Double-Breasted Dust-Jacket

Typewriter Disassembly

2012-01-22T20:14:00.003-06:00

Typewriters are amazing things. They usually have forty or fifty keys, and with the help of the shift key they can make a hundred or so different characters. It arranges each chosen character in a linear fashion, uniform according to its language, performing its roughshod typesetting and kerning as it goes. Mighty complicated pieces of machinery — and it shows, in this image from Todd McLellan's series Disassembly:

Queer Book Titles Found

2012-01-08T10:48:00.002-06:00

From a wire news story, published in 1913:

Queer Book Titles Found

London.—As the keeper of four millions of books, the late Dr. Fortescue delighted to tell of the titular curiosities in the British Museum. He found it necessary very frequently to dip deeply into a book before discovering its subject. Thus, "Music of the Wild" resolved itself into natural history; "Light for the Blind" into an appeal on behalf of foreign missions, and "Earl Percy's Dinner Table" into a war history.

But the book that baffled him completely was "The Abbey on the Marsh." There was internal evidence that the book was an account of a real abbey, but the author had forgotten to mention its name.

So the lesson, dear writers, is as you compose your book of nonfiction, let not your creativity in describing things allow you to forget to say the name of the darn thing.

More Christmas-Tree Books

2011-12-17T08:02:00.003-06:00

This Christmas tree made from books takes a bit more effort, compared to the one from a few days ago, and a little taste for book destruction. Juniper Books found themselves with a surplus of green fabric-bound books, whose contents had been digitized and thus the paper was headed for the dumpster anyhow, and decided to make a Christmas tree. The edges of some books went into the bandsaw to make the traditional arrow-point branches, while the rest make up the body of the tree. Via Juxtapoz.

A Book-tree Merry Christmas

2011-12-14T16:33:00.003-06:00

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful, and as long as you've got a nice bunch of books that you're ready to stack, you can make yourself a book Christmas tree! I found out about this fun craftiness only minutes before leaving the house to go buy a real Christmas tree, and just for a few moments I considered unloading the bookshelves…but then I gave it some thought, and I figured I'd be happier vacuuming up needles than having to reshelve everything before New Year's.

The Books of Skyrim

2011-11-30T11:13:00.005-06:00

After the Oblivion book from a few weeks ago, you wouldn't think there would be many other people going crazy over in-game texts. But, then came Skyrim. In this new game, there's books all over the place, and one inventive fan has extracted them, compiled them into ebooks, and has all the in-game Skyrim books available on their website. Now, we count down until somebody puts them on Lulu in physical form...

Little Newspapers Doing Well

2011-11-15T16:34:00.001-06:00

Here's some good news: small newspapers are doing surprisingly well these days. Particularly, these are weekly papers, small-town newspapers that thrive on stories of largely local interest. They give several examples, and the most striking thing I see is the similarity to newspapers of a hundred years ago.

I do a lot of historical research through online newspaper repositories and sitting at the microfilm viewer, and the meat-and-potatoes of a newspaper in 1920 consisted of a front-page of national news and major local news, a page of just local news, a page of local 'interest' (who was visiting where, how the church social went), a page of recpies and dress patterns for the women of the house, a page of editorials and financial markets, a page of sports, and a page of classifieds. Eight pages, consistently and uniformly produced for decades on small presses for only a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers. Those same methods of news publishing are, apparently, still effective in today's 24-hour news cycle.

So, while those large newspapers have struggled to maintain their hold on news that's available through free sources on the internet, local newspapers are paying their bills by reporting on the stuff not provided by Yahoo! News: the things happening at city council meetings, in the school auditoriums, and in neighbor's back yards. I do suspect, however, that if you added up the budgets of the thousands of successful newsweeklies, they wouldn't even approach that of USA Today, but if they can pay for paper and reporters and keep the lights on, they're going to be the way communities get local news for quite a while.

Truitt's Fix by Rex Evans Wood

2011-11-09T08:33:00.004-06:00

The producer of Hear It Now and Dakota Datebook (a show I write for) at Prairie Public Radio has a new science fiction book out. Rex Evans Wood's new book, Truitt's Fix, is about Dan Truitt, a man "caught between warring nations, on the run, and pursued by a relentless villain."

I haven't read the book yet, but I'm passing along this news: Wood will be doing a reading at Zandbroz in Fargo this Saturday, November 12^th, at 6:30pm.

The Keaton Music Typewriter

2011-11-04T14:30:00.004-05:00

A typewriter has filled the void between handwriting and typesetting for about two hundred years now, but there's plenty of other things besides just letters and numbers that need ink on paper. Here we have one such example — the Keaton Music Typewriter:
This particular example is for sale on Etsy, with a $6,000 pricetag — definitely worth the money, since there are only a few left in existence. The Early Typewriter Collectors Association has an excellent article on this mechanical musical typewriter, too. If you want to figure out how it works, you can see Mr. Keaton's original patent online.

News-Lined Walls

2011-10-22T23:06:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, when people clean out their attic, they find old newspapers. What this guy found was better than just newspapers: he found a bunch of plates used in the printing process nailed to his attic walls. They don't appear to be the actual printing plates; those would be mirror-reversed for the printing process. These look like they're embossed, like either the mold for casting the printing plate, or something thick and soft run through the presses without ink.

Lean Publishing

2011-10-14T06:52:00.008-05:00

What do you get when you distill modern book business through the structure of tech startups? You get Lean Publishing, a means by which a writer can look at book production as a profit-building exercise. You won't find any writing tips or methods for overcoming writer's block in this manifesto. Peter Armstrong has produced a plan that puts people with an idea on the same path of Angry Birds, rather than the traditional route of finding a literary agent.

Every problem looks like a problem with the pipes when you ask a plumber, and Lean Publishing is much the same case. Armstrong's background is in a web development and architecture start-up, so fixing the problem of developing a profitable book, of course, looks like something to be solved the web start-up way. Many of the terms and ideas sound very foreign to somebody who has no connection to that world, but there is one advantage to the language of VC start-ups. "Creatives" are the people for whom the start-up system was built, and the methods for navigating a start-up are suited towards directing creative people through business minefields. There's a reason that much of the internet was created by art majors who quickly hired a CFO once checks started coming in: a creative founder needs that sort of help to reach a profitable end.

As such, the people who can benefit the most from Lean Publishing are the people stuck on the traditional publishing path. The process requires giving up the usual process of getting words onto paper, and introduces the scary idea of making ideas available to readers (and the competition) before the text is complete. The Blooker Prize was a bit ahead of its time in recognizing that a worthy book could come from the web. The success of Julie and Julia, the 2006 Blooker winner, should have inspired more in that direction, but taking that route to publishing lacked the roadmap to such success. Lean Publishing hopes to brandish a machete and clear that road, blazing a new path to long-form writing success through the methods that built the internet into what it is today.

(Via.)

The Oblivion Book

2011-09-23T06:24:00.008-05:00

I know little about videogames beyond the NES and Angry Birds and Wii Fit, but apparently there's a videogame called Oblivion that has a number of magical and pseudoarchaic books within the gameplay. Some guy decided that in-game reading wasn't good enough, so he turned the in-game tomes into a hard-copy, leatherbound book:

Per the creator, this was entirely done by hand, using a color laser, real leather, and a bunch of elbow grease. More images of the finished book here; pictures of construction here. And people worry videogames are going to result in fewer books — here's a perfect case of videogames resulting in new books!

Ode to a Bookstore Death

2011-09-18T21:39:00.005-05:00

The recent implosion of the Borders bookstore chain has been a slow-motion collapse, a magnification of the fate that so many small bookstores have gone through in much the same way. The difference is that Borders was so much bigger; the causes and the outcome are mostly the same. People are reading less; those who are reading read more in digital form; competition and cost of inventory have made it difficult to compete; competition with other forms of media are taking up people's entertainment dollars and time. It's not good for the industry, particularly those who do not modify what they're doing to accommodate change. Borders failed to do so.

The booksellers at the Borders in Santa Rosa, California, wanted to get some things off their chest before they left. Here's the things they never told you: an ode to a bookstore death.

Image from here; full text can be found here.

Be an Author, in 5 Difficult Steps

2011-06-22T21:35:00.003-05:00

After the wise advice earlier today, I found this tale of woe and pain. Writer Robert Brockway published his book Everything is Going to Kill Everybody after following his Five Incredibly Difficult Steps to become an author. I'm at step 3, "Doing an Assload of Research". Brockway's article has taught me a truism that had never occurred to me, yet seems to make so much sense: LeVar Burton is a dirty motherfucking liar.

Tips To Write a Book

2011-06-22T10:50:00.002-05:00

You may already know that the reason my blogs have suffered for the past 18 months is because I'm writing a book. I don't have much to say about it just yet, because I've done a lot of research, but I don't exactly know what it's about yet. Some days I freak out over that fact, afraid that I cannot actually write something until I already have it all figured out, but I do my best to keep on track. The best thing lately that lets me stay on track is to hear about how many successul authors get their books written. They pretty much all boil down to: write even if it sucks, freakouts are normal, and books take a really long time to write do don't give up.

Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller

2011-03-06T17:37:00.001-06:00

I hate to admit that I like internet memes sometimes, but I thought this one needed to be shared: Judgmental Ostrich Bookseller:

More can be found here, or here.

Nancy Drew, via Hark A Vagrant

2010-12-30T15:15:00.004-06:00

The ever-awesome webcomic Hark, A Vagrant takes a look at what you can glean from just the covers of Nancy Drew mysteries. I admit, I giggled heartily at almost all of them. There are two pages, so don't miss any:

History Vs. Historical Fiction

2010-09-18T11:36:00.003-05:00

I have been researching a historical event for some time now, and I think I can make a book of it. However, I was having trouble coming up with a way to do it: do I write a non-fiction book using truthful historical facts, or do I turn it into a historical novel where I can make a better, but untruthful, narrative? Guy Vanderhaeghe has an essay on how history and fiction fit together, which has given me more to think about.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-12-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

NEWS SHIP.

A Ship It is a Sailing, Sailing, O'er
the Sea, and It is Deeply
Laden With Items
All for Thee.

News of Battles In the Cabin¹, and of
Injuns In the Hold², the Sales
were 'lection Marshals³
the Masts were Sher-
man's Gold⁴.

Forty Thousand Sailors Flocking
to the Show, Forty Thou-
sand Stalwarts all
for Chicago.⁵

The Captain was a Gen'ral, the
Convention in His Pant, and
Every Time He Said
"Thumbs up" the Del-
egates Said

Grant.

(The Argus, 2 June 1880.)

(more...)

Jacket Blurbs: 12-4-09

2009-12-04T17:25:00.000-06:00

"You are not running the Bill Clinton Festival, however, you are running the X Literary Festival." – Amanda Craig, How Not To Run A Literary Festival;
"The hand of Nature may also alter texts, essentially transforming them into 'found objects,' which when presented by artists, are imbued with symbolic and implicative presence." – Altered art books at the Museum of Biblical Art this past summer;
"'These are our sandwiches,' said Mamet. 'We have our sandwiches here.'" – Roger Ebert, on lunch with David Mamet;
"Obsession figures largely in several — and meteors, too, weirdly enough." – Glen Weldon, on books to share with friends.
"This facility has turned a piece of street furniture into a community service in constant use." – a phonebooth becomes a library in the UK, via;
"…disseminated tuberculosis affecting the joints and liver – probably of bovine origin – would offer a simpler explanation for her symptoms." – cow flu killed Jane Austen?
"This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon's head." – the winning passage from this year's Bad Sex Awards.
"The books are better, the mood is better and the year is actually going better." – Bookseller Steve Bercu, to NPR on the Xmas bookselling outlook.

Review: Tangerine, by Edward Bloor

2009-12-02T07:32:00.000-06:00

When I first bought Edward Bloor's Tangerine, the flap summary, the various covers, and the information online all led me to believe the book had a supernatural component: the blind can see, predictable lightning that does strike twice, geeks are cool — up is down, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria — and cryptic hints of an evil older brother. It sounds closer in style to a Goosebumps title than your average young-adult fiction, but it's far better than that.

At the core of this story is a common trope: kid moves to a new city, full of the unfamiliar and populated by kinds of people he's never met before. Paul Fisher's family starts the book in transit, moving from Houston to a development in Tangerine County, Florida. Lake Windsor Downs is a representative modern development, a series of cookie-cutter houses on curvy streets, abruptly bordering the swampland that it overlays like a toy town rolled out on a sheet of Astroturf. The families are perfect, the houses are perfect, the school is perfect, everything is bright and cheery, although it rests upon swamp that's been burning for years, re-ignited by the frequent lightning strikes from the daily thunderstorms.

Paul is hampered by damaged eyes, apocryphally attributed to looking directly at an eclipse of the sun, but he sees more than anyone believes. He starts out the school year with the mark of a disability in his folder, which entitles him to special treatment, but he soon proves himself better than his 20/20-sighted peers as a soccer goalie. A series of events, a lightning strike, a sinkhole, and a soccer problem, sends Paul to Tangerine Middle School, which shows Paul the huge chasm between the clean artificiality of his home in Lake Windsor and the lower classes of the original community around which developments have grown. Although nothing in the book is outright supernatural, Bloor describes the unnatural Lake Windsor with all the other-worldliness a transplanted teenager would see in it, thick glasses or not. The mysterious events which drive the story all have natural explanations, although their influence on Paul's life conspire to force him to grow, to see things for what they are, and stand up for himself against the schools, his peers, and his family, for what he knows as the truth.

Wifey and I have lamented the lack of "boy literature," books that appeal to boys without being fantasy, TV-related, or comic books, and this is probably the best fit I've seen recently. The book is dark, contains a mystery, and includes a couple deaths — and prominently features sports. The main character is geeky and plays soccer, while the main antagonists of the story are popular and play football, which still leans towards the kind of book a nerdy bookworm would identify with, but it moves in the right direction. The back cover says the book is for ages 12 and up, which is a reasonable description because the realistic nature of the story is a bit intense, as opposed to giant robots hitting each other. The story itself is deeply rooted in the world of late 20th century Florida, Bloor's stomping grounds, and it focuses sharply on the world a boy in Florida would encounter. More than just topics a boy would enjoy, Paul's world is sharply boyish. Communication is through action, friendship is tenuous and rooted in aggression, and there's no long monologues about how the characters feel. Even between friends, Paul Fisher's conversations are choppy and indirect, something familiar to anyone who's watched boys communicate in real life.

As an adult, there was no struggle for me to enjoy it. The book is 'young adult', which (especially when you include the Twilight and Harry Potter crowds) is becoming less of an indicator of substandard reading. The story is rather complex, draped in metaphor and strung with many well-formed characters and subplot threads, which Bloor masterfully twists together into a fluid story. There's a risk of adding plots and characters to fill pages, and some of the soccer-season stuff in the middle begins to feel like filler, but Bloor's story for Paul Fisher moves forward in a very natural way, despite the fantastic elements. Given the use of language and the complexity underneath the story, age 12 is probably still a good lower boundary for reading, but there's no upper boundary. Know a grown-up who isn't much into reading fiction? This book would be a good starting point if he's usually spending his spare time watching sports on TV. Requiring little suspension of disbelief despite the fantastic elements, and giving more than one might expect from a young adult book, Edward Bloor's Tangerine is an excellent novel, for kids and adults alike.

Tangerine, by Edward Bloor
ISBN 0-15-201246-X
294 pages, 6" x 9" hardcover
Harcourt Brace & Co.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-11-29T20:29:00.001-06:00

QUITE SO.

Her Majesty's Ship Bacchante, as a
Floating Aquarium Sails, Be-
cause She has on Board,
You see, a Couple of
Little Wales¹.

The Injuns Again are on it², and the
Wild Frontier it Riles³; They
Again must Learn the
Lesson That Bad Medi-
cine's Paddy Miles.⁴

The B. & O. Have Wages Raised⁵, for
the Same Longshoreman Try.⁶
Poor Wieniawsky's Gone
Aloft, to Fiddle in
the Sky.⁷

And Being Lately From the Earth,
Perhaps He'll Play This Chant:
"If You Want to be an
Angel, You Must Toot
Your Horn for

Grant."

(The Argus, 7 April 1880.)

(more...)

Review: The Irish In Dakota, by David Kemp

2009-11-25T10:58:00.000-06:00

The upper Midwest is usually considered the domain of Norwegian, German, and Swedish immigrants, but it turns out the Irish had far more impact on the settling of Dakota Territory during the late 19th century than I had ever realized.

The Irish in Dakota, by David Kemp, is a fact-laden chronology of the movement of Irish families into Dakota, but doesn't extend much beyond that. The book is short, and only rarely diverges into analysis or storytelling, but I can see why genealogy websites list it under Irish ancestry resources. The book moves quickly through the late 19th century, a cascade of names and dates and places, providing its own context while lacking much breadth. I'd also say that the book focuses more on the parts we now call South Dakota than the entirety of the territory. Since the author relied heavily on South Dakota's historical societies, it is to be expected.

I checked out the book from the public library because of my recent fascination with the Fenians, and the book devotes a large part to the Fenian presence in this area, which was more than I had even thought before. That's the book's strongest feature: it contains a lot of information that I hadn't read or heard before, so it did open my eyes to a facet of my region's history. The amount of information makes me feel there's a much larger book in there that hasn't been written, making this book short of what it could have become.

The Irish in Dakota, by David Kemp
ISBN 978-0962459313
144 pages, 5½" x 8½"
Rushmore House Publishing

Rogues and Rouge

2009-11-24T09:41:00.003-06:00

Poe's Law states: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing." The release of Sara Palin's memoirs has, amusingly, put Poe's Law on display for book lovers. On the same day as Going Rogue's release, a satirical memoir title Going Rouge hit the streets, too, using a strikingly similar cover. From USA Today to Fox News (yes, Fox News!), the media has accidentally shown the satire book's cover when intending to talk about Palin's book. While I'd like to think its outright inability to distinguish the books (I'm having trouble telling them apart), I'd lay the reason for the mistake to be poor spelling ability. "Rouge" versus "Rogue" is a common spelling mistake for everyone, including the Googling graphic designers of Fox News and their ilk. Keep in mind, O family members who read my blog: make sure you buy the right one when shopping for my Christmas present!

Books v. Computers

2009-11-23T08:41:00.001-06:00

Sergio Della Sala, Professor in Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh (helpfully explained as a "brain doctor" by the BBC), has given a speech to school administrators in Scotland explaining that the use of computers does not improve or advance learning beyond what a traditional book might accomplish.

The headlines — "Computer consoles 'no better' than books for learning," "Brain boffin calls for schools to get back to books" — are a bit of an exaggeration; the direct study is regarding the use of the Nintendo DS as an education tool, and although schools have seen improvement in mathematics in the use of the DS, it isn't particularly better than in those students without the math video games in their pockets. Nintendo has been looking towards the future of the DS in the education environment, and Scotland has one of the earliest attempts to test the DS in the classroom, so the use is very embryonic at the moment and doesn't indicate all learning is going to migrate to a gameboy.

In the few articles about Dr. Della Sala's statement, I can hear the hand-wringing of the books-are-best groups. Add the DS to the list of electronic equipment that is slated to cause fewer books to be printed; iPhones and Kindles and books-on-CD and fax machines, there's been all sorts of machines which simplify or replace the usefulness of books, but a bit of perspective is useful here. A book is simple, portable, and easily interpreted. A book has physical mass, which is something that electronic formats replace: not a condemnation of books, but an attempt at improving the format. A book has minimal interactive engagement, which is something the DS does well. The anecdotal evidence in the BBC article is not that a DS can teach more than a book can, but that the game engages the students and catches their attention better than the book or teacher can directly. Certainly, if the DS-based math education takes off, fewer math textbooks will be printed, there's no changing that. It isn't a case of bells-and-whistles winning over a tried-and-true technology; it is using technology to more productive ends.

That isn't to say the DS will be always applied conservatively only to those tasks to which it is best suited; U.S. schools have been devoting a lot of money to strive for the goal of one laptop for every student, and colleges have often been requiring students purchase a laptop. Like the DS, the report is that students are more engaged, are able to communicate with teachers and other students better, and remain productive outside of the classroom. Once laptops begin to replace large chunks of the learning experience — regardless how many books it eliminates — I worry that there will be a loss of learning skills. Laptops spellcheck, substitute for a calculator, pre-organize outlines and workflow, perform slideshows, and encourage internet-based research instead of library-based research. Students are more engaged, more productive, because the computer replaces the boring, tedious parts of learning, but I cannot accept the idea that this is a better state. Up to a certain level, the computer is allowing the student to focus on the important parts of their education, the memorization and the analysis, but there is a point beyond which the computer is performing the majority of the skills of learning so the student can simply repeat what the screen says. The student is not really learning once they have reached that threshhold, and computers make it very easy to approach and cross that line. I believe that is Della Sala's point: learning occurs when a student is able to take in information, analyze or research it themselves, and respond with a correct answer, and that is a fixed commodity in a student, unimproved by a computer. Computers, by nature, are entirely capable of collecting, analyzing, and learning from information on their own; educators need to watch that students are the ones learning, whether it comes from a book or a computer, because teaching a child how to get a computer to do their homework for them is a disservice to education and students alike.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-11-21T20:31:00.004-06:00

Byfour The Battle.

The Equine Dark Appears at Last,¹
by Milton Turner Groomed,
Who Thinks to Have a
Colored Vice, by Dele-
gates Assumed.

Some British Tars Who Sail the
Blue, Cremate Themselves With
Oil.² Liberian Emigrants
Set Sail, 'neath Tor-
rid Skies to
Broil.³

Four Points There Be, the Game
Within, for Victory Quite
Enough—Conkling Has
High, and Don Holds
Low, While Jack's
Up Logan's
Cuff.⁴

By Playing These Right Carefulee,
So Count the Kickers Can't, the
Other "Pint" is Ours
You Bet, To-witly,
Game and

Grant.
(The Argus, 17 March 1880.)

(more...)

Jacket Blurbs 11-16-09

2009-11-19T09:03:00.000-06:00

"But, since it was just the two of us, he had additional questions. So I told him: "Father, I cannot tell a lie. As I've already told you, I cut the tree." [Sarah, this seems somewhat similar to a story about George Washington. – eds. THAT'S VERY COOL. – SP]" – Editing Going Rogue;
"Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important…" – Kim Stanley Robinson on utopias, via;
"I'm sure he only used to buy books about macho detectives who murder people mindlessly and sportsmen who have recovered from alcohol dependency and significant injury." – Chris Matyszczyk, on Kindles and covers;
"…that as long as they are carrying books that affirm homosexuality as moral, you will not purchase books from them." – easily offended bigots respond to Scholastic's inclusion of a 'pro-homosexual' book in their catalog;
"…the two revived one of the old characters and added in a few, including a Scotland Yard detective and a lesbian vampire countess." – A Stoker writes a Dracula sequel, with some help;
"…someone with a 'personal blog, writing a genuine or organic review,' did not need to disclose how they got the book or assign it a value." – the FTC, on pay-per-post reviewing;
Edison’s Concrete Piano: Flying Tanks, Six-Nippled Sheep, Walk-on-Water Shoes and 12 Other Flops from Great Inventors – the best book title of the year, per the LA Times;
"If you can’t discount books, how can you get customers and market share? This is some communist-style shit…" – Chad Post, on French book discounts;

The 'book burning' mentioned in "Hard on the Bible", via:

Acquisitions: Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

2009-11-18T09:03:00.000-06:00

Last week we hit the Lake Agassiz Regional Library book sale; this week was the Fargo Public Library book sale. The website was very clear: the sale started at 9. When we arrived, we found all the posters said the sale would begin at 10. So, after filling 45 minutes with people-watching and being obnoxious in public, the Wifey and I finally got to be one of the first people into a book sale. The first thing I grabbed was the book to the right — I'm certain it would have been gone seconds later had I not headed tight for nonfiction. How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, by John Muir, must've been a good manual if they recently came out with a 30th Anniversary Edition.

John Muir, who is in fact a descendant of the conservationist Muir, wasn't your average VW-driving hippie. A skilled engineer, Muir worked for Lockheed for years, until deciding late in life to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to lead a simpler life. Muir started working on Volkswagens, eventually acquiring a level of expertise that he felt he needed to share, so he self-published the first edition of How To…Volkswagen Alive. The book quickly became the go-to reference for VW repair, and combined a sensible readability, including humor and philosophy, that appealed to VW owners. The illustrations are by "Juniperus Scopulorum", a/k/a Peter Aschwanden, and add a very R Crumbish feel to the book. Trippy imagery, trippy writing, and a counterculture subject all make this book probably the mosy hippyish book I own — but being a mechanic's reference, it's going next to my Chilton's. I had originally intended to sell it, thinking it was obscure and desirable, but mine's a 4th printing of a quite common book, so whenever I get around to reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I may have to read this one, too, and actually get some mechanical learning out of it. From a young age, my daughter said she wanted a VW Beetle when she got of age, I might as well start preparing now.

Weirdness at the Scholarship Book Sale

2009-11-17T14:56:00.001-06:00

The Exotic Menial has a bunch of fun books found at a scholarship book sale. They were donated, and all are just a bit 'off', and most seem to have fire-and-brimstone religious content. We've been to two library book sales in the past week, and didn't find anything near as much fun as these.

Review: Farewell Atlantis, by Jackson Curtis

2009-11-13T06:52:00.007-06:00

Today marks the debut of Jackson Curtis' first science fiction novel, Farewell Atlantis. Curtis has formerly distinguished himself as an above-the-fold writer for the LA Times, Harper's and Esquire, and there has been no question that his career was headed in this direction. The novel isn't to be confused with Terry Bisson's new short story of the same name in the upcoming Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. Given the literary buzz around Curtis' new novel, it appears to be nothing more than an attempt by Bisson to capitalize on the confusion.

Farewell Atlantis begins with an accident in low-Earth orbit — or is it? The space shuttle Atlantis has been sent into space to study the effects of the gravitational influence of the Great Alignment on the Earth and our solar system. The shuttle is making amazing discoveries regarding the affects of the solar storms on the Earth's magnetic field, but they are unable to communicate with Earth: radio is being jammed, equipment has been sabotaged, and it appears there's a traitor on the shuttle's crew.

The book packs a lot of exposition into its first chapter (Google Books version): Curtis' background in short-form magazine writing betrays his stronger abilities. Just listen to how we meet the recently deceased astronaut:

Commander Martin H. Intersoll — 48-years-old, father of three girls ages 16, 14, and 9, fly fisherman, amateur watercolorist, enthusiastic home brewer of beer, PhD. in astrophysics from the University of Wisconsin, and devoted husband to Sally Weaver-Ingersoll — was about to suffer one of the worst deaths imaginable.

Rule Number One, Jackson: show, don't tell. Already filling an ambitious 2,732 pages (although I have an advance reader; indications are that when it goes to press it will be heavily edited), Farewell Atlantis is quite an undertaking to any reader, but it couldn't have hurt to add a bit more background in the beginning, some vignettes which debut each character in greater detail through creative staging of their Earth-bound lives. Curtis liberally made use of flashbacks throughout the tome, going so far as to flashback one character into the transdimensional dreams of another character's imagination, which makes it surprising that he failed to use them for more backstory in-fill.

Criticizing the first chapter over the clumsiness of a first-time novelist is a disservice to the rest of the book. Over nine hundred of the pages are devoted to ancient wisdom and lost forms of cosmic spirituality, most described in their original languages, which makes the book at once frustrating and awe-inspiring. As the book proceeds into apocalyptic satire of man's political environment and the scope of the conflict of id and superego, the book reaches a singularity of postmodern expressionism couched in a wrapper of absurdist picaresque, alienating and beckoning forth the philosophical ends of mankind's worldly panorama. This is the kind of life-changing book, like Catcher in the Rye, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Donald Kaufman's The Three — it's not the end of the world if you miss it, but waiting until the paperback comes out in 2013 might mean you'll miss out.

Farewell Atlantis, by Jackson Curtis
ISBN 978-0-13-135074-9
2,732 pages, 6.14" x 9.21" hardcover
$18.99 cover price, published 2009
Hudson Cameron Press

(Today is the first day you can go see Roland Emmerich's explodurbation film 2012. What you might not know is that the Everyman in the film, played by John Cusack, is science fiction author Jackson Curtis, and this is that character's in-story novel. As with a lot of other big-name, fan-driven scifi media these days, 2012 comes with an ARG, and part of that ARG is the website of Curtis' new novel, Farewell Atlantis. I am not part of the the 2012 ARG, I just like imaginary books. Via.)

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-11-12T09:12:00.000-06:00

LARGELY DOODLE.

A Reverend Gent in Richmond Town,¹
By Forgery's Made a Livin',
But Being Dropped in
He Admits, He's wil-
ling to be For-
given.²

Fiend in Wayensfille, O - hi - o, Scarce
any Crime Could Match It, Con-
structs and Angel from
His Wife, With His Lit-
tle Hatchet.³

Belva Lockwood Takes A Whack⁴,
Facts to a Senator Slammin',
Says it's not His only Case;
That He Is Ben-
jamin.

Minneapolis Beer Mill Blaze⁵--Ocean
Steamer Stranded⁶--Slippery
Crook Four Stories Drops⁷,
and Leaves the Cops
Bare Handed.

Shout our War Cry o'er The World,
Every One that this sees;
Yankee Doodle Rides the
Boom, His Other Name's

Ulysses.
(The Argus, 17 March 1880.)

(more...)

The Smell of Books

2009-11-11T07:36:00.007-06:00

When a book lover talks about their passion, smell often comes up. Old books have a distinct smell, which is surprising given the wide variety of materials and binding techniques used over the past few hundred years, and especially in the time-range most book collectors have. Rag paper, wood pulp, natural glues, synthetic glues, animal fibers, leather, burlap, all sorts of inks — I'm tempted to claim the smell is the combined layer of finger oils on each page, but that'd be getting gross. That ongoing change in materials and progressive smell-inducing decomposition has given an idea to researchers: A new test has been developed to determine a book's age by it's smell (full abstract here). This measures the kinds of organic compounds that an aging book is giving off, and determines its age by comparing to the known components of books. It's a much better process than the destructive tests, requiring parts be cut out of the book for analysis.

As you might guess, if they can test for the 'volatile organic compounds' that a book emits, then they know what those are, right? Well, those compounds must be useful for something - and here comes the science: you can now buy that book-smell in a convenient spray-can. It seems kinda hoaxey, but, people, the science is there: book apologists have long claimed the smells involved in reading are a reason to avoid eBook readers, but if technology has overcome that obstacle, there's no stopping them. Well, nothing other than a product recall.

Acquisitions: Dali's As You Like It

2009-11-09T21:47:00.002-06:00

You don't get a cover image for this one, and that's probably the only reason I got this book. This weekend, the Lake Agassiz Regional Library had one of their book sales,and we arrived at opening time — which, we knew, meant we were competing with book dealers, book collectors, and frugal packrats (of which we could be considered any of the above). The sale was in the basement, in a poorly-vented windowless room, making it claustrophobic, hot, and everybody seemed ruder than I would have usually expected. Considering how rude some of the local book dealers are on an average day, it wasn't the kind of fun book-browsing shopping trip we usually enjoy. In that first hour, you need to grab what you can, as soon as you can, because if it's that good, you're not going to see it again.

This book, one of its illustrations at the right, is in a very plain library binding, a few generic gold-leaf feathers on the front, and the spine says just As You Like It. In fact, the spine is printed upside-down; if shelved with the text the same direction as the books around it, the front is on the wrong side. Generic Shakespeare play, unimpressive binding, stains on the cover, it's no wonder it had been passed over. Inside, however, is why this is was such a find, and completely worth it all — and the book's introduction explains it all:

Imagine someone picking up this edition of As You Like It: he reads the words 'Folio Society': Folio — the word conjures up ancient manuscripts…of Shakespeare played in Shakespeare's way: he opens the book, there are designs by Salvador Dali, the notorious surrealist: one who is famous for his intimate knowledge of the anatomy of spiders but not for his interest in the structure of the sixteenth-century playhouse.

This is pretty much how my experience went. "Ah, Shakespeare…Folio Society, nicely typeset—wait, Salvador Dali?!?" In the 1940s, Dali was closely involved in the theatre, designing costumes and sets for operas and plays. In 1948, for the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, Dali designed costumes for Shakespeare's As You Like It. In 1953, The Folio Society produced combined the New Temple Shakespeare edition of the play with Dali's sketches of costumes and backdrops. My edition is the third printing, from 1965, but both D and I are Dali fans, and I haven't seen these designs before. The first printing is quite valuable, and ours is a little beat up, but from the start this was intended to go on my Shakespeare shelf and the interior is excellent: it is to my advantage that, rather than the quick dash-and-grab through the library book sale like the dealers and collectors, I stopped to open the cover and look closely at the book's contents, despite rude elbows and invasion of my personal space.

Hard On The Bible

2009-11-03T21:18:00.002-06:00

The world has been pretty hard on the Bible lately. Banned Books Week was just a month ago, a time when the Bible figures prominently (on both sides of the argument). This past Saturday, pastor Marc Grizzard held up the King James Bible and declared it holy…then tossed all other versions on to the book-burning pyre. It was "a great success" according to their website. Recently in New Zealand, actor Sir Ian McKellen said in an interview that he was presented with a fork in the road: destroy the whole book, or just the offending parts? He chose the fractional destruction, physically removing the parts of Leviticus that condemn homosexuality from the hotel-friendly Gideon's Bibles. Also in New Zealand (maybe there's something in the water these days), student Hanahiva Rose was asked by her art teacher to produce a controversial work of art. Hanahiva created The Rose Bible, a torn and wrinkled copy of the Bible resembling a blooming flower. When it came time to show off her portfolio at the end of the year, however, the teacher excluded the Rose Bible due to its controversial nature.

At its core, of course, the Bible is a book: pages, signatures, binding, page numbers and paragraphs, leather and gold leaf on the spine. Sir Ian's Gideons are some of the shoddiest books on the market, but they endure, despite page-ripping revisionists. Book lovers are often ready to condemn the cutting or destruction of a book, despite the beauty of the art produced, but this urge for intactness isn't connected to censorship. There's something sacred about the structure of a book itself. A long time ago, a company I worked for was pitched a book-binding machine for doing proposals. The main selling point was that people may throw away some spiral- or comb-bound photocopies, but when it has a hard cover and a spine, it's a book, so it goes on the shelf. It was a strong point: nobody throws away a book.

The Bible, therefore, gets a double-dose of sacredness: its format and its function are all beyond the nature of an inert inanimate object. Of the events above, two of the three aren't exactly censorship. Sir Ian, sadly, is the promoter of censorship: his intent is to alter and remove offending content. While I agree with Ian's take on the offending passage, he is behaving no better than the mystery Tennessee marker-wielder. The other two, however, do result in removal one or more books from circulation, but their intent is different: they are trying to make a point, which is a First Amendment issue. The book-burning church's point, however, is to express their view that some books are unworthy of existing; they've crossed the Nazi line into expressing their intent to purge the world of certain thoughts, which may not be censorship directly, but their intent is clear and downright anti-intellectual. I sympathize with Sir Ian's intent, I refuse to accept the Bible-burning church's intent, but the poor New Zealand student whose art was excluded from her portfolio gets my utter support. Her controversial act was one of creation, and artistic expression. Destroying a book for the purpose of art, despite making me cringe at the demise of a poor unsuspecting tome, is a worthy form of free-speech communication. Tearing out unacceptable pages and burning unacceptable editions are destructive acts, resulting in a lesser form than it started with. Hanahiva Rose, in the act of damaging the book, created art, so she deserves a break, no matter what book she used.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-10-27T08:35:00.002-05:00

MUCH MIXED.

Alas! Poor Agnes is Betrayed, and
Dion Proves a Rogue; She Says
He's Read up Meaner Parts
Than His "Arrah
Na Pogue."¹

Parnell Spoke in the Emerald Isle
His Land League to Recruit; But
Hungry Erin Only Gave
Him Groans and Bad
Hen-Fruit.²

Two Ships are Sailing on the Blue,
Sounding with Lead and
Trawl; But the Isthmus
Natives Fear They
Mean to Eat That
Ship Canawl.³

Withdrawl Stiffs, Becoming Old,
Blaine Knows Not How to
Slant⁴; Bit a Brother-in-
Law's Passed in His
Chips⁵—Of Course
That Settles

Grant.

(The Argus, 30 March 1880.)

(more...)

Book Vs. Film: The Orchid Thief / Adaptation

2009-10-26T14:27:00.000-05:00

Continuing in the grand stylings of The Onion AV Club (as previously seen here):

SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who’ve already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.

This summer I read The Dangerous World of Butterflies, and the book's promotional material all drew strong ties to Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief. When I ran across the book at a rummage sale, I thought I'd read it for comparison, and I'd already seen Adaptation., the award-winning film based on the book. I didn't get to read Thief until later in the summer, and it became my 'in-between' book, reading in short bursts between starting other books, so I only finished it recently.

Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, starts her book with a description of her titular Orchid Thief, horticulturalist and jack-of-all-trades John Laroche: tall, thin, slouching, handsome, and toothless. Unlike Butterflies, whose chapters bounce from one place to ahoter, Orlean focuses her book around Laroche and his Florida stomping grounds, rather than all things orchidy, so while they both have a foothold on endangered beauty twisted for man's enjoyment, Orlean find a unified theme by sticking to Laroche and his schemes. She first meets Laroche at his trial for orchid poaching, which he defends by having the Seminole Indians, who retain rights to the wildlife in the Fakahatchee swamps, do the actual poaching, hopefully protected by the shield of their legal status. As the book progresses, Orlean delves deeper into Laroche's psyche, unraveling what makes him tick.

In fact, there is one character in the book who appears far, far more than John Laroche. Author Susan Orlean, whether you're counting words or measuring influence, is the star of the book. Laroche comes and goes, his presence and absence each as startling as he is disinterested in the whole story, but Susan Orlean is present throughout. The "new journalism" style of George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson relied heavily on the writer's experience — whether truthful or not, provided the essence remained true — to tell the story. Under New Journalism, the writer wasn't content to research and report, printing interviews in the third person. The writer doesn't just compile statistics and anecdotes of gang culture, they live as a gang member for a month. Orlean doesn't immerse herself to that extent, but when Laroche is at an orchid show, she is there with him, he is speaking to her and she is responding, written in a very fictional style. I also don't doubt Orlean actually did everything in the book, and that personal experience is what makes the book so engaging; the woman at the rummage sale didn't take note of any of the other books I bought, but singled this one out to let me know how good it is: as a book about poaching endangered species, it would barely have resonated with readers as a dry treatise of statistics and third-person description of events. It also smoothly moves in and out of the two styles, adopting a more straightforward journalistic tone when covering the failed Florida swampland developments or the history of orchid collecting.

Laroche's scheme which ends up with him in court, identifying himself as 'the smartest man he knows', is a plan to breed a hardy strain of the Ghost Orchid, a rare and elusive strain of the infinitely-varied orchid line. The plant rarely blooms and is extremely picky in seed germination, which makes them extraordinarily rare and desirable to the obsessed collectors. Laroche intends to breed them, harden them up, and then there won't be a reason to poach them, so everybody wins. Orlean spends the entire book in search of the ghost orchid, including venturing into the dark swamp itself, and ends the book not ever having encountered one. The book is a lesson in desire and passion, both largely unrequited, and the drive in people's hearts to try and satiate those primal drives.

The Orchid Thief ends on that note: Laroche has utterly and completely moved on, opening an online porn business and getting rid of the entirety of his flora projects, while Orlean returns to New York without having attained anything but the heartbreak of missing out on what she never had the chance to experience. This is deeply layered in more than just flower collecting, pressing the orchids between pages in a book of human experience.

To begin...how to start.

I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think.

But I should write something first and reward myself with coffee.

Coffee and a muffin. — Charlie, Adaptation.

It is a very good book, which explains Charlie Kaufman's initial urges to do the story right in his adapted screenplay. The film Adaptation., in turn, presses the book The Orchid Thief between the pages of a screenwriter's notebook. The film points out, very early on, that Orlean's The Orchid Thief lacks the cohesive storyline and logical progression that a movie requires. Film producer Valerie Thomas suggests that Kaufman add a love story, with Orlean and Laroche falling for each other. Kaufman discounts that immediately, saying he doesn't want to add anything artificial to the story to make it fit Hollywood conventions. His adaptation would be true to the book without artificiality.

His twin brother, Donald Kaufman, is the sort of hack writer that Charlie sincerely does not want to become. The two are, clearly, two parts of a Fight Club mirror here, with the antisocial and awkward Charlie needing to learn something about himself from the embodiment of his suppressed self, manifest as Donald. Charlie can't bring himself to start a relationship with the attractive women he meets, while Donald has no problem with the ladies. Donald is social and tells bad jokes; Charlie can barely bring himself to speak in groups. Donald, much to Charlie's chagrin, is writing a formulaic and absurd thriller screenplay where all of the characters are really the same person. It, of course, sells for big bucks, while Charlie struggles to pull his Sisyphean task together.

While The Orchid Thief wraps a book about Florida orchids in the perspective of Orlean's experiences writing the book, Adaptation. is Kaufman's experiences writing the film. Kaufman expertly draws on that theme, making his film about a screenwriter writing about book about a woman writing about writing about an orchid thief. Meta and recursion are where Kaufman (the real one) excels, and the film doesn't miss a beat. Amazingly, much of Kaufman's script is word-for-word from Thief, focusing on the Orlean-Laroche interactions. He covers the high points of the book during his struggles, and by the time he has exhausted the prime thematic elements of The Orchid Thief, his fictional alter-ego has also spent his time learning how to give the book that necessary story arc: add in guns, murder, drugs, sex, car crashes, animal attacks, and a life-changing epiphany. Nicholas Cage plays both Charlie and Donald, and he has a love scene with nearly every woman in the film: Judy Greer, Tilda Swinton, Maggie Gyllenthal, and Meryl Streep. Charlie Kaufman must really owe Cage for something. Every single one, however, is fantasy in Charlie's head, either directly or through Donald, and as the movie moves along, the fantasies appear less in Charlie's head and become more 'real' to the film. The movie finally gives up on the reality of the book at the point where Kaufman gives in and attends a Robert McKee seminar, sending the film spiraling off into absurdity more likely coming from the pen of Donald Kaufman. As the movie draws to a close, Donald dies, but not before giving Charlie his epiphany, appropriate to the book: to love something is a personal thing, and the views of others, even the one loved, is irrelevant. In those last moments of the film, Charlie takes on Donald's characteristics and moves forward, completing his screenplay, admitting his love to a woman, and driving off into the sunset the way any good film should end.

As an adaptation, Adaptation. isn't a very good conversion of the book; I'm sure the film left some of Orlean's fans a bit stumped. But, as the new Where the Wild Things Are film and The Iron Giant have proven, a film adaptation that maximizes the film medium while playing to the original work's strengths is the ideal combination. Kaufman's Adaptation. stands well on its own, even if The Orchid Thief didn't exist, but the grounding in reality forces the viewer to know that nearly every person in the movie is a real person somewhere, but their puppet strings moved by Kaufman, restraining himself at first in deference to verisimilitude, but tugging strings more and more as he needs to make the story happen.

Book Or Film? In this case, the book and the film proceeded down two different paths, which happened to cross one another a curiously large amount of times. Adaptation. is a film of a struggling writer, The Orchid Thief is a book on orchid obsession, and the distinct merits of each are widely separated. Both should be experienced, but with the understanding that there's not a 1-for-1 correlation; I saw the film first and didn't feel I missed anything, although reading the book first does give the film viewing some greater insight.

Acquisitions: The Dakota Maverick

2009-10-16T14:38:00.000-05:00

Governor "Wild Bill" Langer was probably the most colorful politician in North Dakota's history once Teddy Roosevelt moved away. Langer notoriously called up the National Guard to prevent himself from being removed from office — he locked the doors, barred the windows, and issued declarations, one of which I've heard sounds a lot like assertion that North Dakota is a sovereign state immune from national laws, which may or may not be true. That's what I'm hoping to learn more about in this book, The Dakota Maverick: the Political life of William Langer. It's not a common book, having been published and printed right here in Fargo, so when I was recently at BDS Books, browsing their North Dakota section, I bought a copy with highlighting inside and missing its dust jacket, because the better copies were all running in the $15 to $30 range. Two weeks later, I'm at the thrift shop and run across the one pictured to the left: clean interior, with dustjacket, seventy-five cents. Oh well, now I've got two, one with the important parts already isolated for me, and one for the bookshelf.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-10-15T19:26:00.001-05:00

LITTLE DROPS.

Little Streaks of Lightning, Little
Nubs of News, Make the Sleep-
iest Husband Get up
and Peruse.

Little Canuk Councils, Envy in
Their Wigs, Ostracise Our
Cattle, and Like-
wise Our
Pigs.¹

Little Sailor Alfred Compliments
Our Acts², Oleomargarine is
Liable to Tax³.

Little Mississippi, Has a Small Cy-
clone, Twenty-Two are
Slaughtered; Num-
ber Hurt Un-
known⁴,

And the Little Minutes, Humble tho'
They be, Bring us Near the
Time of President

U. S. G.

(The Argus, 28 April 1880.)

(more...)

It Draws Out The Crazies

2009-10-15T07:10:00.003-05:00

At yesterday's signing of X-Factor winner Leona Lewis' new book, one fan got a little too enthusiastic. Identified only as Peter, the fan waited in line to get his book signed, handed his copy to Lewis, then cold cocked her, drawing blood and getting himself arrested. A few months ago, comic artist Alex Pardee was first entertained, then mortified, when a 7-foot-tall mohawked fan cut his own belly open to show Pardee just "how beautiful it could be". When stars of movies and television go out in public, there's a pretty strong sense of security keeping everybody in line, but book signings are often just a guy sitting at a table at the entrance of B Dalton in the mall. A while back I felt sorry for that guy; some local writer, at a card table, watching people walk by, hoping someone will stop and buy a copy of his little stack and ask him to sign it, or at least say they've read it and offer their compliments. Nobody was talking to him either time I passed — which might be a good thing, given the high possibility of violence that might occur in that interaction.

When there's a signing, or an autograph table at a con, or a CD launch party, the world gets turned on its head. Usually, J.K. Rowling is the one putting on the show for you, the lowly reader, but when she sits at the table, patiently waiting for each person to present themselves to her, she's the audience. Most people handle that switcheroo with an appropriate respect, but once in a while you get somebody who decides, "hey, she showed me what she can do and I liked it — now she's see if she likes what I can do." It's not limited to the crazies, though; Rob Lieield is, honestly, one of the crappiest illustrators ever, but you'd expect people to wait respectfully in line as reverent fans to meet him. Not so this guy, who waited in line in order to give Liefeld a gift of a "how to draw comics" book, in hopes that he'll hone his craft before trying to get real work in the industry. Violent, no, maybe a little funny, but insulting and rude for the most part.

In that transposition of presenter and audience, if only as far as realizing who's sitting and whose standing, people get crazy ideas in their heads that they've been given the opportunity to finally have their say. Sorry, that's not the truth: things are still imbalanced in the author's favor, you're there to partake in what the star is giving you. When you head down to SpaceCon 2009 to shake Nichelle Nichols' hand, you're still the audience, don't let the situation fool you — and be happy that the security is better at SpaceCon than down at Barnes and Noble; some crazy shit happens down there when authors and readers get together.

No Rio for Partiers

2009-10-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Censorship always finds odd corners in which to to stick its fingers. A publisher of travel guides has produced several editions of a book touting the essential things to see and do in Rio de Janiero, but they've run afoul of local officials because the books are about how to experience any number of vices when visiting Brazil's finest city. The Brazilian tourism board accused Rio For Partiers of presenting a "false and disrespectful view" of Rio, despite the rather common idea that Rio is better than Vegas for hedonism. Still, enough legal pressure was brought to bear that Brazil ordered the book banned — something the publisher seems more than proud of — although you can still get it in those various countries where the tourists hail from, and on wireless devices like the Kindle.

Jacket Blurbs, 10-9-09

2009-10-09T20:58:00.001-05:00

"And the point of buying a book isn't just to read it. It's to read it multiple times, write in the margins, curl up in bed with it, refer to it on the spur of the moment, have it on the bookshelf when friends come over so it's the source of conversation or shared interest." – MDN, via Metafilter
The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns." – Google's Sergey Brin on their digitizing deals, via
"My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will." – Roger Ebert, on owning books.
"'If a blogger received enough books,' said Cleland, 'he could open up a used bookstore.' – FTC's Richard Cleland, on disclosure of blogging review copies.
"Now, I can guarantee something. As the ability to publish books gets easier, we'll have more 'bad' books than you can shake a stick at." – Hugh McGuire, adding "cloud" to self-publishing to make it more iWeb2.0mbklr
"We hope you enjoy it, and, by the way, we hope everything comes out okay for you." – Toilet-based marketing, free books touched by other poopers.
'I believe in angels and a divine intervention to write this book,' he said. The book is dedicated to 'the angels who guide us.' – Thomas Ray Crowel, on his book reopening a child's murder case.
"At a time when there are other forms that people can buy books in, it becomes more important than ever for the physical book to look really attractive…" – Paul Slovak, Viking, on new books without dustjackets.

Acquisitions: The Secret of the Martian Moons

2009-10-07T08:49:00.000-05:00

This is completely a case of buying a book for the sake of the awesome cover. Just look at it: a man in a space-suit is unloading boxes from a tiny, tiny needle-shaped rocket, only seconds away from being beaned in the head by a Martian ninja. Secret of the Martian Moons (sometimes with a prepended "the"), by Donald A Wollheim, claims that by the year 2120 Earth will have a colony on Mars, and the main character, Nelson Parr, was born and raised on the red planet. On his way back after schooling on Earth, the humans are ordered not to return to Mars, but he and his compartriots land on Mars' moons and check out the problem with telescopes. Bring on the mallet-wielding Martians who don't like being watched! The cover art is credited to Alex Schomburg, a golden-age comic book illustrator and prolific sci-fi cover artist. The book itself seems to revert back to the old premise of Mars-centric literature: Martians had been around long before humans, advanced well beyond mankind, but their dying planet defeated them — leaving only the wet canal regions a haven for what little life remained. While I might not be able to get into the book itself, I can at least enjoy Schomburg's excellent cover art.

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-10-06T17:39:00.001-05:00

MORE BESIDES.

It's Bad Wid Livers Wake and
Woite, but Dennis Kearney
Has 'em¹; He Backed Square
Down in Frisco Town
and Straddled the
Bloody Chasm²

Chicago's Mollies Resoloot, if More
Pigtails They Find, They'll
Murder Every One, and so
They Will, Just in
Their Mind³.

An Indian Scare Up Big Horn Way,
Has Raised the Very Deuce.
The Frightened Folks are
Fleeing to the Valley
of the Goose⁴.

At Fifty Off He Was, You Bet
Our Favorite Maiden Aunt,
His Father Kept a Leather
Shop, His Name Was

U.S. Grant

(The Argus, 17 March 1880.)

(more...)

Review: Do-Over!

2009-10-05T19:09:00.004-05:00

Robin Hemley, like most adults, has never been satisfied with his childhood. He made mistakes: he messed up during the school play, he didn't ask out the girl he liked, he didn't try very hard to be a good student, or even really a good person. Like the rest of us, he overcame his childish ways and became an adult — but he continued to be haunted by those failings of childhood. Robin, however, went further than the rest of us: he went back and had "Do-Overs".

In his book, Do-Over!, Robin Hemley documents his attempts to repair the mistakes and errors of the first two decades of his life, starting with Kindergarten, through summer camps (first appearing in New York Magazine) and various other schools, ending at resolving a failed experience as an exchange student in Japan. As his project grows and evolves, his real life hasn't stopped moving, either, and his family changes and grows alongside his back-tracked years.

The book isn't a good study in re-living the past: as it progresses, the Do-Over plan begins to fade, and it develops into a study on how Robin got to where he is today. Having messed up his Christmas play is a well-defined event to try and do-over, but staying at his childhood home and having dinner with his mother's friends amplifies the more personal aspect of revisiting childhood. By the end of the book, when Robin travels to Japan to relive an aborted exchange student school-year, it has lost the aspect of Robin pretending to be a high-school student, replacing the mechanical do-over method with grown-up days hanging out with a long-lost friend, driving around Osaka, and reminiscing with the chain-smoking Japanese head of the exchange program.

Those reflections on Robin's youth are the more intriguing stories in the book, but they lose the momentum of the kindergarten or Christmas play chapters. When Robin is working towards a goal, overcoming the obstacles both internal and external, the reader is remembering their own childhood mistakes and rooting for the underdog Hemley. It is easy to identify with the guy who wasn't the most athletic, or the smartest, or the Cool Kid. You want him to do his lines correctly or to sit with the football clique at lunch, using the benefit of adulthood to accomplish what seemed impossible to a kid. Robin continually re-discovers that childhood isn't, technically, lost in age — he quickly falls into regressive behaviors, unconsciously behaving more like an 11-year-old when living as one than he had expected. As Hemley wanders away from redoing experiences into reliving memories, he has a chance to reflect on what the do-overs mean to him, aside from a goal of replacing a failure with a success.

At its best, the book is The Autobiography of Robin Hemley, written not from memories composed in a past tense, but through the New Journalism lens of his experience physically revisiting what was distantly remembered. The book, however, is pulling in different directions throughout, and doesn't completely get its bearings on where the Do-Over project is headed. This lack of a cohesive destination, whether intended or not, weakens the book, because it's a different experience to cheer for a character beating the odds versus sympathizing with a man who begins by describing himself through the 'glass half-empty' memories of his childhood. Robin says throughout that he repeatedly received positive feedback when explaining his project's conceit, but when the book leaves behind those do-over goals it starts to be about the difference between recalling flawed memories of the past and reflecting on what those experiences make of a man.

Do-Over!, by Robin Hemley
ISBN 978-0-316-02060-2
319 pages, published 2009
Little, Brown and Company

Grant Poetry: 1880

2009-09-26T23:40:00.008-05:00

In 1880, Ulysses S Grant planned for a third presidency; he was very close to being the Republican candidate for the 1880 election, but James A Garfield was chosen instead. Here in Fargo, however, the newspaper The Argus threw their hat into Grant's ring, and expressed their support by composing short poems, with topics taken from the headlines of the day, and culminating in a comment on Grant. Be sure to check the footnotes; they explain the poem's references. I've got a bunch of 'em, I'll share as I transcribe. Yes, the poems were laid out this way:

CHEERFUL.

The Erie Canal has Busted Its

Straps¹—Gladstone Receives a

Knocker²—About a Score off

Scotland's Shore are

Swept to "Jones's

Locker."³

The Dismal Swamp's in Fearful

Blaze⁴—Hatch, Red Men Largely

Collars⁵—The Town of Hull,

Its Loss in Full, is

Several Million

Dollars.⁶

John and Jim, Those Champions

Grim⁷, Believing Their Chances

Scant, Will Come Home Yet,

and Hedge, You Bet;

Wagging Their

Tales For

Grant!

(The Argus, 23 April 1880.)

(more...)

Banned Book Week 2009

2009-09-26T17:57:00.007-05:00

Welcome to Banned Book Week 2009 — the annual acknowledgment of how much effort libraries have to put into being as well-stocked as they are. Classic children's literature is placed in a bank vault to keep it out of innocent hands, threats of a fiery end to books that treat homosexuals with respect, and not even school textbooks, evaluated and vetted by educators themselves, are immune. Just looking at a list of challenged books might not have the same impact (and it seems the 2009 list isn't out as of today; they only have up to 2008), there's an interactive map of challenged books which gives a greater idea of the distribution of the problem, taken from the years 2007 to 2009. Yes, that's only two years' worth of challenges that fill up a U.S. map with little blue flags.

In case you're wondering, I've got kids. The most common argument is, "would you want your children to read this sort of {whatever}?" My answer is, yes, I'm pretty much OK with any book, provided that it done in a way to promote understanding. Destiny's mother bought her a big biography of Guns 'n' Roses' Slash — not my first choice of a good book for a thirteen-year-old, "shooting coke" is a Key Phrase according to Amazon — but Des wanted to read it, and as she went along we asked her about it, made sure she was looking at the rock-and-roll lifestyle through wiser eyes than glorifying it, and made sure she asked questions if she were confused. Nothing bad has happened, I don't know for sure what she took away from the book, and now she's reading those books about talking forest cats and the Twilight series. The kids I worry about are the ones who haven't read anything, and are getting their ideas from each other.

When I was a teen, I read Hunter S Thompson's Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Morrison biography; a smattering of 60s sci-fi full of violence and sex, imagining a nude Dejah Thoris in great detail; and, frankly, quite a few Playboys and Penthouses. Other than those last ones (those were thanks to resourceful friends at school), all of the books came from my parents or other relatives. I was buying Soldier of Fortune magazine and Rolling Stone and a mish-mosh of Marvel comics titles with my allowance. None of this — nothing — has brought about my downfall, destroyed my life, hurt the people I love, or resulted in incarceration or institutionalization. If the news were full stories about how a book directly or indirectly caused death, destruction, loss of life and property, caused insanity or anarchy, I might stand up and take notice.

As Starrett said in the textbook investigation, a book can't cause anything to happen. The freedom of choice is how good things and bad things happen. A book may inform, it may contain knowledge that fills in the blanks about those various decisions, but it is still up to the individual to make an educated choice. I don't have a problem with Intelligent Design, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, The Joy of Sex, or Dworkin books in libraries: somebody will find that information valuable in learning how to lead their lives. While I may not agree with how they choose to use that information, it is not my place to try and manipulate their choices by limiting the information available to them. Censorship is bent on manipulating people's behavior by controlling what they know, a methodology that is perverse and cruel to the freedom-loving world we live in, and I cannot stand for it.

The Million Dollar Book

2009-09-24T07:25:00.002-05:00

While the new million-dollar book doesn't remotely come close to the most expensive book in the world, it's actually more likely to have an appropriate price for its actual value. The Wine Opus isn't just a book, however. The $1.2 million pricetag doesn't stop with the 850-page book documenting the world's top 100 wineries, but comes with six bottles of wine from each vintner. So, expect the book to cost little, and $2,000 a bottle for fine wine is hardly unreasonable (or maybe not), so the purchase price actually gets you a top-of-the-line wine-of-the-month club with a fine book for free, with their compliments. Via.

Weekly Geeks: Blog Burn Out

2009-09-23T14:57:00.003-05:00

This week's Weekly Geeks asks how bloggers deal with blogging burnout. You might not know it, but I blog quite a bit: I have a personal blog, a cool-stuff I found blog, a cool-stuff copied from other blogs blog, a kitschy blog, a collectibles blog, and a few others that I write but don't advertise that they're mine, just as venues to write about things on my mind that I don't care to advertise are going on in my mind. Heck, my list of abandoned blogs is just about as long. With all this blogging going on — and a full-time job, to boot — I can accurately say, yes, I get burned out quite a bit.

So, what do I do?

I take the easy route: I stop blogging. Oh, I can't completely abandon all writing, because Collector's Quest pays me to blog, so I better not fall behind there, and something may suddenly strike my fancy and force me to blog despite my embargo. But this blog and The Infomercantile, both of which have some dedicated followers and some high-profile in-links, each has periodic lulls in which nothing happens. The Infomercantile has been pretty much dormant all summer, with some minor exceptions. It's a research-heavy and scanning-heavy blog, which takes a lot of time; when we've got kids, and the weather is nice, and there's a whole big world out there, who wants to sit at the computer and feed photos into a scanner? From the 10th to the 11th, I was in Minot for work, which took a lot out of me, so last week I didn't blog much at all. Frankly, it's not a big concern.

One thing I learned from a public speaking class a few years ago is that when you stop talking, the listeners' brains stop, too. It's a reason to allow yourself a pause without saying "um" or "uh" for fear of having dead space, or freaking out over having to shuffle your notes a second to figure out where you were. Your listeners don't even register the pause: their listening-bone is locked up, waiting for the next word, and time has ceased to move. Eventually people's brains wake up and realize nothing's happened, but that's a good 10, 20 seconds of time for you, as a speaker, to allow yourself some silence to regroup.

Blogs work the same way. If you're cruising along, posting every day or so, and you've got readers who like what you're putting out, a break will not register with them. Give it a few weeks, eventually they will start to realize, "hey, so-and-so hasn't blogged in a while," but even then it probably won't stop them from checking your blog — that anticipation makes the pause insignificant, because once you start blogging again, they'll start back up reading just as they did before. The probloggers who say, "Update daily! Update hourly! Don't stop to pee, blog's gotta be updated!" are working on the high-volume advertiser-friendly kind of blog. They're not trying to attract readers, they're after eyeballs. Doesn't matter who's looking, as long as they're looking. Their traffic drops precipitously when blogging stops, even for a day. That's not the kind of blog I write: when I stop, it doesn't really register to the reader, not enough to lose the reader. A short pause in blogging to cultivate my sanity doesn't hurt a blog, but it helps my writing overall. When I come back to blogging, there's a spring in my step. By spending my days reading books, going to museums, or doing oft-neglected lawncare, my mind is clean and refreshed and ready to come up with new witty and thoughtful ideas to spread wide and far on the internet.

I do have some other tricks, though: to avoid appearing burned-out, I blog ahead. I generally have several posts scheduled out into the future. If I'm good, posting prodigiously, I'll either fit them in and schedule something else for the future, or just move their scheduled date out further. If you completely walk away from the computer for a week, those pending posts will still trickle out, making it look like you only slowed down instead of stopping. I also don't blog on weekends, usually; it's a schedule people understand, but it's almost a third less content than trying to constantly blog. Both of those help mediate the burn-out feeling, because I have some built-in opportunities to stop blogging without having less of a blog.

Crazy Books Help Your Learn

2009-09-22T07:16:00.004-05:00

Maybe I need to take another crack at Naked Lunch: a recent study from researchers at the University of California and University of British Columbia have shown that books with illogical structure make you think more. If a book is confusing or bizarre, readers were shown to have devoted more time to deciphering the text to make sense of it, compared to a more logical story that's easier to follow and understand. Most other articles condense that to "it makes you smarter," but that's not exactly true — the press release describes it as "reading Kafka improves learning." Certainly, the more you exercise those mental skills, the more likely you'll be able to use them with little effort in the future. However, that's not really a case of "Kafka makes you smarter;" it's a case of "reading more makes you a better reader," which I think is far more useful of a statement, if not less headliney and more obvious than the others.

Book Cover Evolution

2009-09-21T11:25:00.001-05:00

You don't think awesome book covers start out that way, do you? Print Magazine talked to several cover designers in order to get a better picture of the design evolution of some recent covers. It's not a bad thing, despite the title "Kill Your Darlings": one designer wisely said, "It’s actually a good exercise to have to redesign something," something I remember being told back when I was in theatrical design classes. Working on one design, you rule out everything else; but what do you get when you rule out everything else and the most obvious option? When that best final option actually hits the bookshelves, designers will be happy to know that it's very unlikely anybody had an epiphany and produced that cover the first time out of the gate: the amount of work exceeds what actually shows up in print.

Acquisitions: The Nation's Trashiest Humor

2009-09-20T08:14:00.001-05:00

The cover is a bit beat up, and the internal content is all a re-hash of previously published items, but I had to pick this up. The entire title is America The Beautiful: A Collection of the Nation's Trashiest Humor, but there's very little even remotely adult about the comedy therein. This is publication number 2048 of The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, originally published in 1970. The book consists of thirty comics, from the funny pages like B.C., and some from the editorial pages of publications from the New Yorker to Cleveland Plain Dealer, all focusing on the problem of waste disposal. Amusingly, about half have something to do with outer space, especially with moon-men discouraging us from mucking up their home. I won't be able to read my copy in its entirety, though — several pages are torn out, and a few others are stained. Much to the enjoyment of the people who prepared this book, it has not ended up in the trash: I bought it for seventy-five cents at a local thrift shop, one of the best mechanisms to avoid throwing out trash that doesn't need to be trash. I can, amazingly, read the publication in its entirety online at the EPA's website.

Acquisitions: True's Best Cartoons

2009-09-10T10:59:00.001-05:00

True magazine was the poor man's Playboy in a sense, containing the lifestyle content without as much sex and nudity, but it was also in its own category by including all kinds of off-the-wall content about UFOs, pirates, deadly animals of all sizes, and a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek. It was in print from the 1930s until the 1970s, but most issues I own or have seen are late 50s to 1960s in vintage. This book, Best Cartoons from True Magazine, came out in 1955, but was reprinted into the 1960s. The book isn't completely cartoons: throughout are short jokes and humorous stories for the more literary readers. I just flipped through a bit, and found that I really don't get a lot of the humor of the time. These aren't Collier's comics, aren't New Yorker comics, and lack that broad interest that makes the comic cross-generational. These look very rooted in their time, and I suppose I'll have to do some research if I decide to read it.

WeeklyGeeks: On Reviewing

2009-09-09T23:01:00.000-05:00

This week's WeeklyGeeks offers three discussion options, based on the Shannon Hale's connection between book and review. I'm picking #3.

I haven't been reviewing books for very long, and I tend to put a lot of work into it. I don't transcribe a rough synopsis and assign a numerical rating. I am trying to portray the book in an honest way, so that the person reading my review has a good idea of what to expect. I want to frame a reader's expectations, rather than tell them what to read. I don't want to do a disservice to a good book by recommending it to somebody who wouldn't like it; I once knew a guy who'd look through the newspaper movie reviews and invert the number of stars. If it got one star, he was sure he'd like it, and four stars meant too much talking and artsy crap. I'd rather give people like that a review they can use, whether I'd give it one or four stars.

Anticipating reviewing a book definitely alters how I read; often it happens even before I even crack open the book. I write at a couple different blogs, each with a specific type of content, so I have an idea of where the book is going to be reviewed before I even get a copy of the book. That means I need to think up an angle ahead of time, so I'm not requesting a bunch of review copies that I won't have a good place to review them at. When I actually get the galley, I have to be aware that I need to remember more about the book than I would just reading for fun — I know I'll need to regurgitate what I got out of it sometime in the future. That regurgitation, the writing of the review, doesn't inherently change my opinion of a book, but it does force me to look deeper than I might otherwise have invested in the book. The results of that postmortem analysis, after I would have otherwise left a book behind, has altered my opinion of a book before. Some things you miss unless you stop to really, really think about it.

I wouldn't necessarily say I'm 'rating' the book as I read it, like I said, I'm not assigning stars. I am, however, compiling what my review will contain while I'm reading, but I don't necessarily pick "good" or "bad" descriptors. I try to not frame the book in those polar contexts: while I didn't particularly enjoy reading The Dangerous World of Butterflies, and found a lot of flaws in Uncommon Carriers, I expressed my thoughts in the reviews, but I tried to frame it to help a reader avoid being surprised. If I simply said, "boy, they didn't put a lot of effort into editing Uncommon Carriers, as a book goes, it's crappy", I might discourage someone who might otherwise enjoy it. If I went the other route, amplifying only the good stuff I liked about the book, I'll end up pointing an interested reader in the wrong direction. So, I describe what's good, what's bad, how the two work against each other, and give an overall picture. I am painfully aware that this makes me unblurbable. I'm also aware that it's far more like a college-level book report than I probably need to do, but an author who contacted me a couple months ago said he was referred to me, because I do good reviews. I like to think that's because of how I write my reviews, and I'll probably continue to write that way. I'm doing this as much for myself as for the audience, writing the kind of review I'd like to read, so moving to a blurby, star-laden style probably won't happen.

Review: Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading?

2009-09-06T21:01:00.009-05:00

Tonight I was flipping channels and caught Tucker Carlson's Fox News exposé on the textbook industry, Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading?. I'd be remiss to not start out by saying, yes, the inherent political slant of Fox News was conspicuous throughout, and that's the most telling about the textbook problem as a whole.

Carlson has two arguments: activists are trying to include everybody into textbooks, which is diluting knowledge, and there are textbooks furthering a single line of thinking, which excludes the ideas of others. Those all-inclusive thinkers are painted as censors, liberals, and America-haters; the single-issue thinkers are portrayed as bigots, terrorists, white-washers, and America-haters. In many cases, I completely agree: censorship, hate speech, exclusion of truth and the inclusion of bias are all detrimental to the use of textbooks. Carlson's clearly leading towards the revelation that, well, if we can't do either of the extremes, what's left — ah, the Fox World History Textbook is all that's left. It was actually more even-handed than I expected, but they pulled many techniques from the propaganda textbooks: a commentor refers to textbook writers as ignorant, and the show quickly jumps to footage of the Three Stooges; opposing viewpoints are hounded for proof of their statements of fact while sympathetic statements are exempt from proof and are allowed anecdotal evidence; loaded words like "witchhunt", "indoctrination", "manipulation" are suggested by Carlson, not the interviewees, and built on.

Carlson would have had an excellent show if it picked one topic and stuck with it — I would have loved to see a show devoted to picking apart the state textbook review boards, even though it's a long criticized process that shows no sign of weakening anytime soon. An hour of that would have been fascinating, but Carlson stops just before it gets interesting: he has gotten his tidbits of information to assemble into his big picture.

Quickly, he is on to criticizing And Tango Makes Three, referring to it as a gay book even though there is no mention of homosexuality or sex in the book — it's obvious, say the critics, citing context and intent. Later, evolution is criticized for not including dissenting thoughts, not being open to other possibilities — no reading into the possibility that Christian indoctrination is a negative, but evoking hostility towards books on word choice that seems, when viewed a fraction of a sentence at a time, to bias towards Islam. In fact, when they get to the Islamic textbooks, Fox does their own translation and shows only fraction of sentences with heavily charged words, then challenges one of the book's editors. That editor says Fox's translations were off, and offers to show his translation…but is denied, his translation is not shown on the program. That professor, Gregory Starrett, (video here) says the most important thought uttered on the show: textbooks are not causal agents, they do not make people do anything.

The show is jumbled full of "don't teach my children; I do a good enough job," "why won't the schools teach more to our kids", "stop indoctrinating kids with viewpoints I consider negative," "why are my negative viewpoints excluded," with no real answer on what should be done with textbooks, unless textbooks are thus revised to include the viewpoints Fox News approves of. There is no easy answer, until you stop pointing fingers at textbooks — the point is brought up on the edges in several places — and focus on the various curriculum in which the books are included. Carlson is hung up on the isolated flaws, picking apart words and language with the fervor of a politically-correct censor, without really addressing the major flaw: so much weight is placed on the textbook itself. They point out that teachers often revise their curriculum around the book's contents, teachers can pick one viewpoint or another and expand upon it independent of the textbook, they can include an opposing book and juxtapose the two. They use an anecdote of anti-Columbus sentiment in which negative views of our hemisphere's discoverer were given precedence over a more even-handed view. Carlson's report puts up on the screen the cover of the books — but does not point a finger directly at the teacher. A classroom volunteer supporting the Tango book points out anti-gay bullying he's seen in the classroom and is challenged, but what did he do about the bullying?, and ignores the question, continuing to focus on the book. In its interest in censorship of pro-Islamic wording in books, in its willingness to belittle anti-bullying laws because it encourages reading homosexual books to 2nd graders, in trying to show how Creationism is necessary to scientific research, the show misses the point that textbooks are tools used by teachers, by school districts, by education boards. He was close to uncovering the true dangers of textbooks, but failed to look beyond what's printed on the page.

The entire show is online, in YouTube chunks: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5

Kitty Bookend

2009-09-05T08:31:00.001-05:00

I cannot condone it as a primary use for a cat, but as a cat owner, I am fully aware that "bookend" is within a list of feline abilities, alongside "paperweight" and "office chair warmer":

Found at Fark's Caturday celebration.

Acquisitions: Letters from Mamma

2009-09-02T13:47:00.001-05:00

That guy there on the right is a direct line to Cougar Town: although he performed as the character Charley Weaver, musician and entertainer Cliff Arquette begat Lewis Arquette, father of David Arquette, who is married to TV and film star Courtney Cox-Arquette. Four degrees of separation from 1950s pun-laden humor to shows based on 21st century pop-culture slang terms, eh?

Charley Weaver's Letters from Mamma is a collection of jokes by Arquette, from his Tonight Show skits. They're unanimously groaners, both now and back then, but Jack Paar sure thought he was funny, and Weaver's audiences sure thought so, too. Arquette appeared as Weaver on the Tonight Show, and later on the Jack Paar Show, and towards the end of his life he was a regular on Hollywood Squares. This 1959 book was his first of two, and the one directly related to his Letter segments. I don't know that I'm going to read it — just flipping through, the jokes verge on terrible — so I'm guessing that they were better seen than read, and off to YouTube I go!

Jacket Blurbs 9-1-09

2009-09-01T15:21:00.002-05:00

"…And great, wet book tears were falling down my face — I think book tears are wetter than normal tears." – editor Susan Hirschmann, on Watership Down and tears (listen here, towards the 47min mark);
"By highlighting Wuthering Heights...[she] has introduced Emily Brontë to the Twilight generation." – Wuthering tops charts, thanks to Twilight;
"Twelve years of mandatory education, with millions going through sixteen years, and our goal is only to make lifelong readers?" – John Fox, on self-directed gradeschool literature classes;
"…readers have this idea that they know you, or want to know you and want to have this personal connection to you, however tenuous…" – Author Dara Horn, on book clubs' impact on sales;
"Meanwhile, fans of unicorns, maps, and stilettos had a disappointing year, and perhaps were lost to other genres." –Tim Holman, on fantasy novel cover elements;
"…they say, 'You don't look like a librarian', and now that I'm a roller derby girl, they say, 'You don't look like a roller derby girl, either.'" – 53-year-old Beth Hollis, roller derby librarian; Via;
"…however, getting out of a good book and into their wife's shoes may pose challenges." – Stephen Gertz, on book and shoe collecting parallels;
"It is because information has proliferated like Weimar bank notes, with everyone shoveling it into wheelbarrows, till the old economic arrangements have collapsed." – Tom Scocca, on facts in print; Via.

Pseudonymous Bosch at Once Upon A Time, Montrose, CA, 29 Aug 09
(from the Publisher's Weekly email newsletter; sorry, no link)

Dangerous and Daring Burger King

2009-08-31T17:20:00.002-05:00

Sunday afternoon, while the dogs barked 'hello' at every person who walked past the van and the Wifey and I stretched our road-weary legs, I stood in the entry of the Burger King just off the Highway 93 exit in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, studying their new Kid's Meal promotions. The current promotion is divided into "girl toys" and "boy toys", but rather than Hot Wheels and Barbie, these two are quite related. The boy toys are based on The Dangerous Book for Boys, and the girl toys are based on The Daring Book for Girls.

Fast food restaurants have often had book-related toys, but usually those are released in conjunction with a film or television show based on the book, one step removed from the original content. The Dangerous and The Daring books aren't being adapted and re-released, as far as I know at the moment, but Burger King says the promotion was chosen because those books are "a perfect example of the brand harnessing the popularity of the books and bringing that sense of adventure into Burger King restaurants." Books and adventure — and fast food! Sure, I play my hipster card and mock any attempt of mainstream culture to spread outside its banks, but I can't help but be pleased with the attempt.

The toys leave a bit to be desired, though. I know, what can I expect from a cheap meal? Well, I can expect more than this: they pretty much just took different toys, put "Dangerous" or "Daring" in the title, and tossed them into the kiddie bags. The Boy toys are "Dangerous Fossils", "Dangerous Space", and Dangerous Snake." The snake is a flashlight, the space 'danger' are space-themed stencils, and the dangerous fossils (?!) are a Play-Dough style mold. The girls toys are similarly un-Daring: "Daring Animals," "Daring Watercolor", and "Daring Creatures". The creatures are a dough-mold toy like the fossils; the animals are a stencil set like the space boy toy. The saddest toy is the Daring Watercolor: it contains neither a real brush, nor real watercolors. It has a fake brush which, when it absorbs water and transfers it to the "paper", a picture appears. What could be sadder than a painting whose content, color, and style has already been decided for you, masquerading as Daring Toy for Girls?

From a kid's standpoint, compared to a Devo toy, an educational toy might seem to suck, but other restaurants have done a better job of it in the past. Come on: last fall Arby's had a "metal detector" as a kid's toy reward. Sure, you can't expect to find lost gold with it, but even if it remotely detects the difference between a nickel and a finger, you've got something there. My daughter got a Spy Kids themed camera in a McDonald's Happy Meal a few years ago, and it actually took pretty good pictures for an all-plastic 110 (Lomo enthusiasts probably would pay $50 for one now). One big feature of the Dangerous and Daring books are how they encourage kids to interact with the outside world around them — a snake-shaped penlight is hardly doing the job. D also remarked that the timing was rather odd: a book of activities, fun, and games might have been better timed for the spring, before school was out. The toys may not spread the safe subterfuge of the two books, but the wall-sized posters and banners hung in fast food restaurants around the U.S. will hopefully make a difference. The toy might be discarded before the kid gets back to her carseat, but we can hope that the seed was planted, and a Daring Book for Girls will appear under her Christmas tree in a couple months.

Found: Newspaper Teen, 1950s

2009-08-31T11:38:00.000-05:00

This newspaper clipping was saved with no notes, no caption, no information at all. The age was based on where it was found, and her style of dress, which would appear late 1950s, early 1960s:
The back of the newspaper has a portion of a photo or an advertisement; it was purchased from a junk shop in Sheboygan,Wisconsin. The clipping had been stuck between the pages of a 1958 JC Whitney catalog, in the chapter on muffler sets.

Paris: City of Night

2009-08-27T08:29:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago I reviewed David Downie's new book, Paris City of Night, at Collector's Quest. I tried not to rave about it too much — it's a good book, but not an awesome book — but I was taken aback by the quality in a rather generic suspense novel, by an author better known for cooking and travel books, from an obscure small press, with a rather unimpressive, nondescriptive cover. There's an inherent bias against books that don't premiere in a bestseller list, but that's an learned trait and I should know better than to make that assumption on my own.

Underlying this revelation is a disappointment in the publishing industry; there is an attitude that, unless a novel comes with a huge budget, larger advance, and a marketable name above the title, it must be crap. The film industry got over that showy bias with events like Cannes and Sundance, and, heck, the Fargo Film Festival — every mid-sized city devotes a few days in its arts calendar to celebrating the underfunded, experimental, and unmarketable films made by up-and-comers. There's a definite difference, since reading is a far less communal experience than watching films is, but if the Oprah Book Club is any indicator of how lesser-known books can benefit from singular public events, I wonder why there isn't more to support books this way. If you watch the higher-brow talk shows, including The Daily Show, interviewees are as frequently promoting a new book as they are promoting a new film, even if they're just a talking head they're introduced as "author of the new book…" The basics are there, they just lack that extra step into the public eye.

Cannes and Sundance benefit from backing by artists themselves, but so much of their provenance is marketing. Knowing Sundance exists and has a relevance comes before considering Sundance winners as quality art. I don't think book fairs do this: Sundance may have a tradeshow feel, but the premieres and exposure shows less of a corporate influence. Books have awards, and being nominated for the Man Booker, the NBA, even the Lulu Blooker, all have similar gravitas of getting an award at Cannes, but there is less pomp and circumstance, and fewer 'minor' rewards to books that place or show. Books don't have the same sort of exposure other media get at Sundance or sxsw, and the publishing industry, especially books like Paris City of Night, suffer because of it.

Tintin Behind Bars

2009-08-26T08:51:00.001-05:00

Since 2007, it's been hard to track down Tintin in Brooklyn: a book of Tintin comics has been moved to a vault where contested books live. Quite literally, even: the Times' image shows a bank-like vault door to protect readers from the horrors found within, as though the Necronomicon is waiting inside to peel at the brain of anyone foolish enough to attempt it. Due to accusations of racist depictions of blacks in Africa, the book Tintin au Congo was deemed "not for the public," according to a children's room librarian, and it was removed from the public shelves. It is still available to the public, if requested, but by taking it off the public shelves this does constitute censorship by restricting access.

This isn't the first suggestion of racism in Tintin comics: others have criticized Hergé's creation of a banker named Blumenstein as an anti-Semitic caricature - in fact, there's a cornucopia of archaic, cruel stereotypes in Tintin comics, but are stories from a time of Belgian colonialism, pre-World War II stereotypes appropriate to the period inappropriate today? Not necessarily, if context is provided, which is the common argument for classic works of literary art which offend modern sensibilities. In cases like Huckleberry Finn, what people are often offended by is a framework for defining and reinforcing their reason for offense, but I'm not familiar with Tintin enough to know whether that is the case for Hergé. That uncertainty is the root for the fear of a contextless racism: people don't want the book to be seen by those who do not understand it. It is a tragedy that people must only pursue what they already understand, and must be protected from the unknown, for fear they will reach the wrong conclusions.

Review: Lover Boy

2009-08-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

Check out the artists who created Lover Boy: Stanley and Janice Berenstain. We know them better as Stan and Jan, the creators of the Berenstain Bears. The couple turned to children's books after they had kids of their own, but leading up to it they were part of a group of popular illustrators for mainstream magazines like Collier's. Lover Boy is actually pretty funny, and rather on the fringe in its frank view on sex between couples. First written in 1958, it was a bit ahead of the sexual revolution, so the comic about a guy reading his Playboy, then grabbing his wife lustily, is quite removed from the Leave it to Beaver ideas of how spouses behaved with each other. Today, that Playboy-leads-to-sex comic has probably been used as a subplot in a King of Queens episode, but for the time it was awfully naughty.

Stanley and Janice's couple throughout the book — not necessarily the same couple throughout, but drawn similarly — are obviously a loving couple, but as you might guess from the title, the male psyche is more on trial here. The whole book isn't sex and naughtiness, though: the guy tries a mustache, he meets a talkative woman on the bus and appreciates his wife all the more, he tries home improvements and fails miserably, he tries to put the kids down for a nap. The naughty parts are probably the funniest in their honest humor. The guy isn't a rogue, he isn't cheating on his wife, but he's surrounded by sex all day, at the office, on the street, in movies and at the beach, that he simply can't help but enjoy taking a look whenever he can. The only times it seems the wife storms out or punishes him is when he drinks too much and makes a fool of himself. The wife is the sympathetic one throughout, but she's well aware of what kind of guy she's got, flaws and all. It's no wonder Stan and Jan stayed together for so many years: it's clear, in this early collaboration, that they understood what couples have to put up with.

Jacket Blurbs 8-15-09

2009-08-15T10:11:00.000-05:00

"I think it’s the way the words are printed on every page, the right way up and in just the right order." – Fake Gwyneth Palthrow blog, via.
"[I]ndeed, all we need to do is to question the value of literature itself and, abracadabra, we have eliminated the need to teach it." – Carol Jago, on literature in school (pdf in entirety).
"I don’t do Facebook, I don’t do Twitter. Maybe I should have." – Cindy Dike, closing NOLA children's book shop after 34 years.
"While these words certainly suggest ancient tomes, the term "antiquarian book" actually has a broader meaning, one that is at once simple and difficult to articulate." – Chris Lowenstein, what's an antiquiarian bookseller?
"They told us guys don't read, would never read any kind of anthology, and most certainly wouldn't read an anthology about men. Apparently we are all mindless fools." – Tom Matlack, Book Publishing: Death or Rebirth?
"This is the tradition we wanted to revive with our edition of The Valley of Fear — presenting something 'good for you' in 'bad for you' garb…" – Publisher Charles Ardai, Sherlock Holmes appears in pulp drag.
"I didn't know that a book could be that good. I became a book lover, and a thinker." – Hakim Hopkins, Tioga bookstore community.
"I have no idea where he finds the time to read a book blog. I'm just a blogger and I can barely find time to do laundry." – Carolyn Kellogg, on Bill Clinton reading her blog. Via.

Archie #1 and Broken Dreams

2009-08-14T16:52:00.005-05:00

Some people really love their comics. They become obsessed with the stories, the characters, the writers, the art — I'm sure you've seen pictures of the costumed multitudes from the recent ComiCon. There then comes a time when the comic takes a wrong turn, something isn't quite right, and that obsession begins to crack.

Comic store owner and collector Dave Luebke knows how that feels. He's been an Archie fan for years, but lately he's been a bit dissilusioned about his favorite comic. Archie recently proposed marriage to Veronica, the icy and rude gal-pal, rather than Betty, the cheery blonde girl-next-door who most people thought was a better target for Archie's affections. Fans were shocked — shocked! — that a fictional character could make such a poor decision, and Luebke was in agreement. To show his disappointment, Luebke parted with one of his prized possessions: a rare copy of Archie Comics #1. That comic sold at auction yesterday, for a respectable $38,837, and Luebke made his point. Via.

'Liar' Cover Redesigned

2009-08-11T19:20:00.004-05:00

Previously seen in the last "Jacket Blurbs," an author was rather disappointed in the book cover picked by her publisher. It wasn't an aesthetic choice: the book was about a black girl, but a white girl appeared on the cover. It's all business, she was told: "Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don’t sell." Regardless of the empirical evidence of 'he said that somebody told him', the low-key racism was still evident in the sentiment, especially since the book, specifically, identifies a character who looks nothing like the cover. Put a Native American, eyeglasses-less, burly kid on the cover of Harry Potter and claim it goes over better with the target audience, right? And, of course, forget that if you based the American population on toy commercials from the past twenty years, you'd know that we're ⅓ white, ⅓ black, and ⅓ "miscellaneous" (possibly including the opposite gender of the other two). But, who's to do anything different from what the book industry has already decided is the way things are done?

Well, the blogosphere spoke, and the Earth moved: Bloomsbury has revised the cover to properly depict a young black woman. Personally, I think it's a world of improvement from a design standpoint, too — the color really pops, and it looks far less like a re-cropped Getty boilerplate girl than the original. I did like the smaller "LIAR" in the original, less accusatory than the full-width text in the new one, but, hey, the cover change crossed a subtle racial barrier in publishing, I'm just splitting hairs. We can only hope that somebody learned a lesson here.

Jacket Blurbs 8-5-09

2009-08-06T07:37:00.001-05:00

"Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?" – Kindle and the Future of Reading, via.
"Tree loves boy. Boy loves tree. Boy grows up. Boy exploits tree. Tree takes it all silently, growing less happy with each lonely year." – The American Scene, via.
"Besides posting on my blog, I've begun also to distill some of my views into 140 characters or fewer. Welcome to my orgy, Twitter." – Soapbox: Critics Don't Need Free Books.
"I dumped you because I can't bear being called Josh. Every posh twat in a rom-com is called Josh." – Confessions of a Bridget-Jonesalike.
"How welcome is a black teen going to feel in the YA section when all the covers are white?" – Judging the book business by its covers, via.
"Optical-scan, Multi-use hardcopy files imprinted on dedicated, crashproof media…" – Jackson St. Books sign.
"I personally know half a dozen librarians, and not one of them is anything close to happy. One of them is named Darryl, and there’s no way someone with that name could be happy." – Why books are stupid, via.
"[The book is] a story of the human relationship with food, told through biographies of the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato." – Kottke's favorite books.

The Vampire Reflection

2009-08-05T09:09:00.002-05:00

For the classic vampire, a mirror could be a source of its downfall: a vampire has no reflection, so a mirror could betray a bloodsucker's hidden nature. As a society goes, professor Peter Logan says that society has used the vampire in literature to mirror its own fears, desires, and social norms. Logan says, "a vampire is a tool with multiple uses, and clearly one that continues to be meaningful in different ways to a new generation," whether it's a fear of paupers, foreign aristocracy, unbridled sexuality, or embodying the conflicted antihero. Twilight is the newest of the societal reflections being consumed whole-heartedly by a new generation of vampire afficianados. Logan points out that the newest entries into the vampire continuum are more directly focused on sexuality — from the TV show True Blood, which includes a lot of vampire sex, to Twilight's boy-meets-girl courtship, they cross a line, where formerly vampires, being dead, weren't consummators of their sexuality, using other ways to express eroticism.

But, are vampires really that big of a genre now, besides the clumsy goths that shop at Hot Topic? If my recent trip of B. Dalton at West Acres is any clue, vampire and vampire-related books compose around half of all books published recently. OK, an exaggeration, but there's some evidence:

The B Dalton Top Twenty Paperbacks wall includes five (that's ¼) novels of the Charlaine Harris "Southern Vampire Mysteries" series.

This table has the sign "Beach Reading" prominently above it -- it includes three vampire books, and one zombie book. When I think girlie beach reads, blood and gore are right up there, you know.

The Young Adult fiction section has some — my daughter bought one of these cartoon-cutout-cover vampire books. Wait — then I turn around, and see this wall of vampire:

No, seriously, it required that many arrows, and I actually think I'm actually short a few. Young adult fiction is filthy with probably quickly- and poorly-written vampire erotica lite. But, hey, you follow where the money goes, and if teen girls aren't spending it on cellphone bling or shoes or whatever, they're going to buy it on mildly lusty vampirotica. Oh, and just to toss in some more undead:

Yup, that's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in the Young Adult Fiction aisle. I thought it odd, but Barnes & Noble (who run B Dalton now) lists it in Young Adult as well. The living dead have never been so popular among tweens as it is now; how does that reflect on our society today?

Updates:

"And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills." – Neil Gaiman, on the current crop of vampire antiheroes, and how vampires are at their saturation point in literature. Via.
"The myth seems to be twittering promiscuously to serve all avenues of life, from cereal boxes to romantic fiction."– Guillermo Del Toro, on the vampire's ubiquity in modern fiction. Via the same place as the Gaiman link.

Found: Cat on Belly, 1970s

2009-08-04T10:18:00.002-05:00

Found, probably used as a bookmark, in my rummage sale copy of The Orchid Thief: a photo of a cat lying on a woman's chest (note the toenail polish), while she lies on the floor. Appears 1970s, based on the console TV, and probably Christmas time, based on the gift in the upper left hand corner. Click for larger version:

Postmodern Books: Categorized

2009-08-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

The LA Times blog has provided a 61-item list of the most significant postmodern novels, but that's not the important part. Most lists are simply that — lists — and if you're lucky some short description of each entry, but not necessarily why the item's on the list.

This list, however, is awesome in its data-density. It starts out with an icon key: each book is identified by author, title, and then a series of appropriate icons representing such things as "self-contradictory plot," "includes historical falsehoods," "plays with language," &c. Those icons make this a far more useful list than the usual Cracked fare; it fills in not just the 'what', but the 'why' and 'how' of postmodern literature. And, if those book features aren't appealing (who doesn't a like book which include the author as a character?), it might help you avoid too-dense literature that won't appeal to you…like I said, not everyone likes dense postmodern literature. Also, check out the comments for some other suggestions that didn't appear on the list. Via.

Jacket Blurbs: 7-31-09

2009-07-31T22:17:00.004-05:00

"The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S." – PW For Sale.
"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house." – Michael Jackson 'Extremely Well Read'.
"The two main complaints? 'It’s boring' and 'It’s too hard.'" – Why Won’t My Kids Read My Favorite Old Books?
"100% of our affiliate revenue from your purchases goes to charity…50% to your favorite charity, 50% to Book Wish Foundation" – Bibliotarian, via.
"Girlebooks aims to make classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium." – Girliebooks: DRM-free Ebooks.
"[A]uthorities turned down permission for him to read the books on the grounds that they contained material 'potentially detrimental to national security'…" – Supermax prisoner denied Obama books.
"The staff at Stanraer library think she is a remarkable lady and look forward to her weekly visits." – 91-year-old is UK's most prolific library borrower.

Nude & Tattooed Librarian Calendar

2009-07-31T07:59:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year again: racks of calendars are soon to be populated with the 2010s, which brings on the nude fundraiser calendars! Last year, the male friends of the Barre library bared all for a calendar, so you can sure bet there's some library-friendly partial nudity to put on the wall next year, too.

This time, it's statewide: the Texas Library Association is producing a semi-nude calendar of their members. Not only is there the promise of exposed skin, but the calendar specifically focuses on The Tattooed Ladies of the TLA. Unless the skin is inked, you won't be seeing it. The funds raised from the calendar sales ($20 at their online store), go to support the TLA's disaster relief fund. In fact, like Barre, the TLA's last naughty calendar featured the men of Texas libraries. Who knew that PG-13 nudity and libraries went together so well?

Acquisitions: Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual

2009-07-30T10:36:00.000-05:00

I hope nobody took this seriously, but there's little chance it ever passed as a serious book. Phyllis Diller — who, surprisingly, is still alive & kicking — compiled a bunch of her stand-up punchlines into this book in 1967, at the height of her career. Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual comes with the tagline on the back: "If the last time you smiled was for your wedding photo, this is the book for you." This is for the Wifey's feminism collection: Diller was an early comedienne of the feminine style, and her wife-sympathetic humor has probably driven much of the lazy-lout image of men these days. In flipping through the book, there's a lot of illustrations, done in a style that I initially thought was Gahan Wilson, but is credited to Susan Perl. Maybe if I ever feel the need for a marriage manual, I might have to finally read this; it might not help, but it'll probably make me laugh.

Romance Writers of America

2009-07-29T15:13:00.000-05:00

Romance novels are serious business, and the weekend before last was the 29th annual Romance Writers of America Conference. Largely attended by women aficionados of the genre, the event had meeting and seminars on how to be at the top of their game. The mainstream media covered the event somewhat, with a high-profile article in the Washington Pos t, a Nora Roberts interview by Scott Simon on NPR, and a short writeup in Publisher's Weekly. While it appears the attention is welcome, from a genre who is often a punchline, and there's some sour grapes over being treated like a joke by the media. The Post came across as stereotype-enhancing and an unfunny attempt as humor. The NPR story got his negative reaction on the air: Simon tried his hand at romance, but ended up sounding mockingly cheeky, and got called on it. I hope none of them saw The GeekDad's "ten reasons romance writers are geeky, too"; having their idiosyncrasies pointed out doesn't seem to please the romance author.

(Image found here)

Review: Uncommon Carriers

2009-07-27T08:52:00.001-05:00

John McFee gets around, but not nearly as much as the subject of his book. Between the two covers of Uncommon Carriers, McFee crosses the country on trains, trucks, boats, and — except for fear of customs officials — probably would have UPS'ed himself if he had a big enough box for it.

Uncommon Carriers is a mish-mosh of essays, a series of nearly unrelated gonzo-journalism, in which McPhee rides along with a commercial shipper of one kind or another. Each method is a common one: nearly everyone has passed a mirror-bodied tanker truck on the freeway, or stopped for a mile-long train of coal-filled hoppers to cross the road. The only common thread between the stories, save for one Thoreau-themed canoe trip, is the transport of freight in our country. In fact, as far as commercialism goes, these stories are heavily American. The product moved starts as raw material at one point, and ends up a final product at another. McFee's adventures cover the ground in between.

Being a book of scattershot transportation articles does mean a degree of unevenness between the sections. The copyright page says that much of the book originally appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, which explains the lack of consistency. The boating parts have the strongest writing of the book; had he expanded just on the theme of river transportation, the book might have been better overall. The parts with the 18-wheeler that frame the book are probably the weakest, and the railroad sections, while interesting, spend more time on the mechanics of railroads than the human component of the train. As a work of literature, this ain't a classic, but it is excellent for a summer read, definitely a good "guy's book", full of big engines, American-made materials, just a touch of foul language, brief exposure to bare breasts, and each machine's operators fit into a "man's-man" category of their own.

Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee
ISBN 0-374-28039-8
Published 2006, 248 pages
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giruox

Book-Burning In Wisconsin

2009-07-23T15:06:00.002-05:00

It hasn't happened yet, but several residents of West Bend are inkling for a literary campfire. The presence of gay-friendly books in the library have citizens up in arms, going so far as to build and enter an anti-gay-book float in the Fourth of July parade. That faction claim the books are "explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian," but the library believes that re-shelving the book based on content, rather than book type or appropriate reading age would be considered censorship. The library has also declined to shelve books that affirm heterosexuality or are written by "ex-gays," which I think would be a reasonable concession, but — given the general tone of those books — it's likely the library is unable to find any books of reliable quality that fit the religious resident's requirements and fulfill the library's purpose of serving the community. Happily, free speech does have some advocacy in the community, which is probably why the library hasn't been forced to rescind their stance as of yet.

Acquisitions: Tangerine

2009-07-22T13:44:00.002-05:00

I picked this up at a church rummage sale where there were selling everything for $5 a bag, so everything remotely intriguing got tossed in the sack. I had hoped one of the kids would be interested in it, but everyone had wrinkled their nose at the book — so I'll probably read it myself. Tangerine, by Edward Bloor, is a lite gothic horror for kids, about a legally blind boy whose family moves to an unusual new town where reality is almost inverted, causing mystery-solving revelations. The book originally came out in 1997, and I'm rather surprised I haven't heard of it: it won several awards and is ranked highly on Amazon. Maybe the kids don't know what they're missing out on.

Blender No More

2009-07-21T07:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, upon retrieving the mail, I found a Maxim in my mailbox. On it was this sticker, which read:

Welcome to Maxim!
This note is to inform you that Blender has ceased publishing with the April 2009 issue. The balance of your paid subscription will be fulfilled with Maxim. If you are already a subscriber of Maxim, the balance of your Blender subscription will be added to your Maxim subscription.

I had missed this when it hit the news this spring; it wasn't a surprise. Blender had noticeably succumbed to magazine anorexia, the shrinking page-count of a publication on its way out. I'm a subscriber to both Blender and Maxim thanks to FreeBizMag.com, so there would have been no real loss if Blender stopped arriving (in fact, I hadn't noticed that the May through July issues were even missing), which is probably a further clue to Blender's relevance. Maxim isn't a great magazine either, but I tend to find something worth reading in it more than I did in Blender. I shouldn't get too attached, though: others have noticed symptoms of magazine anorexia in Maxim, too, so the clues are leading to an internet-only Maxim in the near future. Stuff magazine was the first casualty in 2007, but it was repeated content with Maxim for the most part; they, too, were rolled over into the Maxim subscriber's list (frankly, I liked Stuff better). If the magazines are being condensed into one better-quality publication, it might help...but, flipping through this new erstaz-Blender issue of Maxim, it doesn't look like the loss of one title resulted in extra effort in the sister publication.

Classics No More

2009-07-20T16:17:00.000-05:00

The Second Pass has done something drastic: they have picked out several "classics," and decided that they're really not worth all that they're built up to be. Ballsy, but often necessary; as times chance, contexts move, and (from what I remember; I've only read a couple on the list), many of those books strike emotional chords with readers at the time, taking broad strokes at society and humanity in charged prose, but that won't give them lasting power. I could never imagine Kerouac continuing to have the resonance he's enjoyed for much longer; his stuff is so rooted in the time of the 50s and 60s, it was bound to lose relevance as time moved on. Via.

The Book Seer

2009-07-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

The Book Seer thinks it's pretty smart: tell it the last book title you've read, along with the author, and it will let you know some reasonably similar titles to pick for your next foray into literary entertainment. Overall, it does a pretty good job of what it claims to accomplish, and the interface is fun. Don't expect to get recommendations based on recent books, or small-press titles, though: the last few books I've read were new releases, and haven't been in the system long enough for connections to grow. The Book Seer doesn't come up with recommendations on its own; the site is essentially a cool interface to pull data from three book-related websites: Amazon.com, LibraryThing, and BookArmy. The LibraryThing recommendations, at least for the books I queried, were the most thorough and relevant. Amazon's were OK, but fewer relevant ones by my measure. Sadly, I don't think BookArmy gave a single recommendation for anything I entered. Try it out for fun, but I don't think it'll become a need-fulfilling go-to website for book lovers.

Acquisitions: Caught In The Act

2009-07-17T11:51:00.004-05:00

No, I wasn't the one caught: the book is called Caught In The Act: The Photographer in Contemporary Fiction. Despite the "photographer" in the extended title, there's very few pictures in this book, just one at the start of each chapter. The cover makes the book look like it's a series of mysteries, but it's not exactly that, either. This collection of short stories focuses on main characters who are photographers: paparazzi, portraitists, and, yes, it sounds like there's a crime scene photographer somewhere in there. At around 150 pages, it won't be a long read, but it looks interesting, mostly as a collection with an unusual theme. Published in 1996, it is now out of print.

Bus Driver Reading While Driving

2009-07-16T07:03:00.000-05:00

I'm never one to discouraging reading while riding the bus, but it isn't exactly recommended while you're driving. A Montgomery (MD) County bus driver has been taken off driving duties after a sharp-eyed rider recorded some reading-while-driving skills while on duty. Surprisingly, even after the photos were brought to light, the driver wasn't fired: recent changes have been made in the area which would result in immediate firing for using a mobile device while operating public transportation, but apparently a book isn't as big a threat. I do admit, because they are a series of photos and not video, it's hard to say if she's just reading at red lights…not that it would be much better. Via.

Music and Literature

2009-07-15T14:34:00.000-05:00

University of Arkansas literature professor Christian Goering was interested in incorporating music into his English classes as an "instructional and motivational tool" for his students to connect better with the books they are assigned to read. Steinbeck and Tracy Chapman, Jane Austen and Counting Crows, Harper Lee and Johnny Cash: students draw on their CD collections to identify songs that evoke the book's themes, and the two are used together to help students understand their readings. A lot of musicians derive their songs from literary sources — Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner helped me through Senior English — so much of the list seems rather obvious, but if a student needs to get their head into a book, adding an audio component appears to be helpful according to professor Goering.

Goering asked his students to identify as many song connections as possible for the book Of Mice and Men, and the came up with a hundred connections, allowing Goering to pull six common connections that a song might have with a book:

A song is inspired by literature directly;
A song connects to a text thematically;
A song’s setting connects to the setting of a literary work;
Characters in a song mirror the characteristics in a classic work;
The tone of a song is similar to the tone of a piece of literature, and;
A song’s plot structure or narrative follows that of a literary work.

Goering's research has been included in The Essential Criticism of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but he's been collecting more than just Mice and Men's related tunes at his LitTunes website. If you want to get to the meat of the associations and set up your iPod appropriately, the database of relationships can be found here. As a sidenote, I'm bookmarking the page about using Johnny Cash as an example for teaching writing for future reference.

Acquisitions: Portrait From The Heartland

2009-07-14T11:41:00.002-05:00

Another rummage sale book: Portraits From The Heartland. I probably would have overlooked it, except I noticed was published by the Plains Art Museum, the prominent modern art museum in the area. Sculptor Duane Hanson posthumously had an exhibition at the Plains in 2005, which I didn't visit, sadly, and the book appears to have been produced specifically for the show. The publisher is New Rivers Press, which I just learned is the university press of MSUM.

If you're unfamiliar with Hanson, he's the artist whose expertise are jarring, hyper-natural statues of average people. A few years ago, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a group of us encountered his 1975 sculpture, "Museum Guard." The installation was, as you see in the Flikr photo, just standing, off to the side, as a regular museum guard would. It took a good three or four minutes before we realized he was a statue — and fifteen years later, it's about the only thing I remember from that museum. Going to an entire show of his work bordered on causing heebie-jeebies, but now I wish I had gone. The book doesn't do the statues justice. In fact, the photos are too professionally done, too well lit and framed, so the non-real qualities of each piece are too emphasized. They should have been shot in low light on grainy film, and they would have shown off what makes them great art pieces.

The book's cover, in particular, has a poorly-done glossy coating which (you can kind of see in the scan above) is puckering and peeling. No big deal, though; it doesn't affect the interior, and it's for my own enjoyment, not resale. I think I paid fifty cents for it. The previous owner, however, must not have paid anything: inside the front cover is a sticker that reads, "This copy of Duane Hanson: Portraits from the Heartland compliments of the Plains Art Museum."

The Golden Library Cart

2009-07-14T07:34:00.002-05:00

Speaking of librarians and their duties, an ancient competition was held recently, and to the victors have gone the spoils. Librarians from Oak Park, Illinois have won the coveted Golden Book Cart. The event was held as part of the American Library Association's annual conference, which — so I'm told — is far rowdier than us mere mortals can imagine. Those librarians, boy, once they put on viking helmets, expect some pillaging to occur.

Awful Goth Book

2009-07-13T13:16:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I was at the Fargo Public Library, and saw the book to the right: it was so naiively incomplete, I had to take a few pictures. Everything You Need to Know About the Goth Scene is a tiny book full of pictures with only the slightest superficial information on Gothness, including a connection to Wicca I'd never really heard before, so I planned on panning the book here. When I got home, however, I saw Hang Fire Books had linked to the Awful Library Book blog, so I thought I'd send it to them instead and get their take on it.

The reason those librarians found the book to be awful were largely different from me. I had thought it was a book focused on parents trying to come to terms with their weird-dressing child, but their research saw the book as mostly filed under "young adult" categories, which I could see in the simple language and unassuming blandness of most of the content. It probably is better suited for kids than parents, but I found it filed in the adult shelves, so my assumption was based largely on how it appeared on the shelves than its content. A book mostly of pictures with simple language and general statements definitely is more suited for a 10-year-old than a parent — had I found this in the kid's section, I wouldn't have questioned the Everything book's uneverythingness. That brings the Awful Librarian's thoughts more into light: a librarian is often less a judge of content, more an overseer of how information is filed and presented to the potential reader.

Reading Women Are Sexy

2009-07-10T14:24:00.000-05:00

The view of book-loving women ranges from misogynistic to slutty to honest, and now there's an art installation that seems to pick up on those last two. Called Bookworms Never Go To Bed Alone, New Zealand artist Kelly Thompson is exhibiting her view of how hot book-reading ladies are. The gallery showing is, sadly, in Melbourne Australia at the Gorker Gallery. There's more at Kelly's site, if you have patience to get through the lame flash interface (there's a bit of NSFW).

The Codex Climaci Rescriptus

2009-07-09T11:36:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday, Sotheby's had a very, very old piece of literature for sale. The Codex Climaci Rescriptus was auctioned with an expected sale price of around £500,000 — around a million USD — but, sadly, it was not sold; Sotheby's website isn't very clear, so it could have been pulled, but more likely the Codex didn't reach the expected reserve price and the lot was skipped and may come up for sale again in the near future. I'm surprised it didn't go, because of its history, having its own Wikipedia page and being available for reading online via Google Books. It's not often that you can buy something with its own Wikipedia page, let me tell you.

The Codex is an example of one of the funnest literary terms I've heard in a while: it is a palimpsest. In ancient times, due to the difficulty in acquiring or affording parchment, old documents were reused. Being rather thick and resilient, the top layer of the parchment was literally scraped off, leaving a mostly-clean sheet to be written upon again. The process wasn't perfect, and as you see in the example above, the Codex had a very ineffective erasing. A ghost of the original text is clearly visible through the new transcription, and has been identified as portions of the New Testament. The biblical stories were scraped off, and in the 9th century A.D. the pages were flipped and re-written with a portion of the Scala Paradisi and Liber ad Pastorem. Today, those add far less to the value than the underlying older text: the Codex is better known for its Bible text than anything else.

Acquisitions: The Orchid Thief

2009-07-08T13:34:00.001-05:00

Picked this up at a rummage sale of a middle-aged, rather attractive woman. Wifey humorously chastised me for chatting the MILF up about the book while counting my quarters to purchase The Orchid Thief. The rummage-sale woman complimented it for being an approachable book on an odd obsessive subject. My only familiarity with the book is the film Adaptation, which, I understand, has little to do with the actual book itself. I normally would pass a recent, common book, but I just reviewed The Dangerous World of Butterflies over at Collector's Quest, and The Orchid Thief is mentioned several times in its media materials. Butterflies is about the seedy underbelly of butterfly collectors and poachers, and when combined with the recently-read Flight Maps, on capturing and using birds for everything from fashion to target practice, then, too, The Orchid Thief and its illicit flower collectors, rounds out a trilogy of humanity's obsession with possessing the beautiful parts of nature.

Best Of The National Book Awards

2009-07-07T21:08:00.005-05:00

Since 1950, the National Book Award has been given to those authors exhibiting excellence in American literature, but this year, in commemoration of the 60th Awards, a special award will be given. Today the National Book Foundation announced The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction award, selecting the greatest work of fiction of the past 60 years as the pinnacle of American literature today. Seventy-seven contenders have been selected by the National Book Foundation, the governing body behind the Award, and will be voted for by authors connected with the Foundation. The top six will become the 'short list' for the Best Of award, and in September the public will be polled, via their website, and the winner will be awarded in October.

There will be plenty to keep your attention in the meantime until the public vote is undertaken: the Foundation is publishing a blog with entries for each book, including a variety of information about the authors, times, and topics of these classic works of fiction. I'll be one of the people bookmarking the blog, reading about each book every day. The National Book Foundation, despite lacking an Oscars-sized media blitz, is making good use of the internet to get the word out about the award, keeping people interested, and being interested in modern literature is their honorable focus.

Gold Mining, 1855

2009-07-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

In 1855, a Scottish man headed to the goldfields of Ballarat during Australia's 19th century gold rush. Recently, that miner looking for his fortune brought a small fortune to an antiquarian book dealer. The miner's diary was sold to the Gold Museum for $50,000, and will be on display there. The book had already been loaned to the museum, in anticipation of financing, so there was little to wonder if the book would end up anywhere else. The Courier also offers some excerpts from the diary, for those of you curious about the daily life of a gold miner.

Robinsonade

2009-07-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

Add this one to the list of classic literature I have never read: Robinson Crusoe is a book I've never opened, and I'm sure I've passed it by numerous times during my book-shopping habits. Not that it never would have appealed to me. I'd bet 10-year-old me, who enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, would probably have liked it a lot.

The reason it hasn't jumped out at me as a book requiring my attention may be the huge amount of artistic homage to Defoe's 18th century novel. Lost in Space, Swiss Family Robinson, Gilligan's Island: people are constantly ending up on uncivilized, ignored islands, left to fend for themselves. Men imagine each other are some form of beef-based junk food. Tom Hanks names a ball Wilson, which has become a part of American culture as the best name for a self-named friend. This continual reference to Robinson Crusoe even has its own, rather obvious and clumsy name: Robinsonade. The Germans loved the Robinsonade genre more than anyone else during the 18th century, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily good at it, according to The History of German Literature:

[Robinson Crusoe] appeared in a German translation in 1721, and elicited in Germany, as well as throughout Europe, the greatest admiration and a countless host of imitators. Between 1722 and 1755 more than forty Robinsons appeared in Germany, and were read with frantic eagerness. There were the German Robinson, the Italian Robinson, the clerical ditto; the Saxon, the Silesian, the Franconian Robinson; two Westphalian Robinsons at once; the moral, the medicinal, the invisible Robinson; and even the Bohemian Robinson. Then there was the European Robinsonetta: "Miss Robinson, or the cunning young maid;" "Robunse, with her daughter, Robinschen," and so forth. The books are generally worse than the titles.

We Americans lay claim to a genre called "Westerns" that is just about as full of waste as the German Robinsonade genre, so I can't complain too much. Even as a genre, "western" tosses a wider net , in terms of geography and characters, than the "robinson-crusoe" genre. A Robinsonade needs a main character, a one-way mode of transportation, and a civilization-free destination — the rest tends to lean on the level on ingenuity the character has, on on what aspects of civilization they can do without. For as narrow that view is, we've seen a couple hundred years of revamping and re-processing that same story in a myriad of styles, covering wide-ranging genres from contemporary fiction to sci-fi. To see more, the University of Florida's Digital Collections has a whole section on the Robinsonade genre.

Acquisitions: Speer Ammunition Manual

2009-07-01T10:08:00.000-05:00

While rummaging this past weekend, we happened across a little bundle of hand-reloading resources. The rummage sale was rife with western novels, a few WWII novels, and the host looked like he had rode more than his share of motorcycles in his life, so it isn't a large leap to figure he made good use of these books during his hobby time. I have no interest in hunting, and only a passing interest in gunplay (I had fun skeet shooting once), so these books aren't for me. Although, the detailed mechanics therein do appeal to the geek in me: who knew bullets were so complex? No, I can't talk myself into keeping yet another book of statistics of no use to me: each one is for sale over at WeHaveYourCollectibles.com.

Flame and Fur, Fangs and Wicker

2009-06-30T07:20:00.003-05:00

As we've seen, Lyttle-Lytton released their results recently, but so has the Big Boy of these competitions, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Best In Show is nautically-themed as well: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Once a strong and respected genre, the seafaring novel seems to have fallen from favor with the literary illuminati. Or, maybe nautical authors are simply lacking in skill and quality; the lack of opportunities to actually crew a square-rigged ship may mean too much is left to the imagination. I mean, look at this other example I found online: "Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, - aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more - " I mean, who does this "Herman Melville" think he is, writing a book about whaling?

Alas, such dreck isn't acceptable to the Bulwer-Lytton contest; being previously-published, the B-L won't accept it. Both contests are parodies of horrible writing, which — as any parodist will tell you — requires nearly as much talent as being a novelist in entirety. B-L does recognize that horrible writing didn't stop in the 19th century with the original Bulwer-Lytton and that hack Melville: they happily show off some recent examples of the obfuscated and poorly done metaphors.

Briskly, Pants On Her Legs

2009-06-28T17:54:00.004-05:00

The Lyttle-Lytton contest for unintentionally-funny literature has released their 2009 results — the winner, it seems, was the nautically-themed "The mighty frigate Indestructible rounded the Horn of Africa and lurched east'ard." Interestingly, at least according to the internet, "east'ard" is an extremely rare word, although it was featured in the title of a 1936 Time magazine story. This, sadly, lends no credibility to the Lyttle-Lytton winner.

Naked Lunch, Disturbing Literature

2009-06-25T21:33:00.001-05:00

Naked Lunch, William Burrough's revered drug-fueled tale of anal sex, turns 50 this year, having now addled the brains of more than one generation. I attempted to read this during my twenties, and the copy still sits on my shelf, only the first twenty or so pages with any discernible evidence of having been read. Couldn't make it through the book; it made me feel like all the Sam Shepard and Samuel Beckett I read during my theatre years did — that there was some huge joke on me, or on everybody, but I was the only one to recognize that the jumble of overwrought symbolism really meant far less than the literati would have you believe. The absurdist era never really appealed to me, no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't enjoy any of it, and it seems that none was ment to be enjoyed, but to pondered.

Burrough's masterpiece fills the #8 spot in PopCrunch's list of The 10 Most Disturbing Books Of All Time. Before I even opened the link I knew Naked Lunch had to be somewhere on the list, but I was curious about the rest. My greatest surprise was the number of disturbing books that had been made into movies: Blindness, Requiem for a Dream, American Psycho. What didn't surprise me much is that I hadn't read any of the books. I guess I'm too much of an optimist, that overly depressing and violent books really don't appeal to me. Maybe I'm missing out — many of these books also show up on others' lists of great works of modern literature, so it might be time to try one out. Naked Lunch is still off my list; I don't care if it has lasted through 50 years of literary acclaim, I'm not sure I could get any further than I had already read.

Via, Via.

Body Writing, Esquire And Others

2009-06-24T11:53:00.000-05:00

I'm actually an Esquire subscriber — some free-offer thing — but after the first few issues I was actually rather impressed with the magazine. As you might expect, the most recent cover, which, ahem, seems more Playboy than Esquire, doesn't hurt my opinion of the magazine, either. The feature of the issue is a new short story by Stephen King, and the first few lines are painted on the eye-appealing naked body of supermodel Bar Refaeli:

Beauty of the female form has long been a feature of the covers of magazines (Elle, Cosmopolitan, et al are some of the worst, or best, culprits, frankly). The women's website Lemondrop felt that hot men were rather left out in the deal, so they took their favorite literature and "painted" it on to some hot men. Soccer expert David Beckham, honoring Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?, is some funny stuff right there:

Acquisitions: Hansi's New Life

2009-06-23T10:12:00.000-05:00

Lastly, a book I picked up more for its internet notoriety than anything. I often see the comic book Hansi: The Girl who Loved the Swastika pop up online as a non sequitur, "WTF?" contribution to the world of online content because the cover looks so "Yay, Nazis!". I actually own a copy: I had bought it long before it was appearing online. The comic was published by a Christian comic house, and is decidedly anti-Nazi throughout, so the funny cover is about the biggest chortle in the funnybook. What few people recognize is that the comic was based on an autobiographical novel by the real "Hansi," Maria Anne Hirschmann, that was first issued with the same title as the comic, but was later revised as "The Girl Who Left the Swastika," probably to cut back on the amusement of loving Nazi symbols. The book above, I believe, is Hirschmann's second book, Hansi's New Life. If you don't believe me that Hirschmann is the real Hansi, here's proof, taped in the front cover:

Yes, folks, that's the real Hansi, sitting in the Fargo Holiday Inn, sometime in the 1980s. Strangely, despite the photo, the book is not autographed, which may mean the book was purchased after the appearance. I currently own a copy of the comic, the original biography, and now the sequel, putting me well on the way to a complete swastika-loving Hansi library.

Review: West On The 49th Parallel

2009-06-22T15:52:00.000-05:00

Early in most American's education, we learn that the 49th parallel of latitude divides the United States from Canada, the longest undefended international border in the world. On a globe or map, it isn't difficult to draw the line and say, "there you go," that's U.S., that's Canada. On the ground, however, it is a difficult prospect. A latitudinal line is a cartographic construct: the border isn't the middle of a river, or the edge of an ocean, or the peaks of a mountain. Those markers can be seen from the ground, while the 49th parallel can not. John E Parson's book, West on the 49th Parallel: Red River to the Rockies, 1873-1876 documents the first successful and somewhat accurate attempt to mark the line along the borders of Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana. There had been previous attempts to mark the border, with great inaccuracies, but the 1873 product was a joint venture between the British (who held Canada at the time) and U.S. governments. The main method of measuring latitude at the time was by star observations, which at the time had an accuracy within a few dozen feet (amazing, on par with GPS and definitely better than Google Maps' markers), but required a staff of astronomers and mathematicians to correctly interpret. Toss in security to help against the Indian threat, generals and majors to be in charge, the short seasons in which to do the work, and general weirdness involved in being in so remote an area all make for a less than boring adventure.

The book itself, unfortunately, is very dry; it does, however, include quite a bit of dry humor along with the boring parts. The actual process of figuring out the position of the 49th parallel is minor, compared to the pages of anecdotes about life for the crews in charge of the project. You hear of the guy who managed to shoot himself—twice—while on the job, the parties held at remote forts for various holidays, the wild dog conscripted to help pull sleds, the Fenian cook who insisted his innocence but ended up in jail for violent crime before he could even set out with the crew…it's like Best of the West hooked up with Deadwood for a little political cartography. I like Red River history, so the places and situations are familiar to me, but the book won't be for everyone. As a historial reference, it does well with facts and accuracy, but the dryness makes it a less-than-ideal piece of historic entertainment. What somebody needs to do is adapt it to a screenplay; the goofiness of the characters definitely entertains.

West on the 49th Parallel: Red River to the Rockies, 1873-1876
by John E Parsons
Originally published 1963

Father's Day Faux Pas

2009-06-21T10:31:00.000-05:00

Happy Father's Day everyone! As a dad and a reader, I completely understand books as a way to reward Dad for another year as provider, car-repair-advisor, and master barbecuer (if you don't mind a little stereotyping). Better than another tie or humorous t-shirt anyway. A book I wouldn't recommend is, well, anything to do with Josef Fritzl, the psycho parent who kept his daughter in his basement for 24 years and enjoyed …"intimate"… time with her. That's just my recommendations, however — over in the U.K., however, retail giant Tesco apparently didn't have a problem with daughters buying The Crimes of Josef Fritzl for this Father's Day, until it was brought to their attention and an apology was drafted. From first-hand accounts over at Fark, the book was on a specific Father's Day display in the stores — much to the dismay of sharp-eyed shoppers, but what about those shelf-stockers who put the books out? This didn't happen just at Tesco, but also at W.H. Smith, a large bookselling chain in the U.K. I can understand big-box retailer drones not watching what they're tossing on the shelves, but I'd expect more from a retailer who prides themselves on being a leading example of the book retail industry.

The Daily Mail shows the book on the display, bearing the same "half price" sticker as the rest of the books on the promotional displays, so it wasn't a case of "oops, wrong book on the shelves." Special displays are often paid spots, akin to advertising, where a publisher ensures their big promotions are on the endcap or the table at the entryway where they're likely to get more attention. I dug around to see if Smith's was the one in charge of Tesco's book section, like the K-Mart/Waldenbooks arrangement, but everything I found called the two retailers competitors. Now, I'd hope Harper Collins would be smart enough not to specifically recommend this book for Father's Day, but I find it very suspicious that two different retailers, without shared corporate control, would place the same inappropriate book in the Father's Day display. Somebody — publisher, distributor, retailer — got in their head that they needed a recent, hot-button, True Crime title in their dad's display, because dad's like true crime books, you see, so what have we got? Aw, the book is even about a dad, that works great!

JD Salinger: Unmasked!

2009-06-19T08:14:00.000-05:00

J.D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye over fifty years ago, but while his book has been in the public eye for the better part of a century, the author has been famously reclusive. Salinger has been in the news lately, however, trying to block a book from using his copyrighted characters without his permission, but he still hasn't made any public appearances. AbeBooks has a Salinger retrospective, for people following the story but only familiar with Salinger through Catcher, and they include this "back of a milk carton" look at how Salinger might appear today:

The artist's rendition looks a bit younger than eighty-something; for a more recent look, which purports to be an actual photo of the author, check out his biography's cover:

I'll bet literary historians are hoping this goes to court: it may all be an elaborate scheme to get Salinger to appear as a witness, on the stand, for all to bask in his visage after so many years. Won't everybody be surprised when he shows up looking like Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons?

Acquisitions: Almuric

2009-06-18T10:10:00.000-05:00

The Wifey picked up Almuric, by Robert Howard, probably to re-sell, but I'm including it because the cover is so full of awesome. Howard was best known for Conan, but he put out pulp novels of swordfighting loinclothed men like there was no tomorrow. I will note, since it's not obvious in the image above, that the undies the hero on the cover is wearing were heavily outlined in ball-point pen by a previous owner.