britain, early anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough

1879 – E.M. Forster is born in London. (d. 1970)

1889 - Nietzsche has a nervous breakdown seeing a horse whipped by cab driver.

1895 - Benjamin Otalora, the main character in Jorge Luis Borges’ story El Muerto (The Dead Man), is killed.

1900 - 1st date in John dos Passos’ USA trilogy (The 42nd Parallel)

1909 - Marcel Proust ate a piece of tea-soaked toast that brought back a rush of childhood memories. In his novel A la Recherche du temps perdu, his character Swann will have a similar experience when he tastes a madelaine.

1919 – J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was born in New York City.

1920 - Frances Steloff opens the Gotham Book Mart.“Among those who came to chat to browse & to see if their books & plays were on the shelves were Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, H. L. Menken & Euegene O’Neill. Customers included George & Ira Gershwin, Ina Claire & Charlie Chaplin, Alexander Calder, Stephen Spender, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, John Guare & Garson Kanin.” She championed the experimental & challenged the censors. She was also one of the founding members of the James Joyce Society, whose meetings continue at the Gotham.

1921 - Novelist Patricia Highsmith is born

1928 – George Orwell leaves the Indian Imperial Police.

1928 – Ernest Tidyman, American writer (d. 1984) is born

1933 – Joe Orton, English writer is born (d. 1967).

You SO have to try this! a Dummies cover generator, just what I always wanted.

Myspace Layouts

1817 - James T Fields is born in Portsmouth NH. At seventeen Fields apprenticed at the Old Corner Bookstore and began writing for newspapers. He was invited to join a major publishing firm, that became Ticknor and Fields, and was the foremost publisher of the literature in mid-nineteenth century America. Among the eminent authors he published were: Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas De Quincy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Bret Harte. He succeeded James Russell Lowell as editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

Since everyone else is flooding the blogosphere with ‘Year’s Best’ I figured I’d let spill a little. These aren’t the years best, perhaps not even all from this year, just whatever i can remember from the books that happened to catch my eye and get a free ride home from the library:

the Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders by Keith Olbermann
Death by Pad Thai: And Other Unforgettable Meals by Douglas Bauer
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography by Nicholas Rennison
Schott’s Almanac 2007 Ben Schott
Schott’s Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories by Bonny Wolf
The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History by Anne D. Williams
Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! by Michael Reaves and John Pelan
The best American travel writing 2006 by Tim Cahill
Don’t Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World’s Greatest Chefs by Kimberly Witherspoon
Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers by Mark Bailey and Edward Hemingway
Kafka’s Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes by Mark Crick
The Last Witchfinder: A Novel by James Morrow
The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain
They Call Me Naughty Lola, a collection of personal ads from the London Review of Books.
The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker by Matthew Diffee and Robert Mankoff
Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson
the Joke’s Over/Bruised Memories: Gonzo, Hunter Thompson and Me by Ralph Steadman

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1695 - A window tax is imposed in England, causing many shopkeepers to brick up their windows to avoid the tax.
1879 – William S. Gilbert and Arthur S. Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty has its U. S. debut at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, the day after its London premiere.
1945 - Connie Willis is born, American writer
1949 - Ellen Datlow is born, American editor
1949 - Susan Schwartz is born, American writer
1960 – The farthing coin ceases to be legal tender in the United Kingdom.

banktoaster • companion to the old foodie blog has an insane free pdf of 400 historic cookbooks available freely online.

I am so easily amused.

The government is finally wised up to the fact that historical documents are streaming out of their hands faster then they can shred them:

• From Time Magazine: On the Trail of Pilfered History with the market in stolen historical documents hotter than ever, federal investigators launch an operation to retrieve what belongs to the government. Operation Historic Protector, which the Archive’s Inspector General’s Office launched in November to combat what many fear is a growing threat to the federal government’s historical repository, as well as to state archives and university libraries: the pilfering of old letters, documents, maps, photographs, books and other historical artifacts. (via philobiblos)

decorated covers 1. See: FINISHING (1) . 2. In library binding, an illustration, design, or special lettering on the upper cover of a book. A decorated cover would also include books, such as paperbacks with illustrated covers when the original cover is attached to the cloth cover, with or without coating. 3. In edition binding, a design, illustration, or special lettering blocked or printed by offset on the book cloth.

from
Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington. thanks to the Conservation Online site.