Wonderland Expedition Kit

I stumbled upon a true labor of love courtesy of BoingBoing, a fabulous Wonderland Expedition Kit created by absinthetic for his girlfriend. Look carefully at the clever pieces...the necessary Drink Me and Eat Me bottles... the photo of Lewis Carroll... the fetal stage Mome Rath..... a water sample for the Pool of Tears.... I could go on and on but I'm reaching now for my copy of Alice and a decent cup of tea....

I wonder does absinthetic have a much older single brother?

...and if you want to view the original copy of Alice, try the Turning the Pages Project at the British Library ... warning.... you need shockwave and highspeed broadband

Amazon acquires Abebooks

Back in the day when I really was an online book seller, I was an early fan of Abebooks. The owners of the website were used and rare book dealers and totally understood the trade. When AbeBooks acquired Germany's JustBooks GmbH online book marketplace in 2001 and the folks from JustBooks really took over the operations, it started down the slippery slope to being another Amazon clone without the customer base. Record quality became shoddy, penny sellers proliferated, shady mega-dealers signed up and the whole place became estranged from the real world of used and rare books. Many predicted that it was a matter of time before Amazon simply swallowed the operation, especially when Abebooks entered the new book market. Well those fears have been fully realized as Amazon announced today that they have acquired Abebooks. I thank the bookselling gods that I no longer list my wares on either site.