Vatican library & a 6-way book

Just a note before I start, EMBRACED BY FIRE, my latest novel is on special at Amazon for a short time so if you're interested .....

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Embraced by Fire



This week 2 fun bits of books trivia:

First a very cool book from the 16th Century that opens 6 ways. It gives different devotional texts on each unique opening. See a video here. This multi-book was printed in Germany during hte 1550's to 1570s.

Second bit of trivia: The Vatican library is going to digitise its archive with the help of the Japanese. These ancient manuscripts are a vital piece, not just of church history, but of history in general. They include copies of classical Greek and Latin literature as well as mediaeval and Renaissance illumiated works. Eventually the library plans to make it's 82,000 manuscripts available to the public as a result of this work.

Technology Changes

Time passes with each slow incremental step. So often we don't even stop to think how our lives have changed, we just deal with the present. This little video reminded me how much even the little things can change in a relatively short space of time.

Well - that made me feel old. What about you? Old enough to have used a rotary phone, or were you with those kids?    :)

Power of opening lines in grammar images

Pop Chart Labs have come up with a very cool poster of 25 famous opening lines. The twist... they are written using the Reed-Kellogg system.

As they say..."From Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon, each sentence has been painstakingly curated and diagrammed by PCL's research team, parsing classical prose by parts of speech and offering a partitioned, color-coded picto-grammatical representation of some of the most famous first words in literary history. "

Check out a bigger image of all the sentences here.

People with books

Some very fun pictures. They might sound simple but in some ways they capture the joy of books.
New York Bookstore manager, Ellen Pullen, has collated an ongoing photo essay on books & the bodies that love them. The images show her and her colleagues posing with the books with which they work. Here is a small sample, see more here.

  

2014 covers

If you haven't been to Cover Cafe you should. Every year they run a competition for the best and worst cover of the year, they also look at the ongoing trends. I thought I'd give you a little update from them on where things are going.

Linnear has posted a new trend for 2014 (and she's a little peeved - this is not her favourite trend).
It's legs - that's right just legs.

She was a little more impressed with these two covers, feeling like they added a little something to the legs to get a better balance.

Then there's these two non-leg covers that I think stand a good chance of being nominated for best cover.
'Cruel Beauty' uses the 'staircase' trend, but with a lovely twist, adding lovely levels by incorporating the rose.

'Hidden Magic' has the 'woman facing away from camera' trend, but utilised differently because of the two layers of images.

I wonder what the rest of 2014 will hold?