Posts tagged lists

14 August 2008
repost A year of… books
Someone should spend a year reading all these books, and then write a book about it.
re: books, cultural worlds, lists, liturgy
Nate:
a kottke.org post, 8 August 2008

A collection of books, compiled by Rex, by people who spent a year doing something and then wrote a book about it. Topics include competitive eating, not shopping, and reading the OED.

26 June 2008
excerpt All Known Metal Bands
Sometimes wastes of time come full circle. From the good folks at McSweeney's Books, naturally.
re: art, books, cultural worlds, lists, music
Nate:
from the All Known Metal Bands book site



The 300 page book All Known Metal Bands is a simple listing of every heavy metal band name that exists or has ever existed, in every genre, that I could find, in what turned out to be a year and a half of research. Where a name was used by more than one band, the name is listed once for each band. The pages are black, the type is silver, and it will make you want to do naughty things. Of the 51,000 bands listed, the most commonly used name is Legion. There are 24 bands named Legion. There are 20 bands named Genocide, and 20 called Requiem. There are 2 called Cryptic Stench, but there is only one Black Darkness.

17 June 2008
excerpt Edge-notched cards
That great lover of paper ephemera Nicholson Baker would likely note all the extraneous, but scrutinizable data left on the edges of these cards in their handling and sorting—an unrecorded search history in the sections of card-edge gone dark and felty with repeated sorts.
re: information, lists, paper, taxonomies, technology, technology and change
Nate:
a more than 95 theses post by Alan Jacobs



Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once.