The Fundamentals of Business by Michael Scott. Over one billion sold. More than the Bible. I’m not surprised. Chapter One ... The Businessman ... The Office US s6e6: Mafia
You know what you guys should do? Go to the bookstore at lunch. There’s tons of cuties and it's easy to talk to them. ‘Hey, what book is that? Cool, let's hang out tonight. Sex already? Whoa.’ [cut to Darryl in interview] My resolution is to read more. And if someone else is driving me to the bookstore, I can eat my PB&J in the car. 2011 is coming up all Darryl. The Office US s7e13: The Ultimatum
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. Raymond Chandler
We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Books in the home equal higher test scores. Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics
I chose the name The Last Bookstore because at the time Borders was going out of business and a lot of other little bookstores were going out of business, and they just in the news a lot. Welcome to the Last Bookstore, 2015
Orwell’s great book – in my opinion his greatest: Homage to Catalonia. I think it was first published in 1937 but it was suppressed – a couple of hundred copies. Noam Chomsky, lecture March 2002, ‘Activism, Anarchism & Power, Conversations with History’
An obsessive genius pulls off hundreds of perfect crimes. No security can stop him … In 1985 librarians at Washington State University library realised millions in rare books had mysteriously disappeared. Masterminds e53: The Invisible Man, 2005
‘We determined 45 states, several Canadian provinces and the district of Columbia for more than 23,000 books stolen.’ ibid. Nicholas Basbanes, author
Stephen Blumberg: the greatest book thief the world had ever known. ibid.
His entire operation will soon be threatened by the only person he’s ever trusted. ibid.
A Hollywood style heist: they struck with lightning speed … 2004: Lexington Kentucky police were called in to a robbery at the Transylvania University library … Two men posing as researchers overpowered her [librarian] and stole the University’s most valuable books. Masterminds e57: The Transylvania Job
For the poet Sylvia Plath the post-war American dream was a prison, not a paradise. She grew up in the age of Cold War witch-hunts and conservative values. For clever ambitious girls, 1950s America was suffocating. Writing was her rebellion. Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar, BBC 2018
Embraced by the literary world for her astonishing poetry she spent her life besieged by inner demons. In her only novel The Bell Jar she told her own story: it was life as a woman in 1950s America laid bare. ibid.
Four weeks after The Bell Jar was published in 1963 Sylvia Plath committed suicide. ibid.
‘I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties, and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.’ ibid.
The Mann-Booker Prize is one of the most coveted literary awards in the world. Prize night is the most hotly anticipated event in the literary calendar. Winning is life changing. Barneys, Books & Bust-Ups, BBC 2018
The Booker has always been a magnet for scandal. ibid.
From humble beginnings in the late 1960s this prize revolutionised the sleepy world of literary fiction. This is a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and most importantly of all countless brilliant books. ibid.
‘Posh bingo is what Julian Barnes called it.’ ibid. Peter Staus, literary agent
It’s Philip Roth’s 80th birthday. And his entire home town of Newark, New Jersey, has turned out to celebrate with him. Roth is considered by many to be America’s greatest living writer, but he hasn’t always been this accessible. Alan Yentob, Imagine … Philip Roth Unleashed I II, BBC 2014
Over 31 books he charted the American century detailing both the political and the personal. ibid.
A series of fictional disguises which have teased his readers. ibid.
1976: Roth moved to London … ‘A Jew clearly without a home.’ ibid.
‘There’s a journalistic side to writing novels because you need the facts, you need the information, you need the details. You have to invent off of something.’ ibid.
Following the acclaim of I Married a Communist, Roth was awarded the national medal of arts by President Clinton. ibid.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself. Gore Vidal, Julian, 1964
In the interval between Miami and Chicago I read Myra Breckinridge [Gore Vidal]. It attempts heuristic allegory but fails, giving gratification only to sadist homosexuals and challenge only to taxonomists of perversion. I thought and thought about it. There is nothing left to say about Myra. Bill Buckley, cited Best of Enemies ***** 2015
Sirens screaming, a warrior driven by revenge, a sun in search of a father, and the trickiest journey home you could ever imagine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is not some twentieth-century urban rhyme, it’s one of the greatest stories ever told. Homer’s Odyssey has been ricocheting around the world for thousands of years. Akala’s Odyssey, BBC 2019
The central theme of The Odyssey is the irresistible urge to return home. ibid.
‘We have the name, we have the poems, and we have lots of stories from Antiquities.’ ibid. Professor Barbara Graziosi, Durham University
The Greeks actually believed The Odyssey took place. ibid.
The most powerful story from Odysseus’ wanderings is his descent into the realm of dead souls – the underworld. ibid.
He’s [Homer] responding to what’s gone before. ibid.
When Odysseus himself returned home after twenty years he found that his palace was under siege by a gang of local nobles. ibid.
In the year of our Lord 1448 in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould. His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper but what he did was to speed up history. Gutenberg’s invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page
The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points of history and it coincides with a change in the technology of Europe. As papyrus disappeared so did the book as a relatively inexpensive everyday commodity. ibid.
The fact that parchment could be folded made it possible to stitch leaves together into a codex, the modern form of the book. ibid.
Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were prized in China every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe. But in a medieval manuscript the art is in the decoration around the text. The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment produced letters that were regular and repetitive. But in Chinese brush-calligraphy the art is in the brushwork that produces the characters themselves. And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface. Paper was invented in China in 2nd century A.D. ibid.
Paper was key to another Chinese invention: woodblock printing. Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman. This step was laborious and expensive. ibid.
The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system. ibid.
The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass-produce copies of each individual letter. And in this he had a hidden advantage: ‘the letters of the alphabet are really simple shapes … These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can become printed.’ ibid. expert
Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness was influenced by the Battle of Omdurman. Exterminate All the Brutes s1e3: Killing at a Distance or … How I Thoroughly Enjoyed the Outing ***** Sky Documentaries 2021
This knowledge is a fundamental prerequisite. That is why the narrator can tell him story as he does in Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness. He has no need to count the crimes Kurt committed. He has no need to describe them. He has no need to produce evidence. For no-one doubted it. Exterminate All the Brutes s1e4: The Bright Colours of Fascism
No matter what I’ve published – and you can look it up, I’ve published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too – none of it’s very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years’ time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere. Robert Winston
We’ll be looking at two of the most important books in history: the Bible and the Koran. And finally answering the question, Which is best? Cunk on Earth 1/5: In the Beginnings, BBC 2022