Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

These weeks do come around quickly, don't they? Hope you're all ready for a fun Valentine's Weekend - that's right, I'm one of those few single people who finds Valentine's Day rather sweet. Not the commercial bit of it, no, but the fact that it makes people take time out to celebrate their relationships. Awww.....

But I haven't availed myself of the opportunity to make this a themed Weekend Miscellany, you'll be pleased to hear. Instead, we have our usual mixture of interesting link, blog post, and book. Here goes...

1.) The blog post - I have my friend Barbara to thank for bringing this to my attention: anyone interested in old Penguin paperbacks should go and check out this lovely post on a blog called Spitalfields Life.

2.) The book - is, sadly, not one which has landed on my doormat. I spotted it mentioned on Claire's (aka The Captive Reader) blog, and - unusually? - it's a great book which is available in the US and not the UK. Well, available in Canada too, presumably, if Claire has a copy - my other deductions come courtesy of Amazon snooping! Enough preamble - the book is A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen. I confess I was a little dubious - would this be a collection of modern 'great writers' of whom I'd never heard? Or, worse, Danielle Steele informing me that Elinor Dashwood is, essentially, the same as the heroine of her latest novel. But no - this appears to be a collection of essays spanning the years, and the writers in question include Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, W. Somerset Maugham, Fay Weldon, CS Lewis, David Lodge, Harold Bloom, the director of Clueless... and, yes, quite a few people I wouldn't know from Adam - but enough there to make me hanker rather a lot for this collection.

3.) The link - if you ignore the unbookish caption to this video, and close your mind to the destruction of a book or two, then this link is rather fun, and very inventive...