“We hypothesized that the quantitative and qualitative literary output of famous writers would correlate with their number of mates, children, and grandchildren. We further assumed that writing lyric poetry would be more beneficial for mating success than nonpoetry because the former consists of more verbal handicaps (e.g., rhymes) than the latter and thus requires special […]
Tag: Books
Old books up your nose [2]
Are E-book enthusiasts missing out on the olfactory aspects of reading a good-smelling book? The technical aspects of volatile degradation products emitted by books has been examined before, see: Improbable Research, Old books up your nose [1], but a later paper in the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management (Vol 7, 2011) goes on to examine […]
Eats words and leaves
‘Graphophagia’ is a new word (or neologism if you prefer) coined by Janet Beizer who is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. It’s derived from Greek, [literally ‘writing-eating’] and refers to a type of ‘Pica‘ – specifically a subset of ‘Xylophagia’ (i.e. eating wood or paper) but whereby practitioners not only eat […]
Books, books, books: When too many to read?
XKCD tries to answer the question “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?”