Friday, May 1, 2009

Introducing The Book Museum

Roundtable Pictures has started a companion site, called The Book Museum, which can be found at www.thebookmuseum.blogspot.com.

What we hope to do is rescue the forgotten and honor the obscure in published books and other materials. You'll see ephemera, oddities, the covers of annual town meetings published 100 years ago, the illustrations used to decorate cookbooks put out by Heinz ketchup in the 1950s - you name it.

Much of it will be beautiful, a great deal will be curious, but we won't publish it if it isn't interesting and entertaining.

Plus, we think these bits and pieces of published works form a kind of historical record. You can get a better sense of what styles dominated the moment, or what people were thinking, or what they laughed at, if you look at things that exist beyond the official public record. That's what we hope to highlight here.

So this will be a kind of alt-history for publications. We all love a first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but did you ever see the cover of the English paperback edition of Peter Heaton's "Cruising" from 1959?

You will at The Book Museum. Enjoy all of it, please.

-- Roundtable Pictures