The release of another film about the fictional British detective Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, jnr., and Jude Law, has again awoken interest in the address of 221b Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes’s address. But does this address exist, or which address was it based upon? Fans and aficionados of the Sherlock Holmes stories have debated this [more...]
Dire predictions of worldwide calamity in 2012 may be a good way of selling books and movie tickets — but the chances anything remotely like the dire predictions will happen is about the same as that they happened in 1982, 1988 or 2000, other recent dates for which the end of the world or something [more...]
Perhaps surprisingly, book cover illustrations don’t go back very far. Not so long ago, before the 1820s, books were usually sold without any cover. Just a stack of unbound printed sheets. You would then go to a bookbinder and commission a binding and cover. Books were expensive, and the additional cost of a hand-crafted binding [more...]
You might assume that a book as old as the Bible is available for anyone to copy freely, but that is not always the case. When we access the text of the Bible it is not from the original scrolls but from a more recent translation or rewriting – and some of those versions are [more...]
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique 10-digit number used to identify books and other products, such as calendars and greeting cards. It does not include a bar code, it is just a number. The EAN, or Bookland symbol, is 3-digits + the ISBN, making a 13-digit number and includes a bar code for [more...]
The names go back to the earliest days of book printing and the use of individual metal letters known as type. The compositor, who was responsible for preparing and arranging the letters for ready for printing, would stand before two wooden cases which were divided into cells or sections for each letter. These cases were [more...]