(Roughly) Daily

Ah, but “good”?… Past a certain level of quality, our definitions of “good”– that’s to say, the books that entertain and enlighten– vary for each of us. How to choose? Literature-Map is here to help…

The Literature-Map is part of Gnod, the Global Network of Discovery.

It is based on Gnooks, Gnod’s literature recommendation system. The more people like an author and another author, the closer together these two authors will move on the Literature-Map.

If you found a typo or a duplicate, please report it here.

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Help in finding your next book: “The Literature-Map.”

* Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

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As we turn the page, we might recall that this date in 1935 was a big one for the book business:

Allen Lane, Chairman of the London publisher The Bodley Head, was returning home after traveling with author Agatha Christie and her husband. At the train station, he browsed the kiosks looking for something to read on his way home. All he could find were magazines or low-quality paperback stories that he had no interest in reading. Then the thought occurred to him that people, like himself, might be more inclined to read good quality books [literature in paperback was then mainly poor quality lurid fiction] if they were more affordable. And since he was in the position to help build up lagging sales for his company, he ventured into printing previously hard-back books into a paperback format. The first was released on this day in 1935…

– source

Penguin Books featured no photos and were priced about a fifteenth the price of a hardcover book. The traditional book trade initially resisted; but the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth, and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. Indeed, by March 1936, ten months after the company’s launch, one million Penguin books had been printed.

[More here]

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