Wednesday, December 14, 2011

CLASSIC MAGAZINES and JOURNALS


No. 2: THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Continuing a special Compost series on some of the world's most interesting and influential publications.

These are in no particular order, and the number does not represent a ranking of any kind.

While a huge number of publications are issued by clubs and societies, few are on such a scale as the National Geographic. The National Geographic is rare in being almost the definition of it's parent society.

Early issues are noted for having practically no internal images, being a journal of a technical nature. With time, its pupularity ballooned through the combination of a less esoteric content, more of a 'travelogue' feel, and of course (even though initially black and white) the photographs.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE
WIKIPEDIA: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

CLASSIC MAGAZINES and JOURNALS 1: THE LISTENER

THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Thursday, December 8, 2011

A COMMUNAL APPROACH to BOOKS

Our world seems to be becoming an ever-more mobile and jet-setting one. It is clear that few of us are as able as we once might have been to retain a large library, much as we might love to.

Here we have some ideas for book swaps - a great way to cut back on your books (your beloved books: cutting back is something we usually need to do and seldom want to do). Books need to be in circulation as money is. Now, money is cool and all that, but it's better than books only in so far as you can survive in a direct way through it: books, although generally vegetable, are inedible. Also, you can use it to buy more books!

With the establishment of a local and regular bookswap, there can be a river of books flowing somewhere near your door, and you don't even need to spend a single penny! It's merely a matter of dropping your line into it for a while and seeing which random and interesting reading material you can fish up, and sooner or later, throw back in! (Terrible metaphor, I know, but fitting enough.)

CLICK HERE for the FULL ARTICLE!






THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Friday, November 25, 2011

The PEOPLE'S LIBRARY

The BOOK SWAP as a STATEMENT

EXTRACT: Howard Zinn is here. Dominick Dunne and Tom Wolfe, too. Ernest Hemingway and Barbara Ehrenreich and Dr Who and Beowulf: All here, and all free. Barnes and Noble may be endangered and the Borders across the street closed months ago, but The People’s Library at Liberty Square is open for business and thriving.

That a lending library would spring up fully operational on day one of an occupation makes sense when you consider that the exchange of ideas is paramount here, at a new crossroads of the world. Just as occupiers young and old mingle with Africans, Jews, Algonquins and Latinas, de Tocqueville rubs elbows with Nicholas Evans and Noam Chomsky... OCCUPIED WALL STREET JOURNAL(read more)

PEN: OCCUPIED BY TRANSLATION

OCCUPY WALL STREET SITE

The NEW YORKER on the OCCUPATION'S JOURNAL

However...a step backwards for book swaps?

"It was clear from what we saw at sanitation [when items had been cleared away along with the occupation] that our books had been treated as trash," said Occupy librarian Michele Hardesty, speaking to reporters near a table filled with most of the recovered books, including a ruined copy of "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn, and less damaged volumes of "The Coming Anarchy" by Robert Kaplan, and "Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution," by Kolya Abramsky.

The pile of filthy, mangled books also contained at least two Bibles, and "The Essence of Buddhism," by John Walters... WALL STREET JOURNAL: BOOKS DESTROYED in RAID (read more)

THE FULL BACK STORY: WALL STREET JOURNAL: ORIGIN of the PROTEST






THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Saturday, November 19, 2011

The MAGIC of REALITY

One morning The Compost found itself with an hour to kill in a book shop, and stumbled upon Richard Dawkins' fascinating new offering, aimed at children. The Magic of Reality answers questions - many familiar to this writer's ears - often posed by those children with a curiosity aimed towards the search for first principles. The one that caught my eye was one I am posed at least weekly, and obviously address with a distinct lack of success each time: "Who was the first person?"

In a word: wow! Here the reader is led through the logic that there really was no first person, but that humans morphed into being from their ancestors.

This (no doubt provocative) concept is presented in a very thought-provoking way: you are asked to imagine a huge stack of photos, with yourself at the top, and your parent below, and that parent's parent below that, and so on. By revealing each photograph we meet our ancestors going ever backwards in time, and we eventually see them becoming less human but very much given the full accord of being our (how-ever-many-greats) grandparent.

Ultimately, and enticingly, we are introduced to our 185-million-greats-grandparent, this fellow. Finally, we are invited at the end to rejoice at the delightful notion that all living things are our cousins, and worthy of our respect.

Watch MR DAWKINS DISCUSSING THIS NEW WORK on YOUTUBE







THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Saturday, November 12, 2011

BOOKS ON TAP

BOOK SWAPS

Putting books into circulation is one thing that should be happening. We here at The Compost hope to see more of it. However, too often, we have them mouldering away on shelves, often either forgotten or attempting to afford some ornamental purpose.

Our world seems to be becoming an ever-more mobile and jet-setting one. It is clear that few of us are as able as we once might have been to retain a large library, much as we might love to.

We have to start seeing books in the same light that economists see money. That is, there is a large national or international amount which is in fluid supply. Occasionally, they are retained in one locality, but eventually they are released back into the stream from whence they came. Fabulous and important though money is, we're sure, knowledge, learning, information and entertainment: everything that books open to us, are of equal importance at least.

There are lots of internet-based innovations to facilitate this: book crossings, e-bay and trade-me, buying online and offline in the form of our beloved (and sadly increasingly rare) second-hand book shop…

Here is our model, which has been trialled in the past, and has been very worthwhile and effective indeed.

What ideally needs to be done, in terms of the steps and stages, is as follows (but not necessarily precisely as follows: personal variations will occur):

1. Acquire (by purchase or through donation) a heap of books of all genres and eras, with the widest range of appeal possible. The bottom line is that each work is complete, and there are no pages missing (such as the last page, or the page in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe where they discover the wardrobe’s secret). The books don’t need to be in pristine condition at all. Second-hand or 47th-hand books will be just as good; remember it is all about what the books say to us, for this is what makes books books. It is not what they look like. To have around 150 books at the outset is a good target.

2. Decide a target band of books (eg from 150 to 300) which you aim for. Having too many makes it too difficult to carry and store the collection, and too few may make the choice too narrow for the clientele. (If you have too many, you can swap two out for each one in: this will be fully explained in due course.)

3. Determine a venue and a time for the swap-meet. An hour is fine but make sure you specify the full time, otherwise you will get a rush at the start. Another thing is flexibility: our swaps alternated Saturday and Sunday month-about. This way people who couldn't make it on the one day in one month's meeting came on the other in the next.

4. Publish that time and place on the internet, and set up a blogspot or a wordpress information page for your swap. Email us, and we will link it here.

5. Create a name for you swap group (and feel free to affiliate it with The Compost site)

6. Create an inkable rubber stamp for the title page of each book, which actually serves two purposes. The first is to give a path of access to your blog/website and information about your group, as well as (which may seem an odd thing to do) damaging or defacing the book so as to make it worth less as a market item (to thwart those who seek to sell it somewhere else for financial gain, as we will explain later) and to make it worth what it should be as an item of cultural, educational and entertainment importance. Put our address on it too. Clients of your swap will know where to look to find details of the next one. Others who happen to get a book with you stamp in will also find out about your swap, and know where to go to take part in your swaps. If the book has drifted too far afield, there will be a link to this, our federal blog, on it so they can find one near them, should there be one. For this reason, it is wise to put our details on the inkable stamp (as well as yours). That way, people will find your swap, or the nearest to them, if the book has 'wandered'.

7. This is where the financial gain for your group comes in: have stickers for inside the front cover of advertising. Approach businesses to buy the stickers, pointing out they will be advertised permanently on the inside cover. Add an expiry date to the sticker, which is the date after which the sticker can be replaced by a new one, should the book come back into your posession, or that of another Compost book swap. The plus for the advertiser is that it may never come back into your posession. Also, it devalues the book commercially (not textually) so that it can remain swappable and be less saleable.

8. In so far as is feasible, have printed a handful of copies of our newspaper (when available) for clients who may be interested in what we do and what we offer.

9. You should find your swap will be popular, and if not, word of mouth will do the job. There will be a core group who will appreciate the chance to gossip about books and other stuff.

10. Tell us! We'll link it here.


Try this recipe in your town, and see how it goes. We've tried it in our non-native city of Daegu, and found it popular: it was a good chance for foreigners to swap books. Books could be found in any condition: rare, expensive, appealing... or not so.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO put the image below(or something like it) onto an inkable stamp:






And email us via jasondnewman@hotmail.com.

THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

PENSIVE FAUST

The Compost will showcase a selection of interesting reading groups out there in the world at large. Today we head to Wellington, New Zealand for a group with the delightful moniker of Pensive Faust.

Cormack McCarthy and Yukio Mishima are currently featured for discussion.

PENSIVE FAUST
OTHER READING GROUPS
THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

FEATURED READING GROUPS

NEW ZEALAND: WELLINGTON: PENSIVE FAUST






THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

Saturday, November 5, 2011

CLASSIC MAGAZINES and JOURNALS

No. 1: THE LISTENER

Here begins a special Compost series on some of the world's most interesting and influential publications.

This is in no particular order, and the number does not represent a ranking of any kind.

The BBC's Listener, inspiring a New Zealand Publication of the same name, was on the high-brow side of things, and began as a journal for transcribing radio broadcasts considered interesting enough to preserve in an accessible form, before recording methods became widely available.

It had an eclectic approach: its content would span philosophy, science, current affairs, and just about everything else under the sun. This approach was retained into the late 1980s when its articles were often sourced outside radio. It was this very eclecticism which was enjoyed by its readers and subscribers, but would prove its downfall when publishers decided this was the reason for its lack of a wider popular reach. It was re-booted with a more theme-centred and light-hearted approach. This only resulted in losing loyal readers.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

A PERSON WHO ACTUALLY COMPOSTS BOOKS


While selecting the least unsuitable address for this blog, I stumbled upon this one: a person who actually really does (not in any metaphorical way) transform books into compost.

CLICK HERE TO SEE:
http://www.compostbooks.blogspot.com/






THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section

INDEX and LINKS








THE COMPOST: AN INTRODUCTION

BOOK SWAP IDEAS
A COMMUNAL APPROACH TO BOOKS
BOOKS ON TAP - YOU CAN EVEN RAISE MONEY THROUGH BOOK SWAPS

BOOK SWAPS IN THE NEWS
THE PEOPLE'S LIBRARY

FEATURED BOOK SWAPS

FEATURED BOOK BLOGS

FEATURED READING GROUPS

BOOKS: THE MAGIC OF REALITY by RICHARD DAWKINS

CLASSIC MAGAZINES and JOURNALS
THE LISTENER

THE WIDE WORLD: A PERSON WHO ACTUALLY COMPOSTS BOOKS

INTRODUCTORY NOTES







Welcome to The Compost.

Welcome to this humble - and perhaps rather odd - blog entitled The Compost whose inspiration is drawn from many quarters, but in particular it is drawn from the humble compost heap, hence the name. There are few things of equal interest to such a place, hidden away in a corner, contemporaneously completely inoffensive and totally offensive. In this place, matter completes a circuit from death to decay and eventually, perhaps, to life again. Compost brings nourishment and life to all soils regardless of their level of fertility. You might choose to reflect on whether the simile inherent in the title chosen for this blog makes us actually far from humble, but quite ambitious indeed.

With this notion in mind, our goals are several. A major vision or concept we hold is that books (and magazines, and even newspapers) ought to be in circulation in pretty much the same way money is, and most usefully and accessibly so by a process of ‘barter’ facilitated by book-swaps (see our ideas here) which may be either for charitable or commercial ends.

Another aim is to be a champion for the facilitation of reading (and viewing, let us not forget) on a broad range of topics, for the widest possible range of people.

This blog will also seek to be a crucible for a group of readers and writers (however small or large remains to be seen) to share their work, musings, ideas, observations and adventures.

The net as well as print throws up lots of gems, many of which will feature here.

While we at The Compost are clearly aligned with the wonders of computers and the World Wide Web, we are here to celebrate all that is magnificent in the tradition of print and culture in general.






THE COMPOST: INDEX and LINKS section