Isn’t it true that all book lovers want a wonderful library. Just for curiosity’s sake, I did a quick Google search to see who in fact might have the greatest personal library. One name immediately popped up: Jay Walker, founder of Walker Digital. His three-level, 3,600-square-feet llibrary includes an actual Sputnik sattlelite, fossils and other artifacts, and several rare volumes including a 1535Coverdale Bible (the first translated into English). Wow.

There’s more detail here in this 2008 article from Wired.

I’ve got a new book on order, which should arrive next week. It’s called The Evolution of God, written by Robert Wright. Wright is an author who writes about science and culture whose books I’ve enjoyed very much: Nonzero and The Moral Animal in particular. This new book sounds very interesting, and perhaps a bit controversial. It’s about how society’s idea of God changes over time. The Atlantic excerpted a part of the book in the April 2009 issue: One World, Under God. Robert Wright is currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is also the founder of Bloggingheads.tv, a wonderful site for frank discussion about current issues, science and politics. Here is an excerpt from The Atlantic article that gets to the heart of what Wright will descuss in the forthcoming book: “In any event, whether or not history has a purpose, its moral direction is hard to deny. Since the Stone Age, the scope of social organization has expanded, from hunter-gatherer society through city-state through empire and beyond. And often this expansion has entailed the extension of mutual understanding across bounds of ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Indeed, it turns out that formative periods in both Islam and Judaism evince the same dynamic as early Christianity: an imperial, multiethnic milieu winds up fostering a tolerance of other ethnicities and faiths.”

Here is Publisher’ Weekly’s description of the book, which has been 10 years in the making: “In his illuminating book, The Moral Animal, Wright introduced evolutionary psychology and examined the ways that the morality of individuals might be hard-wired by nature rather than influenced by culture. With this book, he expands upon that work, turning now to explore how religion came to define larger and larger groups of people as part of the circle of moral consideration. Using a naïve and antiquated approach to the sociology and anthropology of religion, Wright expends far too great an effort covering well-trod territory concerning the development of religions from “primitive” hunter-gatherer stages to monotheism. He finds in this evolution of religion, however, that the great monotheistic (he calls them “Abrahamic,” a term not favored by many religion scholars) religions-Christianity, Islam, Judaism-all contain a code for the salvation of the world. Using game theory, he encourages individuals in these three faiths to embrace a non-zero-sum relationship to other religions, seeing their fortunes as positively correlated and interdependent and then acting with tolerance toward other religions. Regrettably, Wright’s lively writing unveils little that is genuinely new or insightful about religion.”

This is certainly taking magazine publishing to a new level. In an age that has magazine publishers looking for a medium more renewable than ink on paper, this publisher has created something more permanent than the page. He published his latest issue as a tattoo--on himself. From the Wall Street Journal: “Marc Strömberg is a 22-year-old graphic designer in Ume, Sweden, and his leg is still sore. He creates record sleeves and posters for bands, and in his spare time he runs his own magazine, Tare Lugnt. Instead of publishing the latest edition in traditional paper and ink, he has had issue three entirely tattooed onto his left leg. The leg has now been photographed, and large-scale prints are due to go on display in Göteborg and Stockholm this month.”

“Q: Why did you do it?

“It seemed like a really untraditional and extreme way to publish the magazine. I think that everyone should explore new mediums, all the time. We should experiment and have the guts to do something that stands out. It would have been boring to do just another magazine on paper. I originally wanted to do a pair of long underwear, with the articles printed on the material, so you could wear them, lie down on the couch and read the magazine off your own legs. It sprung from that idea, taken a little further.”

John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun and former president of the American Copy Editors Society, has created his top 25 rules of editing. These are great. I can certainly relate to number one on his list, McIntyre’s Ratio: The project will require three times the planned time to achieve one-third of the desired result.

(Another good one: 12. A thesaurus in a reporter’s hand is like a pistol in a toddler’s.)

A recent study conducted by McPheters and Company found that magazines are much better at reaching potential customers. As an advertising vehicle, magazines compete very well with television and the internet. As reported in this research brief from The Center for Media Research: “To find the relative effectiveness of ads on television, in magazines, and on the Internet, McPheters & Company used 30-second TV ads, full-page 4-color magazine ads, and Internet banner ads in standard sizes, and employed eye-tracking software to determine if (and how) Internet ads were actually seen by respondents.”

Here are some of the study’s findings:
* Within a half hour, magazines effectively delivered more than twice the number of ad impressions as TV and more than 6 times those delivered online.
* Magazines had ad recall almost three times that of Internet banner ads.

Study results, in combination with information on probability of exposure, found that:
* A full-page, 4-color magazine ad, was determined to have 83% of the value of a 30-second television commercial.
* A typical Internet banner ad had 16% of the value of a 30-second television commercial.

For those diehard readers who wonder if they can ever make the switch to e-readers, here’s one cool site that might make you think twice. It’s a collection of some wonderful book covers that have been created over the years (courtesy of Moby Lives). Some of my favorites are those wonderful pulp designs for Dashiel Hammett.

More than 1,000 covers have been collected and archived here. Created by Ben Pieratt of General Projects and Eric Jacobsen of Whisky Van Gogh Go., the site is in beta testing right now, but many features have already been added. The creators even encourage readers to submit their own favorites. You will also find more archives of covers created by individual designers, resources for how-to books, and further discussion about the art of creating great book covers. For readers who love fonts, typography and design, this is a wonderful site. Here’s to ink on paper.

I came across this story recently. Just last summer I had the chance to visit this man’s Harvard Square book stand. It seems that he has finally succumbed to the beuracracy who didn’t want him there.

Noted author Steven Johnson writes about old and new media, and the transition underway in today’s media environment. It’s not a one-sided analysis of the media, neither simply championing change nor complaining about the demise of old media.

Johnson believes that newspapers should have thought about online ventures and the value of their “brand” as outlets for news and information long ago. Had they thought about developing the new distribution models instead of getting into the game late, they may have found themselves in a different position today. “ There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two.”

For detailed analysis about the developing digital media landscape, check out this recent article in Strategy + Business.

Just last week, Rodale shut down its men’s lifestyle magazine Best Life. Many other publications have also folded in recent months. However, the general conclusion that you would reach from all of this recent news isn’t necessarily correct. From this story in Slate:

“Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It’s not that magazines are dying; it’s that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles would conclude).

“In one way, publishers are suffering from the same tendencies as traders binging on mortgage-backed securities: When the advertising market in a particular genre begins to rain really hard, publishers respond by trying to create more buckets, instead of working to find the next bucket where passion resides. The reality is that once a market is mature enough to support a national magazine, chances are it has already peaked.”

An interesting program in Massachusetts allows prisoners to join a book club or go to jail. From the New York Times story: “The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. At each two-hour meeting, students discuss fiction, memoirs and the occasional poem; authors range from Frederick Douglass to John Steinbeck to Toni Morrison, topics from self- mutilation and family quarrels to the Holocaust and the Montgomery bus boycott.”

According to the story, the program is controversial. It’s not clear that it is successful in aiding rehabilitation. Also, some residents of the community complain that prisoners should not have free access to classes for which students must pay full tuition. Despite those concerns, several participants have called their encounter with literature as causing “changes,” “turning points,” “epiphanies,” even “grace,” according to the story.

However, I’m not sure this exchange is the best first-encounter to the classics: “I don’t want to be all negative,” the officer begins, “but you have to read this book.” Not as in “This is a must-read,” but “We’ve had people go to jail for not reading.”