Sierra Prasada

An “interactive crowd-sourced literary” map and multimedia profiles of 150 Great Books from Book Drum and more on the crowd-funded UK publishing platform Unbound from this Little Atoms podcast

Craig Fehrman in the New York Times on the failure of the American Book Awards to seize the, um, popular literary imagination

Up to half a million babies are contenders to be the 7 billionth person. (Just bit more than the 1,000 Midnight’s Children who sprang from the imagination of Salman Rushdie.)

An elegy on handwriting from Intelligent Life

The Arcadian Library is an anthology, but the world it evokes sounds like so much more: a hidden library containing “one of the finest dedicated collections of books ever made about Western entanglement with the Middle East.”

From The Times Literary Supplement:

The earliest items are medieval manuscripts, but there are also many incunables, translations of Avicenna and Arabic originals, printed in Venice and Padua; the more recent items include de luxe editions of the Arabian Nights, such as the white vellum, gold-tooled presentation volumes illustrated in luscious colour by Edmund Dulac. The books rise floor to ceiling in two lofty rooms, with a custom-made emerald carpet woven with lily-of-the-valley posies, the colophon of the Library, and a tribute to the flower that grew under the cedars of Lebanon.

The volumes’ beautiful bindings glow in the penumbra protecting them from light damage; a panorama of Cairo, printed in Venice in 1549, and one of the two impressions still extant, is hung off the main reading room (it is the subject of Nicholas Warner’s fascinating study The True Description of Cairo, published in three volumes earlier in the same series, “Studies in the Arcadian Library”).

Visiting the Library is by introduction; it is free. Its location is not advertised and indeed, can’t be discovered from the publication details of this book or of any others in the series (the most recent is Robert Irwin’s treasure trove about the illustrators of the Arabian Nights, “Visions of the Jinn,” 2010); it does not reveal its whereabouts on the internet.

Invitation, please!

This exquisite paper ‘poetree’ appeared in March as an anonymous gift to the Scottish Poetry Library, followed in June by a gramophone and coffin carved from the pages of an Ian Rankin novel. More statues followed, including this gloves of bee’s fur, cap of wren’s wing and a Tyrannosaurus Rex emerging from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Craving more? Who knows when the mysterious stranger will “strike” again, but in the meantime, visit artist Su Blackwell’s neck of the woods.

Never too early to start thinking about next year’s tree. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

Off Next Week: Back to blogging in 2012 with The Ambassadors.

My book, Creative Lives: Portraits of Lebanese Artists passed its second birthday this past December and celebrated…by remaining in print. In defiance of the laws of economics, this publishing marvel apparently increases in value on entering the used book market.

What other explanation can there be for these prices? For a new copy of the book, dear reader, you can choose from two variations on an average price for a (high-quality!) coffee table book, either $83.28 or $90.16, with an added $3.99 for shipping.

Or if you’re feeling extravagant you can shell out $967.77 (ditto on the shipping) for the exact same item. But what if that paycheck is just burning through your pocket some Monday? And what if a “like new” book or even a “used-very good” copy of Creative Lives is really what tickles your fancy? You’re in luck, Amazon shopper. There is a vender that will be happy to lift $1,839.88 from your pocket. And no, shipping is not included.

*Note: Since I wrote this blog post, the high price has gone up to $2,034.31. Make that $2,117.67, one day later.

When am I not?

In the newly released Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, contemporary authors including Philip Pullman, Claire Messud, Lev Grossman and Alison Bechdel talk shelving and the future of books.

Speaking of shelves, Brainpicker’s selections from December 2009 are worth a second look.

Books now provide the “dressing” and the inspiration for a noteworthy minority of fashion brands, according to The Paris Review. (Though I really can’t agree that “many of our libraries consist only of e-books” – maybe in 10 years.)

The Times Literary Supplement rounds up six new Sherlock-related books (and one movie) and declares that Sherlock Holmes Lives Again, not to mention returning to BBC1 this month.

And the Guardian looks ahead to the Literary Events of 2012, including new books by Ahdaf Soueif, Nadine Gordimer and Zadie Smith, among others.

Image: Target bookshelf by Turkish designer Mebrure Oral

That’s David Orr introducing the lists contained within The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. Probably a book I’m more likely to page through in a bookstore than buy, but I enjoyed the taste test from Brainpickings and it’s not like I lack for reasons to ponder the meaning of great when it comes to books.

I’m putting Daunt Books on a list for my next (alas, unscheduled) London trip, but now I also want to go book shopping in Rome, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Maastricht (Holland), Porto (Portugal) and more, thanks to Flavorwire (and Ellen).

Only in London would an elected public official already tasked with overseeing the Olympic Games also take the time to undertake memorizing the full text of The Iliad – in an election year!

Over at Arab Literature (in English), the everthoughtful mlynxqualey comments on Ahdaf Soueif’s efforts to introduce “shaheed” and “shuhada’” to English in her latest book Cairo: My City, Our Revolution:

Soueif doesn’t entirely eschew the words martyr and martyrdom. She uses them as synonyms for shaheed/shuhada several times, as if getting the reader ready for the switch. Then, as the book goes on, she substitutes shuhada. It is as though she is trying to gently move us to a new linguistic and cultural understanding. Off you go: shuhada.