Lots of questions today:

• Can bookstores compete by combining traditional strengths with innovations? : Is the answer really as easy as Espresso Book Machines?
• Does reading fiction make you more empathetic? : An Ohio State study finds readers can be more sympathetic to others who are different from themselves
• Is most human discourse plagiarism? : Let’s ask Mark Twain
• What would happen if Maurice Sendakcollaborated with Tony Kushner? : Might some prints remain to be published?
• What did Jorge Luis Borges sound like when he lectured? : This fellow had a lot to say
• What is the future of book publishing? : “The bottom line is it’s a mess and everybody’s worried.”

Duly quoted (Mother’s Day weekend edition):

• “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.”  – James Joyce
• “Mothers are all slightly insane.” — J.D. Salinger
• “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.” – Marguerite Duras
• “David Stern should get with the mothers of the NBA and let the moms decide what the dress code should be. I asked my mother if I could wear a chain, and she told me yeah.” – Shaquille O’Neal

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Friday Roundup: Links for May 11

llama, chamay culture, earthenware, 1000-1470

The Walters Art Museum has donated some 19,000 images of works from their collections to Wikimedia. They are among the museums — another is the Getty — who reject the spurious claim of some institutions that they can control the copyright on works that are hundreds of years old. In 2006 they removed admission fees. In 2011 they made 20,000 images available on their website through a Creative Commons license. I endorse this attitude, which promotes the free exchange of ideas and furthers the institution’s educational mission in a dramatic and effective way.

*

via artdaily.org

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Bravo, Walters!

Nice. I’m guessing not many patrons have difficulty finding the library.

(via viahouse.com)

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Kansas City Public Library

• Top five regrets of the dying : “Wish I’d spent more time at the office” not on the list
• Supermoon tomorrow : it’s a big ‘un
• Have book publishers lost the war? : Let’s ask Eoin Purcell
• Launching a successful blog tour : One author’s experience
• Should you check your e-mail now? : Probably not.

Duly Quoted

• “I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public.”
  – Herman Cain, explaining the political gender gap

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Friday roundup: links for May 4

The Font Shop plug-in allows trying before buying. According to the FS webpage, “The FontShop Plugin Beta allows designers and other type enthusiasts to try out FontShop fonts directly inside Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 and CS5.5. You can preview any of the over 150,000 FontShop fonts for free, in the context of your own artwork. This is a great new way to find the perfect typographic fit for your project.”

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Font Shop plug-in

Gotta say, this is purrty well done. More like this over at Bombi(llo).

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Cats as typefaces

This curious image, shamelessly copied from Peacay’s excellent Bibliodyssey, is one of several similar images from a 36-page manuscript said to date from the sixteenth century. The provenance and attribution of this work are a bit mysterious. There was great interest in regular geometric solids during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was thought that in them was hidden God’s secret design for the universe. Such thinking derived from the ancient lineage of Pythagoreanism.

One researcher who explored this direction in depth, as described in my 1616: The World in Motion, was Johannes Kepler, who in the early seventeenth century produced this somewhat similar diagram of a “cosmic cup” in which all of the regular solids are embedded together (Kepler persuaded the eastern Habsburg emperor Rudolf to commission royal metal workers to construct such a cup, though the efforts came to nothing):

The image reproduced at Bibliodyssey is curious for its lack of context and its early date. As a philosophical/mathematical model it is much less rigorous than Kepler’s version and seems as much the result of private symbolism as of mathematics. Some of the images from the manuscript have something of the quality of origami, which is certainly out of the mainstream even of esoterica, so to speak. I would hazard the guess that the author of this work might have been a forerunner of Rosicrucianism (notice the three-dimensional cross in the center of the image, which has some of the vocabulary of alchemy). If I can learn more about the manuscript I will share what I find out.

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A manuscript of geometric solids

Meg Wolitzer raised the issue at the New York Times. Emily Temple at Flavorwire followed up with a sampling of book covers. These authors focus on supposed typographical differences between books by male and female authors. From the Flavorwire sample it looks to me like color and tone might be at least as significant. Is this just random? What do you think?

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Different covers for books by male and female writers?

Cleveland Plain Dealer (March 29, 2012)
“Thomas Christensen’s 1616 is a delight, an adventure, a reading and visual treat of the first order. Once you hold it in your hands, and the sumptuous, well-chosen illustrations fall open, its $35 pricetag will seem like a bargain.”

Maclean’s Magazine (Canada; April 2, 2012 issue)
” Where Christensen shines … is in his tales of individuals incongruently ricocheting around this newly opened world.”

East Bay Express (March 21, 2012)
” A swashbuckling, stargazing, witchcrafty, ’round-the-world-in-three-hundred-plus-pages historical adventure disguised as an art book, 1616: The World in Motion is simply dazzling.”

San Jose Mercury News (March 3, 2012)
“This thoughtful, beautifully illustrated book examines the key events in art, science, war and politics, as well as mass migrations, new modes of trade and women’s emerging roles.“

ForeWord Magazine (Spring 2012 issue)
A “fresh, deeply researched and thoughtfully composed window back in time.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review, December 12, 2011; also named one of PW‘s top ten history books for the season)
“A stunning overview of the nascent modern world through a thematic exploration of the year 1616.”

Kirkus Reviews (November 15, 2011)
” Well-researched and entertaining … a unique reading experience.”

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1616 review recap

RIP Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922–February 21, 2012), publisher of Grove Press and Evergreen Review.

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Barney Rosset

Earlier I talked about creating a landing page for my book 1616. At that time I just put together a quick image map with hot spots for links. But this meant the text was an image, which meant it was neither very editable nor very googleable. In addition, I thought the middle column was a bit too thin and the type too small. So I’ve redone the page as CSS. I’ve also included a new link to an e-mail newsletter that I intend to send out every couple of months or so. You can sign up for it here.

If anything on the landing page seems amiss please let me know.

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1616 landing page updated

You find some funny things in your gmail spam folder sometimes. Google seems to think this e-mail is spam.

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Google on Google

Counterpoint went to more expense and trouble on the production of this book than I expected, beginning with color throughout, which was a little surprising as this is a book intended for the trade and not a museum catalogue or art book per se. The book has nice chocolate-colored boards and a red and yellow headband. The 7¼ x 10 in. trim size makes it a little bigger than a standard trade book (often 5½ x 8½ or 6 x 9) but not so big as books intended mainly for the art market (which are often 9 x 12 or larger).

The front cover and spine are stamped with gold stamping (a little washed out here by my flash).

There are colored ensheets front and back. The image is a pair of Japanese screens (one shown above the other one) from the period covered in the book. Together these happen to fit the dimensions of the book perfectly, and they represent some of the best geographical knowledge of the time.

The book is well bound with sewn bindings so that it lies flat when opened.

All things considered, the art is nicely produced on 128 gsm matte paper with good opacity.

All in all, a nice piece of work, and for now attractively priced at $35.

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Living in the material world

I made this little sign for my office. I thought it might come in handy.

This marker goes with it:

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Errorist alert

As Presidents Day approaches, it is worth recalling one of our nation’s finest moments.

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The Gettysburg PowerPoint

Remember the buzz about Google Plus when it launched? It was a nice bump while it lasted. But I think it’s safe to say it hasn’t sustained itself. My #OccupyXmas piece over at Salon.com has had 504 Facebook likes since it went up a day and a half ago. How many Google +1s has it had? 18 — a little over 3 percent as many. I’d say the ball is in Google’s court. They’d better come up with a new feature, or this game is over.

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Google Plus versus Facebook: Where things stand today

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Give the headline writer a raise

 1616: The World in Motion

More about:

• Thomas Christensen
• 978-1-58243-774-3
• Counterpoint LLC

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Stunning, excellent, fabulous

In some respects this seems the oddest angle to take on Galileo and his work. It is true he never saw himself as undermining religion. His case was more an expression of internal politics within the church itself than any kind of assault on it. Still, the church — let’s just say it — came down squarely on the wrong side of this one, and that reflects badly on it. Nonetheless, the argument continues to this day, as this review of a recent biography indicates.

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Seeking the man behind science’s champion

I was thinking the other day about how my color preferences have changed over time, and that got me looking at a few pop psychology websites about color preferences.

The basic problem with these sites is that there are particular hues and then there are their concepts. So if a site asks you to rank your preferences by clicking on color swatches, you might say, “I like red, but I don’t like that red. Whereas if you are asked to quickly name your favorite color without thinking about it and you name red, you are most likely thinking of the concept of redness rather than of a particular hue.

Of course the notion of a favorite color is ultimately absurd. Red would be meaningless without all of the other colors to juxtapose with it. From the designer’s point of view, colors take meaning from how they are used in relation to other elements.

But as a sort of amusing parlor game it can be interesting to wonder about why one’s preferences change. As a child if you asked my favorite color I would have said blue — that’s the color I usually picked when choosing board game tokens, for example. As a young adult I would probably have given you a lecture about color philosophy and how existence precedes essence and why that is relevant to de Saussurian linguistics, but if (quite justifiably) hit over the head and forced to pick I would have said yellow. Now I find myself increasingly drawn to green, and when I go clothes shopping I often wish there were more greens offered (there are few).

I noticed that there is a great deal of disagreement on the various sites about what your color preferences “mean.” According to one representative site, a preference for blue reflects a conservative, reliable, sincere, trusting, and trustworthy personality; a preference for yellow a cheerful, fun, creative, and analytical bent; and a predilection for green a practical, down-to-earth, stable, balanced, compassionate, and calm nature. Sure.

A few years ago I read a couple of erudite books on color in art by John Gage, former head of the Department of History of Art at Cambridge University. Gage looked at color from a variety of different disciplines. I found his surveys interesting, but I find I have retained little of what I read in his books. It’s probably because I favor the wrong colors.

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Color psychology