Signed By Author

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times on line edition this morning about a revolutionary device which may turn the collection of signed books on its head! It talks about a device called LongPen which Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, devised in 2004 so that she could sign books with a touchpad in her home, which in turn conveyed her handwriting to an autopen in a distant bookstore. You can read the full story by following the link below…

A Book Signing With the Author a World Away
By JOANNE KAUFMAN
Published: December 17, 2007
With his recent conviction and sentencing, the media baron and author Conrad M. Black has turned to a device called the LongPen to help him hold book signings from afar.

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Lewis Hamilton at work

Originally uploaded by Steve_C

A great shot of Formula 1 motor racing so-very-nearly champion Lewis Hamilton signing copies of his autobiography - imaginatively entitled My Story.

Hamilton is obviously still a very young man - he was only born in 1985 - so we can expect further volumes in the the future!

Rules have been strict at his recent book signing events with an insistence on all copies being specifically dedicated.

Photographer Steve Chilton says: At this stage the queue of people waiting to see him covers most of the floor space on the first-floor of The Howard centre. He is using the first of several pens required to complete the task.

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Some of my favourite historic book jackets are those designed by Vanessa Bell for the Hogarth Press, and in particular, for the books written by her sister, Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Bell, together with her husband Clive Bell, painter Duncan Grant as well as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, belonged to the group of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, although she has achieved a certain measure of independent success as attested by her paintings which hang in the Tate Britain Gallery. Recent cinema goers may remember Miranda Richardson’s excellent portrayal of her in The Hours, opposite Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf, an Oscar-clinching performance in the category of Best Actress Wearing a False Nose.

This dust jacket from A Haunted House, a posthumously published collection of short stories by Virginia Woolf, is from a 1943 first edition in War Economy Standard (using cheaper paper etc. to save the country’s resources) and includes a fascinating back inner flap advertising the BBC radio broadcasts which transmitted news bulletins and Morse coded news across Europe during the Second World War.

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