Book-themed Bloglovin' Buttons

(Wow, that's a lot of B's in that title.)

As you probably all know, by tomorrow Google Reader will be gone. This has prompted me to claim our blog on Bloglovin' a few days ago. If you know me at all, you probably know what came next: endless fussing over what icon to use for the Bloglovin' widget in our sidebar. I don't really like the Bloglovin' icon and I also wanted something with a bookish theme. So I came up with a bunch of options for custom Bloglovin' buttons before settling on the icon you now see in our sidebar. And since we didn't get to use all those other options, I figured that some of our bookish friends might find them useful, so why not share? You can see all the icons I made below, some of them after the jump (ignore the white margins, those are added by Blogger).

How to use them: If you want to use one of these images as your icon, just grab it, resize it to your liking and upload it to Photobucket or any other image hosting service. (I recommend Photobucket because it's very easy to use AND it has editing options, so you can resize the picture, add rounded corners, add various effects etc. without having to re-upload.) Copy the direct link to your image and paste it instead of the link you now have after src=" in your Bloglovin' widget code. (See also instructions here.)

If you want different colors, different fonts, different text or whatever, just leave a comment and I'll edit the image for you or send you the original file to modify to your liking.

Oh, and do follow us on Booklovin'!

This is our current icon, but I suppose you can use it too :)

 

Book Crush of the Week: Things We Say Today Which We Owe to Shakespeare

No author will probably ever match the sweeping influence of William Shakespeare in shaping the English language. We're always in awe of the many, many expressions he coined. There are too many to properly list here, although this awesome graphic does a job good of summing up some of the most famous, which is why it's our Book Crush of the Week:

Image via nawasaka.tumblr.com.

Love it! What Shakespearean expressions do you use regularly? Mine are "full circle," "laughing stock," and "so-so."

Vintage Illustrations of Jane Austen's Persuasion

What's a footnote?

Do you know what we love? Books is a good answer. Old books is an even better answer. Old books with pretty illustrations the best answer (or at least, the best answer considering we don't want to be here all night). So I was pretty excited to come across a 1898 edition of Persuasion containing some lovely illustrations by C.E. Brock (who was apparently a well-known Victorian illustrator; thank you, Google, for that piece of information!).

You can see all six of these vintage illustrations below, together with their context in the book. Our favorite thing about illustrations is seeing how the artist envisioned the characters and how closely his sketches match the pictures we had in our minds. It is also the main reason some people dislike illustrations *cough* Charles Lamb *cough*. What do you make of Brock's depictions though? We have to admit, we're not quite sold on his Captain Wentworth, but what do you think of Anne and the other characters?

Book Crush of the Week: Green Grass Bookmarks

Hi everyone! It's time for our second installment of Book Crush of the Week, where we showcase some of our favorite bookish things from around the web. This week we're crushing on these adorable bookmarks--how awesome are they? 

Image from incrediblethings.com.

They are totally perfect for summer, which is now just officially around the corner (provided you live in the Northern hemisphere, bien sur). But what we really love is just how perfect they are for reading; each little shoot of grass reminds us of all those great 'ah-ha!' and 'wow, I love this sentence' moments that arise organically when you're immersed in a wonderful book. 

How many grass shoots would your favorite book have in it?