Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘jqa’

A while back I wrote about stealth — in particular about a sculptor of paper dragons leaving works of art in libraries around the UK. I also mentioned a few of my own stealth projects.

Here is a stealth project I haven’t yet tried. It requires a camera. The idea is to move a book in bookstore to a shelf that you think suits the topic better, then take a picture of what you have done and post it to the “reshelving” group on Flickr. For example, an especially opaque tax-preparation book might go in the poetry section. A wildly imagined novel about, say, Jane Austen could get moved to biography. And a nonfiction book by a politician you don’t admire could be moved to the fantasy section.

You probably don’t want to mess things up in libraries, but just one book in bookstore … how bad can it be? Come to think of it, when my friend Paul Nagel’s biography of John Quincy Adams kept being put in a less prominent location than David McCollough’s book on John Adams, a malignant spirit took hold of me every time I entered that shop, and by the time I left, the Nagel cover was facing outward on the top shelf.

Even if you don’t sign up to post stealth photos of reshelved books, at least take a look at the Ministry of Reshelving site here.

Read Full Post »

We are sad here because Paul Nagel, our friend, has died. He fell ill suddenly in February. We had seen him last September when he came to receive a lifetime achievement award from the John Adams family and stayed a night with us. Paul wrote many biographies and was a mentor to David McCullough. He was especially noted for his work on John Quincy Adams and the Adams women. His favorite among the women was Louisa, JQA’s wife. Read about him here and here.

When Paul was in Concord, we paid a visit to the North Bridge, where the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired on April 19, 1775, igniting the revolution.


					

Read Full Post »