From the NY Times Paper Cuts blog, a piece about bookshelf etiquette:

I like to think of my bookshelves as an enormous store of potential energy — mental energy, that is: I have a non-working fireplace — and an insurance policy against the day when electronic readers have taken over, all the world’s bookstores have gone out of business, and I have to barricade my door against virus-infested zombies who want to drink my blood and ravage my (unread) copy of “Daniel Deronda.”

In my case, if I buy something and read it and realize I've finished with it, it goes into a shelf that's reserved for giveaways.  I've donated sizeable chunks of my book collection to people a lot more starved for reading matter than I ever will be -- like a friend of mine who lost most of his books when an upstairs apartment in his building flooded and drowned a good deal of his collection.

Also, the Brooklyn Museum is having an exhibition of Japanese woodcut prints!

Judging by the exhibition catalog, which has color reproductions of 213 prints, many quite beautiful, a larger and aesthetically superior exhibition could have been assembled from the Van Vleck collection. But Ms. Mueller’s intent was something other than a “greatest hits” show. She wanted to tell the history of the Utagawa school and, in so doing, convey something of the complexity of the Japanese printmaking business in general.

Las but definitely not least: I forgot to post something about Arthur C. Clarke's passing, but that's only because so much of what I wanted to say has been said better by so many other people.  The one comment I could come up with was, "Sir Arthur now knows the Nine Billion Names of God."