• I recall an author reading I went to years ago; she’d written a book about the Book of the Month club. Her opinion at that time was that literate book-culture was seeing its history growing smaller in a rearview mirror, hence the explosion of books about books, books about reading, books about bibliophiles. There’s a strong flavor of sadness and melancholy in these books. I thought of this when reading the UK Guardian review of Alberto Manguel’s “The Library at Night”:

The traditional library was a citadel sacred to the notion of omniscience; the web, by contrast, is ‘the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence’, like a supermarket that boundlessly proliferates in space and deluges the planet with its tacky wares. ‘The library that contained everything,’ Manguel laments, ‘has become the library that contains anything.’

• In junior high school, I got hooked on the Doc Savage novels with the James Bama covers. William Denton somehow located the author Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot Formula for any 6000-word story. While you’re there, check out William’s library science pages. And I’ll probably try his index card system for organizing my school work this fall. Update: I tried it for a while but it duplicated other systems for tracking work and reading that were more convenient, so I dropped it.

• Susie Bright is looking for odd book titles. (Susie’s site is fun, but its ads could be classified as NSFW.)

Related posts:

1. “Why you should throw books out”
2. Links Harvest: novels, narrative, BAE
3. David Markson
4. Links Harvest

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