While our travel plans may be indefinitely postponed, a good issue of National Geographic can still take us on a vacation of the mind. The long-running magazine is known for its stunning photos, intricate maps, and absorbing reports from fascinating, far-flung locales. In this episode we’ll talk about its history, which issues are considered the most valuable, and even creative reuses for your old copies. While it’s not exactly scaling Annapurna, collecting National Geographic can be something of an adventure in itself.
Brattlecast #81 - One Book Collections
Perhaps amassing 2000 copies of Walden isn’t exactly what Thoreau meant when he exhorted us to ‘Simplify, simplify,’ however, some collectors do simplify their libraries by collecting different editions of a single book. Books like the Bible, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Dante Alighieri have been published so often, with such a variety of bindings, languages, and illustrations, that a collection of even one of these books would be impossible to ever complete. We’ll take a look at a few of these monomaniacal collections on this week’s brattlecast.