Marbled Monday board linings and hinges! From the lower board on the cover of Isl. Ms. 453, a manuscript volume of Maʻālim al-tanzīl, al-Baghawī’s (d.1117?) commentary on the Qurʼān, copied in 1447 in Samsun
Marbled Monday border on this calligraphic piece in talik, signed by Durmuşzâde Ahmed Efendi (d.1717) and dated 1695/6, one of several in the album Isl. Ms. 439
Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.
Customers will receive refunds.
This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.
When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.
People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.
If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.
Whatever happens, believe in yourself, believe in life, believe in tomorrow, believe in everything you do, always!
This is not a dig at this post. I love a vibe! Coming across this combination of photos - the first of the storefront of Persephone Books, a formerly-London-now-Bath bookshop that specializes in reprints of underacknowledged or unknown women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the second of indiscriminate piles of second hand books - is extraordinarily funny to me because the Persephone Book is neatly iconic.
Every Persephone Book, save for the fourteen Persephone Classics, is wrapped in a cover of Persephone Grey. The endpapers are printed with textile designs from the year the text was originally published. Each book has matching bookmarks printed with the same textiles.
The London shop, exterior pictured above and in my panorama pictured below, was on Lamb’s Conduit Street, which is a delightfully chewy British name. The panorama doesn’t convey how tight the space was: lined with wooden shelves, rows of tables into the back staff rooms, all settled with neat piles of grey books seated next to neat piles of matching bookmarks.
The employees stop their work every day at 4pm for tea. One chronicles life as a Persephone girl on their Instagram. It is as rambling, charming, and enrapturing as you imagine.
The second photo in op is so aesthetically incongruent with the iconic Persephone look that I cackled when I first saw them together.
Two households, both alike in dignity, but plainly different vibes, you see.
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
:O !!! I didn’t actually think someone would take my tag musings seriously! Thank you @sbooksbowm! Now I feel obligated to actually give you proper context rather than me mumbling to myself.
Unfortunately, I’m not on twitter and it looks as if Plaguelibrarian’s tweets are private…but I would love to read your post about media tie-ins if you ever finish writing it!
I mentioned FF7 in my tags because I didn’t have videogames growing up–I saw photos of cool characters in gaming magazines, and then when I visited a friend’s house, sometimes I got to watch some of the game as they played. This was before Youtube, so I literally had no solution until I discovered FF.net and found people who novelized the game! As often happens with longfic, they usually weren’t finished, but since fics often veer from canon anyway, it was fine. I just needed the beginning, key events, and exactly as you described in your earlier reblogs, through osmosis by mentally collecting all the similarities across many, many fics, I eventually knew what the whole storyline was about.
I think maaaybe I saw novelizations on FF.net in the Legend of Zelda fandom, but once I started reading predominantly in AO3, I stopped seeing any novelization fic at all (admittedly, I don’t read that many fandoms). At this point, I can see novelizations feeling like wasted writing effort because it’s so easy now to find full gameplay streams and cutscene-only versions of every videogame being released. Who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it? Or if media companies see enough market potential, they start planning spin-offs, cartoons, videogames, graphic novel sequels, etc. that covers new ground. They don’t waste money and marketing dollars on rehash.
But sometimes as a fan, I get in a state of mind where I just want *more*….but without straying too far, if that makes sense. I want the new feeling while still capturing the EXACT thing that made me fall in love in the first place. You can’t necessarily get that comfort read with books that were adapted to screen, because of artistic liberties/different media-different vision that occurs in translating a story from one medium to another.
I’m ashamed to say that my last question “would they be hard to write?” was not at all deep enough to warrant an interesting article about the difficulty and pressure of being the token representation and having to Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences in one character because of scarcity.
I was actually just wondering if I had the willpower/creativity/bandwidth to write my own novelization of a Korean crime thriller drama called “Stranger” (on Netflix!) that I absolutely love, but which is so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute to the fandom. I’m on my 3rd rewatch and I wouldn’t change a thing about it! But some of the performances and the nuances in the script are so subtle that there could be a lot of interesting room for interpretation in novel form.
I was starting to convince myself that it would be “easy” because it’s just writing what appears on the screen??? And then I realized to do it justice, I would have to reorder scenes because quick-visual-cuts-between-different-locations doesn’t work on the page compared to on screen, plus adding all the internalized thoughts that are missing from a visual format, plus there is cultural context that I’m sure goes completely over my head since I am not Korean, plus this is sixteen hours worth of drama, how many words would that equal??? Basically I’d be spitting blood before I finished. -_-;;
Anyway, thank you for giving me more to think about!
I’ve been thinking about this question of “who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it?” I think fic offers, especially for film and television (perhaps for games as well, though I am not a video game person so it’s hard to characterize this at all), a way to experience a character’s interiority that is so hard to convey through screen. So while the story might not be entirely new, the perspective is different
Granted, I don’t think many novelizations today follow that path; we get gap-fillers instead (thinking specifically of the inter-season comics for Avatar: The Last Airbender where we hear Katara’s thoughts firsthand on healing Aang and watching him in pain in The Desert after they lose Appa). Novelizations offer a mode to explore the off-screen moments, so to speak. I think that’s what you’re speaking to with wanting a written version of a story to capture the exact thing but through a new mode.
and I don’t think shame factors into that last question at all! the points you bring up, again, about a story “so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute” is the other half of the coin to that article about the American Girl Doll novelizations. often, the best stories are self-contained and do not and should not attempt to “Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences.” I feel similarly about my favorite shows that I cannot read fic for, because I struggle to expand my conception of the story to allow for those gap-fillers or new modular perspectives, so to speak.
anyways, all this is to say that beat-for-beat adaptations from one medium to another are hard and the constraints of executing on them often generate pivots to those gap fillers and whatnot. and, you’re definitely correct that the marketing value of those beat-for-beat adaptations is slim. when I think about my favorite book-to-screen adaptations, the strongest ones use the chosen medium to offer something new (e.g. Station Eleven the novel to Station Eleven the TV show, which are ultimately different stories even as they are threaded together by the original premise of the book), such as that interiority/internal thoughts, the continuity of narrator, etc.
fun stuff!
The Revenge of the Sith novelization is legitimately very good because all the dialogue is what’s in the film or very close to it, and you get much more interiority to the characters (but not too much). It’s a faithful novelization precisely because it is quite effectively the story told in novel form
(Also beside the point but I would lovvvvve to see an episode of the Silt Verses written as if it were a chapter in a novel. MAN would I love that. I’d love to see each of the showrunners and the VAs who are writers each do an episode and also some fanfic writers and somebody who barely knows the show and also Steve Shell all take a swing at a chapter. That would be amazing.)
“Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
Okay but actually this is what we do with ancient texts. There’s a concept called the “ur-text” in textual scholarship and it’s the idea that by collecting all the versions of a text (from any era!), scholars can reconstruct the original, ideal, and now lost version of the text (debate over whether such an ideal text ever even existed rages among the people for whom this is of concern).
But even simpler, we know much of what we know about ancient works not because the works themselves survive but because commentariesabout those works survive, and we can approximately reconstruct what the originals were. If every copy of Percy Jackson were to be firebombed off the planet tomorrow, we could probably reconstruct the books via its fanfiction, or at least approximate the predominant themes, plot points, and questions posed by the text. Literary historians do this all the time, even for more recent stuff than uber old shit (in the ~before times~ I attended a lecture on some very obscure French accounts regarding the exile of an official, which implied that the official had written a damning report of a king…and the scholar had pulled together what the report may have been like based on the bureaucratic accounts). All fanfiction is a commentary on its source text in a similar way.
Things survive when we take notice of them and talk about them. Fanfiction doesn’t just need to be preserved because it’s art in its own right, but because it actively preserves other art.
hello yes @sadviper thank you for these fabulous tags! I have a post about novelizations/media tie-ins of films and shows and dolls (America Girl, He-Man & She-Ra, etc.) in my drafts somewhere that I’ve never finished butif you’re interested in that, you might throw my guy plague librarian a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/plaguelibrarian. he is working on a bibliography of novelizations (i.e. a big list of books that fall into this category) that will hopefully serve as the research basis for your question: why don’t we have these anymore? in a way, we do have remnants of that practice: we see them when we get film adaptations of novels and then the books are repackaged with a movie poster as the cover. original novelizations in the 1930s usedthe movie posters as the covers to make it very! clear! that the two were one & the same. as you might expect, it was mostly a marketing tool, and the little fragments we have of that practice today are still a marketing tool. but perhaps PL will reveal something new or another angle to approach this history!
to your second question: would they be hard to write? one article asks a similar question, looking at Addy Walker, the first Black American girl doll, whose background story was an escape from enslavement. in this case, American Girl complicated the creation and novels for this doll (and everything she represented) more than they needed to. it’s worth a read!
:O !!! I didn’t actually think someone would take my tag musings seriously! Thank you @sbooksbowm! Now I feel obligated to actually give you proper context rather than me mumbling to myself.
Unfortunately, I’m not on twitter and it looks as if Plaguelibrarian’s tweets are private…but I would love to read your post about media tie-ins if you ever finish writing it!
I mentioned FF7 in my tags because I didn’t have videogames growing up–I saw photos of cool characters in gaming magazines, and then when I visited a friend’s house, sometimes I got to watch some of the game as they played. This was before Youtube, so I literally had no solution until I discovered FF.net and found people who novelized the game! As often happens with longfic, they usually weren’t finished, but since fics often veer from canon anyway, it was fine. I just needed the beginning, key events, and exactly as you described in your earlier reblogs, through osmosis by mentally collecting all the similarities across many, many fics, I eventually knew what the whole storyline was about.
I think maaaybe I saw novelizations on FF.net in the Legend of Zelda fandom, but once I started reading predominantly in AO3, I stopped seeing any novelization fic at all (admittedly, I don’t read that many fandoms). At this point, I can see novelizations feeling like wasted writing effort because it’s so easy now to find full gameplay streams and cutscene-only versions of every videogame being released. Who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it? Or if media companies see enough market potential, they start planning spin-offs, cartoons, videogames, graphic novel sequels, etc. that covers new ground. They don’t waste money and marketing dollars on rehash.
But sometimes as a fan, I get in a state of mind where I just want *more*….but without straying too far, if that makes sense. I want the new feeling while still capturing the EXACT thing that made me fall in love in the first place. You can’t necessarily get that comfort read with books that were adapted to screen, because of artistic liberties/different media-different vision that occurs in translating a story from one medium to another.
I’m ashamed to say that my last question “would they be hard to write?” was not at all deep enough to warrant an interesting article about the difficulty and pressure of being the token representation and having to Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences in one character because of scarcity.
I was actually just wondering if I had the willpower/creativity/bandwidth to write my own novelization of a Korean crime thriller drama called “Stranger” (on Netflix!) that I absolutely love, but which is so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute to the fandom. I’m on my 3rd rewatch and I wouldn’t change a thing about it! But some of the performances and the nuances in the script are so subtle that there could be a lot of interesting room for interpretation in novel form.
I was starting to convince myself that it would be “easy” because it’s just writing what appears on the screen??? And then I realized to do it justice, I would have to reorder scenes because quick-visual-cuts-between-different-locations doesn’t work on the page compared to on screen, plus adding all the internalized thoughts that are missing from a visual format, plus there is cultural context that I’m sure goes completely over my head since I am not Korean, plus this is sixteen hours worth of drama, how many words would that equal??? Basically I’d be spitting blood before I finished. -_-;;
Anyway, thank you for giving me more to think about!
I’ve been thinking about this question of “who is going to bother novelizing a show when you can just watch it on whatever streaming platform has it?” I think fic offers, especially for film and television (perhaps for games as well, though I am not a video game person so it’s hard to characterize this at all), a way to experience a character’s interiority that is so hard to convey through screen. So while the story might not be entirely new, the perspective is different
Granted, I don’t think many novelizations today follow that path; we get gap-fillers instead (thinking specifically of the inter-season comics for Avatar: The Last Airbender where we hear Katara’s thoughts firsthand on healing Aang and watching him in pain in The Desert after they lose Appa). Novelizations offer a mode to explore the off-screen moments, so to speak. I think that’s what you’re speaking to with wanting a written version of a story to capture the exact thing but through a new mode.
and I don’t think shame factors into that last question at all! the points you bring up, again, about a story “so perfect to me that I simply can’t do anything to contribute” is the other half of the coin to that article about the American Girl Doll novelizations. often, the best stories are self-contained and do not and should not attempt to “Do Everything Right and Be Inclusive of All Experiences.” I feel similarly about my favorite shows that I cannot read fic for, because I struggle to expand my conception of the story to allow for those gap-fillers or new modular perspectives, so to speak.
anyways, all this is to say that beat-for-beat adaptations from one medium to another are hard and the constraints of executing on them often generate pivots to those gap fillers and whatnot. and, you’re definitely correct that the marketing value of those beat-for-beat adaptations is slim. when I think about my favorite book-to-screen adaptations, the strongest ones use the chosen medium to offer something new (e.g. Station Eleven the novel to Station Eleven the TV show, which are ultimately different stories even as they are threaded together by the original premise of the book), such as that interiority/internal thoughts, the continuity of narrator, etc.
Hey y’all! In this tutorial, I’m going to explain the basics on how I make my custom covers for your books like the ones shown above. The amazing thing about the fanbinding community is that there’s no singular way to do something. I have seen a lot of people ask how custom covers are made (in general) and don’t mind throwing some of my brain knowledge your way.
You do not have to be an illustrator or “good at design” to do this! This is nowhere near a comprehensive guide to designing covers, and definitely more of a nudge into directions where to start.
But please note: this is heavily geared towards using design software. You are going to have to put some effort into learning how it works on your own. There may be some lingo you aren’t familiar with.
This tutorial is long and going to be divided into software, resources, designing, printing, and applying.
“Authors retain all rights to works posted on BetaBooks, and can add or remove content at their discretion. BetaBooks makes no claim to any of the work posted on the site.”
Incase anyone was wondering
Thank you for sharing! Especially about the copyright protection
This is fantastic! I’ve shared it with all my writer friends and hope that they have a ton of success!
I love how this melds manuscript culture and digital reading interfaces. What a cool way to circulate texts and document feedback.
This is the only tiktok you’ll ever need, I’ve made about 13 of these and I’m not stopping anytime soon
I’m reblogging again because I did it myself and added pictures for those who have trouble learning from the video.
First take a standard rectangular piece of paper (I used one from a small notebook which I ripped out then cut the holes off)
Then fold in half touching the shorter side to the opposite shorter side.
Fold again making the new shorter side touch the other new shorter side
I did this one more time, but this time I unfolded it right after to get back to where it was only folded twice. It should have left a crease in the paper.
Using this crease, fold the corners up alongside it to look like this
This are also going to be unfolded, but this time you’re going to push in alongside the triangular folds you just made and undid.
Doing this once will result in this
Hold tight because tumblr won’t let me add more pictures. I’ll reblog will the rest of the instructions
Continuing on,
Do the other side of you haven’t already to get this
You’ll open these newly created flap to change which parts are touching
Leaving you with this
Then you start pulling the top “tabs” down
Do both sides to get the final folded form
Decorate as desired.
Hope this helps!
Ratio for the rectangle size is 2:3
So 6 cm by 9cm
I uh, lost an evening:
Thanatos knows that I hecking love cute origami, and moths, so really, what was I supposed to do, scroll past and not take the opportunity to make butterfly and moth page markers???
