For this installment we take a slightly different view of the phrase “blog of the week.” I think it’s safe to say that the book blog that saw the biggest bump in notoriety this week was Booksaga. What was it that brought sudden exposure to a fledgling, mild-mannered blog about “adventures in the book trade”? Well, sex and scandal, of course. Perry Falwell is a bookseller in Georgia who makes a sort of half-hearted attempt to keep his details private: He buys up books to sell online and some of his sources might frown on that. (Or, conversely, want to get in on the action.) He recently bought a cache of books from a widow, more as a kindness to her than anything else, only to find later that the husband had converted many of them to book boxes, in which he had stored pornographic Polaroids. Falwell blogged about it (complete with a photo of the find), uber-blogger Jason Kottke linked to it (as did countless others, including a link in our forum) and Falwell found himself with an instant audience of gawkers. Those who lingered long enough to peruse the rest of the blog will have found (not quite two dozen) faintly-genteel posts about life combing thrift stores and library sales, which could be either charming or deathly dull, but Falwell takes a bemused and writerly approach, and his sense of humor can be seen instantly in his categories list. It may well prove worth sticking around for.

When this cover popped up in our Judging a Book discussion last week, I’m pretty sure I let out a little gasp. Without a clue what it was about, I was immediately seduced by the orderly rows of patterned scrap, arranged on a piece of notebook paper and accented with a little bird. So pretty. As it turns out, I’m coveting it for more reasons than just Jill Shimabukuro’s lovely design. “I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation,” writes William Davies King in the opening passage of Collections of Nothing. What he collects is more everything than nothing, but the sorts of things many people would think of as nothing (or certainly nothing collectible). The book is described as “part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition” on the publisher’s website, where you’ll also find an excerpt and an essay by the author. If the book is half as good as it promises — or half as good as its cover — I’ll be thrilled.