A Bookish Guinea Pig

Booboo is a bookish 2-year old guinea pig.  That is all you need to know.

(Booboo via Huffpost)

"Tales of the Unexpected": Tim Burton, Karen Elson, & Helena Bonham Carter by Tim Walker for UK Vogue December 2008

This photo shoot was inspired by the books of Roald Dahl.  Director Tim Burton, actresses Helena Bonham Carter and Imelda Staunton, and model Karen Elson act out scenes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and other children's books.

(Shona Heath)

Wonderful Book Dedications

Do you, like me, have to read the dedications and acknowledgements in every book you read?  I love them.  It's like hearing the secrets of people you're never met.  Here are some particularly funny/brilliant/sweet dedications.  For many more, go to Buzzfeed Books.

Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson

No Thanks by e.e. cummings

My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

Psychos: A White Girl Problems Book by Babe Walker

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Sarah Lawson

Cover Envy: The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

We all know we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but we also can't really help it, whether or not we're conscious of the role that book covers (or spines or titles) have in our choices about what to pick up at the bookstore.  I would buy the UK Picador edition of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, which comes out in early July, for its cover alone.  It's a photograph of a dollhouse version of a seventeenth-century bourgeois Dutch canal house, with a hand-lettered title in Delft blue.  Sold.  Even better, however, the book's content is right up my alley as well.  It's about an eighteen year old Dutch girl moving to Amsterdam in 1686 to live with her new husband, who has given her a dollhouse version of their home as a wedding gift.  

Burton was probably inspired by a visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, where this late seventeenth-century dollhouse, or cabinet house, is one of the most popular works on view.  Like the fiction dollhouse in The Miniaturist, this dollhouse was owned by a woman, not a child, and it was probably a replica of Petronella Oortman's (the owner) actual house.  These Dutch dollhouses were extraordinarily intricate and costly, and were not intended to be playthings for children.  They are sometimes called "cabinet houses," because, unlike dollhouses today, they were built into pieces of furniture that, when closed, looked like normal, if very elegant, cabinets.

The cover is reminiscent of the cover of the hardback US edition of Dara Horn's In the Image, a 2002 novel that takes place partially in Amsterdam, and uses a close-up photo of Petronella Oortman's dollhouse for its cover.

The dollhouse on the cover of The Miniaturist was completely handmade for the cover!  Watch this delightful video showing the making of the design of this great cover,  read this post about how designer Katie Tooke came up with the concept for the cover, and check out some close-ups of the miniatures here.

A Bed Made of Books at Anthropologie

(Source)

Coffee Table Candy: "Seven Sisters Style" by Rebecca C. Tuite

One of my unspoken New Years' resolutions is, every year, to stop buying coffee table books.  They're so expensive!  So heavy!  They take up so much room!  But Seven Sisters Style, written by Rebecca C. Tuite and published by Rizzoli, is making it hard for me.  This glossy book tells the female side of the mid-century preppy/WASP college campus fashion store, and it's a sort of companion to the Japanese photographer T. Hayashida's 1965 cult classic photo essay about Ivy League fashion, Take Ivy.  Tuite's book surveys the style of young women on the campuses of the Seven Sisters, a group of prestigious women's liberal arts colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley), in the 20th century, and the legacy of that style in contemporary fashion.