Merilyn Simonds | Writer

Archive for the category: Future of Books

Books of the Dead

Books of the Dead

November 1st, 2017 book history, Digital Divide, Future of Books

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]”The Weighing of the Heart,” one of 192 spells, incantations, and rituals that make up The Book of the Dead, describes how the heart of a deceased will be set into a tray on one side of a large scale. In the other tray, a feather from Ma’at, goddess of truth. If the heart balances the feather of truth, the dead may continue their journey into the afterlife. If the heart outweighs the feather, Ammat the devourer—a crocodile-headed creature with a cat’s body and hippopotamus hindquarters—will snatch the human heart from the scale and gobble it down.
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Where Books Go To Die

Where Books Go To Die

October 16th, 2017 book history, Books in the News, Future of Books

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] The tower of books on a bookseller’s front table swells the newly published author’s heart with joy. She swoons, imagining all the happy readers laying down their hard-earned dollars to take this book home, where they will slowly turn the pages, revelling in her story, finally shelving her book with all their other treasured tomes. This is the fantasy.

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A Brand New Breed (of Books)

A Brand New Breed (of Books)

September 16th, 2017 book history, Digital Divide, Future of Books, reading

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Imagine listening to Maggie deVries’ Rabbit Ears in Vancouver’s downtown east side, among the runaways, addicts, and women of the street she portrays. Or any David Adams Richards book while walking the shore of the broad Miramichi. Or canoeing north of Yellowknife in the company of Liz Hay’s Late Nights on Air. Now imagine a story written to take you to a specific place, where what you see and hear and smell dives you deep, deep, deep into the words. That’s ambient literature.

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The Word Made Flesh

The Word Made Flesh

May 17th, 2017 book history, Future of Books

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In the photograph, the woman is naked except for manly black brogues and argyle socks held up by leather sock suspenders. She sits splay-legged on a stool. An antiquarian book the size of a ledger is propped open between her legs. With one hand, she turns a page. In the other she holds a long feathered quill. Her eyes are closed in ecstasy and her head tips back as she dips the pen deep into her wide open mouth.

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The Afterlife of Books

The Afterlife of Books

April 30th, 2017 book history, Future of Books, Libraries

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Jonathan Swift imagined a battle of books in the night, volumes hurling themselves off the shelves to tear each other’s pages out. But what really happens when the lights are dimmed, when readers go home, when a library falls into disuse or is abandoned to human disaster?

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How to Disappear/Save a Book

How to Disappear/Save a Book

November 13th, 2016 book history, Digital Divide, Future of Books

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Madeleine Thien’s Giller- and GG-winning novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, is set partly in China in the culturally turbulent years after the Second World War. Two sisters, Swirl and Big Mother Knife, are story-tellers who travel the country performing story cycles. “Stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.”

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Why a blog?

Because sometimes the world moves too fast for books.

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As I wrote Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, I thought a lot about books, what they are, what they mean, why I love them, how they are changing and how they are becoming what they started out to be. The brain doesn’t turn off when an editor says “Stop!” so in Books UnPacked, these thoughts spool on, exploring the past and future of books, and the actual books I’m unwrapping to read.

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