Happy 553rd Birthday Da Vinci. Google’s got a Da Vinci illustration today. Yahoo.
Da Vinci was a man after my own heart. He was good at a lot of things but not great. Well, ok, that Mona Lisa was pretty great, but it was only one of six finished paintings. Now I like to complete tasks, but what I admire is that Da Vinci could do a little bit of everything. I aspire to that kind of wide-spread brilliance.
I often engage in conversations about thematic convergence so let me tell you the Da Vinci connection.
I woke up this morning wondering about that damn Da Vinci Code and why it’s so popular. I have read it, and have bought it as a gift, so I’m not slamming the book. I’m just interested in pinpointing its tipping point. As I was mulling over the Code, I turned on the computer and Google popped up with the Da Vinci banner. I look up Da Vinci Code in amazon and saw that the publication date was March 18, 2003. The book has been on bestseller lists for two years. How does this happen? Then I found this article on PopMatters.
Read the article on PopMatters, which, by the way, comments on the many trees “felled to print the billions of pages demanded by hungry readers.”
Why don’t publishers print books on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and stop clearing the world of its old growth forests. Maybe Da Vinci Code is? I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be great to demand that any book being mass produced be printed on old-growth free paper, preferrably something recycled? 18 million copies is a lot of trees.