Happy Halloween, Everybody

Celebrate with candy, share with your friends.

You Know Nothing Of My Work

The letters of Marshall McLuhan, over at This Recording.

The Book Cakes Pool

It's a thing, an actual real thing! Let's dive in to the pool of pictures, everybody.

The Shaqsphere

It's where we work.

Woody Allen

One and the Crowd

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming…

Multitude, solitude: identical terms… The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting…

 "On Crowds" Charles Baudelaire

An excellent piece on social spaces and the tension between desire for access and a need for privacy. Timely and highly recommended.

DIY Literary Halloween

Did you pick up The Marriage Plot and immediately consider dressing up as Jeffrey Eugenides' author photo for Halloween?

You're not alone. There are many of us and we all have a plan.

Don a vest and let this guide you the rest of the way. Happy candy hunting.

Mourir Auprès de Toi

To fill your stop-motion bookstore love story needs:
Filmmaker Spike Jonze and Designer Olympia Le-Tan collaborate inside
of the famous Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France.(via NOWNESS)

Peter Brown: Signing & Discussion

Thursday, October 20th
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College
5pm - 6pm
FREE

Join us tomorrow as we welcome Peter Brown to Brooklyn College. He is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and grew up in Hopewell, NJ. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he's living his dream of drawing, writing, and getting paid to do it. His site can be found here.

Pictured is The Curious Garden, a book about one boy's quest for a greener world... one garden at a time. While out exploring one day, a little boy named Liam discovers a struggling garden and decides to take care of it. As time passes, the garden spreads throughout the dark, gray city, transforming it into a lush, green world. It's an enchanting tale with environmental themes and breathtaking illustrations that become more vibrant as the garden blooms.

Jonathan Baumbach & Will Eno: Signing & Discussion

Wednesday, October 12th

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College

6pm - 7:30pm

FREE

Please join us tomorrow as we welcome Jonathan Baumach and Will Eno to Brooklyn College. Baumbach directed the MFA Program in Fiction from 1973 until his retirement in 2000; he is the author of sixteen books including A Man to Conjure With, Reruns, Separate Hours B, On the Way to My Father’s Funeral, You or The Invention of Memory, and Dreams of Molly. His short stories have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Short Stories, O’Henry Prize Stories and All Our Secrets are the Same (The Best of Esquire). He is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship. He is a former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. In 1973, he founded Fiction Collective, with Peter Spielberg, the first national fiction writers cooperative in America. 

Will Eno is a playwright living in Brooklyn. His recent play Middletown won the first-ever Horton Foote Award and his play Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Fellow, and a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. His play, The Flu Season, won the Oppenheimer Award for best debut production in New York by an American playwright. His work is published by Theatre Communications Group (TCG), Playscripts, and Oberon Books, in London. Other work has also appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, and The Quarterly.

Time Capsule

via plaztik mag blog

When I think about the possibilities of a store time capsule, I can only dream up a trinity that includes this sign, a cat carrier and a rubber-banded stack of bookmarks. For me, that's what we bury in the earth to explain ourselves to the future.

What else makes the cut? A handful of shelf pegs? Let's collaborate on the store crest. It should probably include a book.

A Savage Revisit

Copyright 1971 Random House via Wikipedia

Zach Baron writes for The Daily on retracing Hunter S. Thompson's famous steps, 40 years later.

716 Broadway

Do you like gargoyles, chimeras, and grotesques? 716 Broadway, home of our downtown store, has an impressive collection perched high above Broadway. Flickr user MGChan has a photostream that includes lovely shots of all our creatures. Start here.

Read Like a Gilmore Girl, Extra Credit

My kingdom to know what book is featured in this painting.

Any guesses? If only "enhance" was a real option. Catch up to the movies, life!