Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

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A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...
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Expensive Whitman!

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Yesterday Christie's sold a first edition of "Leaves of Grass" by American poet and humanist Walt Whitman for $305,000. This is the most expensive book sold by Whitman and more than double the expected estimate. A previous record for the same book and same author was $230,500, sold by Sotheby's in October 2011.

The most expensive book ever sold is the Bay Psalm Book, sold by Sotheby's in the autumn of 2013 for $14.2 million! Wouw! I read that this is the first book printed in British North America in 1640, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.




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