Is it March already? Ack! I’m behind in my 2008 Christmas shopping. I confess that I do have an excuse, though. Between reading my new review books coming up, handling BiblioBuffet duties, slaving away at a day job and judging the entries in the Benjamin Franklin Awards plus assorted domestic duties (that includes, among others, the attention demands of four cats) I am kinda busy. Like all of you.

My book design judging is going well. What I am asked to do is look at books in an assigned category, and rate various points about the books in about 15 categories that cover both the exterior and interior. I try to be a conscientious judge by providing a full page of comments that note what I perceive to be problems while offering ideas for solutions as well as praising the highlights and noting why those work.

Judging is time consuming, but ultimately fun. It’s also, I hope, helpful for the publishers who range from first-timers to experienced and sophisticated. I am pleased to say that this is the first year that I do not have a single “bad” book in the batch of about three dozen. They are all excellent, though like the animals in Orwell’s novel, some are more excellent than others.

I’ve been doing this for five or six years, and I believe the work has also taught me to be a better judge, not just of the entries but of all books as well. The importance of cover design has been reinforced for me. I favor handsome or arresting pieces, but for me that doesn’t mean a lot of elements. I prefer understated, which can be more dramatic. But whether a cover is classic, in your face, low key,  ornate or even crazy is less important than that it work for the book since the cover is the primary sales tool for the casual buyer (not someone looking for a particular book or author). I see it this way: the cover must illuminate something about the book, however abstractly. It must entice a potential reader to pick it up and consider it further. It’s a communication tool that should communicate artfully.

Past mistakes that I have seen include a novel with an (amateur) picture of the author on the cover, a coffee table book that was bound with black plastic spiral binding, a typeface used for the text that was no larger than this, blindingly white paper, and text running nearly end to end and top to bottom with barely enough room for the page numbers.

On the positive side are the books that astound me with their beauty and professionalism. I am supposed to pick my top ten choices (out of 35 books) and rate them numerically. I have no idea yet how I am going to do that. There are very few that should not be on the Top Ten list. And there are at least ten that should be number one. It’s a sad job in a way because almost all of these books are superb. It will be difficult to watch only three make the finals when the results are tabulated, knowing how many equally good ones didn’t.

In a way I think it’s probably like being in bookstore. Or at a used book sale. So many good books, not enough money to buy them all, not enough time to read them all. So we make choices. It doesn’t make the books we choose any better than the ones left behind. It simply means that for some reason, perhaps indiscernible, a particular book must be someone else’s choice.

Zora Neale Hurston was a recorder of early twentieth-century African American folktales, a writer that perhaps not many white Americans have read. Her dedication to “saving the stories of ignored, repressed and even endangered cultures” is one that Nicki Leone recounts as she talks about her experiences with Hurston’s stories in A Reading Life.

Henry Carrigan has been exploring the Best Books of Great Traditions, focusing for the last two weeks on France. He continues his journey though great French literature with a look at Honoré de Balzac’s novel, Lost Illusions, which has been called “the tragic-comedy of the capitalization of spirit,” and provides a solid argument for its reading as a foundation for understanding the world of great French literature, this week in Readings.

Innovative playwright, choreographer and dancer Yehuda Hyman sits down with Daniel M. Jaffe for this month’s Talking Across the Table to discuss his current and upcoming plays, the collaboration that brings them to the stage and the story behind his adaptation of a memoir about the Armenian genocide.

Andi Miller likes offbeat books, those that trod a path not yet made. Yet as she discovered, even strange can be a bit too, um, strange, even with a writer whose first two books were warmly received by critics. Sometimes being “this happy” is not enough, as she points out in The Finicky Reader.

MP3 players and other electronic devices for the delivery of music are simply the latest in portable music machines. We are accustomed to having music wherever we go. But in the early part of the twentieth century, though home phonographs had brought music from the concert hall or town bandstand into the home for a while, the idea of having it with you when you went out was an astonishing development. These first mobile devices were portable phonographs. In On Marking Books, I take a stroll down the musical history path when having music on an outing meant hauling something larger than a sandwich.

Falling into a book as a child. Most of us who are genuine readers, consumers of the written word, did that. But somewhere along the line—in Lisa Guidarini’s case, when parenthood arrived—that deep reading changed. Not that she lost her passion for it, but she found her reading changed. “I can sometimes fall completely into a book,” she writes, “but now—alas!—I’m much more easily distracted back out of it.” Is there a solution? Find out this week in Reviews & Reflections.

Sometimes the books that hold the greatest memories for us are the most banal of books. At least they would be to someone who didn’t develop the history with them. In this week’s Seasoned Lightly. Anne Michael takes a fond look back at a functional book that holds more memories than any scrapbook.  

The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, has incredible digital collections that are free for anyone to enjoy online. Their collections can be found on their Oxford Digital Library page, which is amazing. Among its offerings are the stupendous Map Room and Broadside Ballads and most spectacular—at least to booklovers—Images of Medieval Manuscripts with works that go back to the eleventh century, and Early Manuscripts which offer digital facsimiles of complete manuscripts! Each one offers intimate close-ups of these magnificent pieces, something most of us couldn’t possibly experience without today’s technology. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time here.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren