Inside Jacket

Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

I apologize for the Christmas-biased image, but from the look of things it’s probably easier to build a Christmas tree out of books than a menorah. The Book Bench is off next week, so things will be a little quiet around here. We’ll be back on the 28th. In the meantime, we wish everyone a happy holiday.

Photograph by Michelle, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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A group of Swedish physicists, writing in The New Journal of Physics, contend that they can identify individual authors based on a unique “literary fingerprint” of word use. (My first thought: we’ll finally be able to settle the Shakespeare authorship controversy! My second thought: unfortunately, we’ll simultaneously put an end to the profitable stream of books on the Shakespeare authorship controversy.) Cosmos magazine writes that the findings, which could be used to detect literary fraud and identify anonymous authors, also

led the authors to consider the concept of a “meta book”—a hypothetical “mother” book which would provide an abstract representation of the “word-frequency curve” characteristic of a particular author.

That sounds a little like post-structuralist mumbo-jumbo (to me, physicists in search of a “meta-book” is a scenario out of Pynchon, not Sweden), but if scientists really could create some sort of formula for identifying authorship, it would have interesting implications for the way we read, browse, and borrow. Could we match similar fingerprints to create a literary Pandora? Would Apple come out with an accurate iTunes Genius for books? If so, it would take some of the delightful happenstance out of reading—after all, we don’t actually want to read the same sort of thing all
the time—but it would be nice to know that, no matter how formulaic, I was taking a book reliably to my taste home for the holidays.

(Image: Print from Penny Mathews, on Flickr)

Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

Our very own Lila Byock, of the fact-checking department, snapped this today during her morning commute. “I just went to the site,” she writes. “The summary copy is amazing.” It reads:

This book is written to help women enter a world that no one thought is possible. This book can and will give hope to the hopeless. If you are truly looking for a real man, you could be enlighten in these truths; not just facts, opinions or false knowledge.

Typos, Lila confirmed, are included. Self publish, self publicize—that much is obvious. But the answer to that question? Seems bigger than a book.

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Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

If only books could turn into trees. An art exhibit where a tree’s innards are made from recycled books.

Photograph by Sharyn Morrow, CC-BY-NC-ND.

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Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

Books for sale line the brick sidewalk of Market Street in San Francisco, California.

Kristen Holden, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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