Many an urban internet meme collector can tell you about the 25-year-old Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles—embedded in hundreds of city streets throughout the Western Hemisphere, a cryptic message from an unknown crank: TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’s 2001: RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER.
Researchers have traced it back to a handful of tantalizingly vague possible [...]

I mean BookMooch—have you tried it? It’s enough to send a book hoarder past the point of no return. You go and list the books you have that you no longer want and if they’re good ones, you’ll receive email alerts within minutes from people who have those same books on their wishlists and would [...]

McLuhan book gun by Robert The
If you ever wanted to know more about the people behind the book art you see around the web and on sites like this one, proceed to Elizabeth Wadell’s piece in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation. She profiles Robert The, well-named creator of the book gun above, Cara [...]

I’ve recently discovered Etsy as a source for old books and bookish ephemera. A search for “altered books” in the vintage category is like entering an ecommerce-enabled version of BibliOdyssey (i.e., awesome). Some picks:
1866 Ledger
“Medusa-like animals” (1914)
The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1952)(See, he’s contemplating time and space.)
Word and Image: Posters from the Collection of the [...]

NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. [...]

(FFFFOUND)
Top interface tags on Datamob

usa
26
(52%)

government
23
(46%)

maps
14
(28%)

language
[...]

“In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note [...]

At some point I’ll stop blogging about LibraryThing, but it won’t be easy with the amount of material they provide. Tonight’s discovery via this post on the LibraryThing blog is the transcribed marginalia of John Adams. Before blogs allowed people to offer comment on everything they read and tediously deconstruct arguments paragraph by paragraph for [...]

The street booksellers of New York who haunt the estate sales of deceased book lovers know where to get the best books. Via LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books group:
James Joyce, genius:
· The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
· The Book of the Land of Ire, Being a Record of Those Things That Were Done by the [...]

NPR’s Martha Woodroof interviewed me for a piece on bookish social networks last month and the spot aired on All Things Considered today. Check it out here. Since the interview I’ve been all over LibraryThing. And since LibraryThing started bridging the gap between virtual and real bookish social networks with LibraryThing Local, GoodReads has hooked [...]

Book art fans may know sculptor Jacqueline Rush Lee for her book works like the one above (Cube). She’s been known to kiln-fire old books like a ceramicist to make them expand and petrify, and soak and shape book conglomerations into wheels and cubes.
She’s now working with another traditionally two-dimensional medium: paint. Layers and [...]

I’m not trying to compete with BibliOdyssey or anything (check out his book!), but the digital portion of the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection is something to marvel at and mine for visual treats. Below, a completely random selection of archival rarities. Click them for more detail.
Page design by Georges de Feure, 1900
Illustration [...]

The FFFFOUND ffffeed brings a lot of joy.

Mapworks and wordworks by Chris Kenny, via Moon River.

Boston public television station WGBH has started to do what many people long for TV stations and related entities everywhere to do: chop up their archives into short video clips and make them findable online. Open Vault boasts a growing library of clips, mostly from the ’70s. Quick picks:
Nam June Paik’s “9/23″
Featuring the Paik-Abe [...]

BibliOdyssey just brightened things up around here with fresh Athanasius Kircher scans.
Wishlisted: BibliOdyssey the book.

I didn’t want to admit it to myself before, but I’ve been in training for my street Scrabble debut in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. Anagramming, stocking up on brain supplements, the works. Scrabulous on Facebook is wholly to blame. That and the movie Word Wars, which features Marlon Hill, my favorite [...]

One of UbuWeb’s Featured Resources for the month of October, 2007.
Note: Bylined archival selections are the DJ top-ten lists of the ’00s. I’d be interested in Kenneth Goldsmith’s picks from the New York Times archives for example or BibliOdyssey’s top ten archival resources.

From Crooked House, via Silliman, for Lauren, who had a similar idea.

TimesSelect, the subscription pay-wall system that has enclosed premium content on The New York Times website for the last two years, expired at midnight last night. The gates have been torn open.
Putting aside the liberated columnists, who I look forward to reading again, the truly great thing about TimesSelect was the access it granted to [...]