Books do furnish a room

I remember a number of years ago I saw this book in a bookstore: Books Do Furnish a Room. Even though I don't own this book, I always remembered this title and the book... because I remember it having a lot of great photos, but also because I completely agree with this title. I love a room filled with books. Good thing thats what I do for a living. Here are a few photos I've collected over the years. 

I have no idea where I got this picture, but I just love it.

Even a room with messy books has a certain romance to it.

Someone here made wallpaper out of book pages! Awesome.


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I have no idea what this picture is... but I obviously thought it was cool enough to save

This is just dreamy

       via vi.sualize.us

Can books furnish a body too?

       via cupcakemugshot

A room without books is like a body without a soul - Cicero

Garden and a library...

I just stumbled upon an amazing Wonderland at Katiedid's blog. I'm new to the blogging world, but I'm quickly finding out how many wonderful bloggers there are out there and what wonderful things I can discover through the things they post.

So I definitely HAVE to go to The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens next time I'm in the L.A. area. I had no idea that this was in Pasadena.

As my Cicero quote says 'If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need'. I think the Huntington has more than everything I want too :)

This statement is false

Last night I picked up the book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (A Metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll) by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I had recently watched a documentary on the study of infinity and one of the four mathematicians featured was Kurt Gödel. I love the work of M.C. Escher, Bach, and Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), so when I saw all four of these names mentioned within a single title I was fascinated. The book is quite a tome, and I've only read the first chapter thus far, but it is very insightful, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest! Hofstadter's aim is look into the nature of infinity and contradiction. Within the universe there exist 'strange loops' that defy our understanding. Simple statements such as 'this statement is false' or 'The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.' can be eerily complex.

Here are some works by M.C. Escher that play along this theme. There are plenty of places you can read about the man and his works, so I'm not going to attempt to put it all here, but you can read about him on plenty of places on the net. There's a good article on Squidoo.

Escher did a number of pieces displaying the Moebius effect. In 1858, two German mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing, independently discovered what is popularly known as the Möbius strip. The characteristic feature of Möbius strip is that it is a surface with single side. In its most simplest form a Moebius strip can be constructed out a a strip of paper which is twisted halfway and the ends joined together. If one were to start tracing a surface, by the time they complete one trace they find that they are tracing the opposite side of the paper than the one from which they started. Go another round and you come back to the same side.

All of this strangely reminds me of the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing it's own tail.

Anyway, the third person that Hofstadter focuses on is Bach because he had a way of showing the infinite within music. Here is one piece that is referred to in the book, from Bach's A Musical Offering.



The fourth person (who is mentioned in the subtitle) is Lewis Carroll. I love Carroll (or should I say Dodgson), and I am very much looking forward to the new Alice in Wonderland movie that is coming out soon (all the more so because Johnny Depp is my favorite actor of all time).

I had just put the following quote on my facebook status the other day and I think it very much sums up the book I am about to delve into:

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”–Alice, Alice in Wonderland.

When You Reach Me in A Wrinkle in Time

I was just reading a little about this year's Newbery Medal Winner, When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. I haven't read the book, but it sounds interesting and I would like to read it. I've been reading a lot of 'kids' books in the past few years and doing some writing as well. It all started when I re-read A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle. It reminded me how much fun these books were, and I just began to allow my imagination to roam. I didn't always have to be reading these scientific journals or 'serious' books. Anyway, it turns out that Rebecca Stead also loves A Wrinkle in Time and talks about it a lot in this book as well.


This is part of an interview with her. I was completely like this when I was a kid too... actually I still ask these questions:

Rebecca Stead: I thought about time a lot when I was a kid. Not in a mystical way--it was just the passing of time, the idea of time stretching out forever, that interested me. I used to wonder, "What will my room look like on my thirtieth birthday? What will be the first words I say in the year 2000? When I’m forty, will I remember the ‘me’ I am now? Will I remember this moment?" I guess part of it was thinking about how we leave ourselves behind in a way, which I think we do, throughout our lives.

I was also really interested in what is "knowable." There’s a certain number of people alive on this planet right now, and it’s a simple number that anyone could write down or say aloud, and so in some sense that number exists as a truth, yet we can’t know it. That’s the kind of thing I thought about when I was Miranda’s age.


Also, this is from her website under 'about'. I really like what she says, so I'm copying it here:

It was at school that I began writing. Sometimes I invented stories, and other times I just wrote down things I overheard – jokes, or snatches of conversation.

Much, much later, I became a lawyer (I believed that being a writer was impractical), got married, and started working as a public defender. But I still wrote Very Serious Stories when I could find the time.

My first child, a fabulous son, was born. A few years later, I had another fabulous son. There wasn’t much time for writing stories after that. But I still tried.

One day, my then-four-year-old son, though fabulous, accidentally pushed my laptop off the dining-room table, and the Very Serious Stories were gone. Poof.

So. It was time to write something new. Something joyful (to cheer me up: I was pretty grouchy about the lost stories). I went to a bookstore and bought an armload of books that I remembered loving as a kid. I read them. I went back to the store and bought more books. I read them. And then I began to write, and I began to love writing. That’s when I became a writer.

Some people will tell you that real writers don’t use parentheticals (which is nonsense). The most important thing to know about writing is that there are no rules.

A little blurb

This is something I just came across that I find interesting. Its a list of famous authors who first started by self-publishing and sometimes selling their books out the back of their car etc. I find it to be very inspiring when people don't give up and push through to see their dreams accomplished.

This list was compiled by Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual. These authors became famous after self-publishing the now well-known books that first brought them to the attention of the world. Getting published was no easier for them than it is for anyone else. But instead of sitting around waiting for the magic to happen, they had enough faith in themselves and in their work to take the self-publishing route. Though big publishing companies coined terms like “vanity press” and tried their best to make it difficult for authors to self publish, these writers did it anyway.

The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter has 132,000 copies in print after 12 revised editions since 1979. The publisher is Para Publishing (Dan Poynter). As a result of this book, Poynter has been called "the godfather to thousands of books."
A Time to Kill was self published by John Grisham. He sold his first work out of the trunk of his car.



Self publishing Life's Little Instruction Book brought H. Jackson Brown to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List where it sold over 5 million copies.
Twelve Golden Threads by Aliske Webb was rejected by 150 publishers. After self- publishing and selling 25,000 copies, she signed a four-book contract with HarperCollins.
After deciding to self-publish The Beanie Baby Handbook, Lee and Sue Fox sold three million copies in two years and made #2 on the New York Time Bestseller list.
L. Ron Hubbard chose to self-publish Dianetics. Now, it has been in print more than 45 years. 20 million copies are in print, and it has been translated into 22 languages. The book started a movement and later a church.
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters. He chose to self-publish and sold over 25,000 copies the first year. Then Warner picked it up and sold 10 million more.
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (and his student E. B. White) was originally self-published for his classes at Cornell University in 1918.
The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer was self-published in 1931. Today Scribners sells more than 100,000 copies each year.
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. His manuscript made the rounds of the mainstream houses, and then he decided to self-publish. He sold over 100,000 copies out of the trunk of his Honda before Warner Books paid him $800,000. The number-one bestseller in 1996, it spent 165 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list. Over 5.5 million copies have been sold.
After publishing The One-Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson sold over 20,000 copies locally before they sold out to William Morrow. It has now sold over 12 million copies since 1982 and is in 25 languages.
Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth spent seven months on the New York Times bestseller list and sold 4.5 million copies in its original and premium editions.
Embraced by the Light published by Betty J. Eadie spent 76 weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List and was sold to Bantam Books for $1.5 million.
Four Louisiana doctors and a former CEO published Sugar Busters! and sold 165,000 copies regionally in just a year and a half.
Joe Karbo published The Lazy Man's Way to Riches and sold millions via full-page ads in newspapers and magazines.
The 87-page book, The Christmas Box, took Rick Evans six weeks to write. After getting it published himself, it did so well he sold out to Simon & Schuster for $4.2 million.
How to Flatten Your Stomach by Jim Everrode sold out to Price\Stern\Sloan. Since then, the book has sold over two million copies.
What Color Is Your Parachute? was self-published by clergymen Richard Nelson Bolles. Now is has 22 editions, sold 5 million copies, and spent 288 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Other well-known self-publishers include:

Deepak Chopra
Louise Hay
Mark Twain
Gertrude Stein
Upton Sinclair
Carl Sandburg
James Joyce
D.H. Lawrence
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Mary Baker Eddy
George Bernard Shaw
Thomas Paine
Virginia Woolf
E.E. Cummings
Edgar Allan Poe
Rudyard Kipling
Henry David Thoreau
Benjamin Franklin
Walt Whitman
Alexandre Dumas
William E.B. DuBois

Also, I just stumbled upon this website called blurb.com, where you can make your own book, whether it be a novel, cookbook, your personal photos or whatever you want it to be. I guess there are other sites like this too, such as lulu.com, but I hadn't really come across these until now. Technology is moving so fast today, its sometimes hard for me to keep up with all the new sites and things that are available.



Usually I'm of the opinion that there are too many books out there today. I often help out with the local library sale and sometimes when books don't sell they end up going in the garbage because no one wants them. I hate to see that. But then, I also think these self-publishing sites are pretty cool. I love that we have been given such a greater ability to let our creativity shine through in today's world.

I remember when I was in kindergarten, we were given the opportunity to make a few books. I had one called 'My Dad' and another called 'My Cat'. I was so proud of those books, especially because one was displayed in our local city library.

I love books. I love being a book seller. Its like collecting a slice of history. We have an inscribed first edition of 'A Time to Kill'... one of those 5,000 copies that he sold out of the trunk of his car. He signed it in '90, right after it was published. Little did he know at the time what his future held and how famous an author he would be.

Books are the very foundation of cultural civilization. For thousands of years though, reading and writing were only for the elite. As our world becomes 'flattened' however, not only can most people read, but now they can write as well.. not just for themselves, but to share with the world.