somnambulized eyes

odditiesoflife:

The Mystery of “Nancy Drew” and the Author that Never Was

The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift were all the product of one man, Edward Stratemeyer, a New Jersey author who wrote more than 1,300 books and eventually founded a syndicate of ghostwriters who pounded out juvenile mysteries based on his instructions. Thus book syndication was born. They were referred to as “book factories” and were extremely profitable.

Stratemeyer conceived the syndicate when his Rover Boys series proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand for more books. He corralled a stable of hungry young writers, and in 1910 they were producing 10 new series annually. Each writer earned $50 to $250 for a manuscript he could produce in a month, working with characters and plot devised by Stratemeyer. He would review each completed manuscript for consistency and publish it under a pseudonym that he owned — Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, Laura Lee Hope, Victor Appleton. Each book in a series mentioned the thrilling earlier volumes and foreshadowed the next book. The formula worked so well that when Stratemeyer died in 1930 his daughter continued the business; when she died in 1982 the syndicate was selling more than 2 million books a year.

This sounds cynical, but it worked because Stratemeyer had a sympathetic understanding of what young readers wanted. “The trouble is that very few adults get next to the heart of a boy when choosing something for him to read,” Stratemeyer wrote to a publisher in 1901. “A wide awake lad has no patience with that which is namby-pamby, or with that which he puts down as a ‘study book’ in disguise. He demands real flesh and blood heroes who do something.”

Writing books. I am obviously doing it wrong.

(via randomfactsoftheday)

reading junot diaz’s this is how you lose her this weekend. highly recommended!

Strand Books: You are what you underline →

strandbooks:

The best thing about paperbacks (apart from the smell, of course) is that when a little jewel of a sentence grabs you, you can underline it.[…] Underlining something in your book is the original “interactive” media. Think of it as a hyperlink that redirects to your own thoughts, and like a hyperlink, it can leave the rest of the story behind and open up a new window of ideas, insights, musings.

I love everything about this project and want these in my house. More.

these prints are wonderful.

myimaginarybrooklyn:

Flesh and Blood

‘Talulla Rising,’ a Novel by Glen Duncan

If literature is lacinato kale, genre is gelato. Despite regular critical attempts to reconstruct this outdated food pyramid, the base holds strong. Fortunately, thanks to a surge in literary molecular gastronomy, readers can enjoy an ever wider array of broccoli rabe (or brussels sprout, or Swiss chard) ice cream. When cooked by mad word scientists like Glen Duncan — whose new horror novel, “Talulla Rising,” is a sequel to “The Last Werewolf” — this harmonic hybrid delivers sweet (plot), salty (character), sour (emotional pathos), bitter (psychological probity) and umami (stylistic and linguistic panache). If books were required to list the nutritional value of their contents, Duncan’s sumptuously gluttonous werewolf saga would rank as high in pure cane sugar as it does in omega-3s.

“Talulla Rising” powers up where “The Last Werewolf” concluded, which means it, and this review, will be unavoidably full of spoilers for people who haven’t read the first book. Talulla Demetriou, Duncan’s werewolf heroine, has fallen on bad times. Her werewolf soul mate, Jake Marlowe, has been killed by the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena. Despite a supposed werewolf inability to reproduce, she learns she’s pregnant with Jake’s twins. Sequestered and gestating in rural Alaska with her “familiar” (a trusted human helper), she’s discovered by vampires in the midst of labor: one twin out, the second safely in. The vamps abduct her minutes-old son, leaving Talulla, after she delivers her daughter, the book-long challenge of retrieving him. Duncan’s throbbing, fornication-crazy plot defies easy encapsulation, but is best described as a gleeful three-way between Raymond Chandler’s entire oeuvre, Anne Rice’s vampire novels and Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum.” Proust, as usual, is watching from the corner.

What distinguishes Talulla from your standard werewolf is that she worries. In the face of cultural expectations, Talulla is a humiliated failure. (A young drifter she kidnaps in Alaska, and plans to eat when the moon is full, exclaims: “How can you do this? I mean you’re … pregnant!”) She’s lonely. Talulla grapples with the alienating act of emotionless sex with humans — the moral stopgap she’s installed to prevent herself from eating people she loves. (Jake, before he started compartmentalizing, ate his human wife and unborn child.) She must battle the presumed mutual exclusivity of her maternal and her sexual incarnations, in addition to the vampires seeking werewolf blood to fulfill the mandate of an ancient text. Talulla agonizes: Can a woman who kills and consumes innocent people and craves near-constant sex — often with strangers or even enemies, so indomitable is her libido — be a fit parent? A mother can be a monster, but can a monster be a mother?

(More…)

-literary genre fiction = broccoli rabe gelato? discuss.
-i need to read this book.

nevver:

1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’ [Italo Calvino’s 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic]

“‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.”

justdonttellthesquirrels:

Why Old Books Smell Good

“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.”
- From Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: the guide

From the Green Apple Core blog (Green Apple Books).

SCIENCE!

(via emptyorchards)

housingworksbookstore:

Books for walls? Now we’ve seen everything! And so will you if you step inside David Bouley’s long-delayed Japanese restaurant Brushstroke, which puts 12,000 boring old (recycled) paperbacks to good use as the walls in the bar/lounge.

(via Photos: David Bouley’s Brushstroke Uses Books For Walls: Gothamist)

(via libraryland)

thingsorganizedneatly:

SUBMISSION: by Kyle Scully

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany →

wrestlethethistles:

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

(via libraryland)

CB I Hate Perfume | In The Library →

So this is something I’ll be buying as soon as I have disposable income again.

“In the Library is a warm blend of English Novel*, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish.

“*The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite novels originally published in 1927. I happened to find a signed first edition in pristine condition many years ago in London. I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred of these in the first place. It had a marvelous warm woody slightly sweet smell and I set about immediately to bottle it.”