Sometime in either middle school or high school, I discovered Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, which was originally published in 1976. I devoured it, and quickly became obsessed with the rest of the books in the Vampire Chronicles series. I also read and loved the Mayfair Witches series. Anyways, I follow Anne Rice on Facebook, and she loves to interact with her fans, encouraging them to comment on her fan page.
Below is a series of questions posed by Anne Rice on her Facebook page this past Monday (October 18th). I’m reposting them because she asks about the future of the book as a physical object, which prompted me to think how I would redesign the book. You don’t have to have a Facebook account to see her fan page, so I’ll leave it up to you to find out what her fans had to say in response to these questions. You can also visit her official website for her Facebook and Twitter feeds.
[Monday, October 18, 2010 @ 1:29 pm]
Nancy Bento supplied us with this link to a story about the possible disappearance of the physical book. I don't think the physical book WILL disappear, frankly, but what are your thoughts?
Link: Will physical books be gone in five years?
As e-book readers and tablet computers become more common, one prominent tech mogul says that physical books could disappear sooner than expected.
[Monday, October 18, 2010 @ 1:31 pm]
You've probably heard me float this idea before: the physical book can be saved by a new kind of physical book: a synthetic book that weighs less, lasts longer, and costs infinitely less to produce. Why aren't we seeing innovations in the physical book?
[Monday, October 18, 2010 @ 1:39 pm]
Why do books have to look like they did in the 1500's? Why are they still made of paper? Imagine a beautiful synthetic book, feather weight, with bright white pages, impervious to mildew, water, or rot. Why not? Why is there no investment in this area?
[Monday, October 18, 2010 @ 1:41 pm]
A new synthetic book could preserve the age old fonts, the glory of full color illustrations, the beautiful feel of the volume in hand, yet be cheap to produce, cheap to ship, and easy to store. To save the book, we need to remake the book. We have reinvented clothing with synthetics. Why not books?
[Monday, October 18, 2010 @ 1:57 pm]
Kindle and ebooks are fine for those who are connected, and possess technology. But a new featherweight synthetic physical book could go with one to the most remote villages or mountain peaks or desert islands of the world. It could endure in a tropical rain forest. Shipping and storage of such books could revolutionize the "book industry."
Last night, I stumbled across the article “Lit-snobs, hot librarians, and the rise of the literary tattoo” by Eugenia Williamson because I follow @AdviceToWriters on Twitter. The article talks about a forthcoming book titled The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (available through many retailers). It’s a book with pictures of people who have literary-themed tattoos. A brief quote from the article:
With any luck, the book will be used as a primary source by anthropologists of the future who have set out to understand what happened to bibliophiles when physical books began to disappear. At the very least, they'll learn that literary passions ran broadly, and deep, and weren't readily digitized. (Williamson)
You can look at some of the tattoos on The Boston Phoenix website here, but the pictures are cropped weirdly and often cut off the tattoo. Instead, you should go straight to the source and check out lovely Tattoo Lit site. I spent half an hour last night pouring over the pictures, ooohing and awwwing, and plotting my next tattoo. Reading the accompanying information sent in with the actual pictures is fascinating – these people really love both literature and tattoos. They are passionate about both.
I too love literature and tattoos, and I have five tattoos, although only one of them is literary themed. Wanna see it? I’ve wanted this tattoo design ever since I was a little girl, and finally had it inked in April of 2009 by Sideshow Jen at Devotion Tattoos in Orlando, which has since closed.
It’s a bookworm, just like me. I had Jen base the design off Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm character. I caught the reading bug at a very young age, and luckily both my parents and schools encouraged voracious reading. I don’t really remember this because it happened in elementary school, but apparently my parents bought me the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods. They told me if I read the whole thing and liked it, they would buy me the rest of the books. Well, in what they deemed to be too short a time period for me to have the entire book, I finished reading it and demanded the next. They thought I was a liar. I must have convinced them that I had indeed read the entire book, because I still have my boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books. The point being, I was, and am still, a very quick reader of pleasure books. I used to “steal” my dad’s books and return them to him within a day, finished, while he was still on the second or third chapter. And I am incredibly lucky in that my request for books was never refused by either one of my parents, even if they were “ridiculous” books by authors like Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine (which I still own!).
So, do you have any literary tattoos? Do you want to get one? If you did, what would it be?
