“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”
― Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations
― Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations
“There is nothing,” Naudé wrote, “that renders a Library more recommendable, than when every man finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else; therefore the perfect motto is, that there exists no book, however bad or badly reviewed, that may not be sought after in some future time by a certain reader.” These remarks demand from us an impossibility, since every library is, by needs, an incomplete creation, a work-in-progress, and every empty shelf announces the books to come.”
― The Library at Night
― The Library at Night
“The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.”
― Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill & My Mother
― Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill & My Mother
“A book is tremendously important. Nobody ever paid for the price of a book, they only paid for the printing”
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
Bookish Book Club
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We read books loosely pertaining to the history of the book, the world of librarianship, bibliography, the rare book trade, typography, book design, b ...more
Jason’s 2025 Year in Books
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