[PBS NewsHour, May 6, 2020. Click for a larger view.]
That book on Judy Woodruff’s right, the one with the blue-gray cover, its spine often partly hidden behind the NewsHour logo — I’ve been wondering what it is. I could make out The Oxford. A dictionary? An ancient guide to usage? I finally realized that the way to an answer was a computer screen, not a television (or at least not my television).
Let us zoom in:
It’s Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People (1965). If you need something to read, it’s at the Internet Archive, all 1153 pages of it.
I once ID’d T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 on MSNBC’s Hardball. That was detective work.
[Sometimes I have to concentrate on the trivial to cope with the non-trivial.]
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Woodruff’s Morison
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comments: 5
I predict a booming business in supplying suitable books for television home studio backgrounds (if it hasn't in fact started already). Something the Strand is likely to be involved in.
Books by the yard! I think there really are such companies. I might be remembering something from Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture.”
"Trivial"??? I think not!
At the thrift store, sometimes real estate agents buy up books for display.
I used to follow an Instagram account called "Pretty Old Books"--the proprietor bundles old books in matching colors and wraps them in ribbon and decorative cords and sells them. It started to get up my nose though--especially when the titles seemed creepy even though the colors were pretty. Too much artisanal curation!
www.instagram.com/prettyoldbooks
“Trivial”? Okay, how about “small”?
I guess people who use books in these ways don’t imagine anyone looking at the spines and wondering about the person behind the shelves.
Small, like a sardine!
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