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Do you want aliens or the government reading your thoughts? No? That's what I figured. Better safe than sorry, pal. The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Paranormal teaches you how to protect what's in your head from an unwanted invasion.

Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re talking about the book related problems we have. I got 99 problems and they’re all related to books, so this post is creepily similar to you sitting in on a therapy session.

Problem #1: I can’t fight the habit of writing notes in books. I know that this makes me a horrible person, but there’s a thrill to writing on the pages of a book. It could be because in elementary school we were always threatened with death (not really) if we wrote in the library books. I’m not a monster—I do not write things in library books—but I do mark up the books I own. If you ever borrow a book of mine, there’s a 75% chance you’ll know exactly what I was thinking when you least want to hear my thoughts.

Problem #2: No matter what, I never have enough bookshelf space. Where does everyone put all the books?! I keep buying bookshelves and I still have no space. I have stacks of books everywhere. My cat is drowning in a sea of book towers. The books are balancing against every piece of furniture imaginable. Books. Everywhere.

Problem #3: I usually won’t purchase a book if I don’t like the cover. I guess I’m a design snob. If I’m going to spend money on a book, I want to like the entire thing not just the words. It’s not that I won’t read books if I don’t like the cover, I just probably won’t buy them. (Thanks, library!)

In this week’s How-To Tuesday we are going medieval. We are making our own black ink using a recipe from thirteenth-century France.

Looking at the golden inlays and the red and blue ink of a medieval manuscript, it is easy to understand why these books were so expensive to make. But most of the text was written using black ink, which at first glance doesn’t seem to be very expensive. However, the black ink was exclusive as well. It took time to make and the ingredients had to be imported from far away.

The black ink that was used in medieval Europe is called iron-gall ink. There are hundreds of recipes for making iron-gall ink, but they have a few things in common. These things are gallnuts, iron vitriol (a. k. a. copperas), and gum arabic. Many recipes also use rainwater and wine.

Dear readers: this chilly Valentine’s weekend, you have literary events to help you put the “boo” in bookish, to show your love for social justice, or to laugh your exes away, as well as an interactive poetry sculpture exhibit and the return of Laser Life, a queer sci-fi reading series. 

February is the pinkest month, thanks to Valentine’s day. But photographer Dustin Fenstermacher—supplier of eye-popping images for the Quirk titles How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity and the award-winning How to Make Your Baby an Internet Celebrity—seems determined to make pink a fashionable choice all year round.

Because he’s teamed up with designer and photography consultant Neil Binkley to create a photo series that we think features some of his best non-cat non-baby work ever.

Love is in the air, and Valentine’s Day is tomorrow. This Valentine’s season, why not round up some of the most epic literary love stories? Maybe crack open that copy of The Thorn and the Blossom? Valentine’s Day should encourage us not only to appreciate that significant other, but to appreciate all the great loves we’ve been blessed with.

Here’s a compilation of some fantastic love stories for this Valentine’s Day.