Critical Linking: February 22, 2012

The largest book project in the history of Kickstarter is also the third project to crack the $1 million barrier. A month ago, cartoonist Rich Burlew set up a project on Kickstarter with the goal of raising $57,500 to reprint one of the out-of-print books collecting strips from his “Order of the Stick” webcomic. He reached his initial goal in 48 hours. Today, the final total pledged was $1,254,120. Burlew is having a good month.

So, that question we asked you guys on Friday about funding books on Kickstarter? Uh…it can work.

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“He dined with his famous authors — who included Daphne du Maurier, Peter Benchley, Alex Haley, Leon Uris and Stephen King — and other notable friends; attended A-list parties with socialites like Brooke Astor; frequented the opera; hobnobbed with movie stars. He was a friend and frequent escort of Mrs. Onassis, and hired her as an editor at Doubleday.”

I read stuff like this and it makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew.

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“Payne met my whole family, and they all ended up being in the movie. I was on set all the time and even got to be in the film myself. Almost every line of dialogue was right out of the book, every sequence, the music I’d mentioned, the clothes they wore, the places they went to. It was a very inclusive process. I wasn’t possessive of the story because I trusted Payne, but I knew in the wrong person’s hands it could have been horribly melodramatic.”

Are there happier words for a novelist than “Alexander Payne wants to option your novel“?

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“For the next fourteen hundred or so years, books, as Henry Petroski, a professor of civic engineering and history at Duke, writes in The Book on the Bookshelf, were shelved every which way but straight up, spine out. Engravings of private studies show books piled horizontally, standing on the edge opposite their spine (their fore edge), as well as turned fore edge out.”

If you shelved your books like this now, people would really worry about you.