Dubliners

Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 10:41 AM

Posted by Cheryl Pon, Books Online Team

I live in Dublin

Do you see the same city I see?

-James Joyce

[Please note, some books linked from this post may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]

Recently, I moved from San Francisco across the Atlantic to the beautiful city of Dublin. The biggest perk of living in the capital of Ireland for an enthusiastic reader and writer like myself is being surrounded by rich literary history everywhere I go!

One of the first nations to practice vernacular writing, Ireland has produced some of history’s most remarkable authors. Notable literary artists from Dublin include Oscar Wilde (1854-1900); poet and author of the famed The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker (1847-1912), creator of Dracula; Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who brought fictional Lilliputians to life in Gulliver's Travels (and who was the first great Irish writer to be recognized internationally), and James Joyce (1882-1941), who captured the very essence of what it was like to live in Dublin through his collection of short stories Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the great epic Ulysses, a work of art I studied intensively in university. Imagine my delight when I could actually experience Joycean Dublin by walking the same streets this great author had!

I took a walk across gorgeous Samuel Beckett bridge, named for the Nobel Prize in Literature-winning writer who had at one point in his life been James Joyce's secretary, examined the very first printing machines and ancient typewriters at the National Print Museum, admired the ancient Book of Kells, preserved in the library at Trinity College, and enjoyed a cappuccino at cozy Finn's Hotel where James Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, which was also the inspiration for Ulysses.

I spent a leisurely afternoon at the Writer’s Museum in the heart of Dublin and discovered the amazing Yeats collection of letters to his lover, friends, and family. Later that night, through the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, I embarked on a pleasant historical walking tour of the great city with our tour guide quoting at length Yeats, Behan, and Larkin- with stops at local pubs for some hearty, delicious Irish fare.

To visualize the influence of great Irish authors on contemporary Dublin, take an afternoon to stroll through the intense language and exploration of identity of Joycean Dublin in Ulysses on Google Books. Try exploring the literary history of where you live by conducting an Advanced Book Search by using location as subject. You may find a more poetic side to the sights around you!

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Madvertisements

Monday, October 18, 2010 at 7:00 AM

Posted by Daniel Hirsch, Google Books Online Team

When we're not out scanning and subsequently trying to read all the world's books, some of us on the Google Books team actually like to watch television. So it is with some remorse that we watched Sunday's season finale of Mad Men, AMC's hit drama about a 1960s advertising agency--which, if you live in the US and you haven't already heard of it or had someone in your life gush about it, you really should get out more.

Besides providing ample display of period costumes and vices (smoking, boozing, adultery) the show is satisfying for its novel examination of the world of advertising. In depicting the creative process of the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, Mad Men argues that the catchphrases and images used to sell us beer and cereal reveal deeper truths about who we are as a culture.

For some Ad Analysis 101, we harnessed the power of Google Magazine Search to look at some actual ads from 1964, the initial setting for the current season of Mad Men. These cultural artifacts hint at an American society on the brink of historical social change.

Lucky Strike

On the show, Don Draper and company struggle to market Lucky Strike cigarettes to a public increasingly aware of the hazards of smoking cigarettes. In this 1964 ad for the brand, one can see the transition away from previous means of marketing cigarettes. For example, compare the 1964 ad to this 1955 from LIFE:


In 1955, smoking Lucky Strike is for lovers. In 1964, smoking Lucky Strikes is for the well-versed cigarette connoisseurs. The 1964 ad emphasizes taste above all else with the word underlined and repeated four times. Rather than a couple enjoying the romantic ritual of lighting up, this later campaign includes just the image of an anonymous set of lips ready for tasting this "fine tobacco at its best."

By focusing in on the taste of cigarettes, perhaps the architects of the 1964 ad were speaking to a population already hooked on cigarettes. Whereas the earlier ad uses romantic imagery to attract new smokers, the later ad highlights the physical and gustatory sensation to an audience that is already craves them--even if scientists are starting to say they shouldn't.

Samsonite

In a Mad Men episode that some critics called the best of series, Don Draper and his ambitious protégé Peggy Olsen bicker over how best to compose a campaign for the the suitcase maker Samsonite. At one point Peggy presents an idea involving the celebrity endorsement of Joe Namath and cites the quarterback's good looks as an obvious selling point for women. Don rebuffs Peggy, saying, "Women don't buy suitcases." As the above two-page ad from LIFE clearly shows, the real ad men behind Samsonite's 1964 campaigns weren't so sure about that.

While the Samsonite Silhouette is "handsome, rugged and trim" for him, it's also
"an elegant summer traveler" for her. This split page ad suggests that advertisers were wary of alienating their male audience by focusing their energies on woman. But they were also growing increasingly aware of the power of marketing to female consumers.

Pepsi Generation

While the guys and gals of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce didn't pen any copy for Pepsi-Cola, this campaign from the soda giant justly belongs in this blog post in that it is part to the larger canon of 1960s iconic advertising. It was named by Advertising Age as one of the top ad campaigns of the century (#21 on the list of 100). This particular spot from a July 1964 issue of LIFE illustrates where advertisers were increasingly aiming their attentions: the young.

The copy reads: "The horizons of thinking young stretch across the land from sea to sea. The mood is healthy; the drink is Pepsi." The reference to the horizon and the literal one stretching out behind this contented, attractive California couple, echo the "New Frontier" of Kennedy's 1960 Inauguration. The ad capitalizes on the lingering hopefulness of a country about to be mired in a protracted war and a divisive national discussion that pitted old against young.

Pepsi's 1964 advertising also reveals the extent to which advertisers were awakening to the growing market of African Americans. This ad from an October 1964 Ebony provides an African American corollary to the otherwise white campaign found in most other magazines.


LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law only a few months before the publication of this particular ad, and the inclusive tone of "Come Alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation" links drinking Pepsi with integration. In this ad, they're not just selling soda, they're also selling promises of equality.

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We'll have to wait awhile for a return to the 1960s via the exploits of Don, Peggy and the rest, but the 60s--and many other historical periods--are alive and swinging in Google Magazine Search. To do your own investigation of historic advertising, you can search Google Magazine through the Advanced Search option. With fully searchable text, including the ads, you too can probe such weighty questions about meaning and identity--also, less weighty ones like this. Read the full post 0 comments

Google Books at the Boston Book Festival

Friday, October 15, 2010 at 3:07 PM

Posted by Abe Murray, product manager, Google Books

Tomorrow, Sat. 10/16, the second annual Boston Book Festival is expected to attract more than 25,000 attendees to celebrate, discover and learn about books. We’ll be there to celebrate with them because we see books as important keys to human culture, knowledge and progress.

Bostonian Googlers will be there all day, hosting book sales and author signings in our booth in Copley Square outside of the Trinity Church alongside an Internet lounge for people who want to share their experiences with the rest of the world.

We hope those of you nearby can attend the Boston Book Festival -- which is free and open to the public -- and drop by our booth anytime between 10 AM and 8 PM.

Here’s the book sales and author signing schedule. Happy reading!

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On the Future of Books

Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 7:26 PM

Posted by James Crawford, engineering director, Google Books

This morning I’ll be speaking on the topic of the present and future of Google Books at the Europeana Open Culture conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. Now as much as ever, our shared vision of bringing all the incredible content stored in the world’s books online depends on working with libraries, publishers, authors and book lovers.

Europeana is a digital library initiated by the European Commission to bring together digitization projects from around the continent. Europeana works with European libraries, archives, and museums to collect and make easily accessible the books, music, film and art that make up Europe’s cultural heritage. It is an important project, and it shows that around the world, public and private bodies see the value of digitization in order to provide broad access to our shared cultural heritage.

To date, working with library and publisher partners around the world, we have scanned more than 15 million books from more than 100 countries in over 400 languages as part of the Google Books project we started in 2004. The greater the diversity of content on the web, the more useful it becomes. And the more people who can access the information cataloged in books, the more enlightening those works become.

Check back soon for highlights from the conference. Read the full post 0 comments