Touchy-feely...

Everyone knows a thing of beauty is a joy forever...and these beauties are made for keeps. Found these exquisite cloth-bound book covers by Penguin designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on-line here. 

Unputdownable...

Gorgeous images of 'unputdownable' classics from a Penguin print ad campaign in Malaysia. My favourite is the The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit (top), there's also John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Click on the images to see them in slightly more detail. The ads were created by Saatchi & Saatchi. 

A bit of light reading...

What richer fodder could an occupation provide for a writer than the life of a lighthouse keeper? 
Think To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf; By the Seaside: The Lighthouse, Longfellow; the recent Australian film South Solitary; the children's story The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter, Arielle North Olson...
But what if you really were a lighthouse keeper, and you lived in a spiral tower on some godforsaken rocky outcrop battered by tempests with only passing seagulls, the odd shipwrecked sailor and thousands of miles of oceans for company...?
That's what it must have been like in the 1800s....and then someone came up with a brilliant idea. 
In 1876, the Light-House Establishment in America started distributing portable libraries to lighthouse keepers in remote off-shore stations. A system was set up for distribution via light vessels, exchange and updating of texts, so that once a box-load of books had been read by one lighthouse keeper and his family (if he had one) they were shipped off to the next recipient and replaced with a new delivery.
The books were largely fiction but technical volumes were included when requested. All books remained the property of the The Light-House Establishment and were marked in the front with an official bookplate.
Check out these crazy titles from a typical lighthouse library:
Lamont, James. SEASONS WITH THE SEA-HORSES; OR, SPORTING ADVENTURES IN THE NORTHERN SEAS. New York. 1861. 282p. Describes sailing and sporting adventures in the northern latitudes. Illustrated.
Taylor, Bayard. AT HOME AND ABROAD - A SKETCHBOOK OF LIFE, SCENERY AND MEN. New York. 1893. 500p. Decorated cloth. With black and white engravings, etc.
Torpelius, Z. THE SURGEON'S STORIES - TIMES OF CHARLES VII. Chicago. 1884. 349p. Third in a series of six Swedish historical romances, translated from the Swedish.
Chaillu, Paul Du. MY APINGI KINGDOM: WITH LIFE IN THE GREAT SAHARA, AND SKETCHES OF THE CHASE OF THE OSTRICH, HYENA &c. New York. 1879. 254p. Beautiful brown decorated cloth. With black and white engravings, etc.



Images courtesy of the Michigan Lighthouse Conservancy.

Classic cover

How beautiful is this! The original cover art for E.B White's 1952 classic Charlotte's Web sold at auction to a New York collector for US$155,000. The graphite and ink illustration by Garth Williams features farmgirl Fern Arable holding the saved-from-slaughter pig Wilbur, with Charlotte spinning her web above them. If you look closely you can still see the production notes around the edges. The same cover art has been used for over 58 years and in 2000, Publisher's Weekly named Charlotte's Web the best selling children's book ever. 
Williams first teamed with White for the cover of the mousecapade Stuart Little.

Why why why...?

Who knows whether my book will ever be published, 

but this is why I write...

Click image to enlarge.

Wondermark, from the pen of David Malki !

Happy birthday blog!

It's your very first birthday - whoop whoop! To celebrate, Blog, you get.... a facelift! I know * sigh * they start so young these days.

Did a little digging around to see what other auspicious literary occasions occurred on 18 October and this is what I found:

1831: William Blake's wife Catherine died at their house in Fitzroy Square, four years after his death. She reportedly 'called continuously to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now'...

1855: Franz Liszt's Prometheus premiered. Yes it's music but he composed it as a 'symphonic poem' - a piece of orchestral music in which the content of a poem is evoked - based on the Greek myth Prometheus.

1859: Henri Bergson was born, French philosopher and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1927) for The Creative Evolution. Bergson must have had an eye for literary genes, he married a cousin of Marcel Proust.

1869: Henrik Ibsen's De Ungers Forbund (The League of Youth) premiered in Christiania, the city now known as Oslo. The story of a young political idealist who mounts an election campaign in a small Norwegian town became one of Norway's most popular comedic 19th century plays.

1910: E.M. Forster published Howard's End, the classic tale of class conflicts in Edwardian England, considered along with Passage to India to be his finest work.

1967: Walt Disney releases the animated film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

So for a birthday wish, a few lines from Blake, who believed that a bigger force than himself worked through him. He held the pen, the graver or the brush. He was its agent, never its master, the possessed rather than the possessor... 

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

  - William Blake

Picture courtesy of artist Madeleine Stamer at Little Birdsville.

Mooove over desk chair

My cowch arrived back from its revamp this weekend.

Favourite chair for writing.

Love love love!

Tasting plate

Howard Jacobson is all over the internet thanks to his surprise win in the 2010 Man Booker Prize with The Finkler Question, sold out now at a bookstore near you.
So is Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa. He sounds like an interesting dude (among others he wrote The Bad Girl, based on Madame Bovary, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). Bookforum.com has compiled a swag of interviews and info about him from NPR, LRB, Paris Review and The Guardian.
America is abuzz with the announcement of finalists in the National Book Award and the name causing most of the commotion is Jonathan Franzen, whose mega-selling Freedom didn't make the list. Peter Carey did - go figure.
Berkelouw has a flash new website.
And, it's Friday! Which means tomorrow is Saturday - when my favourite writing chair will arrive fresh from being restored after an unfortunate * ahem * reclining incident...
Happy weekend :)

Miner gets his comeuppance

Amazing story of the rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped in a sweaty subterranean chamber deep underground for 69 days. Hollywood loves this stuff. For the writer, the individual human stories behind the collective heroics spawn myriad tales...
No doubt a certain Yoni Barrios - he whose affair was exposed when two women appeared in a panic holeside when the disaster occurred - is being courted by storytellers the world over after being lifted from the vault overnight.
Reports dispute the identity of the person who met Barrios upon his retrieval, the 'unnamed' woman rumoured to be his sister or perhaps his girlfriend. His wife chose to stay away. 
In stories of human frailty we often find some temporary solace for our own tendency to err. 
And so the juiciness begins. Start talking Senor... your underground prison may turn out to have been paradise compared to this...

Farewell La Stupenda

A small note on the passing of a monumental talent. 
Dame Joan Sutherland has died. 
Pavarotti once called Dame Joan 'the voice of the century' and Montserrat Caballé described her voice as being 'like heaven'.
As the SMH reports today: 'Her influence extended well beyond the opera world and reached into popular culture.'
I never heard her sing on stage, but even to a kid like me growing up in 1970s'/80s' Australia, Joan Sutherland was larger than life. 
In fourth class at school we were required to write a poem about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I distinctly remember my first verse. 
With apologies to Dame Joan, who shall be lauded in far worthier encomiums than this, herewith the tribute from my then-nine-year-old self...:


I'd like to sing the opera
Performing every night
Dressing up and singing songs
For everyone's delight.
Like Joan Sutherland, 
she has a lovely voice
Only I would be thinner, 
if I had a choice.


Vale La Stupenda.

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.

Wearable words

Cool idea for the literary minded aesthete. These pieces were part of a jewellery exhibition in San Diego in September - Letters + Words - at Taboo Studio. Love the vintage paper bracelet, and the necklace made from paper, cultured pearls and sterling silver. And you can't wear them but you can sit on one - high back chairs made from recycled aluminium highway signs. 

Vintage mags from Comptoir de L'image

More from the fabulous Comptoir de L'image... Besides the beat poets I found two brilliant cultural icons from my youth...
A stack of Interview magazines and an equally impressive trove of vintage Vogue.
Interview coloured our lives in my teens - took my friend T and I out of boarding school bounds and into the exotic world of 1980s American art, film, fashion, music, culture - Isabella Rossellini, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Cyndi Lauper - the cover art was always fantastic and so different from the drudgery of Dolly and friends on the shelves at the good ole Wahroonga Franklins...
And then there was Vogue.... there's something about the vintage editions that lifts them to a time so much more glamorous than the current. Maybe it's the original artwork, the timelessness of the models and Hollywood icons of old school cinema, the lack of ads and mass consumer chain store rip offs...
Resisted the temptation to lug them all home but did content myself with a cover print from French Vogue, 1 June 1921... I wonder if, in 90 years' time, someone will hang the Oct 2010 cover on their wall?

Synchronicity... oui!

Some may call it coincidence but I say it's synchronicity all the way... I've mentioned it a few times here - 5 February On Rivers comes to mind. So sit back and enjoy this tale of synchronicity and serendipity...

On the 10th of June 2010 I came across a photographic exhibition that was on in Washington DC - Allan Ginsberg's personal snapshots of his beat poet friends. Wow, I would have loved to have seen that.

On the 27th of June, planning a then-imminent trip to France, I blogged about a second hand bookstore Comptoir de l'image that was on my 'non-negotiable drop-ins' list for Paris.

On the 17th of July I walked into said bookstore and the first, the first, book I saw sitting on top of a pile waist high blocking my tracks was:..... the book from the Ginsberg exhibition! Aah... It had my name written all over it. 

So here it is. And what a find. The photos are a fascinating - somewhat voyeuristic - insight into the lives of the beat poets. (Yes that is Lou Reed, second photo from top, left.) Love the handwritten captions beneath each image too. And of course, there's Jack.

Talk fest

Two renowned writers televised from the Sydney Opera House in two days. A veritable feast of erudition. Stephen Fry and Tariq Ali. 
Stephen Fry. Polymath, writer, TV host, blogger, Twitterer and progenitor of a million other projects, was in Sydney to talk about language and his five Ws: Waugh, Wodehouse, Wilde, words and writing. 
Best bits:
His ability to not only quote ad nauseum from the three of his Ws who wrote before him, but also to continually demonstrate their relevance.
His quips. Peppering his conversation with admissions such as having three attributes which would render him infallible in Hollywood: gay, Jewish and bi-polar.
And his ENORMOUS brain. 
Just a pity he didn't bring along that Alan bloke from QI, he's a crackup.
Tariq Ali, who was a guest of the Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and whose latest tome is The Obama Syndrome, is a serious brainiac. I haven't read any of his books but I have read some of his editorials and opinion pieces - enough to know that I'm not qualified to comment on his commentary... Instead a couple of observations from tonight's show where he was the stand out panelist:
Ali knows more about Australia's foreign policy than KRudd.
He has a great voice and an impeccable turn of phrase - especially for an academic, eg - 'he made a nutty speech'. ...that comment was funny at the time. Maybe it was the accent.
Best call of the night goes to his opinion on the euthanasia bill debate: 
'In the short term we should have an experimental phase whereby we restrict euthanasia to politicians.'
QandA watchers now all aTwitter debating who should kickstart said trial...

Read

Cool shot from Bookshelf Porn.

Book bloopers

My brother T picked out this print for me at a market recently. He definitely got the shopping gene that one. 

Anyhow, it's a classic example of the perils of a disconnect between writer and illustrator...haha! Click on the image to read the text.