LibraryThing State of the Thing - September 2020

LibraryThing: State of the Thing Welcome to the September 2020 State of the Thing Newsletter. This month we have many updates for you, including the release of newly redesigned LibraryThing pages and a Treasure Hunt. We also have two (!) author interviews for this month. To view a plain-text version, [edit your email preferences](. Also available [online](. The newsletter archive lives [here](. Like LibraryThing on [Facebook]( and follow [@LibraryThing]( on Twitter for site news and updates. 15th birthday LibraryThing has turned 15 years old (our official birthday was August 29). To celebrate, we ate cake, and various cake-adjacent things. Check out Tim's son Liam, who was born six months after LibraryThing! LibraryThing Redesign Together with Turning 15, LibraryThing also turned "1.5." That is, we've released our first redesigned LibraryThing "2.0" pages, but only some pages have been redesigned so far. These pages include [Zeitgeist](, [More]( and [Series](. The redesign includes a number of changes. The most important are looking good on smartphones and tablets. We've also made LibraryThing much more accessible for screen readers. The design itself has also changed somewhat, with serif typefaces in headlines, but we hope the design remains familiar. Let us [know what you think on Talk](. Pirate Hunt September 19th marked one of LibraryThing’s favorite holidays—Talk Like A Pirate Day! We have a treasure hunt for you on the theme of “pirates.” We hid sixteen pelicans around the site, and you will solve clues to find the pages they are on. Find the hunt [here]( and talk about clues/hints [here](. You have until 9am EDT on Monday, September 28th to solve all the clues! Other New Features Gender. LibraryThing now offers a text box for author gender. You can [read about it on Talk]( . Pricing. We have a new field in Your Books: Price! We’re now showing the list price of books. This new field is still in Beta and we’ll be working on improving it going forward. You can [read about it on Talk](. Author Interview - Nancy Pearl Tim interviewed Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager, authors of [The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives](. [Nancy Pearl]( is, of course, the Seattle librarian, author of numerous books, [action-figure model](, and regular contributor on NPR. [Jeff Schwager]( is a writer, editor, producer, playwright—and book lover. See an excerpt below, and the full interview [here](. Q: How did you pick the authors you wanted to interview? Did you fight over who would get to do them? NANCY: We started out by each making a list of the authors we wanted to interview and discovered, to our relief, that there was some overlap ([T.C. Boyle](, [Charles Johnson](, [Michael Chabon](, [Louise Erdrich](, [Donna Tartt](). Then we each had authors who we were passionate about but that the other person wasn’t as enthusiastic about. I won’t say it actually came to fisticuffs, but I believe that voices were raised in the ensuing discussions. And we ended with, I think, a wonderfully diverse collection of writers, so, as Ma says in [Little House in the Big Woods](, “all’s well that ends well.” Read the whole conversation [here](. Legacy Libraries - Hannah Arendt We are featuring our Legacy Libraries—catalogs of the collections of notable figures or libraries in history. This month it’s [Hannah Arendt](, considered by many as one of the most widely influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Her writing focused mostly on topics around direct democracy, totalitarianism, and the nature of good and evil. For the latter, she is also the person who came up with the phrase “the banality of evil.” Her collection includes: - Plenty of political theory—to be expected—including [Anarchy, State, & Utopia]( by Robert Noznick, the libertarian response to John Rawls’ [A Theory of Justice](. - Works about Jewish heritage, including a [lexicon of Yiddish loanwords used in English](. Arendt was born to a politically progressive, secular Jewish family in Linden, Germany in 1906, later fleeing first to Paris, then to New York City upon the Nazi invasion of France. - Books that intersected with her writings on authority, such as the [account of the (in)famous Stanley Milgram Experiments]( on the human tendency to follow orders. Check out her collection [here]( to find out what titles you share with Hannah Arendt! Early Reviewers Early Reviewers is our program where you can win free(!) advance copies of books to read and review. Sign up to request books. Books for all ages and interests available. The September batch of [Early Reviewers]( has 3,115 copies of 87 books. The deadline to request a book is September 28th 6pm EDT. Author Interview - Anne Helen Petersen In the past several months, we have been interviewing people in the book world with interesting perspectives on current events. This month KJ talked with [Anne Helen Petersen](, author of the new book [Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation](. In a recent newsletter on your [Substack](, you examined how vocational awe affects the essential workers it venerates, specifically in the context of librarians. Can you speak to how vocational awe, librarians, and burnout meet? It allows people outside of the profession to dismiss very real demands, on the part of librarians, for things like adequate funding, health care, and support for dealing with the myriad jobs that each librarian is now tasked with performing. If you ask for more, it’s somehow viewed as indicative of a lack of passion, or a lack of appropriate awe for the job. This mindset is preposterous and yet truly ubiquitous. Read the whole interview [here](. Talk of the Thing Club Read 2020 has some great recommendations going for [Book Club Books](. The Book Balloon group is talking about their favorite [Podcasts, Audible, & Radio Shows](. TinyCat [TinyCat]( is the online catalog for small libraries, created by LibraryThing. It turns your existing LibraryThing account into a simple, professional, web-based catalog. This month, we are offering a deal on trials for TinyCat. Start a trial by the end of August and receive a free, 60-day trial. (Usual trials are 30 days long). Check out our playlists of Tiny Tutorials on [LibraryThing’s YouTube channel](, where Kristi walks you through various features of TinyCat in 30 seconds or less. Hot This month - [White Fragility]( by Robin DiAngelo - [The Nickel Boys]( by Colson Whitehead - [The Starless Sea]( by Erin Morgenstern - [The Dutch House]( by Ann Patchett - [Normal People]( by Sally Rooney - [The Testaments]( by Margaret Atwood - [My Sister, The Serial Killer]( by Oyinkan Braithwaite - [The Institute]( by Stephen King - [Where the Crawdads Sing]( by Delia Owens - [The Silent Patient]( by Alex Michaelides That’s it for September! — KJ This message was sent to {NAME}. Click to [edit your email preferences or unsubscribe from future emails](.