I think that what people have on their bookshelves can tell you a great deal about what kind of person they are. After all those are the books that they decided to buy and the ones they read, meaning they learned something or were influenced by the books. I have found some photos of bookshelves that I truly enjoy. Here is my bookshelf below.

So, I went ahead and created a Flickr Group so that everybody may add there photos and we can see each other bookshelves. Now, I do know that there are other groups out there, but this is different. This is all about taking a nice photo and being able to read the title of the books. In other groups there are angled shots of huge bookshelves and shots of individual book covers. Instead it would be great if you followed this guidelines

Please take the photo directly in front of the bookshelf. No angle shots.
Please also make sure that you are zoomed in far enough to see the titles.
If you have a huge bookshelf zoom in on your favorite section.
You may also just zoom in on the spines so that we don’t see your shelves/shelf at all.

I look forward to seeing what people contribute to the group.
Thanks and enjoy.

We stopped at Barnes & Noble today and I finally picked up Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. I have made it through the first section which covered the history and the basics of typography. The emphasis of the book is Thinking WITH Type not just about it. Lupton writes, “This is not a book about fonts. It is a book about how to use them.” Full review coming as soon as I finish it!

The writer Kurt Vonnegut was, from what I have heard, a wonderful person who recently passed away. Glynnis Eldridge, a friend and fellow classmate of mine, knew Kurt Vonnegut through her grandparents. She has told me a story about Mr. Vonnegut that I would like to share with you.

(This story was written by Glynnis Eldridge)

Jimmy Breslin (”JB”) and Kurt Vonnegut were good friends. JB, my friend Glynnis’ step-grandfather, and his wife, Ronnie [Eldridge], were having a dinner party one night that both Mr. Vonnegut and my friend attended. Glynnis was probably not much older than seven and didn’t recognize that the people mingling in her grandparent’s pent house apartment were celebrities. So Glynnis didn’t try to talk to any of them because she thought that they were just old farts. She thought that she had better things to do like play the piano and eat asparagus, rather than talk to someone who claimed to be famous. And so she settled herself in between the fat cushions on one half of a pair of matching armchairs.

On the table next to her she had a tall glass of ginger ale and on her lap she had a plate of asparagus. Someone sat down on the chair next to her. He looked old; he had gray curly hair not only on top of his head but also underneath his nose. Some people came over to talk to him for a little while and then Glynnis’ foot fell asleep. Her pink, white, and red plaid dress fell just above the knee of her ripped black tights. Her shoes were patent leather Mary Janes with silver lining on the clasps. She sat comfortably with her legs overlapping “Indian style,” and with the dirty bottoms of her shiny shoes pressed against her thighs.

When her feet’s sleeping sensation struck her, Glynnis winced and bit down on a piece of a crushed ice cube. She crinkled her nose and squeezed her eyes closed, and then the man with the gray curly hair looked over in her direction and smiled. He excused himself from the conversation he had been having with the other famous people in the room, and smiled down in the direction of the black Mary Janes dangling off of the end of the armchair.

“Are they sleeping?” the curly haired man asked in between glances at the shiny shoes, and sips of some beverage that Glynnis assumed was ginger ale. Glynnis didn’t say anything, but instead gave him an exaggerated nod of the head. Yes. Her feet were very much asleep. She picked up her glass of ginger ale.

“My feet fall asleep sometimes too,” he continued, “not long ago I ran into a little boy about your age who also liked ginger ale. Do you know what he said?”
Glynnis grinned and shook her head, “No”.

“Well, he told me that his feet feel like ginger ale when they fall asleep,” he gulped down the last of the liquid in his glass, “How about that?”

Ronnie called everyone into the mirror walled dining room for desert. Pies and cakes and pastries and cookies and ice cream and plates of fruit and bottles of wine covered the entire table. Maybe it is necessary to say that celebrities do eat (by the way), but what was much more scrumptious than any desert treat on that pent house apartment’s dining room table, were the experiences that took place, and the stories they made. The curly haired man with the hair under his nose was named Kurt Vonnegut. He was brilliant.

(The story is Copyrighted 2007 by Glynnis Eldridge. All Rights Reserved)

…and I am proud of it. I judge books by their cover because it is the first thing I see. If I see a nice book cover design then I pick up the book. Sometime I find out that its not about a subject that I am not interested in and sometimes it leads to finding a really great book. Where do I not judge books by their covers? Online. If I am shopping on Amazon, chance are that I am not judgeing a book by its cover as much as I would in a store. Instead I am reading reviews on the book and looking inside at the table of contents and other excerpts. If you want me to pick up our book, then you should design a sweet cover for it.