Totemic Object or Dusty, Dog-Eared Companion?

Keeping your books in a pile on the floor might be a cheaper way to organize your trove of literary treasures, but it just doesn't show them the respect they deserve. In an era where the physical book seems to be under siege by its digital analogues, books are often deemed tired, old and ever so tangible. In a bits and bytes world, who needs a separate book for each story?

Bibliophiles do! And as digital readers become ever more popular, it seems that the act of owning and displaying books has become an activity that seems almost holy, historical and reverent: like the Renaissance duke who exhibited his worldly and exotic treasures in his Cabinet of Wonders, books seem to take on an increasingly totemic significance. And the design of the furniture meant to hold these reliquaries of story has been getting wilder.

To the designers of these displays and those who buy them, books are no longer another regular feature of the home; their placement has become far more fetishized. Some of these designs conceal their burdens, disguising books as something more or less. Others incorporate a place for the bibliophile to sit or recline, in effect providing a place of practical worship. Some carve out a huge, central niche for themselves, announcing the tantamount important of the dead-tree written word. Others safeguard the books as if being out in the open were too blatant, too dangerous.

 To wit:

 

 

The Girl Who Was Mistranslated

At Couth Buzzard we've been in the midst of a maelstrom of Stieg Larsson buzz. The posthumously famous author's Millennium Trilogy has been the most requested title of the year, and with more movie adaptations on the way, it looks like requests for The Girl Who Did Something with Something aren't nearly on the wane.

However, as familiar as most Americans are with the series, did you know that the original titles are quite different from their translations? Take the first book in the series, which American publishers translated to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." The original Swedish title reads "Män som hatar kvinnor," or, "Men who hate women." Certainly a more apt title for the violent and misogynist goings-on , but American publishers shied away at its frankness and preferred to mask its internal workings with a vaguer title.

The second book, translated as “The Girl Who Played with Fire” is an identical translation to its Swedish namesake, but intriguingly, other translations got a little more visceral with it; the Spanish and French titles read “The Girl Who Dreamt of a Gasoline Can and a Match.”

The third book is where the major problems seemed to occur. A colloquial Swedish expression threw a monkey wrench into all of the translations: “Luftslottet som sprängdes” roughly translates to "The aircastle that was blown up.” According to the infallibility of the Web, “luftslottet”connotes a castle built out of air, somewhat akin to a “house of cards” in English. However, “The Girl Who Exploded a House of Cards” is more than a little laughable, and publishers scrapped all authenticity to fit the title into their preexisting theme as “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.” Other languages had similar problems with this last title, offering everything from the Italian “The Queen of Paper Castles,” to the French “The Queen in the Palace of Drafts,” to the Russian title which attempts to combine both themes in, “The Girl Who Was Blowing Up Aircastles.” Hmm, that last one sounds like a good anime title...