Quentin Tarantino films as Penguin-style book covers!

Hot on the heels of our bestselling albums as books blog post, London designer Sharm Murugiah has re-imagined Quentin Tarantino’s films/screenplays as vintage Penguin-style book covers!

 

We’d certainly like to add these to our book collection!

Do you write in the margins?

Calling all bookworms! Do you scribble in the margins furiously while disagreeing with somebody’s opinion? Do you highlight lovely quotes to text to your beloved? Does the thought of writing in a crisp new book horrify you?

We’re two book-related academics (no seriously, we get to study books for a living – how awesome is that!?) who are super interested in marginalia and want to find out if/what people are writing in books. Would be lovely to hear what you do.

If you’re interested sharing your practices then please fill out this questionnaire. It should take about 15 minutes and will be really helpful to us. Please pass this on widely to any other book-lovers (or any weird book-haters) you know.

Link to our lovely questionnaire:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1139295/Marginalia

Thank you 🙂

Happy Birthday Douglas Adams!

Being a Publishing Student

The reason I chose to study Publishing depends on the person asking the question; to prospective employers I study Publishing to develop a career in the industry, to family it is because I want a job that I enjoy, to friends it’s because I couldn’t decide between English and Marketing.

The honest answer is simple, shallow and nerdy: I love to read.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not ashamed to admit it – I’m just not convinced that it is satisfactory reasoning for doing a three year degree in it and effectively having my career determined by it.

Nonetheless, here I am; a finalist student of Publishing with English at Loughborough University, because I love books… and eBooks and magazines and e-zines and newspapers and blogs and even leaflets that people hand out in the street (weird, I know).

When people ask what I study and I say Publishing, they invariably pull a puzzled face and ask what that involves. I have been on this course for three years and I still haven’t developed a concise answer to that question. What does a Publishing student do? The easiest answer is ‘we learn how books are made’; but this doesn’t even begin to cover it. We learn what is happening in the Industry, and I don’t mean just the book trade; we cover information management on a broad scale.

We learn how to market, design, produce, organise (in theory and in practice!), we learn to index, build websites, present ideas, copyedit, proof read, we learn to spot good ideas and criticise bad ones, we cover legal issues, we study human resource management, we explore historical and technological developments and we learn HTML and XML. Oh, and on top of all that, we do a Minor in English.

To anyone that has ever suggested that this course is easy because it is not maths or engineering; you are wrong. Full stop.

If you consider taking a course like this one, prepare to see mistakes everywhere; typos on posters, inconsistencies in storylines, overlapped elements on websites, paper with high lignin quantities (yes, it gets specific). The point is that errors and irregularities stand out like a muggle in the Forbidden Forest. And on that note I should point out that industry-related references become a lovable way of life.

Do you know your Jane Austen from your Jane Eyre…?

Celebrate International Women’s Day and test your knowledge of pioneering female writers.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/quiz/questions/0,,448070,00.html

Happy International Women’s Day!

Happy World Book Day!

 

What book are you reading today to celebrate?

The full list of £1 books for 2013 is:
Alfie’s Shop by Shirley Hughes 
Giraffes Can’t Dance: Colouring and Puzzle Fun by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees 
Horrid Henry’s Guide to Perfect Parents by Francesca Simon, illustrated by Tony Ross 
Tony Robinson’s Weird World of Wonders: Funny Inventions by Tony Robinson 
The Diamond Brothers in… Two of Diamonds by Anthony Horowitz 
Hang In There Bozo: The Ruby Redfort Emergency Survival Guide For Some Tricky Predicaments by Lauren Child 
Tom Gates: Best Book Day Ever! (So Far) by Liz Pichon 
The Chocolate Box Girls: Bittersweet by Cathy Cassidy