Archive for October, 2011

Friday, October 28th, 2011

October Interviews: Susan Orlean and Richard Brookhiser

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.

Our author interviews this month:

I talked to author Susan Orlean about her new book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Find out how she got interested in Rin Tin Tin, which of her animals would make the best movie star, and about how Twitter has affected her work and her interactions with readers.

Read the full interview with Susan Orlean.

I also chatted with Richard Brookhiser; his newest biography, James Madison was published recently by Basic Books.

Asked what surprised him most about Madison, Brookhiser wrote “Everyone knows he is smart. I was interested to discover he was tough. Madison never quit. When he lost a fight, which happened often enough, he always thought: what next? what now? how do I go on from here? This is why he generally prevailed in the end. The history of the early republic is littered with the broken careers of people who got in his way.”

Read the full interview with Richard Brookhiser.

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, state of the thing

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Occupy Libraries!

It’s been fascinating to watch the rise of libraries at the various Occupy sites around the world, particularly the impressively-large collection at Occupy Wall Street known as the People’s Library. We reached out and suggested a LibraryThing account for the collection, and the volunteer librarians in Zucotti Park responded enthusiastically.

The OWSLibrary catalog now includes more than 3,300 titles, and it’s quite a rich and varied collection (check out the tag mirror). We’ve got a Talk thread where members are posting the books they share with the library; as of this morning, I share 100 titles with them, everything from E.O. Wilson to Annie Dillard to Strunk & White. If you’re signed into LibraryThing, you can see what you share with the OWS Library here.

The OWSLibrary folks also have an active blog, Twitter, and Flickr presence (they’ve even got library stamps!). Many authors have visited to speak, lend support, and sign books, and there’s now even an Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology.

More than 1,300 writers have signed the Occupy Writers petition in support of the Occupy movement, including Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Junot Díaz and more.

You can read some good coverage of the Occupy library movement in American Libraries, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal.

On Friday, local librarian JustinTheLibrarian, Tim and I went downtown on our lunch break and cataloged the Occupy Maine library, a small collection housed at Portland’s Spartan Grill restaurant (which also serves a very tasty gyro).

Occupy Sacramento’s library is also up on LibraryThing, and we’ve been in touch with various other Occupy libraries; if your city’s library joins up, we’d love to know about it!

While you may agree or disagree with the Occupy movement as a whole, we think what they’re doing with books and libraries is simply awesome. And we’re very happy to be a part of it.

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

Friday, October 21st, 2011

LibraryThing Meetup in Boston!

Are you up for a day of bookish enjoyment, food, and LibraryThing socializing? Join us on Saturday, November 12 for a series of meetups in Boston, centered around the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, one of the best book fairs in the country!

We’ll begin the day by meeting for brunch at 10 a.m. at Trident Booksellers and Cafe on Newbury Street and stop in at Raven Used Books’ Newbury Street location before the book fair opens at noon (at the Hynes Convention Center).

Commonwealth Books is providing free passes for the book fair, and offering at 15%-off discount to LTers for Saturday, so after we’ve seen the fair we can head downtown during the afternoon for visits there and to the Brattle Book Shop. In the evening, we’ll go out to Cambridge for dinner and visits to Harvard Bookstore and the Raven location on JFK Street.

Help us plan in the Talk thread, and sign up on the wiki page to let us know what meetups you might attend (feel free to come to as many or as few as you like!). We hope to see you in Boston!

Labels: bookstores, boston, meet up, members

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Talking LT at the Montana Festival of the Book

Longtime LTer Benjamin L. Clark (benjclark) spoke about LibraryThing at the Montana Festival of the Book earlier this month, as part of a talk he gave there called “Adventures in Book Collecting.”

He writes: “There were tons of great questions, and people seemed genuinely interested in learning more when it was done. Of course, my favorite part was all the smiles at the end. It didn’t hurt that LibraryThing hooked me up with some great swag to give away! You can’t tell, but the guy in the greenish shirt is holding a cue-cat. Everyone else ran away to gloat over their prizes, so I missed photographing about half of the swag winners because I was mobbed by the audience. I should bring an assistant next year. Any volunteers?”

Read the full report over on Benj’s great blog, Exile Bibliophile, and many thanks for helping us spread the word about LibraryThing!

Labels: bibliosphere, conference

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

October Early Reviewers batch is up!

The October 2011 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 77 books this month, and a grand total of 2,189 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, October 31st 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, Israel, and a whole bunch of other countries. 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 Putnam Books Riverhead Books
Bloomsbury William Morrow Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
Penguin Young Readers Group Bell Bridge Books Jupiter Gardens Press
Jupiter Storm Random House Matador
Greenleaf Book Group The Permanent Press University of Iowa Press
Plume Little, Brown and Company Palgrave Macmillan
BookViewCafe Crown Publishing Human Kinetics
Haffner Press Prufrock Press Gotham Books
Avery Camel Press Coffeetown Press
JournalStone Open Road St. Martin’s Griffin
Orca Book Publishers The Writer’s Coffee Shop Open Books
McFarland

Labels: early reviewers, LTER