more on post cards - from Sam Coulbourn

From: Samuel W. Coulbourn Subject: More on postcards I enjoyed Jerry Blaz' piece on postcards. I collect (and sell) postcards, as well as journals, autograph books, memo books, and scrapbooks, each with some small story that gives clues to America's rich history. Not the "big" history but the little stuff -- like a young woman in 1928 writing the whole journal of her trip to Europe on the back of 22 post cards. Or Elsie, in 1911, writing on a card with a picture of the Battleship Alabama, to poor Davidson, who is about to go to jail. She's equally concerned about whether her suitcase got scratched up. But she'll pray for him anyway. Or there's a card from Blanche to Flora on a card with a picture of a young man sneaking a look at young girl's legs, with caption: "Veal is meat but calves aren't." Writes Blanche, the humorist, to Flora: "Do you have any good veal like this down your way. Received your card thanks." Leila writes Aunt Jenny from Revere Beach, Mass. in 1907 on a card showing fully-clothed people spread out on the beach at Revere, with entertainment pavilions in background. "We will leave Thursday…coming by trolley to your home. Leila." Ruth Bradford's Post Card Travelogue, 1928: Boston girl is on the "grand tour" of Europe, and sends home this detailed, colorful report of her adventures, carefully described on the backs of 22 post cards. She watches the fireworks for Bastille Day at Biarritz and warns her friend Lucia to stay clear of Nice. She tells about the violent hailstorm as her group drives through the Pyrenees. Luncheon in Quimper, visit to the potteries. Elsie Writes to Davidson, 1911, from Brooks, Iowa. "I am praying for you as you go to jail... I was in Omaha last week... Did my suit-case get scratched up?. Meeting (Prayer) starts here today...."Revere Beach, MA 1907 J.C. writes to "Miss Lizzie" in Everett, Mass. in 1908: "This is me, stirring the sugar..." Best wishes, Sam Coulbourn Rockport, MA

New feature - curious finds

Hawaiian Post card album - found this at the salvation army today....I was there picking out my new spring wardrobe. Instead I ended up with 2 throw pillows a desk lamp, the album and the monkey. It's about 9½"x7" and has 10 leaves, room for 20 postcards or photos. The most curious thing is board covering: the green part are large leaves, and the beige part is covered with something that looks like corn husks. the buttons, twine, etc . . . are all natural fibres. I am surprised at the condition, though it wouldn't take too much to cause a problem with the front hinge. I am wondering, if I should add moisture, like steam or add oil, like a leather treatment, or is my best bet to polybag it and hope for the best? I am guessing it is late 60s to late 70s, but i am not up on my Hawaiianania. Well so much for my guesses...appparently this is not an uncommon item, as they are still cranking them out in Indonesia. but i still think it's wicked cool.

ever wonder?

one potato • they are choosing up sides in the UK over HMV's acquistion of Ottakar's, since they already have Waterstones, some people think it's a little greedy. essays • nice long essay about Borges, from Ready Steady Book literary blog. edit • ever wonder how all those books got in to project Gutenberg's database? well you can volunteer to be a proofreader for digitized public domain works. DYK • did you know there is a wealth of software now that vets papers for plagarism automagically? just in case you were wondering: any phrases you find on the Bullpen that are not in quotes and attributed are guaranteed to be my own. I may lift an image here and there for illustrative purposes, but I try to skate the edges of 'fair use' blog note • Excellent blog devoted to Japanese fiction in translation, particularly mystery, sci fi and horror - from Rebekah Bartlett bank toaster • don't forget to sign up for Knopf's April Poem A Day mailer.

WOD - headband

headband n. A functional and/or ornamental decorative strip of silk or woven threads attached to the top and bottom of a book's spine to fill the gap normally found there. It does provide extra strength to the top of the spine when the book is unshelved by pulling on the head.

school of thought

super shopping • Shakespeare's legendary first folio is to be sold and may fetch up to £3.5m. Although 750 copies were printed only a third survive and most of those are incomplete. Even the complete ones have bits missing or are in replacement binding. The only comparable edition to appear at auction is an edition known as the Houghton copy sold in 1980 and now in Tokyo. obit worth reading • Irish author John McGahern in Dublin at the age of 71. talking heads • a nifty Alice Hoffman interview in MO's Herald Online. hot item • The new set of limited edition reprints of the Book of Mormon is now available. red hot item • New Battlestar Galactica comic book series to start in May. If you haven't seen the new TV series you have been missing out on some great story telling. banktoaster • Middlebury College has their digital image archive available online. Check it out, there are some images from their past Bread Loaf Conferences, manuscripts from Longfellow, Whitman, Thoreau, Bierce, Alcott, including some nice Vermont postcards. hey mikey • Michael Palin's ‘Himalaya’ added to geography curriculum in English schools almost naughty • once upon a time there was a comic book....THE comic book to end all comic books: Transmetropolitan, A little dose of HST, a large serving of distopian vision, wit and wisdom from the twisted mind of Warren Ellis. But 60 issues later it was gone, lucky for you, some blogger has loaded issue #8 "Another Cold Morning" onto the net,even better Warren Ellis isn't upset, he is encouraging people to read it. I say read it, there is more where that came from. Adult fare • On the spur of the moment, I grabbed the box set Dick Cavett Show : Comedy Legends off the shelf at the video store. For those of you who are experiencing this neo-Vietnam era for the 1st time around, you may never have seen television for grown-ups, but it did exist and is now enshrined on the same media format that you can find Dukes of Hazzard and Survivor. The closest we have to Cavett presently would be Charlie Rose and James Lipton. Intelligent conversations between people who aren't just famous for being famous. Cavett has topped off these 'best-of' sets with some new introductions, and tossed in some clips of his precendent morning show. I was dumbfounded when he spent 10 minutes of one episode, reading letters from viewers of the Joan Baez /Alan Ginsberg program, which unfortunately is not on this set or the Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons box set. The letters were both pro and con, irate and complimentary, it was truly fair and balanced programming. Anyways, it wasn't book oriented but I just thought I'd share. BTW the Shout Factory also has a box of Jack Parr Shows which is now on my wish list. 8) Damn, I love DVD techology!

Funniest book you never read #4

The Haphazard Gourmet by Richard Gehman (1966) I am almost loathe to share this title with you, it's one of the titles I keep in multiples, so I always have one to give away. I wouldn't want to create a rush on it, leaving me unable to afford to buy more. Richard Gehman was a writer. You could look him up, he was a successful magazine writer, teacher, biographer, mentor, novelist, journalist etc, etc, etc . . . by the time I read this book he had been dead 10 years. I bought it by the cover, it could have been blank, I'd have bought it anyway. Well, actually I think I got it when I was 15 and slaving away at library sales, back before they became full of soccer mom politics, so I may very well have stolen it. I had become addicted to a form of 'light non-fiction' that is no longer practiced. A sort of humorous creative autobiography that would never pass muster in this post Frey-era. Master practitioners were Alexander King, Jack Douglas, Bob Hope; whose anecdotes be they whole truth or whole cloth always go over better in the first person. Gehman's Hapharzard Gourmet, is in this vein, it just happens to be segmented into 'recipe' entries, and sure enough actual mouthwatering concoctions do appear amidst tales, but you gotta read to get at em. I'm one of those foodies who reads cookbooks for fun, I prefer the MFK Fisher kind, but that's a high bar to set. So I settle for food essay books and cookbooks with more prose than recipes, but very damn few of them can make me droolwith just mere words. Gehman can. He imparts his mad passions for cassoulet, bean soup, barbecue sauce, caviar, Sardi's, scrapple, or Tabasco sauce, whether you would normally like those things or not. He wrote some of them most savory phrases I have ever read: "Quick cook beans are for people who eat TV dinners; they are not for you if you have any respect for your stomach," "The bird will be as brown as a Tahitian maiden when you take it out of the oven," "Throw in three onions the size of shrunken heads from South American Indians (this recipe can get expensive, for you may have to go to South America and buy a shrunken head to find out how big one is.)" My favorite recipe in the book is for Bean Soup . Here is a .txt file of Gehman's Bean Soup recipe in its entirety, in the book it takes up 4 delicious pages. I take the book off the shelf and read this recipe at least once a year, by now I can recite it. It's a good stew of food and humor and wit.

the ephemeral - jerry blaz

From: Jerry Blaz Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 1:45 PM I noticed that you had something about an ephemera show in Lansing, MI coming up. The link led to a mention of how ephemera is still going strong as a collecting area, etc. and mentioned postcards. Most postcards were sent from places the senders were not from, in short, from travelers to places not home. And while most postcards probably said nothing more than "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here," occasionally they were short epistles written small and around the margins of the small area given to the message. When I was a neophyte in the business, I found myself running a table where I was only one of several bookdealers among mostly ephemera dealers who were offering simply postcards, and while it was a bad business investment for me as a bookdealer, it gave me the opportunity to learn something about this area of collecting. It also gave me an opportunity to learn something about how impressarios of these fairs would hide the fact that we were going to be out-of-place by being bookdealers at their show. I don't know if many people are still using postcards to communicate their vacation experiences with portable emails, cell-phones, easy "long distance," etc., but very often the postcards had artwork on it depicting the exotic locale in Michigan or Iowa that was being visited, usually a photo in color, and these were popular when photos didn't come in colors. I haven't received a postcard in years, and the only ones I've received in the past few decades have been from cruise travelers who drop off at strange and exotic locales where they see the same "made-for-tourist" shops at every port. As a dealer, I have dabbled in postcards, but I don't think of myself as a connoisseur of them. They were offered by people to us who didn't want them anymore, and, if the price was right, it was something to have in an open shop when someone came in requesting postcards. So I always had at least a shoebox full of them around. The average collector of postcards appears to be female and, from my necessarily limited experience, quite mature. Most of the specialist dealers in postcards are also female. I don't make this statement as a scientifically-extracted fact from a formal survey but as an anecdotally-extracted statement based on my 30 year+ experience. Postcards seemed to become less popular after WWII, and most of the collections I've seen are late 19th and early 20th century postcards. There are people who collect one particular kind of postcard, and the sub-categories are quite varied. For instance, some chose postcards that have a religious theme. Others have postcards that depict means of travel, or some particular means of travel, such as railroads, which would more likely be a male collector. I have seen collections based on plants, landscapes, humor, and fashions. There still are postcard and ephemera shows in our area, but I haven't had the urge to attend for at least a decade. But in my mind's eye, I can still see the dealers sitting with the long rows of postcards that just fit and are neatly sitting in boxes with the faces out to the viewers/customers like the cards in a library's box catalogue, and chairs where they can sit down and browse through those boxes on the table. Jerry

WOD - offset (2)

offset (2) n. the transfer of ink or acidity from one page to another, as in the case of an ink inscription touching the facing page. ". . . endpapers have offset from laid in newspaper clipping."

new directions

okay folks this is quick and dirty, cause as always i am supposed to be someplace else doing something that will earn my keep, feed my cats and keep from living in cardboard board the rest of my natural. as far as visitor numbers go, yesterday was our worst day ever since I started this blog, i don't know why, may be i didn't shower or I spit on sidewalk crack, who knows? All i'm gonna say is, if there are certain features about the Bullpen you like, don't like, hate, despise, loathe, love, adore or admire, let me know about it. I f it's not good i will cut it out, if it's a hit, i will do more of it. but the comment fields are there for a reason. How am i ever gonna get rich and famous like this?

worth a looksee

mixed up media • the Reduced Shakespeare company is performing All the Great Books (Abridged) in Buffalo, NY until April 9th. The Reduced Shakespeare Company's homepage has their tour schedules. essay • from the Lansing CityPulse we get a piece on ephemera's steady popularity. audio • NPR covers the new translation of 'Persian Book of Kings' events • New York Magazine gives a run down of the readings happening about town, apparently public readings in bars is the new HOT ticket. alcohol and books, who knew? in the gene • 14,400 words about Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On, with some audio downloads. talking heads • NC Second graders interview Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne histoblog • Military Historian Mark Grimsley just won award for his academically related blog - really it seem the more chaff i wad thru the more wheat i find - go figure. cookie • Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln won the New-York Historical Society first Book Prize for American History. silly shopping • things you find while looking for other thing, t-shirts and other things with snarky writing related comments for those who buy or wear such things. blog of note • BibliOdyssey is a blog devoted to illustrations from old book. and is WELL worth checking out. I will be adding this one to the sidebar. dinner & a book • a TN reading group called "the Pica 18 Bold" group is the focus of this cheerful piece. reviews • A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore • Quite Honestly by John Mortimer peekaboo • Ethan Persoff collects wierd comics books and loads the scans on his site.

everday rebellions

“There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Albert Camus essays • from the Berkeley Daily Planet, Thoughts On The Notion Of Fictional Suicide by Dorothy Bryant. • from the New York Observer, Ralph Gardner Jr. loans his Crumb collection to Vassar SF events • SFist.com has a nice little blog listing upcoming author appearances in the city on a hill. rebellion • Toronto bookstore owners are loaning out copies of a Three Wishes by Deborah Ellis after the Toronto public school board restricted access to it. goliath alert • Peter Beagle is being screwed over by the folks who turned Last Unicorn into a film, and he needs our help to fight back. cookies • Marilyn and Charles Baillie have announced a new children's literature prize for Canada. Books eligible for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award must be written in English, be aimed at readers aged three to six, be written and illustrated by Canadians and be published first in Canada. • Winners announced for Kiriyama Prize, Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter won the fiction prize, while the nonfiction award went to Piers Vitebsky's The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia. • The creators of Shelton's Creative Writer's Workshop will receive the inaugural Arizona Literary Treasure Award at the Arizona Book Festival. The award was created to honor individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the state's literary culture. off the rack • interesting litigation: a gaming hint book author is suing the owners of World of Warcraft for getting him kicked off ebay. Seems to me this will test what's left of the 'fair use' part of copyright law. Unauthorized guides have been around as long as role playing games themselves. banktoaster • Powerpoint download European Geography Quiz I got 36 out of 44. off topic • interesting piece about the criminalization of pirate broadcasting, play a song, go to jail.

report from the front - Watanabe

re: the 27th Annual Vintage Paperback Collectors Show "I had the pleasure of spending several hours with Chris Volk yesterday at the LA Paperback Show and also met Shep Iiams. We also connected with one of my favorite people, Jerry Blaz, who knows Chris from the IOBA board. Alice and Marty Massoglia's table acted as a meeting point for Chris and I. Hard to believe they have occupied that same corner spot for at least the 16 years I have been going to the show. Ray Bradbury did not show, but that wasn't totally expected given his health. Laura Freas was there, but Kelly was missed. He passed away about a year ago. I only bought one book, "The Paperback Art of James Avati", (ISBN 1880418711) by Piet Schreuders & Kenneth Fulton. Avati also died last year. It is not a price guide, but a great reference book with one bibliography for his Signet/New American Library books and another for all the other publishers who featured his covers. It is really more than a reference book. It's one I'll spend time to read. Lots of background info and pictures of the sets and models he used. Also, his critiques of certain covers. Apparently, he and Salinger had quite a conflict over the cover for "Catcher in the Rye." Salinger did not want any faces to show since he had never described Holden nor his sister looks. Avati said that was fine for people already familiar with the story, but would not make a connection with new readers. Neither was happy with the final product because the publisher had him put a white rectangle to the right of Holden, where they put the blurb, "This unusual book may shock you, but . . ." Avati said it didn't even look like his work after they got through with it. There are lots of snippets of correspondence between Avati and publishers and authors, so while it is a visual treat, there is a lot of good reading. For many of us older folks, his are the covers on our first readings of many classic novels of the mid-century, so it is a litle trip down memory lane as well. " from Mary Watanabe

p is for plagarism • blogs may be rampant with text lifted directly from the main stream news (not that that ever happens HERE) but is the AP guilty of lifting news from blogs? phone books • Japan launches electronic books and comics specifically for phones. idiot alert • Virginia Hamilton’s, The House of Dies Drear is being challenged as unsuitable as required reading because the story lacks moral grounding and advocates revenge. sheesh...guess that also means the bible and the morning paper is out of bounds too. 8( naughty • The British Library unveils its list of missing items; Among the pilfered pieces are A Manchester City football programme from 1905, a Led Zeppelin CD and 17 Rolling Stones albums. The British Museum has also been the victim of the razor blade print and map lifting crew. bank toasters • from the New Yorker we have a short story from Chris Adrian: Better Angel. • from BMW a new free audio book Karin Slaughter : Cold Cold Heart, so far i have found this series totally enjoyable. from NPR salesmen • Tony Kushner has edited the Library of America collection Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961 oh god • On Point had Matthew Stewart, author of The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World for a discussion of Leibniz, Spinoza, and a new telling of the fate of God in the modern world. birthday boy • Mark Kroll muses on Herr Mozart's 250th birthday worldwide. mixed media • Betsy Sherman gives us a fair and balanced review of the movie version of Christopher Buckley's Thank You For Smoking.

fair day at the fair

Well my trip to the Vermont Book Fair didn't go as planned...serves me right, "we make plans and god laughs." 1:20am post a small sunday blog to tide the troops over, ambitiously set clock for 5:45am 5:09am let loud red obnoxious cat out 5:45am turn off alarm roll over 6:45am get up in a panic, feed cats, let dog out, clean litter box, wash dishes, take out trash, pack bag 7:15am visit atm machine, get gas 7:45am make mental list of all the items left behind and decide if any of them are important to go back for. 8:00pm futiley spin dial for 2 hours try to find steadly NPR signal; watch increasingly boring and innoucous landscape go by, varying shades of brown dotted with mixed herds of cows and satellite dishes. 10:30am arrive at Vermont Book Show and realize free pass is pinned to wall over desk, 10:40am make the first pass of the bookstalls, greet the few people at the show I know, Eloquent Page, Cheryl Needle, Peter Stern, try to make a few new friends. 10:45am keep changing eye glasses, the light is too dim in the hall and I have either drunk too much Red Bull or not enough, super migraine takes up residence right behind my eyes. 11:00am make another pass looking at books I either used to own or can no longer afford. 11:30am meet up with Michael Ross who is in from the west coast trying to work out the kinks of his bi-coastal relocation 12:00pm take off to visit Monroe Street Books in Middlebury 12:30pm have been heading in the wrong direction for a half an hour; realize the Mapquest directions suck; reverse direction before I hit Canadian air space 12:40pm migraine is NOT going away; chug large MacDonalds Chocolate Shake hoping that resultant brain freeze will attack migraine from the inside 2:30pm arrive at Monroe Street Books, which is no longer located on a street named Monroe. go figure; Swallow asprin, doesn't really help. Otherwise, spend a pleasant after noon shooting the shit with Flanzy and Dick, in their Aladdin's cave treasure trove style bookshoppe. Limit myself to all the books I can afford. Plan to come back when scenery and wallet are both greener. 7:00pm start back for Methuen a hour away from a decent interstate, use unfamiliar routes 9:00pm miss exit for route 9, take long way around, end up in Western Mass, realize I have maps for ME, NH, VT, NY and Eastern Mass, but none for Western MA. On the bright side, I finally get a good NPR Signal, and listen to repeat of last week's This American Life. 11:00pm feed cats, walk dog, clean up all the little landmines, can't be bothered blogging, pass out.

old booksellers trick - erase, eraser, erasing, erasure

To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you're overdoing it. . . . except if you are a bookseller. This is my eraser collection...or the better part of it. I know I have vented my spleen about this before folks, but it costs almost nothing to clean up your book when you are listing it. I won't go into extensive eraser detail, basically when you are out and about, always look for erasers and buy the ones you don't have. When tackling something that ISN'T an author's signature, start with the white vinyl eraser as it has the least grit and the best chance of removing the typical shmutz found on an endpaper or dust jacket. From there you move on to gummy kind, like the grey rubber and the crepe, then the gritty kind, like the pink, red, and grey ink erasers - eventually if it's erasable, it will come off. You just have to balance the amout of elbow grease and grit, so you don't damage the surface. If you have a penchant for ex-library copies and text books, invest in an electric eraser....yes they cost a bundle ($65-80) bucks but they will save you many of hours of your life best spent doing other things. Electric erasers use 'sticks', which come in grey ink, red pencil or everybody's favorite white vinyl which I found surprising.

"A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance." Stanislaw Lem obit worth reading • Solaris author Stanislaw Lem dies at 84. new tool • Michael Ross stumbled on a new book multi-site search tool : www.bookfinder4u.com match books • Brooklyn's Wisdom, Knowledge, Overstanding Books had a suspicious fire yesterday and lost his valuable collection of religious texts. early bloomer • 13 year old Wisconsin boy translates 20 Icelandic children's books into English cookies • Female Iraqi bloggerof "Baghdad Burning" nominated for UK Samuel Johnson Prize for contemporary non-fiction. direct blog link. power shopping • A ship's log book written by John Lennon will go under the hammer next month, as well as a 5th grade excercise which is expected to net £1ooK. dystopia watch • a NY photographer was held, searched and questioned by police for 2 hours for shooting pictures of Westchester flagpoles. i wish i was making this shit up. naughty, naughty • Troy NY PTA president snitched book fair monies.

worth the read • This month's Bookforum features a good article on Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman (the executor of Parker's estate) by Marion Meade. from Rebekah Bartlett • they also have a piece on a new translation of Stefan Zwieg's Secondary Narrators audio • NPR Interviews Thomas Perry about his new thriller Nightlife • and while we are there, they had a few authors in to discuss a new series of Urban Noir anthologies Worth the listen. The Akashicbooks Noir series itself sounds wicked. interview • Pittsburgh online has an interview with Peter Abrahams. video • Interview with Bruce Sterling banktoaster • 16 minute Disney hygiene film VD Attack Plan, ya gotta check this out. green eyed monster • woman with perfect memory baffles scientists. overkill • from Mother Jones we get the 'Harper's Index-like' Intellectual Property Run Amok among the high points: • BILL GATES had the 11-million-image Bettmann Archive buried 220 feet underground. Archivists can access only the 2% that was first digitized. • THE CLASSIC civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize can’t be aired or sold because much of its archival footage is copyrighted. • THE PUBLISHER of Super Hero Happy Hour removed “Super” from the comic book title after Marvel and DC Comics stated they own the phrase “super heroes and variations thereof.”

1957• Alleging that the book was obscene U.S. Customs confiscated 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's book Howl, which had been printed in England. giggle • from a political blog Growl , a Howl for the new Millienium. wtf? • a San Antonio School Superintendent tried banning the Atwood's the Handmaids Tale fom the AP curriculum, where it had been for 10 years. why are people's brains run backwards these days? is there something in the water? burned book tour • from the DeMoines Register we get a review of "Fighting The Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings," a traveling exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is presently at the Drake University Museum. visit the HMM for the schedule specifics: March 26 - May 20 2006 • Des Moines, IA June 1 - July 31 2006 • Denver, CO August 13 - October 7 2006 • Albuquerque, NM October 20 - December 19 2006 • Williamsport, PA January 1 - February 28, 2007 • Seattle, WA March 10 - May 5, 2007 • Spokane, WA May 18 - July 12, 2007 • Amherst, MA July 25 - October 2, 2007 • Baltimore, MD October 13 - December 8, 2007 • St. Petersburg, FL February 24 - April 20, 2008 • Los Angeles, CA September 10 - November 4, 2008 • Park City, UT November 15, 2008 - January 10, 2009• Green Bay, WI essay • the NYT has a piece on the April 1st Edible Books Festival light reading • Guardian's Martin Kettle comparesVasily Grossman's Life and Fate favorably to War and Peace. polywogs • NC Middleschoolers have themselves a nifty Battle of the Books. Middleschoolers who read something that wasn't written by Rowling? I want proof. field trip • Alice Walker dropped in on some screenwriting students at Hampton University, VA mitzvah opportunities • Luckily the library systems doesn't look to FEMA for help rebuilding, to get in on the rebuild of the New Orleans libraries. To help rebuild Mississippi libraries. reviews • from the Guardian Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson • syndicated reviewer Meghan Daum runs down Women Who Make the World Worse: and How their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports. what? like i was NOT gonna find that? dead horses • from the Daytona Beach journal we have a funny think piece on Brown's Book That Consumed the World. Sony has started the DaVinci Challenge.com, where scholars and religious leaders have been invited to pick away at Brown's history. no such thing as bad publicity eh? banktoaster • okay , okay it's not a TRUE toaster, it's not free, but the demo is. Fontifier will take your handwriting and create a personalized font from it. That's just so silly.

fixing what ain't broke

ok, ok so I got a little button happy. But that's how I am I learn a new tool and I try to apply it everywhere until I find a happy medium. Please give me some feedback on the new sidebar buttons. I want to draw some attention to the bullpen features but I may have made it a little over. . . .zealous? anyway taste drive it. for anyone who cares I will checking out the Vermont Book Fair on Sunday. I dunno if I can post from there, but I will try.

from our event calendar

Saturday March 25th CT • 29th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament CA • California Indian Storytelling Festival VA • Virginia Festival of the Book ND • University of North Dakota Writer's Conference TN • Ocoee Story Fest TH • Bangkok International Bookfair 2006 TX • Aggiecon 37 MS • Coastcon 29 TN • Midsouthcon 24 Sunday March 26th VT • Vermont Antiquarian Book Fair CA • Vintage Paperback Collectors Show IL • 2006 World's Fair Memorabilia Show

remember this

"It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved." - Tom Wolfe flashback • from the CJR Jack Shafer muses on the 40th anniversary of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Aide Test beaujolais • the NYPL has released their list of 25 Books to Remember from 2005 and l@@k more lists!! . . . sorry having a moment there, I'm a 'list maker'. podcast • Guardian Book Club, Kazuo Ishiguro talks to UCL professor of English, John Mullan very naughty • In 1967, Paul Krassner published Mad artist Wally Wood’s Disney parody as a centerspread for his satirical magazine, The Realist, and then as a poster, you can again buy the poster at Krassner's site. short shelved • the Washington Post has a nice piece on folks out there who have more books than shelves and don't have the excuse of being used book dealers. Doesn't everyone live like this? stoopid ekonyme • Scholastic shows weak earnings and is looking at massive layoffs. There are some parts who think this has been a self inflicted wound. worth reading • from the Times Online Waldemar Januszczak deciphers the Michelangelo 'code' dead horses • Blythe Brown has been crowed indispensable literary spouse along with include Vera Nabokov, Olivia Twain and Tabitha King. Is it just ME or have they seriously run out of Dan Brown crap to print? mitzvah • Several Grand Rapids MI schools are sending more than 11,000 books to replenish libraries in a hurricane-hit Mississippi school district. flipside • Apparently the UK Love your Libraries program is riddled with irony, since the government that sponsored it, has also has let the actual number of books purchased for the libraries to dwindle. new century, old conflicts • A Turkish Cypriot was fined £700 for not declaring an old book belonging to a Greek Cypriot to the Antiquities Department. ya gotta read a little bit between the lines of the report, but it's excessive no matter how you twist it. banktoasters • Ajaxwrite - an online word processor that loads in 6 seconds, resembles a traditional application, opens and edits Microsoft .doc files accessible from any Internet connection, works with any OS and is free. The only drawback is that it only works with Firefox as yet. (they are working on more browser work arounds) BTW if you are still using IE and Netscape you should try Mozilla's Firefox, it's much more user friendly. • Instructions for Making Your Own Stationery with MS Word, specifically all the little settings to create: notecards, postcards, organizer pages, gift certificates etc . . .

old bookseller trick #3 - bone folder

Bone Folders - I'm sure you have seen these mentioned in various places. They are highly polished pieces of bone that are used for folding, smoothing, scoring, creasing, and working materials in and out of tight corners. But really what they are is an extension of your hand. In a pinch you can use another makeshift tool but there really is no substitute. There was a time when you had to order them from a specialty vendor, but they are turning up in the craft and paper stores. Usually only in one size, but it will do for a starter. Once you stick one in your pencil cup, you will find yourself reaching for it often, and you will probably find a different size will to be more useful for you. These are just a few of the ones I have kicking around, I think I have more somewhere. The large thick ones are perfect for smoothing pasted items, or burnishing archival tape, and the smaller, thin, sharp, pointy ones..(my personal favories) are like an 11th finger with a sharp fingernail. When you are folding acetate for dust jackets after the 4th or 5th you are tempting a blister. Depending on size they go for 4 to 10 bucks, and now come in Teflon . . . which I suppose is good too, but I'm a traditionalist, I prefer bone. If you keep them clean and polished, you can sculpt them with sandpaper to your own specifications. I once took a seminar with Bernard Middleton, who has been working as a book binder since he was 15 in 1939...and THAT's how old his bone folder was . . . it was the tiny yellowed nubbin of a thing. The picture of antique bones is from the Indiana University Libraries Preservation Repair and Enclosure Treatments Manual. Worth checking out.

everything old is new again

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. " - Richard Wright worth seeing • First editions of 15 major works of Richard Wright will be on display at Pitt's Hillman Library Through April 30th. shutters • from NPR Dave Dutton's North Hollywood book store is closing its doors after 46 years. cookie convention • the Hugo and Campbell Awards Nominations are out and the winners will be announced at L.A.con IV, the 64th World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Anaheim, California, 23-27 August . power shopper • A Harry Potter fan with more money than brains spent more than £2000 for a Goblet of Fire signed by the cast of the movies. love story • 'The Love Libraries' UK campaign to transform the image of public libraries has the support of the likes of Nick Hornby, Philip Pullman and Margaret Drabble. dead girl talking • Sebold's Lovely Bones chosen by a Malibu HS student committee for a campus wide reading event . . . much to the horror of their parents. worth the read • a tale of authors Adolph Hitler, John Fante and Stackpole books. reanimation • Illustrator Bob Staake & Fantagraphics have re-envisioned the 160 year old Sturwwelpeter memento mori • A play adapted from the Marguerite Duras autobiographical 1950 novel A Dam Against the Pacific (Un Barrage Contre le Pacifique) will open in Ho Chi Minh City to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the French writer's death. breast or wing ? • A first edition 1948 Donald Duck comic book is being held in custody in Sweden during a divorcing couple's drawn-out custody battle. diversify he said • Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz winner of the Bancroft Prize for history also holds the untenured position of "historian-in-residence" at bobdylan.com and was a Grammy nominee for his liner notes to Dylan's "Live 1964," released in 2004. self serve • Libraries are looking at technology that lets books check themselves out. obit worth reading • Jade Snow Wong, 84, Fifth Chinese Daughter Author, Ceramicist bob review • Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns booktv • (VA) C-Span's Booknotes will visit Ram's Head Book Shop @ Towers Shopping Center in Roanoke from noon to 3 p.m. March 29. mixed media • M. Night Shyamalan is writing a children's picture book of Lady in the Water to coincide with the release of his film. interview • Ithacan interview with Rachel Maines, author of Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. giggle • RMN's Patti Thorn test drives ArcaMax's Classic Book by chapter a day email service.

if wishes were horses . . .

pb & o • from the NYT - Edward Wyatt catches the rest of America up on the surge of paperback orginals and perhaps the demise of hardcover literary fiction. was this really a surprise? waterlogged • N.O. Bookstores do gangbuster business replacing cookbooks lost to Katrina. Meanwhile the Washington Post offers a few tips on creating a family cookbook, in case of future catastrophes..do you think they know something we don't? here's kitty • from the Bermuda Gazette we get a review of The Well-Lettered Cat written by California couple; Porter Evans and designer husband Edward Ferro and combines the couple’s seemingly uncombinable interests – typography and cats. The part I found interesting was that the book isn't listed anywhere except their own website ISBN 0976883708 hey, i thought it sounded cute. ever ready • Oswego's Winter Club: books, tea and the ladies since 1884 and still going strong. books, they aren't just for kids • They are choosing up sides in Canada over a kids book called Three Wishes by Deborah Ellis. uk auction • A collection of rare natural history books will go under the hammer for the benefit of the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust on March 23. odd socks • we have another entry in our overdue library book Olympics, a fella in the UK kept Exploring Bridges by Geoffrey Williamson out for 43 years. I'd wish I'd known there was a contest. :( theocracy watch • A bill that allows public high schools to offer classes on the Bible sped through the Georgia House Monday, passing overwhelmingly with no debate. I'm ready to wake up anytime now.

report from the front - Jerry Blaz

From: Jerry Blaz Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 9:46 PM Subject: Tom Stoppard argues that free speech is not an inalienable human right Tom Stoppard's thoughts about the relativeness of the right to free speech to living in a liberal society stops short of considering all the other freedoms that network with that idea. Just today, in the L.A. Times there is a story of how, in Indonesia, ostensibly a nation that separates mosque and state (Indonesia is at least 90% Muslim), many people serve jail terms for deviance from Islam as decided by a group of local Muslim clergy or the Indonesian Ulema. One is sitting in his prison cell because he wanted to pray in Indonesian because he feels that 70 percent of the Indonesians do not know the meaning of the Arabic prayers. What does this tell us? That if there is freedom of speech, there is also tolerance for other opinions. It tells us that no matter how we view or do not view the metaphysics of our existence, it's OK, and the state will see that we are not persecuted for that. It means that Voltaire is saying to a holocaust survivor, that as wrong as a David Irving might be, he should not be sitting in an Austrian jail for denying the holocaust. He might be a stinking bit of moral drek, but he should be able to say what he wants, even though the idea of using up shoe leather picketing his imprisonment by Austria is a disheartening thought. I believe in the power of ideas, but if you cannot express your ideas, if the "marketplace" is closed to your ideas by law, and you go to jail for it, that is wrong. Today, while being gay or lesbian may be denounced by churches, etc., gender-benders have the right to express their ideas in words, attire, lifestyle or deed. In the area of sexual deviance, there are still many areas of lifestyle that are prohibited because they involve acts that victimize others, and it is serious cause for reflection, these include such practices as pedophilia and necrophelia. However, in the area of pedophilia, the mere possesion of pedophilic material is prima facia evidence of the victimization of a child, though it has been my belief that collection of "child pornography" can, in many cases mitigate the need to actually engage in pedophilia. Rather, society today registers these individuals, track them, permitting the persecution of them after they have "paid their debts to society" and try to find ways to prevent them from rejoining society. In the end, "freedom of speech" is abridged for these people, and society has still not found an answer other than outlawing the very possession of such material. So even in a country like the U.S., there are abridgements of freedom of speech. Certainly, when you know that conversations could possibly be wiretapped if you are calling your cousin in Winnipeg from the U.S., this very knowledge may abridge your personality and speech. So, rather than thank my lucky stars to be born in a country that views "freedom of speech" as an inalienable right, it is more important to protest any abridgement of it. Jerry Blaz/mybookiejoint.com

if it's tuesday . . .

"The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people." - Geoffrey Chaucer pen prez • Ron Chernow will succeed the novelist Salman Rushdie as the president of Pen American Center. check it out • Even though he's been dead for 600 years author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer has a blog wherein he answers readers questions. Why didn't I think of that? and not to be outdone here's a Shakespeare's Sonnet: "shall i compare thee to a summer's day" translated into a programming language. ever get the feeling some people just have too much time ontheir hands? essay • from the Guardian, J G Ballard muses on modernist architecture and death. • from the NYT, Edward Rothstein muses on the health of the conversation. giggle • from Blogcritics site, Joan Hunt thinks if "Pimps Think They Have it Hard - They Should Try Editing" NPR • Edward Cotham, editor of The Southern Journey of a Civil War Marine: The Illustrated Note-Book of Henry O. Gusley, the diary of a Union Marine who was captured by Confederate soldiers on Sept. 8, 1863, guests on Morning edition. covering covers • Magritte’s Impact on Book Cover Design from the WBUR's arts blog. who's hot • Kite Runner's Khaled Hosseini talks to audience in Gainesville event • KitchenAid® The Book And The Cook® Food Network event - Philadelphia March 17-26 wurrah • Scottish Profs are worried that Edinburgh publisher Canongate's revamp of their Classics series will leave important works of Scottish literature out of print. Oh please, is anything REALLY ever OOP anymore? dystopia watch • the Federal Trade Commission subpoened Google for the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. This is unrelated to the Department of Justice's subpoena obit bit • all the info I have so far - founder and owner of the Montreal bookstore Argo Books, John Lamont George,(82) died last Wednesday. An integral part of the downtown intellectual community for 40 years, George left the store to longtime employees Jim McPhail and his assistant.

lingo bingo

Before I even start this, I know I'm gonna get comments up the wazoo . . . well, have at it, as I always say what's the point of writing things everyone agrees with? For some strange reason newbie booksellers on the Bibliophile Mailing List, email me off list with basic questions about the trade. I don't know if it is because they think I'm smarter or friendlier than anyone else, or if they think that I won't think less of them just for asking what they think are dumb questions, but nevertheless for the last few years people have been asking me stuff. Yesterday's question centered around an obscure late 19th century title that had dueling copyright years; one on the verso and another on an interior illustration. The verso is the the back of the title page, where the copyright traditionally usually lives. Actually it's the back of any page, and the recto is the front, but if someone just says 'verso' this is the page you want. This verso said 1888 and the illustration said 1895. So, was someone smoking opium? This newbie, like all newbies, is trying to speed teach themselves bookselling by using other people's listings to research the books in hand. But not all listings are alike, in fact a good portion of the people listing books on the internet don't know their verso from a hot rock. (my friends are laughing cause they know I usually insert a few vulgar epithets here) Never assume that what you are reading is gospel (including this) and figure out which booksellers KNOW a hot rock when they see one. But I digress. Back to the book in hand, because of the later copyright date, one can conclude that the book was NOT printed in 1888 and hence is NOT a first edition, first printing. Another of my pet peeves: first versus later printings. RARELY will a book be refered to as a 'first edition' if it is NOT a first printing of that edition. I say rarely because it happens, but not so much as you would think. There is a trend on the internet, especially on fleabay, to present later printings as 'first editions'. This is a shame (and a crime), since you shouldn't HAVE to verify the printing, but then you shouldn't have to ask someone not to drop kick your package all the way to the post office, but there you have it. Never assume, always ask, and a never call a reprint 'a first edition', call it what it is: a later printing. Sometimes, a 2nd or 3rd printing can be of interest, such as with Harry P. #1, where the first 3 printings were very small, and it's nicer to have a 2 than a 4, but that's rarely the case. I digressed again didn't I? After a tiny bit of research (read:Googling) the author I found that the book was indeed originally printed in 1888. Therefore, the illustration must have been added to a later print run. I have seen this happen more often with frontispieces, that's the illustrated page that comes BEFORE the title page, sometimes the 1st printing HAD one and to save money they removed it from later printings, OR they decide that adding illustrations will cause renewed interest. Who knows? the late 19th was rife with printers, and they weren't all conscientious about changing the information on the verso everytime they did something just for the benefit of people 100 years away. Coincidentally, the question I had a few days ago regarded the difference between a printing and an edition. USUALLY the difference is obvious. If the same printing plates are used, it is usually just a later printing, as in our 1895 reprint. But if the textural contents are changed beyond fixing errata (mistakes), as in revisions, new introductions, forwards, etc it should be considered a new edition. If the publisher changes the size, format or resets the type, it's a new edition. If the book changes publishers it's a new edition. Use your eyes, if it looks different, it's most likely a new edition. So what have we learned Dorothy? We learned never assume as well as verso, recto, printing, edition, frontispiece and errata. Ask yourself why does it matter if you know these words, "I can't use them in my listings, my customers won't know what I mean and they won't buy my books, and I will go broke, and I will get evicted and I will have to live in a cardboard box and then I won' be able to Tivo the Sopranos!" Oh ferchrissakes! you would think I was asking you to actually WORK for your money or something. Look you got a 10 dollar book, and a 5 dollar listing, fine, I agree. But as even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then, what if you are listing a $100, $1000 or $10,000 book? If you were the buyer would you settle for a $5 description? These should get much more professional treatment. You want people to trust you with the big bucks, you have to sound like you know your ass from a hot rock. And you can't go around lifting other peoples descriptions, it's not nice AND worst of all there may not be one. You are gonna have to write it from scratch yourself. You don't even have to BUY research materials anymore, there are plenty of sites on the net with glossaries and diagrams, all free. Just root around for one. Teach yourself a new word every day. So that when you HAVE to ask someone for help, you are both on the same page. Thus endeth the lesson. hmmm, perhaps I need to start an advice column. • Stanford's Conservation Online Resource • IOBA Glossary of Book Terms • ABAA Glossary of Book Terms

votes not to be tallied in florida or ohio

People keep asking me how I can afford to keep this up. Well, I have no life and no 2 legged dependents, so as long as I get the dishes done, books catalogued, deodorizer bottled, orders filled, packages mailed, etc . . . I can devote the rest of my day to keeping you folks entertained. As you can imagine I don't sleep much. The question is: Should I do as every one else, add discrete google adsense ads or big flashing box ads to the unused margins of this blog? Or do you think that will take away from your patronage? We don't get that much foot traffic here to begin with. thanks j- godsey email me

member submissions

pawning pooh • 2 early Milne Poohs with a melancholy history are up for auction in the UK for a worthy cause. in from Rebekah Bartlett fun with words • for those who like complicated poetry forms, McSweeney's sestina-only poetry page. in from Win Shaffer geek love • trek passions , a free personals site for science fiction lovers, including but not limited to Star Trek. Find others who share your passion for sci-fi. Meet people who read Asimov, Bova, Heinlein, Adams, Clarke and more. The site also offers chat and other services. in from Ira Joel Haber cover judging • The Robert Stanley Cover Archive • Vintage paperback and Digest cover archive • the Modern Library dust jacket archive in from David Klappholz totally tubular • UCSB music collection an incredible archive of early 20C American music that you can download, song by song. NYT just ran a piece on this Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project.

novel idea • Gainesville, GA Bible/book repair day - April 4 . The Hall County Library System is offering to help people with books or bibles in need. Jack Kyle of the National Library Bindery will provide free estimates on the cost of repairing or restoring those old texts. Should you want a repair, Kyle can take books to a company in Roswell. They'll be returned to the library in two months. That's just freakin brilliant. worth the read - from the Guardian • a nifty piece on ghostwriting by Tim Adams. • When novelist Elaine Dundy learned she was losing her sight she fought despair, recalling the tenacity of her friends Aldous Huxley and James Thurber. • Tom Stoppard argues that free speech is not an inalienable human right other people's research •Allen Esterson gives us the low down on Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife,and Alberto Martinez gives us another point of view on Mrs Einstein. rhyme time • Dan Schneider gives us a few thoughts on The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, from the simon magazine site, which is rather readable. hi, spy • Just when you thought you had heard all the stories, the Toronto Star gives us Ernest Hemingway the secret agent. banktoasters • In honor of National Poetry month the friendly folks at Knopf will email you a poem a day for the month of April and they have all the poems from 2005 available. • the New Yorker gives us a short story from Louise Erdrich: Gleason • The Granta site has quite a number of pieces from previous issues available to read.. obit worth reading • Lucille Emch 96, a longtime University of Toledo librarian and rare books scholar. reviews • Anna of All the Russias by Elaine Feinstein [about Akhmatova] • Rome, Inc. by Stanley Bing

guest blogger - Andrew Laties

Rebel Bookseller: How to Improvise Your Own Indie Store and Beat Back the Chains by Andrew Laties 320 pages. Vox Pop. ISBN: 0975276344 Barnes & Noble and Borders are posting record numbers and Amazon masters the universe, but are we bookpeople their slaves forever? Monopolies and oligopolies have always been trampling the asserted rights of individuals whenever possible. Take for example copyright, once there was none. But today's laws that protect the weakling authors are the outcome of centuries of battle. Compare Google's recent assertions about the violable nature of authors' copyrights to the great Whig lawyer, Lord Camden who in 1774, successfully fought to destroy the existing tradition of copyright and combined Pope's opinion of the generality of booksellers with his own aristocratic scorn of the man who made his living by the pen. "Knowledge", declared Lord Camden, "has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated.... Glory is the reward of science, and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views: I speak not of the scribblers for bread, who tease the press with their wretched productions; fourteen years is too long a privilege for their perishable trash. It was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, and Locke instructed and delighted the world; it would be unworthy such men to traffic with a dirty bookseller. When the bookseller offered Milton five pounds for his Paradise Lost, he did not reject it and commit it to the flames, nor did he accept the miserable pittance as the reward of his labour; he knew that the real price of his work was immortality, and that posterity would pay it." -Frank Mumby, "Publishing and Bookselling: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day" (1954. London. Jonathan Cape.) 190-1. By this argument of course only the rich could afford to write and publish! Yet, though Lord Camden won that day, authors ultimately regained their copyrights, as did those dirty booksellers, who were that era's publishers. Perhaps Google's modern-day attack on copyright is only a sideshow: the big battle today is over centralization of distribution and the consequent marginalization of small booksellers and publishers, along with the innovative, challenging, adventurous authors they champion. But here--as with copyright before--a change is coming: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few are under attack from all sides. As authors once had to fight to be paid for their writing, today independent booksellers and indie publishers are fighting to be paid for our own efforts. No chain-store systemized attack on indie stores--with hourly-wages for those would-be indie booksellers forced by default into chains' employment--can long endure. Wage slavery will lead to Rebellion; Masters of Capital, we'll see you in hell. -Andy • buy the book Rebel Bookseller • an audio interview with Andrew Laties • a video interview with Andrew Laties • povertyfighters.com

sunday bloody sunday

I just figured out that this blog is shite for trying to find something I KNOW I posted already. I listened to Eli Wallach the other day, and wanted to send someone to it, and I couldn't find it in my own BLOG! must devise better indexing. Apart from the fact that I can't remember the exact wording, the blog search function leaves much to be desired. streaming • Eye on Books has short podcast interviews with authors about their fortcoming books. • Expanded books does the same thing, but with video • Meet the Author does the same thing, but with video. • Meet the Author UK does the same thing but with video and a haughty accent. essays • NYT - Rachel Donadio: The Chick-Lit Pandemic • NYRB - Ronald Dworkin: the Right to Ridicule interview • NPR Vegetable Love by Barbara Kafka • BBC Melvyn Bragg's 3/16th show is about Don Quixote. reviews • Bloodstained Oz by Christopher Golden and James A. Moore • American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips • Samuel Menashe:New and Selected Poems having all kinds of wierd errors today, images later.

time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

bank toaster • okay you guys are gonna REALLY hate me for this one..... you thought the Bookworm Word Game ate up a lot of your day....I played this for 4 hours last night Babble shark jumping • Secrets of the Alchemist Dar, by millionaire author Michael Stadther, will incorporate riddles leading to 100 gems hidden around the world. milk n'cookies • Henry and Mudge and the Great Grandpas book claims the ALA's first Geisel Award: which will be given annually to the author and illustrator of a beginning-reader book that demonstrates "great creativity and imagination." biblio-geek • Amazon's Text Stats software calculates a variety of statistics for each book in the Search Inside program to find out how many big words there are and how long the sentences run. bobs* • The Sunday Times has a long piece extracted from the soon to be published Twelve Books that Changed the World by Melvyn Bragg. Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men On the Origin of Species (165%9) by Charles Darwin On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1885) by Michael Faraday Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare *bobs will be Books about Books.

old bookseller trick #2 - Lint roller & shoe brushes

Book cloth is just that, it's cloth. Call it the book's clothing and just like clothes, it attracts dust and dirt and lint AND cat fur. And if you haven't noticed, it's not washable. The dyes aren't water friendly. So before I drag out the spot remover, I reach for the lint roller and shoe brushes. You can remove a lot of gunk with those 2 things. This last week I have been having a fight with a dozen ready made post bound albums that are covered in BLACK book cloth...and well...I have cats...so basically without a lint roller, I would have probably lost what few of my marbles I have left.

todays events

1982: Judge halts 'obscenity' trial FL: First Annual Antiquarian Book Fair, Boca Raton FL International Conference On The Fantastic In The Arts FL Lee County Reading Festival FR Salon du Livre-Paris GA The Atlanta Spring Book Show NC Charlotte Spring Literary Festival NJ Lunacon NYC Triple Pier Antiques Show SF Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair TN Fantascicon 2006 TX: Austin Book & Paper Fair

the end of art

"The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going, but what were we doing here in the first place?" - Art Buchwald fare thee well • the ailing Art Buchwald gives us perhaps his last view from the pier in the Washington Post . And Editor and Publisher gives us perhaps our last look at Art Buchwald. talking heads • the AP interviews Judith McNaught and Seattle Post Intelligencer interviews Mary Pope Osborne. blue books • NH's Steerforth Press to produce three books in the "Playboy Press" collection: a literary anthology edited by Hefner, an erotic memoir and a collection of advice columns from Playboy magazine. hmmm I used to love picking up the 'Playboy' imprint paperbacks when i was a kid..they always had the bestest dirty jokes. crime tourist • Douglas Preston entangled in probe about real-life mutilation of eight couples in Tuscany foodie • NPR Steven Rinella discusses his new book, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, where he tries to revisit French master chef Auguste Escoffier's 1903 magnum opus, Le Guide Culinaire. Nice excerpt included. reading in tongues • NPR the New Testament has finally been Translated into Gullah. bibliogeeky • the OCLC has compiled the top 1,001 works most widely held by libraries. cookies • American Booksellers Association have chosen four books to be the 2006 Book Sense Books of the Year. end of days • Macaulay Culkin has a debut novel

drunken irish writers

where would literature be without drunken irish writers? Flann O'Brien John Banville Samuel Beckett Colm Toíbín Seamus Heaney Brendan Behan perhaps the most famous Irish writer of his time, and refered to himself as as "a drinker with a writing problem", was once hired to write an advertising slogan for Guinness. As part of his payment for this, the company offered him half a dozen kegs of their stout. After a month the company asked Behan what he had come up with; Behan had already managed to drink all of the beer they had given him and produced the famous slogan Guinness makes you drunk. banktoasters • Free Irish Literature online novels - The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The Dark Lady of the Sonnets by G.B.Shaw Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift The Playboy of the Western World by J.M.Synge Dracula by Bram Stoker short stories - Janey Mary by James Plunkett The Confirmation Suit by Brendan Behan The First Confession by Frank O'Connor The Reaping Race by Liam O'Flaherty

Casual Friday

"Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese! " - Wallace Wisconsin's largest used book sale, featuring more than 15,000 books, March 22-25 to benefit the Friends of the UW-Madison Library. Wisconsin Book Festival will be held on October 18-22, 2006 in Madison. Wisconsin Center for the Book will be holding the Wisconsin Book Bash April 22,2006. Wisconsin Center for Book & Paper Arts is running 20th anniversary exhibition: Paper Heritage: The Art of Books and Paper in Wisconsin. homeless • The 4,500 book and pamphlet collection called "Wisconsin's Own Library" started in 1949 and consisting entirely of works that were written or compiled by Wisconsin authors or are about the state, has overflowed the shelves of its current home and needs new one. moo • OH Louis Bromfield's experimental Malabar Farmopen to the public; Official Website. splice is nice • according to Boyd Tonkin's column, The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra manages to link The Name of the Rose and The Da Vinci Code. I can hear lawyers girding their subpoenas as I type. cookie • UC-SB Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has been awarded the Robert Ferrell Book Prize given by the Society of Historians for Foreign Relations, for Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. podcast • the Bat Segundo Show guest is William T Vollman. obit worth reading • John R. Gardiner, author of Stone Fox, dies at 61 bank toaster • Free audiobook Cold Cold Heart by Karin Slaughter is now available to download from bmw-audiobooks.com. event • CA the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has mounted '1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures." event • The 2006 North Carolina Festival of the Book announced their final schedule of 80 writers includes Tom Wolfe, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Pat Conroy and Pearl Cleage. There is a school of thought that Casual Friday may not be the best idea for internet booksellers, but then we could be wrong. image scrounged by Madlyn Blom and is not representative of any known bookseller, we hope.

Bullpen Bathroom Bookclub vol 5

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. " - Charles Kuralt Here We Are: The Humorist's Guide to the United Statesby Robert Wechsler (Editor) 224pp, 1991. ISBN: 0945774133 Most people who know me, know I don't do a lot of traveling . . . it's not for want of trying, at present I'm chained wrists and ankles to elderly family members and a plethora of pets. But I am a huge fan of armchair traveling of all sorts, and if it can bring a smirk to my lips all the better. I was given this little volume by a bookseller who has since passed away who knew my proclivity. This is a non-descript grey little anthology, with extracts and anecdotes from all of the best and the rest: Twain, Thurber, Benchley, Buchwald, Baker, Raban, Bemelmans, Cooke, Kuralt, Kipling, Forster, McCarthy, Golding, Trollope and so for and so on . . . all with one goal to remind us that above all . . . America is a silly place. Whether it is in the travelling or the destination the funnier side can be found of damn near anything America can throw at you. This volume in print or not, goes for a minor amount. But once you devour it, (another selection perfectly sized for privy reading) there are four more kicking around both sides of the pond: Savoir Rire: Humorists Guide to France When in Rome: The Humorists Guide to Italy In a Fog: the Humorists Guide to England All in the Same Boat: The Humorists' Guide to the Ocean Cruise

bibliophile - the mailing list

Dear Bullpen Reader: Are you wandering alone out there in the internet wilderness and are wondering where oh where have the other little puppies gone...then you are in luck!! The Bibliophile Mailing List, est 199_, is a moderated internet play area for people who collect and/or sell old books to having deep meaningful conversations, advertise for books, sell books, feign wit, accumulate friends, alienate enemies and generally keep tabs on the pulse of the antiquarian book-verse, both real and netbased. In case you are wondering what the Bibliophile Mailing list can do for you, here's a typical subscriber email that list owner Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson has passed along to us. Yes, I paid Lynn my Biblio fees, and the change was immediate! My acne cleared up, my voice deepened, and boy does my girlfriend notice the difference during our weekly "private time"! No more fumbling for me! I even felt energetic enough to knock off parts I- XXXV of the Stand saga by Stephen King and rip the binding off a Daniele Steele hardcover with one hand! You to can have these health, literacy and relationship enhancements with just one easy payment to a man living somewhere outside the country. You, yes *you*, can amaze your friends, and be the life of the party. No gimmicks, no tricky lotions or balky appliances. Just a simple international financial exchange*, and you get one full year of vim, vigor, intellectual expansion and even the occasional verbal fisticuffs, which you can participate in at no extra cost!** Please, send money today , as server space and patience is limited. Allow 6-8 hours for transaction to clear. You won't be very sorry! *some actual procedures have been modified for the purposes of making payment more exiting than, say, stubbing one's toe. **Participation through internet only. Showing up on another's doorstep unannounced after email exchanges may lead to restraining orders and/or blasts of gunfire. Management will not take responsibility for any injuries sustained in said acts. So with that in mind, sign yourself up for a free 2 week trial. Meet the best and the brightest bookish people on the internet . . . and I will be there too.

everybody has one

". . .they are hoping for a headline, which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes such good copy as a feud. "- Leslie Charteris The Bullpen had its second best day ever, due in large part to a spit fight that yours truly was involved in...well..instigated actually... on a comment thread. Don't look for it, it's gone. It flamed along nicely until someone ratted it out to an dis-involved third party and I deleted the entire fiasco to appease him...apparently he didn't want to be associated with the likes of us. C'est la vie. The original agitator tried to patronize me for being ignorant when in actuality I feign incompetence on many topics in order to provoke laughter, I am secretly a member of mensa's gold circle with a t-shirt, a decoder ring and everything. Why the hell he should give a damn what I think or write on a particular topic is beyond me. I'm a bookseller, I dwell in a trade which is founded and thrives by pure opinion. Aside from the books themselves, there are no actual facts, not like in baseball anyway. Sales, prices, values, auction records, sure they have occured, but are only someone's opinion of the value of particular book on a particular day. The next day the book may have an entirely different value. We spend years accumulating other people's opinions, and invent some of our own that we love to dust off and share. You see, like the rest of us I am used to shooting my mouth off, sometimes at my own foot, sometimes at someone else's provocative posterior. Caveat lector. I mock therefore I am. cover judging • the Robert Maguire cover art page has led Ira Joel and I off on an interesting tangent, we know there is at least two sites on the internet for every author in the world, but how many book cover artists are represented? Those of us who are fetishists about a book's physicality not just it's contents are particular suckers for sites like these. Here's one for George Salter and one for Alvin Lustig. and since we are in an artistic vein: 1000 words • Three law professors have collaborated on a comic book that explores the impacts of copyright on creativity, and examines both the benefits and costs of copyright in a digital age with Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain 1000 words² • After 7 years what started as a 22 page comic book inkling of the Book of Esther has turned in a graphic novel Megillat Esther by J T Waldman. research search • Some WI HS student research from the 60s may prove the provenance of Hitler's personal copy of His Kampf. worth the read • From the Freezerbox blog comes a nifty piece on travel reading "the Worst Book Fair Ever" which i found very entertaining. I am insanely jealous, original yet bookish content is damn hard to come by. I would kill for more stuff like that for the bullpen, but alas begging and stealing haven't worked, I will haev to try something more drastic. all that glitters • the LA trash can Les Miserable signatures turned out to be merely wishful thinking. in vino veritas • The NYT has a new blog about the pleasure of drinking wine, and beer and spirits by food critic Eric Asimov why didn't I think of that!! review • also from the NYT a profile of author James L. Swanson's Lincolnian obsession. cookie • US author Katherine Paterson was named winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. spawn • Rowling inspiree Canadian Matthew Skelto's Endymion Spring, has sold for a tidy enough sum that would choke a horse or two or six. pens envy • UK Six-year-old to become published author.

1939 • John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath was published. 1887 • Sylvia Beach founder of Shakespeare and company was born. company books • it seems book clubs are going great guns in this day and age. Here's a nice report from a Cinicinnati paper. Makes me wanna just run right out and make me some new friends. radio notes • by popular demand I must insert a plug for Says You radio program, which is brilliant radio, unfortunately to listen to past shows you need to pay for them from Audible.com, . Check the schedule to find your local broadcast. And if you root around you can find repeat broadcasts of the BBC show My Word that inspired Says You. dystopia watch • In little-known case, the PA Attorney General's Office has seized four hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper as part of an investigation into leaks to reporters. events • MA - there is an exhibit of illustrator Tomi Ungerer's work at the Boston Public Library through March 31st. WBUR has a nifty slide show. • VT- book artist Claire Van Vliet will speak on "Papermaking Collaborations in the Publication of Janus Press" on March 16 at 4 p.m. in the University of Vermont's Bailey/Howe Library. Her post-1990 work is on display through April 30 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Janus Press. • CAN the 14th annual Westmount (Montreal) Antiquarian Book Fair, will be held at Selwyn House School this Sunday, March 19. A Westmountl paper has a good piece on the Montreal book scene. who knew? • There is a travel agency online just for people with a literary bent, called...wait for it . . . Literary Traveller. Started by a young ambitious couple who figured out a way to turn something they like to do into a money making concern, something I have never been able to master. But if anything their site is full of lovely articles well worth reading. banktoaster • the BBC has a nifty site set up for writer wannabees, Get Writing which among other things has got a cool tool that lets you randomly sort cut out words, a la William S Burroughs, and is incredibly useful for writing ransom notes.

guest blogger -Jay A. Gertzman

Bookleggers and Smuthounds The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 Jay A. Gertzman 424 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 53 illus. Paper 2001 | ISBN 0-8122-1 Who Was Samuel Roth? He was perhaps the most multi-talented, and convicted, bookseller and publisher of the 20th century, and the one with the most enemies. His career started about 1917, and lasted until the early 1960s. Here are some brief highlights: • Opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1917 and met up with Frank Harris, Floyd Dell, Harry Roskolenko, and Sholem Asch. • Traveled to Europe in 1920 as a free-lance writer and poet. Got Ezra Pounds attention and planned an anthology of recent American literature which Pound endorsed. • After troubles with the police over publishing some Victorian pornography, he established a literary periodical in which he serialized a bowdlerized version of James Joyce's Ulysses. Despite his claims that Pound gave him permission, this act resulted in an "International Protest" against his piracy signed by over 100 contemporary writers. • Due to the notoriety, Roth began using aliases, eventually self-publishing his own work (he had at least 50 imprints during his career) under at least a half-dozen pseudonyms. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (again bowdlerized to get by the censors), with great success, under his Wm. Faro imprint. Also printed the first American unexpurgated piracies of the novel. Even wrote a play about it, in order to get hold of the copyrights. • Responsible for The Strange Career of Herbert Hoover Under Two Flags, a "scandal book" published close enough to the 1932 presidential campaign to disturb the Hoover White House staff and to allow Roth to claim some credit for the election of FDR. • After going bankrupt during the Depression, he blamed his colleagues, (possible the founders of Crown publishing, the Wartel brothers), and wrote one of the most anti-Semitic diatribes of all times, Jews Must Live, which repeats most of the worst cliches about Jews in business and politics. It was eagerly taken up by the Nazis, and Roth was ostracized by his community. He said his purpose was to provoke a re-evaluation of claims and counterclaims that would eventually reconcile the Jewish and Christian people. The book contained a drawing of Roth speaking with Jesus himself. • Roth was caught purchasing pornographic texts (left for him in subway lockers) so he could reprint them. Spent1936-39 in federal prison. • After World War II, developed a mail order business in borderline erotica under about 60 separate imprints and company names. The Post Office had to assign a small office staff exclusively to track down and prosecute his publications. • Published a expose book about Walter Winchell, as a result of which its author is attacked by thugs and the NYC police raid his offices and apartment, throwing out on the street or confiscating everything in his office, including furniture. • He testified before Kefauver Committee investigating obscene materials. Tells Kefauver that anyone who says he published anything but works of literary value should take an IQ test. • In 1957, aged 60, he was convicted of mailing pornography and sentenced to five years in prison. Served the entire time. The Justice Sept. lawyer focused on his publication, with Beardsley drawings, of Venus and Tannhauser ("if you allow this to be published, I can assure you the sewers will open"). The minority opinion in this case sets up a three fold test of obscenity that allows for the open publishing of sexually explicit books of literary value, staring with Barney Rosset's edition of Lady Chatterley' Lover, while Roth is serving his last sentence. Despite the self-hatred, piracy, pornography, and defiance of authority, Roth published, with their permissions, authors such as Milton Hindus, G. S. Viereck, Mark Hellinger, Maxwell Bodenheim, Ralph Cheyney, Clement Wood, and Gershon Legman. Because of his defiance of censorship over a 45-year career, culminating in the Roth Case, he is considered one of the legitimate champions of the First Amendment. Prof. Jay A. Gertzman Chapter Summaries Preliminary Checklist Of Samuel Roth's Imprints, 1920-40

naughty • Handwritten manuscripts by the well-known Japanese author Haruki Murakami have been sold in large quantities at second-hand bookstores without his permission. BTW the Random House official site for Haruki Murakami kicks ass. goodies • CA Library inherits 1,000 Science Fiction Book Club volumes from deceased Escondido resident. mitzvah • an American based humanitarian organization has donated over 31K books to Tigray Ethiopa to be distributed to technical and vocational training institutes and colleges in the state. worth winning • Here's a feel good piece about a DC young reader's program that seems to work: Everybody Wins! DC, a nonprofit organization that began in 1995 to promote children's literacy.

is this the end of rico?

Harper Collins has announced that Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events will come to an end with Volume #13 appearing on Friday October 13th, how indescribably appropriate. I will finally get to finish reading this series, I found them well written and deliciously black fun however I just couldn't tolerate the biblios-interruptus that occured at the last page of each volume.

digitization leads to un-balkanizaton.

The directors of the National and university library in Sarajevo, National and university library in Ljubljana, Serbian national library, Central national library in Cetinje, Information sciences institute in Maribor and the National and university library in Skopje, have signed an agreement for mutual cooperation in a joint strategy for faster access to the new European library, rapid digitalisation of the valuable texts and increased exchange of information and experience in the realms of electronic library information network COBISS. wouldn't it be really nice if libraries and the other members of the book verse formed their own coalitions regardless of the nonsense that politicians and armies got up to?

annie poo poos the lotus eaters

meow • from the Guardian Annie Proulx strikes back at the AMPAS voters: "We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture," Proulx wrote. "Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. "And rumor has it that [Lionsgate] inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of 'Trash' — excuse me — 'Crash' a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves and the debate over free silver." I will try to get the entire article from the Guardian. really cool • Bleak House flash animated at the BBC's very cool Charles Dickens site. long haul • Mexican author finishes 27 year long bilingual poem: Migrations / Migraciones. event • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be throwing their own edible book festival on April 3rd. April 1st : Check the official website for a full list of all the groups participating in this annual event : Australia - Brazil - Canada - England - France - Japan - Germany - Italy - Ireland - Japan - Luxembourg Mexico The Netherlands - New Zealand - Russia - U.S.A: Arizona, California, Colorado ,Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland/Washington D.C. , Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington,Wisconsin, Wyoming

fact checking

The Guardian is reporting that a copy of Shakleton's Aurora Borealis has been found in a stable in Northumberland. Monday March 13, 2006 The Guardian Paul Lewis A book published by Ernest Shackleton while he was in the Antarctic has been found in stables in Northumberland.The explorer is understood to have produced about 100 copies at his Antarctic base in 1908, and just under 70 are accounted for.His colleagues wrote items for the book, Aurora Borealis, illustrated by George Marston.This copy - the covers of which are made from wooden panels from a crate that contained marmalade - was signed by Shackleton to Lady Grey. The book is expected to fetch £20,000 when it is sold by the Newcastle auctioneers Anderson and Garland this month. Bookseller David G Anderson caught a couple of tiny errors in that. "Shackleton produced 90 copies of the appropriately-titled Aurora AUSTRALIS whilst at the winter quarters of the British Antarctic Expedition in 1908. 60 are accounted for in a census taken by John Millard in 1985 and possibly more by now (certainly this present one.) ref: Aurora Australis: The British Antarctic Expedition, 1907-1909 / [edited by] Ernest Henry Shackleton ; preface by Lord Shackleton ; introduction by John Millard (Alburgh, Harleston, Norfolk: Bluntisham, 1986) There is currently one copy on offer at ABE for $95,000 and, curiously, none on the ILAB site. Embarrassing for the book section of The Guardian to rush to print such an obvious confusion with the North Pole. Even their GBP 20,000 estimate should be more like GBP 50,000, I should think. David G Anderson Books

trash day • a signed 17-volume first edition of Hugo's Les Miserables as purported to be found in a Lousianna trash can. there's a flat signed joke in here somewhere i'm sure. retread • the AP has a happy little interview with Kaye Gibbons who is revisting her earlier creation. apparently you CAN go home again. nipped in the butt • the Arizona Senate killed a bill that would have allowed college students to opt out of reading books they considered offensive. I found algebra offensive as all hell...but did anyone give me a break? zoot suit • Dan Brown is using the UK media circus as a bull pullpit to flog his next book. word war • Jane Goodall and the great state of Nebraska are squaring off in a death match. The spry 72 yr old primatologist may have finally met her match in the cornhuskers. power shopping • Jan 28th PA book auction of box lots nets $45K pilgrimage • Australian journo Bruce McCabe gives us 700 words on his trip to Gutenberg's Mainz and what he saw there. will someone pay for me to visit someplace cool and write a book report on it? please? mitzvahs • Florida Atlanta University, Lynn University and four middle and elementary schools in south Florida have donated 5,000 books to the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast library. • Pittsburg area school district sends books to Katrina zone in from Win Schaeffer a site that markets among other things Nancy Drew Stationary, Address book, Note cards etc...and a Nancy Drew Guide to Life. who knew this stuff was still being made nevermind used.

hearing aid

NPR • Weekend Edition has Christopher Buckley talking about the moviefication of his prescient and fall down funny 1994 novel Thank You for Smoking. • Historian Richard Rhodes guests on Studio 360 to talk about nuclear weapons and the nuclear age. There is also a lovely exchange about how Dr. Strangelove really isn't all that strange. • WPLN's Fineprint has a lovely interview with the authors of Carved in Bone a forensic thriller based on the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research facility known as “The Body Farm”. yes i'm a ghoul. NPR - Flashback Poet John Ciardi had a program called On Words that ran from 1979-1986, sort of like an etymological Alistair Cooke, his voice has that sonorous Edward R Murrow timbre, definitely eminating from a previous age. These shows are now available online or as podcasts and are well worth the listen. Strangely I find only Daniel Shore's voice still stirs those forgotten embers. match book - Here's a fascinating flash site on the history of book burning from the United States Holocasut Memorial Musem. cooleth - terrific Shakespeare site (Flash required) describes how Will's words may not be his and his alone. obit worth reading - March 6th 1888 Louisa May Alcott, DYK ? the New York Times has their obit morgue available online.

funniest book you never read #3

"The problem for anyone writing satire today is competing with the front page." -Christopher Buckley Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley (2000) Americans don't DO humous novels anymore or at least not very well or very often, not like the English do anyway. But every so often someone comes along who disapproves my theorem. Little Green Men was my first introduction to Buckley's skewed view and he gives great satire, he's like a bartender who mixes my drug of choice. In this novel he takes his father, or a reasonable facsimile perhaps crossed with John McLaughlin, the X-files, Area-51, the Art Bell show and all those wonderful Washingtonian bullshit merchants, stuffs them in a Waring blender and hits puree. What comes out is a marvelous satirical slushee of pundits, polemics and paranoia. It's humor lies in juxtaposing things that one would normally find antithetical only to find they they are actually more alike than not . . . and best of all it very well written. Not like the truckloads of trade paperback tripe with cartoon cover art that fill up bookstore endcaps, purporting to be 'the funniest book this year!". . . . yes, I have issues -don't you? also on tap are Thank you for Smoking, the White House Mess and No Way to Treat a First Lady

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin birthday boy - Ben Franklin turns 300 this year, and the NYT is gives us a rundown on some new books about the old boy. birthday girl - NZ Author Margaret Mahy has celebrated her 70th birthday with a host of friends. smiley face - Jane Smiley makes an appearance in Cleveland. interview - Nerve.com has Norman Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer hanging around. reviews Robert Browning a life after death by Pamela Neville-Sington The Scavenger`s Guide to Haute Cuisine by Steven Rinella Bloodline by Fiona Mountain A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller by Frances Mayes. NPR • Barbara Wallraff author of the "word fugitives" column in the The Atlantic Monthly talks about her new book, Word Fugitives contenders • ALA's list of 10 Most Challenged Books of 2005: “It's Perfectly Normal” for homosexuality, nudity, sex education, religious viewpoint, abortion and being unsuited to age group “Forever” by Judy Blume for sexual content and offensive language “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger for sexual content, offensive language and being unsuited to age group “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content and offensive language “Whale Talk” by Chris Crutcher for racism and offensive language “Detour for Emmy” by Marilyn Reynolds for sexual content “What My Mother Doesn't Know” by Sonya Sones for sexual content and being unsuited to age group; Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey for anti-family content, being unsuited to age group and violence “Crazy Lady!” by Jane Leslie Conly for offensive language “It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families” by Robie H. Harris for sex education and sexual content giggle • NYT Lee Siegel speculates what a publisher's fact-checker would have thought of the Bible, Marcus Aurelius and the Framers of the Declaration...et al.

funniest book you never read #2

from ychan - Sydney, Australia Bullpen reader: The Old Man and Mr Smith (1990) by Peter Ustinov was a book I came across about a decade ago when browsing in a bookshop. I am still not quite sure why the bookshop is called "Academic Remainders", since it seems to have an awful lot of cooking, craft, fishing, and kids books and very little even remotely reaching the levels of what is deemed “academic”. Then again, academics seem to be getting funding for the most ridiculous research projects nowadays so I guess that anything is possible. Ustinov had been known to me as an actor and a raconteur in a class of his own (I was lucky enough to actually see him in a live show) but not as an author. Ah, what a grand type of book to introduce me to this other talent of this amazing man!! TOMAMS has been described as a fable but to me it is first and foremost a laugh-a- minute rollicking good read. The Old Man is God, who, after millenia of being quite indifferent to the existence of Earth, decides that perhaps it is time to take a human form and see exactly what his creations have been up to. Accompanying him is his old friend Mr Smith, aka Satan. What follows is a series of misadventures and escapades around the world by the constantly bickering friends. They are hunted by the FBI when God absentmindedly starts creating money for a Federal Agent. Satan discovers televangelism, gay massage parlours and a canine namesake. The Old Man regales the Russian Parliament, causes apoplexy at a Jewish Religious Court and discovers that in fact he and Mr Smith have more in common than he remembered. of satan..."It was just like the powers that be to employ a hideous creature of indeterminate age, with a mane of greasy hair and a dirty T-shirt with a frivolous message on it, to mend complicated hardware. He had probably graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

March 11th, 1818 • a 21 year old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. trash day • Cumbria library find it's easier to pulp books rather than sell them. Hell i could have told them that. NPR tidbits • interview with David Laskin author of The Children's Blizzard the terrible pre-global warming suprise snowstorm that killed mostly children • Doris Lessing has two new books out Time Bites: Views and Reviews and The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, and Griot and the Snow Dog • Susan Stamberg reflects on a WWII era Emily Kimbrough essay where she witnesses the homecoming of young men from a Pennsylvania town who died in World War II. • Chris Bachelder Resurrects Upton Sinclair in the comedic novel U.S.! • Exploring why Whistler's Mother removed from the latest edition of Janson's History of Art. But don't worry she is still installed in the Museum of Depressionist Art website reviews Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent by Lyanda Lynn Haupt Female Caligula: Ranavalona - The Mad Queen of Madagascar by Keith Laidler just in from Win Schaeffer : the Ayn Rand dating service. it's so nice these people can find each other. Sheffield's a Chicago Bar holds a Reading Under the Influence on the first Wednesday night of every month. The rules are simple: Guest readers, who themselves are authors, read from the published works of unidentified writers, tossing down a shot of booze before and after. Sounds like my kinda pub.

birthday boy - Edna O'Brien marks Samuel Beckett's centenary by dispelling some of the disinformation about the laureate. all-pro - Snow Wildsmith, youth services librarian at Mooresville Public Library (SC), has set out to read nearly 1,200 children's books by year's end. doncha just LOVE that name? boondoggle - The Guardian's Culture vulture takes on the Google gobbling, just in time for Google to announce it's plan to cut publishers in on profits from their own books. isn't that sweet of them? super-mitzvah- the results of PBA Galleries auction of Beat Material previously belonging to Edwin Blair of New Orleans, who gave it up to to help out Gypsy Lou Webb, (one of the publishers of some of Bukowski's earliest works) who was Katrina-ized. tattler - NYT profiles Bernard Malamud's daughter who has written about her father: My Father is a Book. mia - Danish writer Peter Hoeg, (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) will release his first book in a decade on May 19th. Den stille pige, (The Silent Girl) only a Danish version is planned. resurrectionists - Salon profiles John Fante Why do people jump all over themselves as if they just discovered authors who the rest of us never figured had gotten lost to begin with? cookies • Nominees for the 26th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced, and the newspaper's Robert Kirsch Award went to Joan Didion. • University of Florida English professor William Logan has won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for his book The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin

old is new again

cookies - Nominees for the 26th annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced Thursday, and the newspaper's Robert Kirsch Award went to Joan Didion mixed media - John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust resurfaces as a film reviewed in todays NY Times. March 10 1926 - the First Book-of-the-Month Club selection is published by Viking Press. Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, by English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes, a story about a widow who scandalizes her relations by moving to a town involved in witchcraft. The Book-of-the-Month Club's 4,000-plus members were not pleased with the novel. However, Warner was used to being controversial. As an openly gay woman in the early 1900s, she was the object of much hostility throughout her life. march 11th events FL: Florida Antiquarain Book Fair CT: Ephemera 26 Int'l. Fair & Conference CA Mariposa Storytelling Festival OK Oklahoma Book Awards Ceremony IL Storytelling at the Prairie Center DC Further Transactions of the Book IRE P-CON III bank toaster - the New Yorker offers us a free short story called the Trench by by Erri De Luca, as well as their normal complement of non-fiction items.

"To talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass."- Grace Metalious return to peyton place - Sandra Bullock has signed to play Grace Metalious in a biopic. For those who have been in a coma for the past 50 years, in 1956 Metalious wrote a novel where actual small town folks had sex and talked about it afterward. The nation came to a screaming halt and a coverup was quickly effected so that it could never happen again. parts is parts - Annie Cheney, author of Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains guested on NPR's On Point along with some other experts commenting on the new trade in body parts. You may remember a NYPD investigation into a couple of 21st century Burke & Hare wannabes revealed that Alistair Cooke's bones were looted and replaced with PVC before he was interred. Apparently this incident is hardly unusual, I can't wait to see the movie. Up the close and down the stair, In the house with Burke and Hare. Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, Knox, the boy who buys the beef. goodies - "Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution," an exhibition of books is on display at the Grace Doherty Library on the Centre College campus, Danville, KY. worth a looksee - Lawrence Weschler's new book Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, collects 30 essays he wrote during the past 20 years for magazines, including The New Yorker and McSweeney's. worth a listen - Bill Thompson's Eye on Books Bookcast site gives us wonderfully rich interviews of authors of new books...also podcasted I just listened to Janet Evanovich, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley basically folks, anyone who is anyone has a 3 minute snipet recorded here. event - The 25th Annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, Friday, through Sunday,at the Coliseum, St. Petersburg. dusty - carbon dating shows rare manuscripts dubbed the 'Dead Sea Scrolls of Buddhism' are indeed from the 1st and 5th centuries AD. all-pro - Chicago Trib profiles Chris Murray the editor-in-chief of Soundview Executive Book Summaries who reads 1000 books a year. idiot alert - Oklahoma is considering a bill that would withhold state money from public libraries if they don't move books with gay themes and on sexuality out of children's areas. deep tale- Caving author Roger Brucker reconstructed the 1925 failed rescue attempt of trapped spelunker Floyd Collins for his book Trapped. Which has just been optioned to Billy Bob Thorton for a film project. The Floyd Collins story has also been visited by Robert Penn Warren's novelThe Cave, Billy Wilder's film Ace in the Hole and recently a musical called Floyd Collins. It's amazing how much mileage (not to mention money) one can squeeze from a dead guy in a hole. bank toaster - okay folks I been saving this one up... it's a card game called 1000 blank white cards. I's a free form game where you MAKE your own game cards. Anyway it's one of those things i classify as internet folk art. You have to only be marginally creative and have actual friends to play it with, not like the card board cut outs I keep around here. But if you do, you can come up with cards like these. I don't see it in the rules, but I think alcohol is involved somewhere. • the HIPSTER PDA link up on the sidebar leads to something else I think of as internet folk art. it's ridiculous in it's simplicity, but to me it indicates that WE HAVE TO work AT ANTI-TECHNOLOGY as much as we embrace the new technology. hmmm did that make any sense at all?

Just in from Coelacanth Books light in the darkness - Reason.com's Jonathan Rausch writes about A new Arab language website, MisbahAlHurriyya.org("Lamp of Liberty") is hoping to change the world by publishing liberal classics translated into Arabic -- at dire risk to the translator and publisher, who must work in secret. MEOW - The Independent reports on what it considers to be the Ten Worst Biographies. Hillary Clinton Living History Paul Burrell A Royal Duty Anthea Turner Fools Rush In Alan Shearer My Story So Far Tom Maschler Publisher Sir Norman Fowler Ministers Decide Lillian Hellman An Unfinished Woman James Frey A Million Little Pieces Jane Fonda My Life So Far Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf hidden treasure - In 1943 well known French novelist Irène Némirovsky gave the manuscript for Suite Française to her daughter, Denise Epstein who carried it in a suitcase while hiding from gendarmes in Vichy France. Némirovsky later died in Auschwitz, but it was decades before Epstein could bear to open the suitcase and the novel considered the French War and Peace is now a bestseller.

funniest book you never read #1

Three Men in a Boat to Say Nothing of the Dog - Jerome K. Jerome (1889) One fine summer day 3 young wastrels and a dog went for a boat trip up the Thames and literature was never the same. I made it more than 35 years before I discoved this book existed which is just as well since I would never have appreciated it before. It's definitely one of those books, you can only appreciate it after you have read a lot of other books, a lot of BAD books in fact. The plot is very straight forward, three men and a dog get in a small boat and go up river, but that's not why you read the book. It's the language, it is just straight forward Queens english and dead funny. Written in the first person, it recounts the adventure in that wonderfully droll way that the Brits have of telling you some utterly outrageous story all the while leaving their tongue OUT of their cheek. The 1st time I read it, I had to check the copyright, as I would have never guessed it had been lying around for over a century. Jeremy Nicholas, President of The Jerome K Jerome Society has a delicious history of the book on the Society website: "What was entirely new about Boat was the style in which it was written. Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson were widely read and highly popular but Jerome differed in two respects: his story was not of some fantastical adventure in a far-off land, peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, but of three very ordinary blokes having a high old time just down the road, so to speak; and, in an age when literary grandiloquence and solemnity were not in short supply, Jerome provided a breath of fresh air. In the preface to Idle Thoughts, Jerome had set out his stall: 'What readers ask now-a-days in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.' He used everyday figures of speech for the first time ('colloquial clerk's English of the year 1889' as one critic described it) and was very, very funny. The Victorians had simply never come across anything like it." You won't need any help in finding a copy, I think I have about five. If you handle used books all the time, you will come across it at least once a year. It's never been out or print, in fact there are innumerable editions, including several audios also downloadable. I recommend the slightly abridged version read by Hugh Laurie. Rebekah Bartlett of Coelacanth Books found that one can downloard the Hugh Laurie recording as a set of MP3 files for 7.99 pounds. The e-text is in several places on the net. Here's a nice one with all the illustrations inset.

shaped like books

the Book Magazine , a new UK quarterly national consumer magazine about books has decided to crown themselves a Greatest Living British Writer - if Rowling wins I may vomit. This Mag smells a lot like PW's Booklife, new books fed to the public in pop culture servings. salvaged - The Russian Embassy is saving the thousands of books from the Russian bookshop in Gaithersburg that unexpectedly closed last month when the owner was evicted. guilded - Roy Blount Jr. has been elected president of The Authors Guild, which represents thousands of published authors and freelance journalists. lingo bingo - fiction translators don't get enough love, as in this piece from the News & Observer (NC) essays • from the Weekly Standard: Plagiary, It's Crawling All Over Me by Joseph Epstein • Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange: A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece by Theodore Dalrymple, found a nice little Italian site with some snippets of Burgess reading from Clockwork Orange. e-fiction Slate.com will be offering an online novel written in real time, by novelist Walter Kirn. Installments of The Unbinding, will appear roughly twice a week from March through June. cookies • American Adam Hochschild has won the 2006 Lionel Gelber Prize (Can) for writing about international affairs: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. • J.B. MacKinnon's Dead Man in Paradise won The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction which is awarded to the Canadian author whose book "best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style and a subtlety of thought and perception." booksafes - Western Digital shipping external hard drives shaped like books. Editions start at $149.99 for 160 Gigs to $349.99 for 500 GB. I wonder if they come leather bound? obit worth reading - Honolulu artist and author Martha Alexander at 86 I'm trying folks, but there is not a lot going on in the land of used books. I will try to beef up the original content. (yes that IS a hint for submissions for guest blogs)

lurid news

"If you enjoy 1940s detective fiction, you may be interested in reading about the books in Ziff-Davis's line of Fingerprint Mysteries that came out between 1943 and 1948. Bill Pronzini, Victor Berch and I have compiled a checklist of all of the books in the series, complete with extended biographical notes on the authors, including Bruno Fischer, Virginia Rath, Amelia Reynolds Long, Brett Halliday, Phyllis Whitney, Hugh Pentecost and many others. Color images of the front covers of all of the jackets are also provided." Steve Lewis While we are at it: Robert A. Maguire, famed cover art illustrator passed away last year, but his website still offers prints of his fabulous cover art at reasonable prices - makes me wish I had wallspace that wasn't covered with bookcases.

big bad boy - Because of flagging sales Pearson Prentice Hall gave six art scholars free reign to revise the 1056 page Janson's History of Art, and the NYT is doing a 'page six' on who's in and who's out. badbooks - the Da Vinci Code isn't the only book people love to rag on - via the LA Times London's Stephen Bayley regales us with a few more. everybody poohs - the US and Egyptian gov'ts gave 700 new books to each of 38,000 Egyptian public school. books n' bars - Floridian youthful offenders reading their way through their jail time, whereas a UK inmate is being denied magic books, to limit his knowledge of Houdini-ing. cookies • the shortlist for the Blooker Prize has been announced. The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks": books based on blogs or websites • BBC has the list of nominees for the 2006 Aventis Prize for popular science writing, previous winners have been Bill Bryson, Stephen Hawking and Jared Diamond. • Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World by David Bodanis • Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond • The Elements of Murder - A History of Poison, John Emsley • The Gecko's Foot - Bio-inspiration - Engineering New Materials from Nature by Peter Forbes • The Silicon Eye - How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete by George Gilder • Parallel Worlds - The Science of Alternative Universes and our Future in the Cosmos by Michio Kaku • Power, Sex, Suicide - Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane • Venomous Earth - How Arsenic Caused the World's Worst Mass Poisoning by Andrew Meharg • Empire of the Stars - Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes by Arthur I. Miller • Seven Deadly Colours - The Genius of Nature's Palette and how it Eluded Darwin by Andrew Parker • The Truth About Hormones - What's Going on when we're Tetchy, Spotty, Fearful, Tearful or Just Plain Awful by Vivienne Parry • Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis - The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers by Dan Rockmore • The Fruits of War - How War and Conflict have Driven Science by Michael White naughty - Thieves check out books from the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library (OR) and sell them to local bookshops. naughtier - Book Club Associates (BCA), part of the Bertelsman publishing empire has been behaving badly and now we have a paper trail. naughtiest - Author and playwright Clyde Edgerton was robbed at gunpoint near the Cape Fear Regional Theatre last week. memento mori - Indiana's Mabel Herbert, author of 'The Married Life of Helen and Warren', is remembered 50 years after her passing. banktoaster - Make your own 80x15 brilliant buttons like this one or

fair-ness - From Atwood's mechanical hand to the guy from Google, "What technology can do" was the theme of this year's the London Book Fair and a HarperCollins UK, exec fears Amazon's move into publishing more than Google's digitization.....is this good or bad? game preserves - The editor of the beloved Chambers Dictionary is trying to save the 'zoozoo', 'obernowl', 'logodaedalus', 'incompossible' and supernaculum'. toaster- Chambers online offers 2 free PDF books, Word Wit and Wisdom - charts the fascinating history of The Chambers Dictionary and Scrabble® Hints. cookies - nominees for the UK Orange Prize for Fiction by a woman announced: Leila Aboulela - Minaret Lorraine Adams - Harbor Naomi Alderman - Disobedience Jill Dawson - Watch Me Disappear Helen Dunmore - House of Orphans Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess Alice Greenaway - White Ghost Girls Gail Jones - Dreams of Speaking Nicole Krauss - The History of Love Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black Sue Miller - Lost in the Forest Joyce Carol Oates - Rape: A Love Story Marilynne Robinson - Gilead Curtis Sittenfeld - Prep Ali Smith - The Accidental Zadie Smith - On Beauty Carrie Tiffany - Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living Celestine Hitiura Vaite - Frangipani Sarah Waters - The Night Watch Meg Wolitzer - The Position hot to trot - Harness Tracks of America has launched a new service to the sport. The association of 42 harness tracks has added a Rare Books division to its Web site, offering "the rarest of the rare" in literature of the trotting and pacing horse. I just love this story....how many industries care about their own literature? worth while - Washington Post has an interview with Chapel Hill Professor Bart Ehrman author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Prof Ehrman was also a guest on NPR's Fresh Air in Dec. I am not religiously inclined and I found this fascinating. ex-pats -JM Coetzee has become an Australian citizen. memento mori • The ashes of M. M. Kaye, the author of The Far Pavilions, were scattered in Lake Piccola in Udaipur, India over the weekend. • Bloomington novelist Harold Sinclair is remembered 40 years after his passing. un-news - Alexander McCall Smith wants to build a hot tub in the garden of his £1m home. banktoaster - For those of us who use such things Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

Larry McMurtry's oscar

Big surprise Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana won the Ocar for the Best Adapted Screenplay for Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain...(only McMurtry could get away with wearing blue jeans to a black tie event.) -"And finally I'm going to thank all the booksellers of the world. Remember, "Brokeback Mountain" was a book before it was a movie. From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world, all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book. A wonderful culture, which we mustn't lose. Thank you."

#@!&# *&#$!

JMHO I've been coming face to face with our friend Mr. First Amendment lately, everywhere I turn it's an issue. When did we become afraid of words? When did it become okay to run things by the White House before it got published? When did the largest retailer in the land get final cut on a motion picture? Do they think they can muzzle everyone who doesn't believe what they believe?. What's the matter don't these folks read their Bible any more? "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John VIII-32. If all the bloggers and reporters and whistleblowers are going to jail for ratting out all the Potomac rats, the Department of Corrections is gonna have to annex the Mall of America. Where's an empty continent when they really need one? (don't worry I stole the image from Loompanics) sex & satanism Dennis Wheatley: Churchill's Storyteller by Craig Cabell - been a while since we've seen any of his books kicking around, eh? hmmm time for a come back meethinks. more sex please we're English - D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider by John Worthen 'bout time - NPR's got a nice piece about an upcoming biography Stepin Fetchit: The Life & Times of Lincoln Perry by Mel Watkins. A biography of the much-maligned first African American film star memento mori - J.G. Ballard reminisces about his childhood internment sans the Hollywood rewrite - overall the Guardian is really a damn fine site for book junkies. cookies - Alabama's Wayne Greenhaw has been named the 2006 recipient of the Harper Lee Award, given in recognition of a writer's significant body of work. naughty - Alabama comic book store broken into with sweater. review - of Jeremy Mercer's Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs the memoir abour Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. a little nosh - here's a little interview with NPR's Maureen Corrigan from a KY paper. dystopia watch - Seems that pesky first amendment is gonna get what for, now that Washington has takenoff the kid gloves. Our present regime is gonna start dragging reporters in front of grand jurys to find out who's been been telling tales out of school. As if it were any of our business whether our government agencies set up shadow prison systems or wiretap us for our own protection. Sheesh. Jail them reporters, damn criminals the lot of them. Stoopid Constitution is just GD piece of paper anyway. My president tole me so. So there. I kid you not - A Colorado teacher who was suspended after making controversial comments about President Bush .

just a few Sunday reviews Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte Out There in the Dark by Wesley Strick. American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now ed. Philip Lopate Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert When Cats Ruled Like Kings: On The Trail of the Sacred Cats by Georgie Anne Geyer The Book Thief by Markus Zusak An Imperfect Lens by Anne Roiphe The Big Oyster - History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky Death on the Ladies Mile by Diana Haviland trying to run anti-virus software and it keeps crashing...grrr...

today's events in the bookverse : IN: Indiana Book & Paper Show MO Children's Literature Festival TX Squatty Pines Storytelling Festival 1839 Charlotte Bronte declines marriage IT Napoli Comicon MX 27th International Book Fair UK London Book Fair GA Azalea Storytelling Festival LG Latvian Book Fair 2006 MN Marscon 2006 banktoaster - Clipart Heaven - the mother load of free clip art.

NYT's Editorial Observer Verlyn Klinkenborg is shocked and dismayed that his collection of paperback perfect bindings aren't so perfect anymore in "Yellowing Paper, Stiffening Glue and the Sudden Demise of a Library" The Book Industry Study Group released its study of the 2003-2004 used-book market: The Used-Book Sales: A Study of the Behavior, Structure, Size, and Growth of the U.S. Used-Book Market. Some of the results can be found at the ABA's Bookselling this Week site. If you scroll all the way to the bottom you will find this: The study was based on analysis of sales data from the leading online booksellers and primary research with over 500 booksellers and over 2,000 consumers and students. Major data sources included Abebooks.com, Alibris.com, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, Biblio.com, eBay, and Powell's Books. Partners in the study were the American Booksellers Association, Bowker, Book Hunter Press, Monument Information Resource, and the National Association of College Stores. If you don't see, what I don't see, can we say that we really truly surprised? Tonight's TV - Book TV's Afterwords David Vise a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post describes his new book The Google Story Sunday, March 5 at 6:00 pm and at 9:00 pm - worth watching if your home. playtime - NPR's All Things Considered, covered the theater companies marking Clifford Odet's centennial, well worth a listen. yummy - NPR's On Point had Mark Kurlansky (author of Cod and Salt) on to talk about his new gourmand tome The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell goodies - Ireland's National Library unveiled six sheets of notes by James Joyce. The collection of notes, which date from April to August 1923, are previously unknown documents sketching out early ideas for Finnegans Wake. oh puhleese - some folks in Savannah are objecting to a cute little book about 2 male penguins raising a chick together and insisting it be unshelved from the children's section. Don't these people have REAL problems to worry about? road trip - 10 Welsh authors pick books for a long trip, with a lot of surprising answers. round two - the Financial times weighs in on the HBHG v D.Brown circus. And the Guardian speculates on what it means if the HBHG boys win. fighting back - Students in a Maryland county are protesting the district superintendent's ban of the book "The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things." (it's from Dec, but i liked it.) mitzvah - The Czech Republic has donated $111K to the Mose Hudson Tapia Public Library, Bayou La Batre, AL, which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. In presenting the check, the Czech ambassador said libraries in Prague were flooded in 2002 and they wanted to help others who faced similar problems. dystopia watch - our g'mnt is at it again folks - this time they are trying to ban public from all access to chemicals specifically those bought and used in chemistry sets, model rocketry and pyrotechnics. Small chemical companies are being unfairly targeted. As a fellow bookseller once said..."first they came after the chemicals, but I did not object because I did not use chemicals..."

pod people

What the F is a podcast? it's a trendy word for an audiofile, there are finer details about subscription and content updates, but basically you can listen to it online, have it sent to you or download it into device like an ipod, mp3 player, etc for consumption later. These days most booksellers spend hours sitting in one spot staring blindly at a glowing screen, so anything that goes in through the EAR that's not insipid is GOOD. NPR, talk radio, audio books, classical music, we use them all - But sometimes we run out. Almost any radio station worth their salt has streaming audio, so you can listen to stations from around the world, if you take the time to track down the ones you like. This morning I found a cache of podcasts, lurking on the NPR site: of course I only cared about the book related ones. KUOW's The Beat: Book Reviews KUOW Between The Lines WABE WPSU Bookmarks - The Book Review Show WPSU NPR: Books NPR KCRW's Bookworm KCRW WPLN's The Fine Print WPLN KCRW's Overbooked KCRW My next question was HOW to I avoid having to log into each and every one of those sites every time? I don't have iTunes, an iPod or an i anything. So I read through NPR's Podcast subsciption Help. And yes I was still confused. I did recognize this so I clicked it and added each of them to my Yahoo Account something I NEVER use. To check all the things you want keep an eye on all on one place you need an aggregator. Some people use them for RSS feeds, for news orgs, or blogs or any website. Yahoo is basically a HUGE aggregator. So after I closed all the little windows with People Magazine feeds and top news items, I was left with my podcast selections. Yahoo will collect up the podcasts and keep them in this tidy list for me to listen to whenever. What I noticed is that it didn't have podcasts previous for my subscription. I also tried a free audio aggregator: Odeo, which was more complicated to set up, but it did have lots of yummy 'back issues" and I didn't have to wade through Yahoo to find what I want. (i'm a big believe in one tool for one job)I actually prefer it now that I got the hang of it. When you see you will get an html direct link to the podcast, you can then copy and paste it into whatever tool/aggregator you want to use. Signing into Odeo which was grotesquely easy, I then clicked create: import audio which gave me a place to paste the podcast URL. In the case of these audio feeds, they are already in the database so I got a notice that it already exists and a link to add it to my subscriptions. I found their tag index, where more bookish podcasts are lurking. So now I am listening to John Lahr talk about Honky Tonk Parade: The New Yorker Profiles on KCRW's Bookworm from February 23, 2006. If I have screwed up these directions, please email me and I will clarify them.

c@@l - the NYT has added a science fiction column, Dave Itzkoff kicks it off by taking new sci-fic to task for not being old sci-fi, he did toss in his top personal ten list, of which I have read eight - so i'm excited all over. A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller Jr. Cat's Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess The Crying Of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon Gun, With Occasional Music: A Novel (1994) by Jonathan Lethem Looking For Jake (2005) by China Miéville The Man In The High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick R Is For Rocket (1962) by Ray Bradbury The Twilight Zone Companion (1982) by Marc Scott Zicree Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons cookie - Yes, Norman Mailer did indeed get the French the Legion of Honor last night. well, duh - a study by ACT, a nonprofit company that tests students, found that the ability to handle complex reading is the major factor separating high school students who are ready for college reading from those who are not. I wanna know who pays for freaking studies of the blatantly obvious? this day in History - Papa Hemingway completed work on the Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers guested on NPR's Weekend Edition to discuss the big little book.

forecast - it takes a lot to get me excited . . . wait that didn't come out right . . .I rarely give a damn about forthcoming books. I was a Harry Potter fan right up until people started acting like it was the second coming, that kinda took all the fun out of it for me. But as always things you find when you are looking up other things...Walter Moers has a book March release for UK and April in US...that you all MAY want to taste: The City of Dreaming Books: Yarnspinner, a young Zamonian writer, inherits very little from his beloved godfather apart from an unpublished short story by an unknown author. This manuscript proves to be such a superb piece of writing that he can't resist the temptation to investigate the mystery surrounding the author's identity. The trail takes him to Bookholm, the so-called City of Dreaming Books. On entering its streets, our hero feels as if he has opened the door of a gigantic second-hand bookshop containing millions of musty old volumes. His nostrils are assailed by clouds of book dust, by a hint of acidity reminiscent of lemon trees in flower, the stimulating scent of ancient leather, and the acrid, intelligent tang of printer's ink. Yarnspinner not only falls under the spell of this book-obsessed city; he falls into the clutches of its evil genius, Pfistomel Smyke, who treacherously maroons him in the labyrinthine catacombs that extend for many miles beneath the surface. He finds himself in a subterranean world where reading books can be genuinely dangerous, where ruthless Bookhunters fight to the death for literary gems and the mysterious Shadow King rules a murky realm populated by Booklings, one-eyed beings whose vast library includes live books equipped with teeth and claws. Walter Moers transports us to a magical world where reading is still a genuine adventure, where books can not only entertain people and make them laugh but drive them insane or even kill them. Only those intrepid souls who are prepared to join Optimus Yarnspinner on his perilous journey should read this book. We wish the rest of you a long, safe, unutterably dull and boring life! I already ordered mine, I will let you know how it tastes. novel idea - Malaysia plans to create a "book city" in the federal capital, large enough to accommodate all the book publishers in the country and where various activities can be held to encourage the public to read as well as a place for academic discussion. It would become a display centre, book launching venue, a place for negotiating copyright sale and various other activities for readers including meet-the-author sessions. meow - Times Online has a deliciously nasty essay about the failures and expectations of the second novel. worth the listen - Bloomsbury Publisher Nigel Newton calls for a boycott of the Google search engine in protest of the literary land-grab. Click here to to listen to the entire speech. more audio - On NPR's All Things Considered Dr. Wayne Flynt, retired professor of history discusses the basis for the persistent speculation that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and why it 's not true. cookie - E.L. Doctorow's The March won the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction. rugalach - The Koret International Jewish Book Awards is working to achieve a higher public profile their goal is to be the next best thing to a Jewish Oprah. face first - Meet the Author UK & Meet the Author US have lots of lovely videos of authors hawking their wares. yeah..well i hadn't heard of most of them either but then again most of the authors I read are dead...and I really wouldn't want to see them videoed now giggle - According to the World Weekly News Greenland archaeologist James Grande was excavating an old Viking settlement and unearthed a well preserved edda. The collection of poems, written around 1100 AD, speaks of a Viking woman named Brunhilda Stewardde who was raised to godlike status for her sumptuous meals and visual flair. Brunhilda Stewardde was responsible for inventing most of the look that defined the Vikings. "The horned hats, the furs, the decor of the castle -- they were all Stewardde's ideas," said Grande. "According to the edda, she was just a hardworking Viking housewife who hated the idea of wasting the pelts, antlers and teeth of animals after they had been stripped of meat....To interest Vikings in the goods she designed, Stewardde began throwing lavish feasts."

Bullpen Book Club vol 4

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." - Flannery O'Conner Women Who Love Books Too Much, Bibliophiles, Bluestockings & prolific Pens from the Algonquin Hotel to the Ya-Ya Sisterhood; by Brenda Knight, forward by Viki Leon (of the Uppity Women series) Conari Press, 2000. 1-57324-024-9. 274pp. Now, I'm not one for reading women authors out of solidarity, I mean if a woman can write that's great, if she can't well she should hang up her pen and stop banking that the chick-lit fad will last forever. But this little handy dandy tome, just the right size to fit on the back of a toilet tank, does an exemplary job of dredging up authors and anecdotes, both obscure and famous, whose singular trait is their lack of penis. I will admit, I was nicely surprised when I got this edition, that there were more authors in this book that i HADN'T heard of than had. (hmm that sentence doesn't lay right, whatever.) I am pointing out this nice little volume, because the publisher has since reissued it: Wild Women And Books: Bibliophiles, Bluestockings, & Prolific Pens from Aphra Ben to Zora Neale Hurston and From Anne Rice To the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Brenda Knight, updated from its original version with a new introduction by Ntozake Shange Conari Press, 2006. ISBN 1573242713, 288pp. Hell they did more than that, they dressed it up and took it to a masquerade ball. Conari retitled it to cross merchandize it with their better selling "Wild Women" series. But they DID have the good sense to add more text- but perhaps not enough to justify the double dip. I recommend buying the 1st edition, which can be found for well under a buck and then if you like that one, upgrade. It works out just fine if you have 2 loos in the house.

odd words

"All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content." - Henry Miller. banktoaster - BBC 's Poetry Outloud has online recordings of famous poets reading their works, such as The Charge of the Light Brigade by Lord Tennyson, A March Calf by Ted Hughes, Homecoming: Anse La Raye by Derek Walcott, Bogland by Seamus Heaney et al. see? this is the kind of shite the Internet was created for! ebooking - EU plans to digitize 6 million books by 2010, the European Digital Library.. suessiana - Nationwide pajama reading parties honor Dr. Seuss's Mar 2nd birthday - nope, not gonna touch that one. cookies • Bookseller Magazine (UK) awarded the Oddest Book Title of the Year to How People Who Don't Know They're Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill. • Vancouver magazine writer John Vaillant has won the Writers' Trust Awards (Can) non-fiction prize for his book The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed and Joseph Boyden won for his debut novel Three Day Road. • Eastern European authors dominate the shortlist for the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (UK) 4 letters - Nerve.com a more or less non-pornographic online magazine about well..sex...has a Henry Miller Award for the best literary sex scene published in the English language. Every month nominations for the semi-finals are presented with each months winner advancing to the finals. A grand prize and a readers' choice will be chosen at the end of the year, with the grand prize winner gets $1,934, commemorating the publication date of Tropic of Cancer For a a list of previous winners. under the radar - the Boston Globe had a nice piece on the 50th anniversary of J.P. Donleavy's the Ginger Man. smut pedding - Since were're rolling around in the gutter today, this came in the mail today: Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 by Jay A. Gertzman. A serious study of the underground book trade back when that sort of thing could put one in prison.