Oxford University Press and the Making of a Book

A silent film made in 1925 by the Federation of British Industry. This film was one of a series illustrating industrial life and it highlighted the Press's work to audiences around the world. Film courtesy of the Oxford University Press Archive.

Great find by my friend Sal Destro. 

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

The Guardian publishes an excerpt from a lecture by Neil Gaiman explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

George R.R. Martin on readers

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin

— iA Writer (@iAWriter) October 6, 2013

Being a Lifelong Bookworm May Keep You Sharp in Old Age→

The Smithsonian's Surprising Science blog: 

The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.

[...] 

Reading gives our brains a workout because comprehending text requires more mental energy than, for example, processing an image on a television screen. Reading exercises our working memory, which actively processes and stores new information as it comes. Eventually, that information gets transferred into long-term memory, where our understanding of any given material deepens. Writing can be likened to practice: the more we rehearse the perfect squat, the better our form becomes, tightening all the right muscles. Writing helps us consolidate new information for the times we may need to recall it, which boosts our memory skills.

Here are a couple of suggestions to get your reading workout going: Summer Reading: Independent Learning & The Novels of Max Barry.  

2,131 books fell over...

And now for something different. The Seattle Public Library launched the 2013 Summer Reading Program by setting a new world record for the longest book domino chain. Check out the book they used to start the sequence.