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Ever since the first human scribe put stylus to parchment, books have been destroyed. Bummer, right? And, ironically, not something you read about that often: history’s written by the victors, and sometimes the victors are real jerks and don’t even start writing their own yay-me congratulatory epics until they’ve burned up all written evidence to the contrary. Literal scorched earth, if you know what I mean.

While we may not know what we’ve lost, we at least know where we lost it from. Here are six of the most tragic burnt-up, smashed-down, flattened-over, and ripped-to-shreds libraries in history.

Writers everywhere were abuzz this weekend with the news that Amtrak is piloting “Amtrak residencies”—train trips provided to authors for the sole purpose of writing. Really, there’s no better place to get some quality authoring in: the scenery flying past, the white noise of the tracks, the chance to eat breakfast one place and dinner somewhere miles away…it’s like Walden Pond on wheels.

We here at Quirk are ALL ABOARD with this idea. In fact, we’d like to submit our entire company for one of these railroad residences. We want to be the first train-based publisher. We think we can, we think we can, and here's our plan!

Writers everywhere were abuzz this weekend with the news that Amtrak is piloting “Amtrak residencies”—train trips provided to authors for the sole purpose of writing. Really, there’s no better place to get some quality authoring in: the scenery flying past, the white noise of the tracks, the chance to eat breakfast one place and dinner somewhere miles away…it’s like Walden Pond on wheels.

We here at Quirk are ALL ABOARD with this idea. In fact, we’d like to submit our entire company for one of these railroad residences. We want to be the first train-based publisher. We think we can, we think we can, and here's our plan!

We love Monty Python. To an embarrassing, quote-flinging, watch-and-rewatch-and-rewatching degree. (In fact, I’m of the opinion that we should’ve launched Flying Circus episodes into space to introduce ourselves to aliens. Silly walks and dead parrots are—no pun intended—universal).

But our beloved Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin were no mere workaday comedians: they were Oxford and Cambridge men, and terribly well-read ones at that. So it’s no surprise that some of their best skits train their absurd and surreal brand of sketch-writing on the literary canon. Here are ten of our favorites.

(image via flickr)

February 14^th: A day of heart-shaped chocolate boxes, naked archer babies with wings, and linguistic pedantry. Yes! Some people—no names named—live to gleefully gloat their pronunciatorial prowess any time some unfortunate, uninformed soul dares to let slip the word “Valentimes.”

To which I say: listen up, you whatever-the-February-equivalent-of-Grinches-is! You need to stop. No, not because correcting people is cruel (for Cupid’s sake, all of this holiday is cruel), but because it’s time—Valentime—for a change.

Controversial, I know. But I brought charts. Here are five rock-solid reasons we need to rename this holiday already.

Friends, these are dark times. Gangs of misused homophones run wild and unfettered through the streets. Tongues wag in nonsensical sentence fragments and keyboards transcribe contractions of words that should never be shortened. Superfluous commas and apostrophes glitter in the sky like the trail of an ominous, ungrammatical comet.

Sure, some may claim that “it’s no big deal” or that “you still get what I mean,” or that we should “stop being such a total jerk about it, Blair,” but we all know the truth. The Day of Judgment is at hand, when the ears of the deaf will be unstopped to how many times they’ve said “where is it at?” and the eyes of the blind will be forced to read all their flippant substitution of the second person possessive pronoun for the contracted form of “you are.” But we, the grammatically righteous, shall peer down the shining walls of our ivory tower and watch the doomed writhe in agony! We must accept the scepter of our sacred duty and must judge the erroneous in accordance with their grievous sins…which, conveniently, I have cataloged here, for ease of punition.