Interesting!

Great blog about "BooksIllustrationsScienceHistoryVisual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart." Some really funky old stuff!

British History Online found some great old books and scanned them: "Old and New London" (Thornbury & Walford) - Surveys London and Westminster and their environs (6 volumes, 1878).

Salon: Looking for the best novel about Zimbabwe? Or just want to take a virtual trip to Martha's Vineyard? On this literary journey, everything is first-class.

"Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usuallly within the week of release."

"Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book

Nice stuff at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Catalog your books online or use the site to find tagged books on something like "magical realism

"Part of a collaborative project to gather ambient sounds from locations mentioned in Kerouac's "On the Road" in order to create a sonic portrait of the big cities, small towns, backwoods, deserts and mountains that Kerouac visited and wrote about. Feel free to record and contribute your own and become part of the musicircus." Via Metafilter

A fun new way to read and write novels

Bookmark this! There is more to come.

The British Library just added "Alice in Wonderland" and 13 other rare manuscripts to the 'Turning the Pages' collection. Other works include the Diamond Sutra and the Leonardo Notebook."

Browse here..

The author of books like The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay started a nice new website. There is an interesting essay called A Yiddish Pale Fire

The new mag by Darren Smith and Illustrator Markus C. Roessler is out. "Tales from the Transdimensional Horror Express" is a bilingual quarterly in German and English.

A tribute to the author...

Accoutrements brought you Sigmund Freud, that infamous action figure of Jesus, good old Albert Einstein and this doll called Fuzzy which looks like that Osborne-brat.. But the real thing is The Librarian, based on Nacy Pearl, author of "Book Lust". No bookshop can be without this one!

"Librarian Dolls Defend The Nation!" "Librarian Dolls Defend The Nation!" - story by Tanya Angell Allen at Chicklit.com, a fine site for chicks who read books.

Telepolis has something to say about Gary Wolf's book Wired - A Romance, the story of the most influential magazine of the 90s.. The introduction and the first chapter can be read online in Wolf's weblog.

Wired ran a story on Dennis Hensley's Virtual Book Tour (VBT) through various weblogs. Interesting idea!

"This glossy trade paperback reprints the full two Baker Street graphic novel arcs, some single standaalone issues and some never-seen-before illustrations.

The idea behind Baker Street is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in a world where WWI wasn't as devastating, where WWII never happened. The Victorian Age hasn't really died, and the technology isn't really up to the our present day standards. Most of all, the punk and gothic movement are in full swing, creating a subculture that clashes against the Victorian world they all live in, and Baker Street is in the centre of it."

From a review by Cindy Lynn Speer at sfsite.com

This is one of the finest stories of weird alternative history ever done and also a refreshing take on Sherlock Holmes. Ok, it's a comic, but Davis and Reed produced a book that appeals to fans of mystery, fantasy and rockmusic at the same time. The mix of references to the real world and the works of Arthur Conan Doyle works perfectly. It rolls the various elements into a completely original universe and tickles the mind with smart storytelling and great moments of suspense. Baker Street is highly recommended and it's been about time the paperback came out after having been in the making forever.

"Guy Davis is a self-taught writer/illustrator who has worked in the comics industry for over 17 years. He was the long-running artist on Sandman Mystery Theater with Matt Wagner and Steve Sagle for DC/vertigo. He designed and illustrated the Nevermen series for Dark Horse Comics and most recently worked as the artist on the Marvel series Deadline. He is currently working on his second creator-owned book, The Marquis.

Gary Reed was the publisher of Caliber Press, a specialty publisher of comics and books that released 1,500 issues in the 1990s. In addition to serving as President of Caliber, Gary was also publisher of Stabur Graphics and Vice President of McFarlane Toys during the inaugural launch of that company. He has written over 200 comics and books, including Baker Street, Renfield, Saint Germaine, Raven Chronicles, and others."

Taken from the description at amazon.com

"Four parents of Science Academy sophomores are determined to protect their children. From books.

The board of directors for the South Texas Independent School District is expected to decide tonight whether to ban two books — Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" and Robert Heinlein’s "Stranger in a Strange Land" — from the high school’s 10th grade English advanced placement curriculum. The books, part of the class’ summer reading list, may lead to "inappropriate sexual arousal of young teens," parent Julie Wilde wrote in her complaint to the district.

"We feel this is inappropriate for the ages of the students at (the) Science Academy or at any South Texas ISD High School," she continued in her letter, specifically citing "Brave New World."

"This is pornographic literature and we do not feel it has a place in any school funded by taxpayer dollars."

full story in the Valley Morning Star