The Ghost in My Hands: On Reading Digital Books
The virtual bookshelf on my Kindle is a list of titles that I've read but never held. These books are just ideas, abstractions, nothing less, nothing more.
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The Physical Book Will Surely Endure: But Will It Endure for the Right Reason?
As an empirical matter, reading on a tablet cannot remotely approach the sensual literary experience offered by an old-fashioned book. The latter is, I’d venture, intrinsically more pleasurable than the former, not unlike the intrinsic difference between high quality toilet paper and the sandpaper stuff used in bus stations.
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Judging Books by Their Covers 2016: US vs. UK
Only a fool would think these covers came from different countries. They were clearly designed in alternate dimensions.
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The Private Library: What Books Reveal About Their Readers
On a page of Charles Darwin’s 'The Voyage of the HMS Beagle Round the World,' Mark Twain wrote: “Can any plausible excuse be furnished for the crime of creating the human race?”
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The Bard’s Book? An Epic eBay Buy
If any fragment with Shakespeare’s handwriting came to light, it would generate international headlines, and that scrap would be worth millions. In this sense, Shakespeare truly is the “holy grail” of the rare book world.
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The Weight of Knowledge: On Moving Books
It would be trickier to decide whom to put in the adult diaper boxes.
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Praise the Colophon: Twenty Notes on Type
I call for the return of colophons. Colophons can send us back into books for another level of reading. If we love books, that second reading might be ecstatic in the same way good writing can lift us.
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Ink on Paper: On the Beauty of Typewritten Book Covers
The reason these typewritten book covers have caught my eye and captured my heart is because they’ve so ingeniously captured the essence of the writing process -- and the central truth that no piece of writing is ever truly finished.
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Calendars, Timelines, and Collages: Mapping the Imaginary
I got curious about the other visual aids that novelists create to manage their books, so I asked around and gathered a variety of notebook pages, diagrams, and timelines.
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Merging Two Loves: Cover Art Reimagined
In an effort to merge two loves of mine -- writing and photography -- I recently began this photo series that pairs snippets of novels with fun visuals that expand upon their cover art.
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Judging Books by Their Covers 2015: US Vs. Netherlands
I was recently looking at the covers of Dutch-language books. Despite our different cultures, we share many overlaps in our literary taste. I hoped that I could draw some conclusions about those tastes by comparing book covers. After spending way too much time on the task, I conclude that I can’t.
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Art Inspires Fiction: On the Power of Jacket Design
I loved this photograph in all its weirdness and, more to the point, I was just relieved that no one was proposing slapping on my novel the image of a woman holding a briefcase, a baby, or a mop.
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The Point of the Paperback
Here’s what I learned, after a month of talking to editors, literary agents, publishers, and other authors: A paperback isn’t just a cheaper version of the book anymore. It’s a makeover. A facelift. And for some, a second shot.
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Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary
For all its many virtues, the fifth edition is not perfect. Its one glaring flaw is an introductory essay written by the chairman of the Usage Panel, Steven Pinker, a Harvard University linguist and cognitive scientist who is also an avowed descriptivist. What's that whirring noise I hear? Is it William Morris, who died in 1994, spinning in his grave?
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