Archive | Bibliophile

ebb and flow

By Erasergirl on July 6, 2012 in Bibliophile, books

I started working on my apartment by zone last night…i started with the easy parts, the bathroom which i had classified as three zones..and a couple of the zones in the kitchen including washing the floor yea i had a bunch of redbull yesterday. It was my reward for doing all this..i just got to drink it first.
anyway, this morning i worked on three sections along the bedroom wall..these bookcases and and the larger one below. After going through the bookcase and touching every book… i ended up pulling perhaps 10 off the shelf and tossing them into the get rid of box..but then i sat down at the computer and order two more ..(one is a copy Freedom for the Thought That We Hate a biography of the first amendment by Anthony Lewis that i have to return to the library…and the other is a gift copy of Confronting Suburban Decline for the Mayor’s office..it’s usually an expensive text so i have been keeping an eye out for cheap copy – cause i don’t want to give them mine.

Yeah I know buying more books seriously defeats the purpose and ONLY pulling about 10 books is not in the spirit of the whole fifty percent target. I still may make another pass and pull another 4 or 5. But for the most part, i’d rather get rid of clothing or canned goods than my books. But as long as I go through the shelves every year or so and pull those that i no longer have any affection for.

BTW don’t look for a theme on these shelves..there isn’t one …it start off as new acquisitions but ended up being books for which i don’t have another place to store them. Actually strike that..i figured it out…it is new acquisitions combined with books i could easily reread .. about half and half…so if i am looking for something to read it usually comes off this shelf..and if i buy anything else it goes on these shelves..somewhere.

sniffed out a solution

By Erasergirl on November 13, 2011 in Bibliophile, books, gadgets, humor

Send Later 3 extension for the Thunderbird email. Send Later does exactly what it is supposed to do, schedule emails so that they are send out at a later point in time. You have two options. It can highjack the Send button to display a send later menu on every send, or be used via buttons that need to be placed on one of the available composition toolbars.The computer has to be on and Thunderbird has to be running for it to work …damn…close but so far away…. I supposed it doesn’t really matter as long as it comes in the inbox once a day..but some days i don’t turn on the big computer just the laptop. still looking for a more automated option.

AHA! Why is it when you start looking for something you think is going to be hard to find…it ends up being right under your nose? and then you feel like a schmuck. I have a number of domains and emails with Godaddy I don’t know about anyone else but I have always been quite happy with their service..and shockingly I only become more enamored of it when I discover something else about them. Well their email client interface HAS a scheduling function, so i can schedule an email to be sent to myself from my own account whenever the hell I want. So it looks like I will be able to tackle Dickens after all. Unless something else happens that proves me wrong, again.

But first I have to finish Diary of a Nobody of Grossmith a classic comedic novel punch Punch in 1888 – 89, and printed in book form in 1892. I can only read Three Men in a Boat only so many times.

Constant Comment.

By Erasergirl on January 5, 2010 in Bibliophile

It’s cold, I’m cold. I am wearing both pairs of woolen socks. I need me some Bob Cratchit gloves. The thermostat is right in front of my desk, but i have vowed NOT to touch it until I turn it off in spring. I owe the gas company my soul now, I shudder (or is that shiver) to think of what they will take from me after that.

Damn few customers this time of year…good time of year to revamp websites…I did the Animal Rescue site over Christmas and Sicpress.com over New Years. I suppose one of the reasons people do inventory about now is that no one’s buying anything and hence you have no money to lay in stock, and the inventory counts are teetering on single digits.

I had intended to take the office and the workshop apart and swap rooms, but when i think of it I want to lie down until the thought goes away. Instead I took the time to do a thorough cleaning of my hard drives, they are both nearly full since I have been too lazy to replace them with larger ones. Deleting duplicate and unused files didn’t actually free up that much space since I do that several times a year anyway.

Until the weather changes in the living room, I will just have to be content with curling as much of my body as possible around a cup of Constant Comment.

stuffing

By Erasergirl on December 17, 2009 in Bibliophile, opinion

outdoorworld1 Well I got my bag o’nuts in the post and my new bartending certification in my wallet . . . . and celebrated my 47th birthday with friends wandering around a redneck mecca called Outdoor World. Trust me if you get the chance GO there, it’s a more ridiculous afternoon than mocking people at Walmart. I swear, there are more animal corpses in that one store than live ones in my entire town.

Famous Monsters of Filmland lives again

By Erasergirl on December 9, 2009 in Bibliophile

Press release from IDW PUBLISHING:

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the classic sci-fi/horror/fantasy-specific film magazine that captured the imaginations of so many for more than three decades, today announced its return to print. FM has partnered with IDW Publishing, responsible for hit comic book titles such as 30 Days of Night, Angel, Transformers, and Locke & Key, to bring this new incarnation of the magazine to life. The new Famous Monsters magazine will begin its run on a quarterly basis starting in summer 2010, and will be available in major book retailers, comic stores, and online at famousmonsters.com.

Originally launched in 1958, Famous Monsters of Filmland was one of the first magazines to take readers behind-the-scenes of some of the most popular movies of present and past. Pulling the curtain back on the filmmaking process, the magazine became a lightning rod for legions of young fans, sparking the minds and hearts of future storytellers such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro, Stephen King, and John Landis. Under the guidance of beloved editor-in-chief Forrest J Ackerman, credited with nurturing and even inspiring the careers of early contemporaries such as Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and L. Ron Hubbard, the magazine brought monsters to life and made household names out of writers, directors, creature designers, FX artists, and monster makeup technicians.

Editorial duties for the magazine will be handled by Michael Heisler, a veteran of the comic book industry for over 20 years, with experience logged at Marvel Comics, WildStorm Productions and IDW itself. “FM was far and away my favorite magazine when I was a kid, and there has been nothing quite like it since,” said Heisler. “Our goal is to update that magic for a modern audience, with coverage of current horror in all its forms, while continuing to pay tribute to the classic films that started it all. Personally, I’m thrilled to be taking this step down the road that Forry Ackerman and ‘Chilly Billy’ Cardille put me on so many years ago.”

The Private Library: Teeny, Tiny Books

By Erasergirl on December 5, 2009 in Bibliophile

From the Private Library Blog

Running out of shelf space in your private library? Maybe you need to collect smaller books….

Miniature books, commonly defined as books smaller than 3″ x 3″ (76.20 mm x 76.20 mm) in width and height, don’t get a lot of respect from many book collectors, an unfortunate circumstance since the printing of such books often requires more skill than is required for printing the typical book in the marketplace. In fact, printing such books requires so much skill that [d]uring the first centuries of printing, miniature books presented challenges to apprentices in the printing trades. Exercises in setting small types and binding diminutive volumes were instrumental in learning the profession.

Such tiny books were more popular in centuries past partly because they were easily carried or concealed (an especially important consideration if one was fleeing from religious persecution). This accounts for the numerous thumb Bibles(paraphrases prepared chiefly for children) and miniature Bibles that one occasionally still finds available at major auctions:

(continue reading)

some fridays are worth the wait

By Erasergirl on November 6, 2009 in Bibliophile

I spent thursday churning out a large order for a special customer…well technically it took all week and as profitable as it was – it’s all spent every penny on frivolous things like insurance and utilities. But after I had washed my hands of the entire thing and before I wrote the 1st check, I celebrated with a trip to McIntyre and Moore in Cambridge. Granted the shop has changed locations more times than Nathan Detroit’s crap game, and has even changed hands…for me there is ALWAYS something to buy.
‘

I wasn’t looking for anything to resell just books for myself and I kinda had to stop after an hour or so, because the longer I looked, the taller my pile became. (M&M likes that, they give discounts on the height of your book stack…no shit.)

I came away with much to read:

A Great Idea at the Time by local boy Beam is the history of the Great Books series; The WPA Guides: Mapping America…the history of the WPA Guidebook series; Writers, Plumbers and Anarchists: the WPA writer’s project in Mass; Swindler, Spy, Rebel: the Confidence woman in 19th century America; a contemporary travel book about a guy who rode from Turkey to Wales on horseback; and a UK travel book that follows the BBC shipping forecast route…I kid you not; and a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1973 monograph on Witches, Midwives and Nurses. [the copy of McCaffrey’s Hound came in the mail from Old Bag Lady books] . So all in all it was a good day for the pile on my sideboard.

just along for the ride

By Erasergirl on October 23, 2009 in Bibliophile, local

I wish I had staged that shot..but nope…..the cat sauntered out of one yard across the road in front of me and into another yard. When the universe does that to you all you can do is sit there and watch your life unfold.

I’ve been watching a lot of other people’s lives lately…the spaghetti and bean feasts, the fleas and forums etc . . i shot images of a town hall forum the other night and if you eliminate the pols and the journos i didn’t know anyone else in the room.

Life looks different through the camera lens . . . i am still uncomfortable shooting humans..with a camera…i spent 20 years shooting things that don’t ask you why. …i watched the ‘real’ news photographer fly about the room like a hungry hummingbird – perhaps one day i will be less self conscious.

irony ain't dead…just a bit snarky

By Erasergirl on October 22, 2009 in Bibliophile

isn’t that the most beautiful thing you ever saw? to me it looks like puppies and kittens dipped in chocolate…

Technically she is called a percontation point – a ‘rhetorical question mark’. . . an irony mark also called a snark or zing. Created by Henry Denham in the 1580s, it pops up in literature every century or so, but never really caught on.

I can’t be the only person who thinks that is a terrible fate for such an incredibly useful invention. I’m gonna make it my mission in life to use this sticky puppy as much and as often as I can.

Let’s take back the snark people, we need her, we live in an age where irony is pretty much a contact sport. I may even get it tattooed somewhere. What do you think؟