Entries from December 2009

Dec. 4, 2009

“Tamburlaine Must Die”

Louise Welsh’s “Tamburlaine Must Die” recounts the final days of the Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe, whose murder in 1593 is one of the great unsolved historical mysteries beloved by conspiracy theorists.

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Dec. 1, 2009

Lukewarm Kindling

Anthony Grafton on the Kindle, which he loves but describes as “reading free of visual delight”: Open an old-fashioned book — a book published by Zone this year, or, even better, by Alfred A. Knopf thirty or forty years ago, or, better still, one printed by Aldo Manuzio a few hundred years before that — and you [...]

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Dec. 1, 2009

Put down your Kindle and watch this

Letterpress printing is the craft invented by Gutenberg five hundred years ago: printing one page at a time using moveable type that is literally pressed into the paper. It is still practiced, apparently, by the Firefly Press of Somerville, Mass. Obviously the switch to digital books has everything to do with efficiency and nothing to [...]

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