The world at large

Does size matter...? In this case I would say YES. The biggest book at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair hails from our very own Northern Beaches. Millennium House Australia has printed 31 copies of Earth (top) - a massive atlas measuring 1.8m x 2.75m and weighing in at 120kgs - featuring exquisite mapping detail that smaller tomes just cannot match. Publisher Gordon Cheers says the state-of-the-art cartography, geography and oceanography was overseen by the world's finest in their discipline.

The Klenke Atlas (above) is considered by those in the know to be 'the last great atlas' and was produced in 1660 by John Klenke as a gift for King Charles II of England. Only one copy was made and it's preserved today in the Map Room at the British Library. 
According to The Manly Daily 'the atlas was bound by hand in Milan by the Vatican's printers and the foreword was written by the head of maps for the British Library.'
Two have already been sold to museums in the Middle East. You can pick one up too if you have a spare $100,000. And a very large room.

Manna from heaven

Look! The universe gifted me with two literary treasures today: 

The latest LRB landed in my letterbox from London and I discovered Patrick White. 

Neither of which will in any way fan the flames of self-confidence in a wannabee writer but both should inspire nonetheless...

And, if you happen to pass by my favourite local second-hand bookstore, drop in and ask to see Desire Books' latest acquisition, a 1958 first British edition On The Road, one of only 3000 in the original print run. Don't need to tell you how much I love a bit of Jack.

She's a rare bird

Hope you've been saving your pennies booklovers, there's a book sale on in New York in December. A couple of the treasures up for grabs have my name written all over them.... though sadly I don't have a few cool $mill to cough up for them. sob.
The books are among a collection of 50 items from the estate of a certain Lord Hesketh, who died in 1955. 
A first edition of Shakespeare's plays, widely acknowledged as the most important in all English literature, and a rare book by America's most famous bird artist, John James Audubon, billed as the priciest tome in the world, are going under the hammer in a literary coup for Sotheby's.
Shakespeare's 'First Folio' dates from 1623 and among the 36 plays included are The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Macbeth. It's expected to go for around 1 to 1.5 million pounds.
The bird book, which took Audubon 12 years to complete, contains around 1000 illustrations of 500 breeds of birds. The dude knew his stuff. Charles Darwin quoted the highly influential natural historian three times in The Origin of the Species. Only 119 original copies of Birds of America - said to have inspired generations of ornithologists - are known to exist and this one is tipped to achieve a whopping four to six million pounds at auction. 
Wow. Santa Claus did I mention I have been a very, very good girl this year...