Category: Miscellaneous

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‘A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now’

James Delbourgo’s “A Noble Madness” is a brilliant, droll study in the shifting profile and consistent obsession of the stop-at-nothing, buy-or-die collector. Mr. Delbourgo, a history professor at Rutgers University, finds that the collecting mentality, like most things, divides into ancient and modern. The ancients believed that those who loved too much were possessed by gods; Suetonius wrote that Caligula, who believed he was a god, once ordered his troops to fill their helmets with seashells, the “spoils of the ocean.” We moderns, Mr. Delbourgo argues, have gone from theories of “demonic possession to accusations of superstition, obsession, sexual neurosis, and pathological greed down to the recent invention of the medical term ‘hoarding disorder.’” Read more

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A Smuggled Book Changed His Life. Now He’s Built 500 Prison Libraries.

Reginald Dwayne Betts carjacked a man who was asleep in his car in a parking lot in Fairfax County, Virginia. Betts, who was 16 at the time, was tried as an adult and spent nearly a decade in state prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Books weren’t allowed in “the hole.” But the men in the prison devised a pulley system using torn sheets and pillowcases to pass books from the general population to people in solitary. “Imagine yourself as a teenager, 17 years old, in solitary confinement, and you’re just calling out, ‘Yo, somebody send me a book,’” Betts said. “Somebody sent me Dudley Randall’s “The Black Poets,” and it radically changed my life.” Betts started writing every day and reading anything he could get his hands on. Books transformed him, he says, revealing that other ways of living were possible. When Betts got out, he earned his bachelor’s degree, then a law degree from Yale Law School. He became a poet and an advocate for prison reform, as well as a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient for his work with his nonprofit Freedom Reads, which installs libraries in prisons across the country. Read more

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Virginia Woolf’s Lost Book is Coming Soon

More than 80 years after her death, a new book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month after the manuscript was discovered in a stately home. Scholars say the book, a collection of three comic stories about a giantess named Violet, is the first significant literary experiment that Woolf completed, at the age of 25, eight years before the publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out. Read more

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Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk?

There’s a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help best-seller list. These books have titles like “The Courage to Be Disliked” and “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain. This all becomes more alarming when you think of the best-seller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be. Read more

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New Cozy Game, Tiny Bookshop, is Getting Good Reviews

Developer neoludic games celebrates the release of Tiny Bookshop, a new sim that sees you running a small seaside secondhand bookshop. You’ll collect books across different genres in an attempt to satisfy the reading habits of your customers, accumulate decorations for your shop that also affect the mood and purchasing tendencies of your customers, and more. Watch trailer

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