Tom McMahon

This Book Is The Property Of The Colored High School Library Of The City Of Lynchburg

This Book Is The Property Of The Colored High School Library Of The City Of Lynchburg

An old bookplate from the days of segregation.

Some General Guidelines For Cleaning Out Your Library

Excerpt from Francine Prose:

• Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the Pharaohs.
• If a country, like Czechoslovakia, no longer exists, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to take the travel guide along with you when you go.
• If the reproductions in an art book are so fuzzy and blurred that you can’t tell the work of the Impressionists from that of the Pointillists, or even from the Surrealists, get rid of it.
• Ask yourself the following hard question and answer honestly: If I live to be 100, will I read this book again?

(via Grow-A-Brain)

Wikipock: Brings The Full Text Content Of Wikipedia To Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android And Symbian Mobile Phones

Wikipock: Brings The Full Text Content Of Wikipedia To Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android And Symbian Mobile Phones

• And it's coming soon for iPhone
• About 4GB worth of text
• No photos
• $10 or $15, depending on whether you want free updates
• You can get it on an 8GB microSD card for an extra $15, which is cost
• Check out the reviews here
• I got it for my new Windows Mobile phone and it's pretty neat.

Comic Reader Mobi: The Comic Book Reader Specially Designed for Cell Phones

 

Comic Reader Mobi: The Comic Book Reader Specially Designed for Cell Phones

The Blurb:

"I'd love to read comics on my phone But the screen is way too small"

But wait! It's big enough to look at pictures,watch movies, and even play games! So whats wrong with comics?

You can see all the art on the page without any problems. You can even see the whole layout and all the action without any difficulties.

Its not the comics that are too small, its the TEXT thats too hard to read!

But thanks to Comic Reader Mobi, thats no longer a problem!

Simply tap on the text and watch it pop out to a readable size!

Its simple, its intuitive, and now you can finally read comics anywhere you want! Unlike other solutions, Comic Reader Mobi works on standard CBR,CBZ,RAR and ZIP files. No need for propreitary formats, or specially redesigned comics!

How To Get A Genuine Sony E-Book Reader for About $150

Sony Reader PRS-505 and the new Sony Reader Pocket (PRS-300)

In most cases the PRS-505 will cost you around $300 on eBay, whereas you can find the new PRS-300 going for about $200 at various retailers. Either one would make a great gift, for yourself or someone else. In addition to the larger display, the PRS-505 has a few more features that explain the $100 price premium. As usual, Wikipedia tells all.

The Heretofore Obsolete PRS-500

The older PRS-500 is a 6-inch display like the PRS-505, but since it doesn't read the new industry-standard epub file format you can usually find them for about $150 on eBay. But wait! Sony just announced a free firmware upgrade that will make your PRS-500 capable of reading the new epub format. So if you'r nimble and willing to deal with a bit of a wait, you can get yourself a nice little deal.

Sarah Palin's Walmart Strategy

Going Rogue by Sarah Palin

From J. Robert Smith

What's notable about Sarah Palin's book tour, which starts midweek, is where she's not going. She's not going to L.A. or New York, Boston or San Francisco. She's going smack-dab to the middle of the country. Fly-over country, liberals call it. And it's a shrewd move, not only in selling books, but positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012 if she chooses that path.

It's a strategy right out of the late Sam Walton's playbook: go where there's demand and the competition ain't. Walton, who could have run and won political campaigns, built Walmart into the behemoth it is today by opening his discount stores in small towns in the heartland, towns that the eight-hundred pound gorilla K-Mart ignored.

Walton conquered the discount retail category from the heartland out. He didn't so much clobber K-Mart as steal a march on it. Palin may just prove that a heartland strategy does more than sell blenders and books. It may be the foundation for winning a national election.

Is This The Ring That Inspired Tolkien To Write The Lord of the Rings?

Is This The Ring That Inspired Tolkien To Write The Lord of the Rings?

From The National Trust:

Placed for years within a glass-topped cabinet, beside a little type-written note, this solid gold ring might have caught the eye of specialists – but for most it might warrant no more than an admiring glance.

Made in the fourth or fifth century, with its chunky bezel mounted on a faceted 10-sided hoop, it is engraved with a compelling, if primitive profile of Venus. This goddess is no beauty, with her exaggerated nose, spiky headdress and one oversized eye.

The ring was discovered in the late 18th century by a farmer at the remains of the nearby Roman town of Silchester.

No one knows quite how the ring came to The Vyne, but its story did not stop there. By an extraordinary coincidence, just a couple of decades after its discovery, a Roman lead tablet bearing an inscription about this very ring was found at a temple site at Lydney in Gloucestershire. It was engraved with a curse imprecating woe upon the person who had stolen the ring.

The original lead tablet is now at Lydney; but alongside this ring in the little cabinet is a replica, so the two can be admired together.

By 1928 the great archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler was at work excavating the rich finds at Lydney where he was told the tale of the two finds.

And, so some conjecture, it is almost certain that he would have passed this exciting story to another who was advisor to finds at Lydney – an expert in early English – an Oxford don, named Tolkien.

A ring – and a curse. Enough to make anyone wonder: could this be the ring that inspired an iconic tale, my precious? We, of course, couldn’t possibly comment...

More here.

My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Discover Manga Meeya CE and Decide To Use My Viewpad 100 as a Comic Book Reader

My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Discover Manga Meeya CE and Decide To Use My Viewpad 100 as a Comic Book Reader

Manga Meeya CE (MMCE) is a terrific piece of Japanese abandonware available here. It's a comic book reader that's just wonderful -- it's responsive and gets out of your way. I can run as-is on an Airpanel running Windows CE.net 4.1, but if you have a Viewpad 100 running Windows CE 3.0 you can make it work like a champ by installing Alpaxo's RedGear Compatibility Layer.

My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Give Up and Buy a Sony PRS-505

My Viewsonic Viewpad 100 eBook Project: I Give Up and Buy a Sony PRS-505

OK, OK, I haven't really given up on my Viewpad. But I did buy one of these on eBay. I got the Sony PRS-505 for the following reasons:

• It has a terrific, clear display.
• I reads ePub files. The PRS-500 can't.
• On eBay it's cheaper that the Kindle.
• It has a slot for an SD card.
• It can play MP3 files.
• You don't have to pay extra for a protective cover.
• Aluminum case, not plastic.
• Cleaner look than the Kindle.

Since I don't do a lot of traveling, I don't need the purchase-over-the-air capability of the Kindle.

My only complaint: The built-in font isn't all that great. Lucky, the tech-savvy among you can change the default font using the insanely-detailed instructions found on MobileRead. The font shown above is Caecilia. Being perhaps a little older, I chose Caecilia Bold. You can, of course, bump up the font size to Medium or Large too.

Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels: A Gallery

Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels: A Gallery