Friday, May 18th, 2012

Free accounts for bookseller reference libraries!

A good reference library is a must-have for any bookseller, but having a wide range of useful reference sources at hand is particularly necessary for the booksellers who operate at the used/rare/antiquarian end of the spectrum. If you’ve ever had a chance to browse through a really good bookseller reference library, you’ll know immediately what I’m talking about (and, like me, you’ve probably had to be practically dragged away from the shelves).

Brooke Palmieri, a bookseller at Sokol Books, Ltd. in London (read a profile of Brooke from the Fine Books Blog’s “Bright Young Things” series here, or check out her excellent blog, 8vo), has been cataloging Sokol’s reference library on LibraryThing (Sokol_Books_Ltd), and that got me thinking about ways we might be able to encourage other booksellers to use LibraryThing for their reference collections. A good first step: free accounts for everyone!

So, as of today, we’re offering free lifetime LibraryThing memberships to booksellers who are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ABA), Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) or the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB)!*

Just open an organizational account on LibraryThing and email me (jeremy@librarything.com) with the username you choose, and I’ll upgrade it to lifetime status. You commit to adding your reference library to LibraryThing. It doesn’t have to be immediately, of course; booksellers are some of the busiest people I know! You’ll have a useful catalog of your reference books, and the world will be able to (virtually) browse your shelves. And if you want a hand cataloging, let me know that too – we can almost certainly pull together a merry band of LibraryThing volunteers to come help sometime (and, ahem, do some shopping too!).

Huge thanks to Brooke for providing the impetus for this, and for the picture (a portion of the Sokol Books collection). She noted on Twitter this morning that the reason she started cataloging on LT was that the library “isn’t consistently organized & I when I first started working I needed to learn its contents FAST. I have heard horror stories of firms owning multiple copies of expensive bibliographies because their libraries are disorganized … so cataloguing a ref library saves 1) time 2) money 3) teaching other employees what you have committed to muscle memory.” If we can help at all with any of that, we’re happy to!

Mmm, bookstores. For more ways to use LT, see our How Bookstores Can Use LibraryThing page.


* If you’re a bookseller and not a member of those assocations, but have a large reference library you want to catalog on LibraryThing, just email me; we’ll make it work.

Labels: booksellers, bookstores, references

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Edible Book Contest winners!

Thanks to everyone who entered our first virtual Edible Books Contest! We were delighted at the number and range of entries, and I think we’ll plan to do it again next year! Check out all of the entries in the gallery.

Without further ado, your winners …

The grand prize goes to TheCriticalTimes for this edible version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, made of sponge cake and edible paper, complete with fondant Kraken.

Along with the honor and fame, TheCriticalTimes wins an LT t-shirt, stamp, and sticker, plus a CueCat and three lifetime gift memberships to LibraryThing!

We picked two runners-up: both will win their choice of an LT t-shirt, stamp, or CueCat, plus two lifetime gift memberships. The runners-up are Unexpected, for “The Luggage,” from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (chocolate cake with marzipan and “lots of little pink icing feet”) and mellu for this take on Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman, made of marzipan (with a real carrot nose!).

We also chose a couple of Honorable Mention winners; each will receive a lifetime gift membership. These are infomagnet for War and Pizza, and exlibrislady for the delicious-sounding (and looking!) Gregor and the Apple (“a crunchy peanut butter mousse covered in a hard chocolate shell on caramel feet. The plate is garnished with raspberry coulis and a single apple crisp. It must be eaten in a grey, bleak building while the rain falls dispassionately outside”).

I’ll be contacting the winners to claim their prizes.

Congratulations to our winners, thanks again to all the entrants, and watch for an announcement next spring for our second Edible Books contest!

Labels: contest, contests, fun

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

Harvard University’s 12 million records now in LibraryThing

Short version. Our “Overcat” search now includes 12.3 million records from Harvard University!

Long version. On April 24 the Harvard Library announced that more than 12 million MARC records from across its 73 libraries would be made available under the library’s Open Metadata policy and a Creative Commons 0 public domain license. The announcement stunned the library world, because Harvard went against the wishes of the shared-cataloging company OCLC, who have long sought to prevent libraries from releasing records in this way. (For background on OCLC’s efforts see past blog posts.)

It took a while to process, but we’ve finally completed adding all 12.3 million MARC records (3.1GB of bibliographic goodness!) to LibraryThing. They’ve gone into OverCat, our giant index of library records from around the world—now numbering more than 51 million records! As a result, when searching OverCat under “Add books,” you’ll now see results “from Harvard OpenMetadata.”

This release (“big data for books,” as David Weinberger calls it) is, to put it mildly, a Very Big Deal. Harvard’s collections are both deep and broad, covering a wide variety of languages, fields, and formats. The addition of these 12 million records to OverCat has significantly improved our capacity for the cataloging of scholarly and rare books, and greatly enhanced our coverage generally.

Kudos to Harvard for making this metadata available, and we hope that other libraries will follow suit.

For more on the metadata release, see Quentin Hardy’s New York Times blog post, the Dataset description, or the Open Metadata FAQ. And happy cataloging!

Come discuss here.


Harvard requests and we’re happy to add: The “Harvard University Open Metadata” records in OverCat contain information from the Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset, which is provided by the Harvard Library under its Bibliographic Dataset Use Terms and includes data made available by, among others, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the Library of Congress.

Labels: cataloging, open data

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

Summer internship at LibraryThing

Will you be around Portland, Maine this summer? Are you interested in libraries, programming, or website design? LibraryThing’s looking for a local intern (or two) to work on a variety of projects for us. Depending on your interests and skills, we may have you work on programming or design for LibraryThing.com; we’d also be interested in having some help on various Legacy Library projects, so if you have an interest in historical libraries and bibliography, we’d love to hear from you too!

Potential internship opportunities:

  • LibraryThing.com programmer. Build a new feature (or improve an existing one) for LibraryThing.
  • Designer-developer. Help LibraryThing plan its future look.
  • Legacy Libraries researcher/cataloger. Assist with research, cataloging and maintenance of the Legacy Libraries.

Skills

  • Programming. LibraryThing is made with PHP, mostly in non-OO code. We also use JavaScript and MySQL.
  • Design. The standard software and a keen eye.
  • Legacy Libraries, we’re looking for someone with an interest in library history and bibliographic description. You don’t need to have the programming and design skills mentioned above, but a familiarity with bibliographic databases and rare books is a must.
  • Bonus. Familiarity with LibraryThing itself would be extremely helpful.

Intangibles

  • We like to hire people who care about books and libraries, and believe in a open and humane vision of the future for both. We live to create technologies that make readers happy and keep libraries vital.
  • LibraryThing is an informal, high-pressure and high-energy environment. Programming is rapid, creative and unencumbered by process. We put a premium on speed and reliability, communication and responsibility.

Location

LibraryThing is headquartered in Portland, Maine. For these internships we’re looking for people who can be in the office regularly.

Compensation & Schedule

We’ll pay—minimum wage, but we’ll pay! We’ll work with you to come up with a suitable schedule for the summer, but ideally we’d like you to commit to about a month with us.

How to apply

Send an email and resume to jeremy@librarything.com. Instead of a cover letter, go through this blog post in your email, responding to it, especially the skills and intangibles part, and suggest some ways you could be useful or projects you’d love to work on. Include your availability for the summer months (June, July, August).

Labels: jobs

Monday, May 7th, 2012

May Early Reviewers batch is up!

The May 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 100 books this month, and a grand total of 2,841 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Tuesday, May 29th at 6 p.m. EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Taylor Trade Publishing Akashic Books Henry Holt and Company
Riverhead Books Lake Claremont Press Ballantine Books
Wilderness Press Ashland Creek Press Doubleday Books
Tundra Books South Dakota State Historical Society Press Random House
The Permanent Press Small Beer Press St. Martin’s Griffin
Exterminating Angel Press Touchstone Books Random House Canada
JournalStone Eerdmans Books for Young Readers Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Kayelle Press Random House Trade Paperbacks Putnam Books
Human Kinetics Heathrow Books William Morrow
Archipelago Books Talonbooks Leafwood Publishers
Palgrave Macmillan Safe Harbor Publishing Centrinian Publishing Ltd
BookViewCafe Bellevue Literary Press Quirk Books
McFarland Dragonfairy Press Kensington Publishing
Ingber Spiegel & Grau Stone House Press
Crux Publishing

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Reminder: Edible Books Contest!

Quick reminder: we’ll be accepting new entries for our Edible Books Contest until 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 10.

See the contest announcement for all the details on entries, rules, prize information, etc. Or check out the entries submitted so far in the photo gallery.

Labels: contest, contests, fun

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

April Author Interviews!

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, is on its way to your inbox. You can also read it online. It includes a reminder about our Edible Books Contest and more!

For one of our author interviews this month, I talked to Elizabeth Little about her new book Trip of the Tongue: Cross-Country Travels in Search of America’s Languages, published this month by Walker & Company.

What was the most enjoyable moment in researching Trip of the Tongue? The worst?

My most enjoyable moment was, without a doubt, my first evening in Neah Bay, a tiny town on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I had just spent the past few days with friends in Tacoma, and I was loathe to leave their hospitality for what sounded like an uncomfortably rustic accommodation in the middle of nowhere. But then I discovered that I was staying in a cozy little cabin a stone’s throw away from this windswept gem of beach. That evening I walked along the sand in my bare feet as the sun set. Then I returned to my cabin to drink hot chocolate and read about language. A near-perfect evening.

My least enjoyable moment, on the other hand, was surely when I was in northern Maine, when I got caught in a snowstorm and had to battle all-day morning sickness. There’s a very good reason why that section didn’t make it into the book.

How did you end up deciding which particular languages to highlight in the book? Were there some that just barely didn’t make the cut that you’d like to tell us about?

The languages that made it into the book were those that really challenged my own assumptions about the history of language—or language itself—in the United States. I spent some time in San Francisco, for instance, but my background in Chinese language and culture made for a less than compelling narrative thread. It was a lot of “Oh, yes, I remember reading about that.” (Looking back on things now, I wish I had tried to look at Chinese language and culture in Old West frontier towns. Although that should probably be a book of its own.)

Some other sections had to be set aside because they led me down a very different path than the one I was trying to travel. The chapter that got cut at the very last minute was a chapter that looked at the impact of technological change—very particularly in transportation and manufacturing—on language communities in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit. I loved my time in each of those cities – in Baltimore I met the loveliest and most helpful docent and historian at the city’s Jewish museum; in Cleveland I gorged on paprikash and learned about Hungarian girl scouts; and in Detroit I went to the Ford Rouge Factory, which turned out to be one of my favorite activities on the entire trip. Unfortunately, when I found myself compiling economic paper after economic paper for research purposes, I had to acknowledge that my focus was starting to drift.

In the final chapter of your book, you note that Trip of the Tongue didn’t end up being the book you thought it would be. How did you originally envision it, and how did your travels and experiences change the book into what it is?

At the beginning I envisioned that the book would be more of a romp: road-tripping high jinks with some linguistic data thrown in. What I ended up with, though, is something more like a meditation. On language, on discrimination, on my own preconceived notions. I first got an inkling of this in South Carolina, where I went to learn about Gullah. My very first day in Charleston, I learned about these spikes (called chevaux-de-frise) that some city residents put on their fences in the nineteenth century to protect themselves in the event of a slave rebellion. It was at that point that the desire to write anything resembling a romp died a swift death. The history of race and language and culture in the United States isn’t exactly rich in comedy. (Though I certainly tried to find it where I could.)

But I’m glad that I ended up somewhere very different than I’d intended. Because it’s not much of a journey of discovery if you only learn things you already knew.

Read the rest of our interview with Elizabeth Little.

I also talked to Diana Preston, the author of The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1839-1842, published earlier this year by Walker & Company.

For those who haven’t yet had a chance to read the book, give us a thumbnail synopsis of the First Anglo-Afghan War: how did the conflict come about, how long did it last, and what was the result?

The First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838-42 is one of Britain’s most notorious military catastrophes. The genesis of the war was British suspicion that imperialist and expansionist Russia was planning to advance through Afghanistan to invade India, Britain’s richest and most prized colonial possession. The Afghans resented the British presence, and the invasion was politically controversial at home. Barely two years after the British had occupied Kabul thousands of British and Indian troops, officials and their dependents suddenly found themselves besieged. A disastrous retreat to India under constant attack by the Afghan hill tribes left only one Briton and several Indian soldiers alive. When the news of the disaster reached Britain, it was greeted with anger and the British sent an army of retribution to punish the Afghans. Soon afterwards, the British withdrew from Afghanistan with their puppet king already murdered, allowing Dost Mohammed, who had surrendered to the British and been exiled by them, to return. The entire enterprise was a disaster that soured British-Afghan relations for many years.

How did you come to be interested in the conflict, and how long was the research process for The Dark Defile?

I’ve been interested in the conflict for a long time and in particular in some of the characters but the more I began delving into the sources the more I realized it is something of a cautionary tale. The Duke of Wellington (the conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo and a former Prime Minister) predicted at the time—accurately as it turned out—that “The consequence of crossing the Indus once, to settle a government in Afghanistan, will be a perennial march into that country.” (British forces entered Afghanistan twice more over the subsequent 80 years, before doing so again as part of the current NATO-led force.) I became increasingly intrigued not only by what actually happened and the many vivid personal stories but also by the wider political and strategic issues surrounding the campaign.

Subsequent research in the UK and northern India took about two years.

I was struck by Lady Florentia Sale, whose diary of the war you draw on frequently in the book. Tell us how Lady Sale ended up in the middle of the conflict, and about her diary which recounts so vividly the events she witnessed.

Plain-speaking, fifty-year-old Florentia Sale arrived in Kabul to join her husband, a senior British officer nicknamed “Fighting Bob”. She devoted her early months to planting a flower garden but when the Afghans rose up she found herself trapped in Kabul without her husband who had left with his regiment for India. She commented acidly on subsequent British military incompetence and diplomatic vacillation, writing, “it appears a very strange circumstance that troops were not immediately sent into the city to quell the [rising] … but we seem to sit quietly with our hands folded and look on … General Elphinstone vacillates on every point. His own judgment appears to be good but he is swayed by the last speaker …”

She survived the early days of the British retreat, caring with her pregnant daughter for her dying son-in-law, a wounded British officer. She was then taken hostage by the Afghans. Her clear-eyed, unsentimental, occasionally humorous diary provides a detailed account of events, both previously in Kabul and then in her captivity and—unlike some of the other eyewitness accounts written with an eye to publication—rings true to the core. She describes how, as she and the other prisoners were bundled away by their Afghan captors, they passed naked starving people left behind by the retreating British column who were surviving “by feeding on their dead comrades.” She also wrote that she and the other prisoners quickly became verminous—”very few of us … are not covered with crawlers”—and learned to distinguish between lice which they called “infantry” and fleas which were “light cavalry”. She lived to be eventually reunited with her husband.

Read the rest of our interview with Diana Preston.


Catch up on previous State of the Thing newsletters.

If you don’t get State of the Thing, you can add it in your email preferences. You also have to have an email address listed.

Labels: author interview, authors, state of the thing

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

LibraryThing “Edible Books Contest”!

We haven’t run a good, old-fashioned contest in a while, so it’s time! We’re going to try something new (to LibraryThing) for this one: it’s a virtual Edible Books Contest!

How to participate:

1. Create an “edible book.” We’re defining this broadly, so entries can include dishes:

  • referencing a book’s title or characters (puns are entirely welcome)
  • inspired by a book’s plot
  • in the shape of an actual book (or eBook, or scroll, etc.)
  • takeoffs on the LibraryThing logo

2. Take some photos of what you made. The photo at right is one of the entries from the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library’s Edible Books Festival (see more of their photos here).

3. Upload the photo to your LT member gallery. Sign in, then go here and click the “Add another picture” link to add the image.*

4. When adding the image, tag it “EdibleBooks2012”. This will add your image to the contest gallery, and counts as your entry into the contest. If your photo doesn’t have the tag, we won’t know that you’ve entered. You’ll be able to see all the entries here.

5. Tell us about it in the “Title/description” box.

Deadline: Add your photos by 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 10.

What we’ll do:

Based on all the images in the “EdibleBooks2012” photo gallery, LibraryThing staff will choose the following winners:

Grand Prize (1)

  • An LT t-shirt (size/color of your choice)
  • An LT library stamp
  • A CueCat
  • An LT sticker
  • Three lifetime gift memberships
  • Great honor

Runners Up (2)

  • Your choice of one LT t-shirt, stamp, or CueCat
  • Two lifetime gift memberships

We may also pick a few Honorable Mentions—final number will depend on the number of entries received—and they’ll receive a lifetime gift membership.

Have fun!

Fine Print: You can enter as many times as you like, but you can only win one prize. Your dish must be made of edible ingredients (no hats, lost-wax sculptures, performance art), and by entering the contest you certify that it is your own creation. All decisions as to winners will be made by LibraryThing staff, and our decisions are final. LibraryThing staff and family can enter, but can only be honored as prize-less runners-up. Any images you load stay yours, or you can release them under a copyleft license, but we get a standard “non-exclusive, perpetual” right to use them.

Questions? Feel free to post questions/discussion/etc. here.


* We thought about having everyone send us their dishes for judging (and tasting). But we decided they might not hold up to mailing well, and that our waistlines probably couldn’t handle it!

Labels: contest, contests, fun

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

New Legacy Libraries: Houdini, Douglass, McCullers, Waugh

Four recently-completed Legacy Libraries to report!

Frederick Douglass – working from a National Park Service inventory of the books at Douglass’ home, Cedar Hill, a small group of volunteers flash-mob-cataloged more than 1,300 books to Douglass’ LT catalog. Thanks to amandafrenchbenjclark, Elizabellegoddesspt2, JBD1thornton37184waitingtoderail, and wendellkate for their kind assistance! Douglass acquired an impressive collection of government documents, which make up a pretty hefty portion of his library. Member meburste holds the most books in common with Douglass so far, at 47.

Harry Houdini – A large portion of Harry Houdini’s library (which was huge!) is now at the Library of Congress, and we’ve now added that to LibraryThing, along with a few other books in the collections of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other significant portions of Houdini’s library are not yet accounted for in LT, but we’re hopeful that other information might allow us to fill in some more segments of his very interesting and extensive collection. I’m sure we’ll never be able to add another library so heavily focused on magic and spiritualism! One of the top members with whom Houdini holds books in common? Jackie Gleason.

Carson McCullers – The library of Carson McCullers is now at the Harry Ransom Center, which also houses McCullers’ papers. While it’s not quite clear that McCullers herself collected all the different editions and translations of her own works included in her library at the HRC (check out the author cloud), and some of the books in the collection almost certainly belonged instead to other family members, we thought it was still very much worth adding. Not surprisingly, McCullers shares quite a few books with fellow Legacy subjects, including E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, and Ernest Hemingway.

Douglass, Houdini, and McCullers don’t share a single book in common, but Douglass and Houdini share ten books, while Douglass and McCullers share two titles (the Bible and Les Misérables). Further combination work and additions could change this, of course.

Just as I was getting this blog post ready to go, I realized that I never blogged about the completion of Evelyn Waugh’s LT catalog back in December (shame on me!). This was accomplished by member jburlinson, who added the titles from July 2010 through the end of 2011.

I also added the small, three-book library of Godbert and Sarah Godbertson yesterday afternoon: this is the first joint husband/wife probate inventory in the Plymouth (MA) Colony records, taken in October 1633 after both Godbert and Sarah died in a smallpox epidemic.

Other projects continue chugging along! We were really hoping to be able to work on adding the Titanic libraries (there were two, one for first-class passengers and one for second-class passengers), but we’ve had no luck in finding a catalog of the books. If you can help us out there, we’d be very grateful.

I know for sure that there are more Houdini books out there, and it’s very likely that more Douglass and McCullers books remain to be added, so if anyone knows of others for these as for any of the Legacy Libraries, please do let me know.

NB: Both the Houdini and McCullers libraries were added through a new tool we’ve got that allows for the direct import of MARC records (once they’re in they still need some cleanup to make them display correctly, and often require the addition of copy-specific notes, &c., but this tool certainly speeds along the process). So, if you know of a possible Legacy Library that’s out there in some library catalog, let me know about it and if we can add it directly using this method, we’ll certainly do so! Some more from the Harry Ransom Center are already in the pipeline, for example.

Come chat about this Legacy Library update here.

Labels: legacies, legacy libraries

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Library-only 2.0 is dead. Long live Library 2.0!

Library 2.0 is alive and well at Lamar County and the more than 300 other library systems that use LibraryThing for Libraries.

Over at Information Today Steve Coffman wrote a long and interesting piece The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire, running through a list of recent library efforts in the digital world and concluding that most have been failures. His comments on “Library 2.0” are of special interest here:

“Jumping ahead a few years, we have Library 2.0. Some may feel that it is too early to write this off … even if we could all agree upon what it is supposed to be. Basically, Library 2.0 was intended to allow library users to interact with librarians and each other online using a variety of new social tools developed for the web. It was meant to include patron-contributed reviews and rankings, tagging, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook sites, and so on. Even a cursory look at some of the more highly regarded Library 2.0-styled websites suggests that this idea may not be going very well. It seems that any conversations we may be having are largely with ourselves, while our patrons are busy contributing reviews and doing all sorts of other cool, interactive things on Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and the hundreds of other places people get together online to compare notes on books.”

Coffman is right that library-only Library 2.0 efforts have failed. Most such systems don’t aggregate across libraries and, when they do, Library patrons aren’t that interested in adding content to their library catalog, which fail to connect meaningfully to the larger digital world.

But library efforts continue to succeed, by taking advantage of data and communities outside the library. Coffman mentions LibraryThing’s wealth of tags and reviews as something outside of libraries, but LibraryThing data appears in hundreds of library systems in the United States and around the world.

Through LibraryThing for Libraries library patrons can read more than 600,000 professionally-vetted user reviews–the cream of LibraryThing’s larger corpus. And if they feel like it they can add their own review, which is aggregated across all libraries that use LibraryThing for Libraries. The results are pretty good–a book like Mockingjay (eg., Randolph County) has 583 reviews, 22 of them from library patrons.

After reading the reviews they can browse their local collections drawing on over 85 million user tags, exploring the world of “Steam Punk,” “Cozy Mysteries” or “Queer Fiction” within their existing catalog and restricted to their collection. And they can explore similar books based on all the users, books, tags and other data of LibraryThing, mashed up with the availability and usage statistics of their library and others.

Although vendors continue to sell “Library 2.0” as a “feature,” it was never so. Social software is always both feature and society, requiring scale and openness to users’ wider world. That a library can’t be Facebook all by itself isn’t sad, or a failure. Facebook isn’t Facebook by itself either. The error comes in thinking about the 2.0 world in 1.0 terms. Library-only 2.0 failed because it tried to be an empire. Library 2.0 is alive because it isn’t one.

So, Library-only 2.0 is dead. Long live Library 2.0!

Labels: library 2.0

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

April Early Reviewers Batch is up!

The April 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 73 books this month, and a grand total of 2,202 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, April 30th at 6 p.m. EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Akashic Books MSI Press Henry Holt and Company
Ashland Creek Press Ballantine Books Penguin Young Readers Group
William Morrow Washington Longfellow Press Chin Music Press
Orbit Books Tell-Tale Publishing Group, LLC WaterBrook Press
Humanist Press Palgrave Macmillan QW Publishers
Tundra Books Doubleday Books Dream Treader Press
Orca Book Publishers Human Kinetics Coffee House Press
Dundurn Light Messages Putnam Books
Pale Fire Press BookViewCafe Confiteor Media
Blazing Sword Publishing Ltd. Leafwood Publishers Information Today, Inc.
CyberAge Books Centrinian Publishing Ltd Taylor Trade Publishing
Sunrise River Press Elephant Rock Books Prufrock Press
Crossed Genres Publications Random House Kirkdale Press
Little, Brown and Company The Overlook Press

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Important Policy Change

Effective immediately, LibraryThing will no longer be including lean finely textured beef (commonly referred to as “pink slime”) in any of our products. We have revised all page designs and source code so that this product is no longer required for smooth operation of the site.

Over the past several weeks many members have written to us expressing their concern about the use of boneless lean beef trimmings on LibraryThing. While the USDA and food industry experts agree that lean finely textured beef is perfectly safe, recent media reports have caused considerable consumer concern about this product. We have concluded that in response to member concerns, we must take steps to ensure that this product is not used anywhere on the site, and have worked diligently to make the necessary changes to LibraryThing.com. That process is now complete.

We at LibraryThing would like to thank all those who took the time to express their concerns about this product.

UPDATE: It appears that small quantities of pink slime have continued to seep from the LibraryThing user interface. We blame a supplier, and will be working to remove any and all interface slime as soon as possible.

UPDATE: April Fools is over, so the slime-drip is gone. Click on the image below to see what it looked like:

Labels: openness

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

March Author Interviews!

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, is on its way to your inbox. You can also read it online.

I forgot to include in SOTT a very neat interview our friends at Random House passed along: Jennifer Egan, the author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, did a Q&A with Dan Barden about his new book, The Next Right Thing. You can read the interview here, and thanks to Random House for sharing it with us!

For our author interviews this month, I talked to Lauren Groff about her new book Arcadia, published this month by Hyperion and Voice.

Like your first novel, Arcadia is set in upstate New York, where you grew up (as did I). How do you think the area has shaped the things and people you write about?

I find that I can only write about places after I’ve been absent from them for a while. I’ve lived in Florida for six years, now, which only makes me love upstate New York more. I grew up there, and it seems that when I want to write through or about a childlike sense of wonder, I reach for the place I remember as a child. Also, I miss the lilacs and the icicles and the rolling hills and the cold lakes in the summer, and this sense of loss makes me long to return there when I sit down to work in my hot and humid studio.

You’ve set one section of Arcadia in the future, 2018 specifically. Did you find writing scenes in the future any different from writing scenes set in the past, or in the present?

It was strangely exhilarating to write scenes set in the very near future: it wasn’t as pure an imaginative leap as writing a hundred years in the future would be, and it required research and thought into where we are in the world right now. It was as if I had a photograph of the present, and my job was to paint beyond the bounds of the frame.

Tied up in Arcadia is the fascinating and elusive idea of utopian communities: did you find yourself doing much research into historical views or depictions of this topic as you wrote? If so, was there a particular source that you enjoyed or found most useful?

There are many books about both philosophical utopias and real-life attempted ones on my shelves. I find the utopian urge to be a deeply American one: in fact, in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were over forty utopian intentional communities created (and lost) in America. The two that were among the most successful, and therefore the most devastating when they collapsed, were Oneida in central New York in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century community called The Farm in Tennessee. I visited both places for overnight stays and loved them both.

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer? How did you make
it a reality?

I’ve always been passionate about books, but to become a creator of the things I loved most in the world seemed impossibly difficult, and possibly even narcissistic, when I was little. I didn’t know any writers. I didn’t know that they were normal people and not gilded demi-angels selected by the gods. It began to dawn on me that I could do this, too, when I took a writing class in college, taught by a real, live novelist. After I graduated, I made my poor parents suffer a little because I declared that I was going to be a writer, and I did many terrible jobs for a few years to be able to teach myself how to write fiction. Then I went to graduate school, which gave me two years in which I wrote as much as I possibly could, and learned a great deal.

Read the rest of our interview with Lauren Groff.

I also talked to Taras Grescoe, the editor of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, coming soon from Times Books.

Tell us a bit about how the idea for this book came about, and how long you spent making all the trips it took to research the different cities you profile. What was your best experience (transportation related or otherwise) while researching the book? Your worst?

For the last decade, I’ve been thinking about writing a book-length examination of how cars changed our lives, and how car-centered thinking has transformed our cities. But I didn’t want to contribute another angry screed against the evil motorcar to the literature. There are so many people thinking differently about transportation, and so many amazing initiatives happening in cities around the world, that I figured I could combine a little righteous anger and a lot of hope and optimism in the same book—which is why I detail how we got into the mess of sprawl and congestion, and how a lot of committed people are finding ways to get us out of it.

As much as I loved riding funiculars, rattly old subways, and high-speed trains in Asia, Europe, and South America, the best experience was meeting people around the world who are committed to making their cities better places to live for themselves and their families—a lot of those people have become friends. The worst part: when I was looking at sprawled and congested cities like Phoenix and Moscow, being stuck in endless traffic. Hours I spend in a car always feel like hours I’ll never get back.

You write that Straphanger is, “in part, the story of a bad idea: the notion that our metropolises should be shaped by the needs of cars, rather than people.” How and when did this idea take hold, and can you tell us a few of the ways this bad idea has manifested itself?

Streets in North American cities belonged to the people of those cities until at least the ’20s. Kids played in them, pedestrians crossed them at will, streetcars and horsecars and cable cars used them, bike-riders enjoyed them, vendors sold food from carts. They were anarchic, and alive. Though Americans accepted the new technology of the automobile, and it became ever more affordable thanks to Ford’s mass production, it took a concerted effort on the part of automobile industry lobby groups to manufacture the concept of the “jaywalker” and convert city streets into speedways for cars. At first, police resisted, citizens resisted: tens of thousands of kids were slaughtered by Chevrolets and Fords, and there were giant demonstrations against “death drivers” in almost every major city in the 1920s. A great portrayal of the process in action is Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1918. (Tarkington was clearly ambivalent about the coming of the automobile to the city, but he brilliantly portrays the way that new technology unstitched so much of what old walkable cities used to be.) Later, technocrats like Robert Moses in New York City consolidated power and streamlined the process of building cities for cars, rather than people. Car culture really did its job well: now nobody finds it strange that so much precious public space—the streets of Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto—should be occupied by two tons of privately-owned of plastic, fiberglass, and metal.

Read the rest of our interview with Taras Grescoe.

I also had a chance to chat with Natalie Dykstra, the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Do you recall what first interested you about the life of Clover Adams?

I vividly remember the moment I got interested. I was still in graduate school, working on my dissertation about how nineteenth-century women represented themselves in letters and diaries, when I read a five-page scene in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s brilliant first volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Cook describes how Mrs. Roosevelt would go every week to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., to sit in front of the seated bronze statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that marked Clover’s grave. She found comfort there in the months after her discovery of her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer. But why? I became fascinated by the woman who fascinated Mrs. Roosevelt.

You write in the prologue “Clover’s life has remained half-illumined, a reflection of how others viewed her but not how she saw herself.” But, you argue, her photographs “invite the viewer to stand not on this side of her suicide, but on the other, the one she lived on.” For those who might have not have yet had the chance to see Clover’s photographs, what is it about them that’s so compelling? Do you have any particular favorites?

Clover’s photographs, when I first saw them, struck me as interesting and extraordinarily beautiful. Packed with a lived life. There are photographs of friends, of the seashore, of her dogs perched at chairs around a table as if “at tea.” There are carefully composed photographs of her women friends that have great clarity and style and portraits of children that confer an enormous dignity. She got down on the same level as the children to take their photographs, so the viewer sees them eye to eye. And she was meticulous about the sequence in which she put her photographs in the albums, one image per page. I suppose some of my favorites include her gothic-like picture of her summer home, Pitch Pine Hill, on Boston’s North Shore; her portrait of Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, wife the historian George Bancroft; and her portrait of three women standing on rocks at the seashore, with two of the women turned away from her camera.

Read the rest of our interview with Natalie Dykstra.


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Labels: author interview, state of the thing

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

New: LibraryThing T-shirts for kids!

We’ve just restocked on LibraryThing t-shirts, and we took the opportunity to add some new sizes: we’re now offering youth sizes XS, S, and M (roughly 2T, 4T, and 6T). They’re available now in the store. Each size comes in black or red (the kids’ shirts are a brighter red than the adult “cranberry” ones). They’re Anvil brand, 100% cotton, pre-shrunk, and can be yours for $15 plus shipping.

We could think of no better way to highlight the new shirts than to allow the LibraryThing staff to show off their cute children (most of whom longtime members may remember from when they were LibraryThing babies). Click on each picture for a larger version. All five are wearing the new Youth Small size.

From left, from oldest to youngest: Tim’s son Liam, 6; Chris C.’s daughter Ellie, 4.5; Chris H.’s daughter Kate, almost 4; Abby’s son Jasper, 3.5; and Chris C.’s son Julian, 1.5.

Labels: employees, tshirts

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

“Is There a ‘Real’ Maine?” – Book Discussion in Portland!

If you’re in or around LibraryThing’s home base in Portland, Maine, we hope you’ll join LibraryThing, the Maine Humanities Council, and the Portland Public Library for a discussion exploring the portrayal of Maine in children’s literature: “Is There a ‘Real’ Maine?” We’ll use Robert McCloskey’s classic One Morning in Maine as a case study and starting point for the discussion.

Details: Wednesday, March 28, 6-7 p.m., at the Portland Public Library. No RSVP is required, but you can “Join” the event on the MHC’s Facebook page.

We hope to see you there! And don’t forget the Maine Festival of the Book, which starts the next evening and runs through Saturday, April 1!

Labels: events, maine, meet up

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

March Early Reviewers Batch is up!

The March 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 91 books this month, and a grand total of 3,103 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, March 26th at 6 p.m. EDT.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Taylor Trade Publishing Hyperion and Voice Akashic Books
Henry Holt and Company Riverhead Books William Morrow
Ballantine Books Bethany House Unbridled Books
Tupelo Press Random House Trade Paperbacks Mulholland Books
Penguin Young Readers Group Petra Books Prufrock Press
Doubleday Books Kregel Publications Pink Petal Books
Jupiter Storm Palgrave Macmillan Urban Romantics
Leafwood Publishers Random House Centrinian Publishing Ltd
St. Martin’s Griffin Ellechor Publishing House, LLC The Permanent Press
JournalStone Human Kinetics Advantage Media Group
Greyhart Press BookViewCafe Putnam Books
Aauvi House Wilderness Press Mongoose Press
CarTech Books Tundra Books Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers humane exposures Confiteor Media
NewCon Press Tell-Tale Publishing Group, LLC Ivy Court Press
Orca Book Publishers Washington Longfellow Press

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Friday, February 24th, 2012

February Author Interviews: Matthew Pearl and Leah Price

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, is on its way to your inbox. You can also read it online.

For our author interviews this month, I talked to Matthew Pearl about his new book The Technologists, published this week by Random House. The novel focuses on the early years of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as students in its first graduating class face down a mysterious force bent on destroying their school and their city.

Which part of The Technologists came to you first?

The first scene I envisioned was one that appears early in the novel, when a group of the original MIT students are bullied by a Harvard crew team as both groups row the Charles River. It’s still an important scene for me when I think about the book and especially the main character. The early MIT students were ultimate underdogs and this moment captures that, plus introduces the Boston backdrop.

Your previous books have put major literary characters at the center of the action; what made you decide to use college students this time around?

For many if not most people, college is a formative and unique experience in their lives. Different from any time before or after. “The best four years of your life”? Maybe, though probably not. But certainly among the most interesting. I really loved releasing my characters into that context.

Did you find it easier to write using fictional protagonists rather than historical characters?

The Technologists has a mix of fictional and historical characters. The central protagonist, Marcus Mansfield, is fictional, though based on my research into many of the original MIT students. It’s hard to say what ends up making writing “easier,” at least for me, because the long process of writing the novel inevitably complicates every task. Still, I can’t deny there’s a liberating quality when working with fictional characters after spending time on historical figures with more established profiles!

Read the rest of our interview with Matthew Pearl.

I also talked to Leah Price, the editor of Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, published late last year by Yale University Press. The book includes interviews with thirteen contemporary writers about their libraries, plus some wonderful pictures of their books.

Were there any responses to the interview questions that surprised you?

I was surprised—even touched—by how intimate some of the answers were.  Questions about a writer’s relation to his books somehow yielded answers about a writer’s relation to his father, his lovers, even his exes. Junot Diaz told me that “When I was still with my ex, I drove back and forth between New York and Cambridge seven to eight times a month, and that’s how I got into audiobooks. I liked reading to my ex. Never read to anyone else. Never had anyone read to me, really.” Just as poignantly, Lev Grossman pointed to a bookshelf custom-built for the apartment he used to share with his ex-wife. “Funny how libraries retain ghostly impressions of the past,” he reflected: “those bookshelves retain the dimensions of those old rooms, not of the rooms they’re currently in, so they’re slightly ill-fitting.” Both writers think of books as something shared with other people, or tainted by memories of the people with whom they were once shared – which helps makes sense, in a way, of the success of LibraryThing in building social relationships via books and circulating books by forging virtual networks.

I also asked Leah to tell us about her personal library and how she organizes her own books (and she sent along a picture of her shelves, too):

I alphabetize my books by author, because I’m the kind of obsessive-compulsive who also alphabetizes the spices and color-codes the socks. My books are divided between home and office, but paradoxically the ones that are most on display, in my office on campus, are the least revealing, because when I’m at work I rarely have time to read anything longer than an e-mail or a memo, and so that’s where I keep the books that I don’t have any intention of rereading.

At home, we segregate the cookbooks (though, inconsistently, I have a beautiful 1880s edition of Mrs Beeton’s Household Manual filed under B, because I don’t have any intention of cooking suet pudding), and there are a few straggler sections dating back to the days before my library started to flirt with my partner’s. When we moved in together he started pulling books out of boxes and plopping them down on the shelves without regard to which were mine and which were his. I panicked, because I had assumed that we wouldn’t interfile our books, just as blithely as he had assumed that we would. A family therapist would probably add interfiling to the list of things to negotiate in advance: blended families are nothing to merged libraries. Now that our books are promiscuously mingled, we’re getting married next month, but that feels like a formality compared to the day when we steeled ourselves to put duplicates out on the curb. Once you’ve ditched somebody’s copy of Middlemarch, you might as well have signed up for a covenant marriage.

Read the rest of our interview with Leah Price.


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Labels: author interview, authors, state of the thing

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Flash-mob catalog: Frederick Douglass’ library!

Starting at noon EST today, we’re going to flash-mob catalog the library of Frederick Douglass, working from the National Park Service’s inventory of Douglass’ library at his home, Cedar Hill.

Douglass (1818-1895), a leading abolitionist, social reformer, noted orator, and author, collected quite an impressive number of books and pamphlets, including a very significant body of abolitionist literature as well as many history texts, religious literature, and U.S. Government publications.

We’d love to have your help! See the Talk thread or jump right to the project wiki page to get started and claim your section of the library list. No worries if you haven’t worked on a Legacy Libraries project before – this is definitely a good introduction to them! I’ll be helping out too, and will answer any questions you have on the Talk thread.

Labels: flash mob, flash-mob cataloging, legacies, legacy libraries

Monday, February 6th, 2012

New feature: Filter by Kindle and audiobooks

I’ve released a new feature, allowing you to look at certain pages—tags, tagmashes, authors and three types of personal recommendations—filtering to see only item available in select media. At present these are: (1) Kindle, (2) Audiobook from Audible (basically what’s on iTunes too), (3) audiobooks available on Amazon as audio CDs, (4) audiobooks by CD or Audible.

Whether you like it or not, I’m going to love this feature! Most of my reading these days is in audiobook. Although I don’t use Audible, I do use iTunes, and almost everything Audible sells is also available there. iTunes in particular has a terrible search interface. I’ve spent hours looking for interesting things to read. This makes finding audiobooks on iTunes (ie., on Audible) much easier. I’ve already found quite a few.

You can see the options here when you click on “edit” or “filter”:

The same options are available on your “Quick Links,” so you can tell at a glance whether a given book is available in those formats or not. If you’ve never played with your “Quick Links” they’ll be there already. If you have, you can add them by editing them. A convenient reminder notice also appears on every members home page.

Media information should be pretty up-to-date, with almost a million alternate versions tracked.

Filtering is a powerful idea. There were a couple ways it could have been implemented, and there are many other categories of thinks that could be filtered. I’m anxious to hear what members think.

Come comment on Talk here.

Labels: new feature, new features

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

February Early Reviewers Batch is up!

The February 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 112 books this month, and a grand total of 2,771 copies to give out, including books by Scott Westerfeld, Naomi Novik, and Anna Quindlen!

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Wednesday, February 29th at 6 p.m. EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, and a whole bunch more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Taylor Trade Publishing Hyperion and Voice Riverhead Books
Putnam Books McFarland Tundra Books
Akashic Books Upper Rubber Boot Books Kregel Publications
Prufrock Press Random House William Morrow
Kayelle Press Elephant Rock Books Henry Holt and Company
Ballantine Books Chin Music Press The Pantheon Collective
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books PublicAffairs February Partners
Kane Miller Books Del Rey Spectra
And Then Press The Permanent Press BookViewCafe
Candlemark & Gleam DiaMedica Rovira i Virgili University Press
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers Human Kinetics
St. Martin’s Griffin Open Road Dutton
Avery Bethany House ArbeitenZeit Media
A & N Publishing Sourcebooks Demos Health
Chosen Books Unbridled Books Maupin House Publishing
Orca Book Publishers Gotham Books CarTech Books
Charlesbridge

Labels: early reviewers, LTER

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

ReadaThing Reminder!

Just a quick reminder: the February ReadaThing begins tomorrow! See the earlier blog post for full details, or head right over to the ReadaThing wiki to sign up!

Labels: readathon, reading

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

January Author Interviews

This month’s State of the Thing, LibraryThing’s monthly newsletter of features, author interviews and various forms of bookish delight, should have made its way to your inbox by now. You can also read it online.

We had a whole host of author interviews this month:

I talked to Shalom Auslander about his first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, out this month from Riverhead Books.

Which of these characters came to you first? Which was the most fun to create?

Kugel, the main character, came first; I liked the idea of a character whose tragic flaw was hope, the very thing we’re supposed to never give up or go without. And yet here was a person, it seemed, whose hope was getting him hurt, who might be better off if he gave up and just accepted things as they are, i.e. crappy. Mother, though, was the most fun to create. She is eternally hopeless and finds glory in suffering and pain in joy; I was given birth to by people just like that. Also, she moans about being in the Holocaust, which she never was, and that makes me laugh.

Read the rest of our interview with Shalom Auslander.

I also talked to Theodora Goss about her latest book, The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story, published this month by Quirk Books. You may want to watch the book trailer to get a sense of the book’s interesting design.

How did you come up with the idea to have the book designed this way, as a “two-sided love story”? Can you describe the design process bit for us?

I actually didn’t come up with the idea of the two-sided design myself. My wonderful editor, Stephen Segal, came up with it and called me to ask if I could write a story that would fit the format. It was quite a challenge! We didn’t want a story that would simply have two sides to it—that wouldn’t really be using the format. We wanted a story that could only be told in this way, that would use the format as part of the reading experience. And I think when you read the book, you’ll find that it does. You can only understand the story, particularly the conclusion, by reading both sides.

But I was the one who decided that it should be a love story (after all, what other kind of story is so particularly two-sided?), and who came up with the story of Brendan and Evelyn. And after I had come up with it, the basic plot and the characters, then the characters started talking to me, as they do anytime you write a story. They started telling me what they wanted to say and do.

I should also mention the wonderful artist, Scott McKowen, who captured the feel of the story so perfectly. I can’t think of a better way to present this book than the way Scott has presented it, with the gorgeous slipcase and the illustrations inside. I think in the end, the book was a collaborative effort between the three of us. And once it’s read, the readers will become a part of the collaboration as well, because this story isn’t just on the pages. In a sense, it exists between the two sides, and that’s the story the readers will have to put together themselves.

Read the rest of our interview with Theodora Goss.

My third interview this month was with Susan Goodman, the H. Brown Fletcher Chair of Humanities at the University of Delaware, and the author of Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857-1925, recently published by the University Press of New England.

The Atlantic Monthly’s founders laid out quite an ambitious goal for themselves in 1857, “to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” How did they manage to make a success of their magazine when so many similar ventures did not last?

As the country’s most intellectual and literary city, Boston brought together men and women who from the beginning of the magazine made it a powerful voice in American politics as well as the arts. Its success depended on a loyal group of contributors, informed and curious readers, often intent on self-improvement, and good management. Luck also played a part. The first issue, for example, contained Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Brahma”, which provoked a craze of parodies and made readers eager for the next issue.

Read the rest of our interview with Susan Goodman.

I also chatted with Jay Wexler about his new book The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions, published by Beacon Press.

You write in the introduction that you first got the idea for writing a book about the Constitution’s “odd clauses” while you were working in the Office of Legal Counsel for the Clinton administration. Do you recall a particularly odd question the OLC was called upon to advise on while you were there?

There were all sorts of odd questions, but the one I spent most of my time on had to do with whether the President had the authority to create a national monument in the middle of the ocean. President Clinton was interested in creating a giant national monument in Hawaii to protect coral reefs, but it’s not immediately clear that the relevant statute giving the President the authority to create monuments (it’s called the Antiquities Act) gives him the authority to make monuments in the ocean. The question required a good bit of statutory analysis as well as analysis of the proper scope of the so-called “Property Clause” of Article IV of the Constitution. The legal opinion that came out of all that work is here. As it turned out, it was President Bush, not Clinton, who ultimately made the Hawaii monument.

Read the rest of our interview with Jay Wexler.

And, last but not least, we have an interview with Susan Cain. Her first book is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, published this month by Crown.

You describe in your opening chapters the rise of what you call the Extrovert Ideal. Give us the nutshell version: what is this, and how did it come to be such a powerful force in American culture?

The Extrovert Ideal says that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they should try to “pass” as extroverts. The bias against introversion leads to a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness.

In my book, I trace how we shifted from a “Culture of Character” into a “Culture of Personality” at the turn of the 20th century. Big business, the media, the self-help industry, and advertising all went through radical changes that had the effect of glamorizing bold and entertaining personality styles. I also tell the surprising life story of Dale Carnegie, who morphed from shy, awkward farm boy into bestselling author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and is a fascinating example of this cultural transformation.

And I talk about why the Culture of Personality is not a great model for the 21st century.

Read the rest of our interview with Susan Cain.

Catch up on previous State of the Thing newsletters.

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Labels: author interview, authors, state of the thing

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Announcing the February “Dickens of a” ReadaThing!

Mark your calendars! Coming up is a weeklong February ReadaThing, and with the bicentennial of Charles Dickens‘ birth on February 7 occurring right in the middle, we thought it would be fun to include a voluntary “Dickens of a ReadaThing” option this time. All are welcome: you don’t have to read Dickens if you don’t want to, and of course you don’t have to read for the full week: the goal is to have a few people from around the world reading at any given time during the ReadaThing.

The official start time will be at 1 p.m. on Friday, February 3rd in New Zealand: midnight GMT and 7 p.m. Thursday, February 2nd, in the Eastern US/Canada time zone. This ReadaThing will run for a full week!

For more information, see the announcement thread; to sign up, head right to the ReadaThing wiki. As we get closer to the date, consider posting your reading selection in the “What will you be reading?” thread, and during the ReadaThing you can use the “Log Book” thread to document your ReadaThing experience.

For more on ReadaThings, and to participate in planning future events, join the ReadaThing group.

Edward Pettit is spending the entire year reading books by and about Dickens, and charting his course at Reading Charles Dickens, so I asked him to weigh in on his experiences and offer some suggestions of Dickens-related books LibraryThing members might want to consider reading:

“For the Charles Dickens Bicentennial in 2012, I’ve decided to become a Charles Dickens Ambassador. First, I’m finishing a reading project I began on Sept 15, 2011 to read all of Dickens’ published work in just one year. Having read only a few of Dickens’ novels over the years (including A Christmas Carol a dozen times), I had always hoped to get to the rest of them, but never seemed to find the time, so what better time than the Dickens Bicentennial. And as reading is such a solitary activity, I thought I’d invite everyone along for the ride, so you can read (and comment) about my Dickens endeavours online.

Second, you can also join me at The Free Library of Philadelphia for events every month of the year as the FLP opens its amazing Dickens collection to the world in several exhibitions. We’re hosting literary salons, speakers, performers. We’ll follow Dickens’ foosteps on his visit to Philadelphia in 1842. We’ll even have some Drinking with Dickens events in local bars to imbibe the many Victorian beverages featured in the novels.

To further my duties as a Charles Dickens Ambassador, I also carry around a bag full of Dickens novels, which I freely give to anyone who asks for a copy. So join me in 2012. Become a CD Ambassador. Spread the joy of reading Dickens.

If I could recommend a starter Dickens work, it would be A Christmas Carol. It doesn’t need to be Christmas time to read this extraordinary tale of ghosts and transformation. I am moved by it every time I read it (and my kids are still scared to death of Marley’s ghost).

Or you could try The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Dickens’ first novel (and first serial). This book is a pleasure to read with vibrant characters, especially Mr Pickwick and his manservant Sam Weller. The novel is not just funny, but there’s also a kind of innate joy and goodwill that rises out of its pages. I never wanted to leave this Pickwickian world.”

Ed (EdwardGPettit on LT) will be around during the ReadaThing as well, so look for more suggestions and recommendations from him as we get closer to the ReadaThing dates.

I’m already looking forward to this ReadaThing: I haven’t picked what I’ll be reading yet, but it’ll probably be some Dickens (maybe American Notes), along with whatever else I happen to be reading that week.

Reminder: For more information on the ReadaThing or to sign up, see the announcement thread. Have fun, and happy reading!

Labels: readathon, reading

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Try the 2012 75 Books Challenge!

If you’re looking for a fun way to get more involved with LibraryThing, you might consider joining the 75 Books Challenge for 2012, one of the site’s most active (and entertaining) groups. Members take a stab at reading 75 books in 2012 (although, as the group description notes, “It turns out we care less about the numbers than we do about the exchange of book info and the community of readers”). Your mileage will vary.

Participants are invited to start a thread and list/discuss what they’re reading (here’s the full list so far), but the group goes way beyond that, with monthly Take It Or Leave It (TIOLI) challenges, monthly themes (like Journeying January, group reads (like the SteinbeckaThon or Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa), meetups (D.C. and New York City meetups are planned for the spring, and a group met in Denver just this weekend).

The 75 Books Challenge has been going on for a few years now (I think this may be the fifth year), and it gets more and more interesting every time. I’ve joined the fray for the first time this year (you can see my reading thread here), and I’m already finding it lots of fun … not to mention the fact that my wishlist continues to grow as I see what others are reading!

The activity level is fairly high, but there’s a handy wiki to help you keep things straight, and of course the members of the group are always helpful to new members. Most importantly, it’s a fun

To participate, just jump right in by visiting the group page. And have fun!

Labels: groups, reading

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

January Early Reviewer Batch is up!

The January 2012 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 86 books this month, and a grand total of 2,069 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, January 30th at 6 p.m. EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, and a whole bunch more. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

Taylor Trade Publishing Ballantine Books Monarch Books
Multnomah Books WaterBrook Press Hyperion and Voice
Tundra Books Riverhead Books Putnam Books
McFarland Beacon Press Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
MSI Press Second Story Press Faber and Faber
William Morrow Palgrave Macmillan Linden House Publishing
O’Reilly Media Wakestone Press Nilgiri Press
Candlemark & Gleam Jupiter Gardens Press Crossed Genres Publications
Random House Trade Paperbacks Jupiter Storm Rovira i Virgili University Press
Akashic Books Upper Rubber Boot Books St. Martin’s Griffin
BookViewCafe Random House The Permanent Press
Orca Book Publishers Human Kinetics JournalStone
Bellevue Literary Press Capricho Press Bell Bridge Books

Labels: early reviewers, LTER