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rabbitcruiser · 1 year

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Bibliomania Day

Stephen Blumberg loved books. It has been written that “it was his habit to read constantly through the night, cat-napping, walking, reading, dozing, waking, reading again, never fully sleeping.” Stephen Blumberg didn’t just love books, he was a bibliomaniac. Bibliomania is when someone has a strong love of books, where they collect them to the point of hoarding, and social relations and health may suffer. Symptoms may include acquiring more books than would be useful for any reason or getting many copies of the same book. The term was coined by John Ferriar, who published a poem in 1809 with the word as its title, for his friend Richard Heber, who had the condition. The term became used to describe obsessive book collectors. That same year, Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin published Bibliomania; or Book Madness. Bibliomania is different from bibliophilia, which is a healthy form of love for books.

On March 20, 1990, Stephen Blumberg’s bibliomania caught up with him. He was arrested for stealing more than 23,600 books (weighing 19 tons) from 268 libraries, universities, and museums. It had taken him over 20 years to steal them, and he got them from 45 states, Washington D.C., and Canada. After originally being thought to be valued at around $20 million, the value of the books was estimated at $5.3 million. He is known as the number one book thief in American history and became known as the Book Bandit. The books he stole, which included a first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin among other rare books, became known as the “Blumberg Collection.”

An acquaintance of Blumberg, Kenneth J. Rhodes, turned him in for a $56,000 reward. During Blumberg’s trial, a psychiatric doctor let it be known that Blumberg had gone through psychiatric treatment as an adolescent. The defense claimed that Blumberg had stolen the books because of psychiatric issues beyond his control. According to the defense, Blumberg had thought he was saving the books from destruction by stealing them. He thought that the government was trying to keep them so that everyday people wouldn’t have them, and he thought he was acting as custodian of the books and doing something good. Because he was well-intentioned, he said he would have never sold any of the books for a profit, and hoped they would go to another person who would take good care of them after he was gone. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to 71 months in prison and given a $200,000 fine, and insanity or psychology wasn’t factored into the decision. He was released on December 29, 1995, and has since been arrested for burglary multiple times.

On Bibliomania Day, we remember Stephen Blumberg and his remarkable feat of stealing over 23,600 books. Could you buy, steal, or gather together that many books? Probably not, but you aren’t the world’s most famous bibliomaniac. Perhaps on Bibliomania Day, you could at least try.

How to Observe

Celebrate the day by getting as many books as possible. It’s probably best not to steal them as Stephen Blumberg did, but that’s a decision you will have to make for yourself. You could start by getting some books about bibliomaniacs, such as A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books or The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. After that your options are limitless. As bibliomaniacs tend to collect any and all books, regardless of their value, you could just start trying to gather up any books you can find. But maybe it’s best to start by getting some of the best fiction or non-fiction books of all time.

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lifebetweenpages · 1 year

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MY FAVOURITE WRITER-ISH MOVIES

You’ve read the title correctly, and I can hear you saying: “Lifebetweenpages, you’re still not giving us a recap of the books you have read over the past month (plus a few weeks, give or take)! Bad Bookblr creator!” However, instead, I am giving you my list of movies to watch when you are out of ideas for your books, can’t be bothered to read and still want to feel like an intelligent author. We’ve all been there.

I can also hear you saying “But Lifebetweenpages, how can you be a trustworthy authority on writer things? You’re our favourite bibliomane, not our favourite author!” To this, I raise two points:

I have been writing silly little books since I was virtually a toddler, and I have three main projects sitting dejectedly in my Google Docs currently, my novel which I work on most frequently sitting at an upsettingly ‘decent’ 23k words.

I do imagine you would have more faith in me, dear hypothetical followers, seeing as you only exist in my synapses, and I would hope I hold higher opinions about myself than that. However, I believe many of you (hypothetically) should have (hypothetically) guessed that I’m a writer as well as a reader, seeing as all writers read and many readers write.

Now with that out of the way, let’s jump into our list, and by list I mean my ramblings about two very specific movies.

1 - DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989)

I’ve decided to put the obvious up first, so you can skim through this if you have either watched this incredible movie or have already heard glowing reviews.

With its heavy focus on classic poetry and message of embracing the arts and following your passions, it’s not a surprise that Dead Poets Society has became the artist’s top pick movie and a cliche staple on this sort of snappy list.

When I say the movie focuses on poetry, I mean a much stronger term. Dead Poets Society promotes poetry in a way, showing the viewer the truth, joy and magic that comes with the form of art, inspiring them to go out and seize it. If that doesn’t help sell the movie to you, just note that my friends and I, who come out of every poetry analysis in English class with our eyes glazed over, were inspired to create our own Dead Poets Society, meeting every so often. In fact, we reconvene in two days time at the time of writing, and I still need to pick a poem (and it will be a Sylvia Plath.)

Another element that stands out in Dead Poets Society is the atmosphere of the film, somehow drawing in: a contagious teenage sense of wonder and mischief, world-destroying grief, and that Dark Academia aesthetic that people on the internet adore and my blog leans into all together.

So please, even if you aren’t a writer or reader and have stumbled onto this page confused and startled, give this movie a watch, for your own world to be changed if not just for me.

2 - TICK, TICK... BOOM! (2021)

You know the overwhelming sense of doom that comes with attempting to make your mark on the world? Do you recognise the sense of dread that drowns you whenever you remember the concept of time? Well so did Jonathan Larson, and he documented the experience expertly when writing Tick, Tick… BOOM!

Lately, I’ve been hearing this sound. Everywhere I go. Like a tick. Tick. Tick. Like a time bomb in some cheesy B-movie or Saturday morning cartoon. The fuse has been lit. The clock counts down the seconds as the flame gets closer, and closer, and closer, until all at once -

This was written years before he achieved fame with RENT, years before his genius was appreciated, and years before his untimely death from an aortic dissection. Tick, tick... BOOM! was written when Jonathan was relatively unknown, struggling with balancing work, social life and his art, and completely confused as how to tackle the final fragment that was needed to complete the musical he had been working on for the entirety of his youth, fighting against the tides of the ever-chasing deadline of Superbia's first showcase. Whatever your art is, I imagine you can relate to the desperation of Jonathan.

Andrew Garfield, who plays Jonathan Larson, perfectly portrays the starving artist, ever frantic to please, ever submerged in just how much there is to balance, ever striving to make a difference, and it almost feels as if he has held a mirror up to the artist's soul, portraying all of the irrationality and the unintentional selfishness as well as the charisma and the creativity that I see in myself every time I look into my mind for more than one second.

All of these factors and more that I can't find the words to describe (which is a lot for me, because I always find some words, however shallow they may be) makes Tick, Tick... BOOM! one of my favourite movies. Plus, the songs are absolute magic (I have a very strange favourite - Play Game - how can a song parodying 90s hip hop reflect upon the commercialisation of theatre in such an eloquent way?)

So those are my recommendations for all your tired writer needs, and once you do watch these, my asks are open for you to wax poetic about their glory.

#dead poets society #lists #xanthous #tick tick boom #movies

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morphaeus · 1 year

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url change bibliomanic → morphaeus

#blog updates #url change

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aqueluna · 2 years

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Prompt 25 (Extra/Free) - Entertain

CW: Mention of illness

“W-Wow… you must be really tired,” a squeaky-voiced stutter crept out from across the candlelit infirmary, contents as shielded from the sun by the thick, almost florally spiralling hoarfrost as they were by the fact that it had set a good hour or so ago. “You’ve yawned maybe um… twenty-eight times? Twenty-nine? Um, a lot in the last f-five minutes.”

Another, cavernously dramatic yawn rolled forth from the pyjama-clad Raen quite at odds with the alert, expectant glint to her luminescently ruby limbals, gaze wandering the room predominantly, though ever returning to observe the Veena sat across the room at her, crooked hand gently swishing, flicking and swirling as she dabbed paint across another canvass. Another yawn…

“Oh… I’m boring you a-aren’t I? You’re trying to g-get my attention without asking for it,” the rangy woman occasionally known as Spins mused, drumming the bottom tip of her paintbrush against her chin. The sickly detective scowled, face curdling from the veritable wooden mask it’d been before, ripe with offence so grave an onlooker might think her entire lineage slighted.

“Nonsense, your theory has three grave flaws. Firstly - you’re wrong. Secondly - I command attention with my presence, my grace, my delightful face, I needn’t “try”,” Chiho began, thick, aristocratic Hingan drawl oozing from her lips, concluding with a huff, “Thirdly - I only want attention from attractive people.” Holding up a pale, dainty finger as if to lend her words a sliver of gravitas.

“Oh… that’s true, I’m not r-really pretty,” the wretchling offered lightly, as gently and lacking in the craved offence as if the Raen had offered talk of the weather. A flicker of disappointment wending its way up Chiho’s visage as her insult fails to land. It wasn’t in truth, that the notion didn’t upset the Veena as a whole, but coming from -her- of all people? It had ceased to mean anything.

The arrogant, affluent brat was simply impossible to take seriously, too quick to resort to slinging insults, fish for arguments and to grandstand - words that had once stung so thoroughly that the notion of even being in the same room as her had been frightful utterly dulled.

“You were right about one thing though - you -are- boring me. Entertain me,” Chiho demanded, volume and bombastic energy draining from her voice as she reluctantly observes the ineffectuality of her barbs, deflating slightly. Had she truly fallen so far that even the hideous twig of a creature before her refused to rise or crumble beneath her words?

The wretchling considered the request finally given briefly, dim, dark gaze glancing across to the old, longcase chronometer then offered a hesitant nod, piping up, “O-Okay, I think it should be fine, it’ll be a little while until d-dinner time and I don’t r-really mind.”

Truthfully? The scrawny amnesiac didn’t mind, the foul-mattered brat she’d found herself lingering in the company of, treating and otherwise reluctantly assisting was unpleasant, but with the worst of her tuned out that which remained was so dreadfully pitiable… Company she’d once dreaded, now just scarcely preferable to nothing.

Chiho’s expectant gaze upon her, Spins mused on exactly how she might entertain the heiress. A joke perhaps? But she wasn’t especially funny. She’d gotten about as far as working out that laughing at other people’s quips even if they were dull endeared her to them. Thoughts eventually congealing around one of her favourite subjects, one to which the library that housed the infirmary was prodigiously well-equipped to sate.

“W-We could read a book together? What sort of books do you like, Chiho? I c-could go fetch one if yo-...” The wretchling began, only to be cut off by another terrible yawn.

“I know how to read, I don’t need you to do it for me. If I felt like reading, I’d do so without you Spoons.” followed the interrupting detective bluntly.

The sting of the rejection of one of her favourite hobbies, one the waifish bibliomane scarcely got to indulge with others nearly as often as she liked, was utterly diminished by the ridiculous blunder of the name she was in the process of considering a replacement for.

“You know that’s not my n-name, but the more you s-say it, the more I like it, maybe it should be,” Spins snickered, subsequently placating, “I know you c-can read. Sometimes you f-fall asleep with the book on your f-face, reading books with p-people isn’t about um… ability? It’s f-fun to experience t-together and do the voices.” Gentle, ocean blue doe gaze at odds with the glimmering bright rubies of Chiho’s own as she considered her.

“B-But something else then,” Spins ultimately surrendered lightly, a brief, pensive, fleck of guilt dancing across the pit of her stomach. For all her boasts, pomposity and ludicrous claims of legions of lovers, she’d found while running errands, fetching things for and treating the detective that she loathed sharing her personal space, and absolutely despised being touched, bristling defensively and recoiling rigidly. Reading a book together would not be kind to her.

Adding a few brushstrokes to the portrait of the chipped old mandragora vase she’d been working on, bringing to life the azure hue of the royal blue oldroses nestled within, the wretchling offered another suggestion lightly, “Do you l-like to paint, Chiho? You usually h-have a lot to say when I p-paint.” It was true enough, she’d often brought her paints into the infirmary as to indulge in her second-favourite hobby and not leave the sick Hingan unattended too long and the effort was usually enough to prompt a conversation.

“I like it well enough,” Chiho conceded, the waxing tenseness in her form ebbing slightly at more agreeable suggestion, eventually drawling pretentiously in elaboration, “I’d call it a singular aspect of a far greater art, lesser for its incompleteness, but not entirely without value for the facet it represents I -suppose-...” A sweetly mellifluous giggle rang out from across the room, the bookworm unable to help but chortle, the sound wrinkling the heiress’ nose, prompting her to huff, “What’s so funny?”

“Y-You are. You can’t e-even say you like something without having to p-put it down to b-barely be worth your attention or lift it up to be o-only something you are good at, it’s so r-ridiculous!” the chortling amnesiac managed to creak out in between wheezing breaths.

Chiho’s scowl returned with a vengeance, cheeks inflating into a brief, distinctly puffy-cheeked pout, rocking in place to better push herself into sitting up all the more, eventually exhaling, “My papa says I’m funny… but also says I’m not to be mocked. The fact of the matter is that I am a -phenomenal artist, drawing from the inspiration that forever flows free from my bosom, a living piece of art myself.” Pointing an accusatory finger at the lanky Veena, the plaster pale Raen barked, “I had thought to spare your feelings, but I see you need to be “taken down a peg” as you Eorzeans say. I challenge you to a painting contest!”

“I’m not E-Eorzean, I think I a-already told you that,” Spins frowned, a long, leporine ear lopping limply to the side as she craned her head to stare gormlessly at an angle, eyes briefly crossed in fixation upon the challenging digit. Unfolding her scraggly, bony body up from her chair, a smile crept its way onto the wretchling’s face at the notion, returning the gesture with a crooked digit of her own, squeaking, “As long as w-we’re done before dinner though, I accept. What are we p-painting?”

“Portraits. Each-others. I’ll do you that much of a favour - I dare say if it’s of -my- face, even you could come up with something that might be valuable someday. Such is my confidence I will win, I’m quite happy to lend you that advantage,” the boastful Raen offered, remnants of a pout twisting into an awfully inflammatory sneer. Despite her mannerisms in offering the notion, the prospect ultimately agreeable enough to prompt a nod from the wretchling.

“Aaaaand, aaaaaand!” the increasingly excitable Raen barked, stifling a cough into her pyjama sleeve, continuing after a few shallow breaths, “If - no, -when- I win. I should like a prize.” At the curious cant of a head from the sunny-maned Veena, Chiho elaborated, gaze gleeful at the notion, “I have something I think might… improve your look - such as it is.” Wrinkled nose as the wretchling is considered leaving it quite clear indeed exactly how it was.

“I’d like you to wear it for a few days. I am magnanimous, yes? Even in my imminent victory? Chiho Amada the Eleventh - always considering the needs of her lessers,” the arrogant, self-absorbed detective laid out.

Restraining a snort, the wretchling murmured amusedly, “W-Wow… I sure hope it isn’t embarrassing… I’d h-hate to be lesser -and- embarrassed I t-think.” The excitement coursing through the sickly heiress was, in truth - ever so slightly refreshing to behold amidst day after day largely dominated by lethargy - she didn’t terribly like Chiho, but it was hard not to think well of such an improvement in one’s patient, even for a failure of a chirurgeon’s apprentice.

“What of you then? For fairness’ sake even if the outcome is nigh impossible it’d only be proper for you to choose a prize too,” Chiho insisted, offering a few suggestions with a lackadaisical sweep of a pyjama-sleeved arm as her opponent-to-be considered the question, “Coin? An autograph? A kiss on the cheek?”

Spins shook her sunny-maned head, stuttering up with the choice that’d best amuse her and she supposed, be good for the self-absorbed Raen, “N-No… I don’t really want any of t-those. If I win, I w-want you to say one n-nice thing to every person you meet for a w-week when you f-feel better and it h-has to actually b-be nice. No t-technicalities, no put-downs, no c-comparisons to you.”

The notion soured the heiress’ countenance, just as she expected it would. “Of c-course, if you can’t do that… I wouldn’t blame you for giving up,” the wretchling offered, off-handedly, the kindling that ignited the competitive, crimson glare cast her way.

“I -can-! I can do it! Don’t you dare think I can’t! I’ll blow you away with how truly heartfelt the niceties are!” hurriedly barked Chiho, eager to defend her own capabilities, puffing up pretentiously. “Of course… that requires that I lose and I don’t think that likely. Enough bloviating, face me.”

The wretchling’s lips curled into a grin as she divided her paints and brushes into two, a spark of competitiveness taking root in her own heart.

#ffxivwrite2022 #ffxivwrite #entertain

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mariacallous · 2 years

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“Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.” He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts—including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described as Victorian”—have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds. Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their place. “I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery,” he writes. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.”

Kociejowski writes from the “ticklish underbelly” of the book trade as a “factotum” rather than a book dealer, since he was always too busy with writing to ever run a store. His memoir is a representative slice, a core sample, of the rich and partly vanished world of bookselling in England from the late nineteen-seventies to the present. As Larry McMurtry puts it, in his own excellent (and informative) memoir of life as a bookseller, “Books,” “the antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture,” rich with lore of the great and eccentric sellers and collectors who animate the trade. Kociejowski writes how “the multifariousness of human nature is more on show” in a bookstore than in any other place, adding, “I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires.”

The bookseller’s memoir is, in part, a record of accomplishments, of deals done, rarities uncovered—or, in the case of the long-suffering Shaun Bythell, the owner of the largest secondhand bookstore in Scotland, the humdrum frustrations and occasional pleasures of running a big bookshop. While Kociejowski recounts some of the high points of his bookselling career (such as cataloguing James Joyce’s personal library or briefly working at the fusty but venerable Maggs Bros., the antiquarian booksellers to the Queen), he above all remembers the characters he came to know. “I firmly believe the fact of being surrounded by books has a great deal to do with flushing to the surface the inner lives of people,” he writes.

Some of them are famous, like Philip Larkin, who, as the Hull University librarian, turned down a pricey copy of his own first book, “The North Ship,” as too expensive for “that piece of rubbish.” Kociejowski tells us how he offended Graham Greene by not recognizing him on sight, and once helped his friend Bruce Chatwin (“fibber though he was”) with a choice line of poetry for “On the Black Hill”; how he bonded over Robert Louis Stevenson with Patti Smith, and sold a second edition of “Finnegans Wake” to Johnny Depp, of all people, who was “trying incredibly hard not to be recognised and with predictably comic results.” But more precious are the memories of the anonymous eccentrics, cranks, bibliomanes, and mere people who simply, and idiosyncratically, love books. “Where is the American collector who wore a miner’s lamp on his forehead so as to enable him to penetrate the darker cavities of the bookshops he visited? Where is the man who came in asking not for books but the old bus and tram tickets often found inside them? Where is the man who collected virtually every edition of The Natural History of Selborne by Reverend Gilbert White? Where is everybody?” Kociejowski’s tone, though mostly wry, verges on lament. “I cannot help but feel something has gone out of the life of the trade,” he writes.

Like many memoirs, “A Factotum in the Book Trade” is a nostalgic book, wistful for the disappearance of bookselling—antiquarian books in particular, but also new titles—as a dependable, albeit never very remunerative, profession. The Internet dealt a major blow by creating a massive single market for used books, undercutting the bread-and-butter lower end of the secondhand market. Amazon, in turn, depressed the prices of new books. And then there are rising rents, which have devastated small businesses of all kinds. What dies with each bookstore isn’t just a valuable haven for books and book people but also “a book’s worth of stories” like Kociejowski’s, a book full of characters, of the major passions that heat up our minor lives. The fact that bookstores have been allowed to close, Kociejowski writes, represents “an overall failure of imagination, an inability to see consequences.”

While Kociejowski mourns bookselling’s past, Jeff Deutsch, the head of the legendary Seminary Co-op Bookstores, in Chicago, thinks through its future in his new book, “In Praise of Good Bookstores.” “This book is no eulogy,” Deutsch writes. “We can’t allow that.” Free from Kociejowski’s charming, twilight-years saltiness, Deutsch’s tone is an earnest, even idealistic consideration of what we gain from a good bookstore, and what we risk losing if we don’t overcome the failure of imagination—and of economics—that has allowed so many bookstores to close.

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