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Saturday, 14 August 2010

Childish fun with our library book stock

Someone's had the rather good idea to see what mild entertainment can be had from their bookshelf.
"Essentially, the idea is to arrange two or more books so that the titles, when read in the order they appear, make sense (or at least coherent nonsense) as a collective. As a form of amusement it can accomodate a variety of approaches: some might think of it as a form of poetry, others primarily as a form of humour. If you have some books, a digital camera, a blog, and the inclination to put them all together, you really should have a go."
http://outerhoard.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/bookmash/
We have some strange books in the Diabetes UK library and archive, and I've not even started on our 'Book Exchange' (staff bring in old books / videos / DVDs, swap for new ones and donate 50p) and I wondered if any of them might lend themselves to some bookmashing.


Hummingbirds of North America using research in primary care


Homoeopathic first aid - know your chances


Henry Wellcome eats shoots, and leaves Google inventing the 20th century

4 comments:

  1. h/t @edyong209 for tweeting this in the first place

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  2. Good to see you had fun with this!

    The Google one seems a little ambiguous. You could interpret it to mean "Henry Wellcome eats, shoots, and leaves Google [to get on with] inventing the 20th Century", but you could also interpret it to mean "Henry Wellcome eats, shoots, and leaves Google, [thereby] inventing the 20th Century". In the first interpretation, Google does the inventing, whereas in the second case, Henry does.

    I hope you'll do more, particularly ones that include at least three books. In my opinion, two-book mashes whet the appetite but don't quite satisfy.

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  3. Thanks for your comment :)

    I meant the first meaning for Henry, and hadn't spotted the second meaning actually!

    Quite agree that three or more books would be better - but I am new to this. However I am determined to find more, I think this will keep me entertained for some time.

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  4. Well, we're all new to it, really. :-) (That is, all of us except Nina Katchadourian, who's been at it since 1993.)

    The second example in my blog post started out as a two-book mash ("making money out of the silent planet"), but I didn't feel it was worth publishing until I'd added the additional books. This is probably just a personality thing - with you being perhaps naturally inclined to publish your ideas spontaneously, and me relatively more inclined to sit on them for a while if I think I can improve them. Just speculating here. There's room in the world for both approaches.

    The homeopathy one is nice. :-)

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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).