bibliopulp

Heldfond Book Gallery, Ltd., San Anselmo, CA has finally exposed the underbelly of bookselling and sleeze. They are generating faux bookcovers as 8"x10" posters, just the right size to hang over your desk - with the obligatory - not for sale label on it. I can't decide which one describes me best. Any thoughts?

birthday boy • 1763 - Samuel Rogers, English author (d. 1855) birthday girl • 1818 - Emily Brontë, English novelist (d. 1848) audio • NPR discusses how Russian Mathematician Grigori Perelman may have solved the 100-year-old math problem known as Poincare's Conjecture, one of the 7 millenium problems. worth reading • from the NYT, a piece on how Wired Editiors Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" is keep backlist titles in print. in event • the World's Longest yard Sale kicks off this weekend August 3-6, it runs 450 miles through 4 states, from Covington KY to Gadsden AL. map to the yard sale essay • an interesting piece from Guadalajara about the reading rate. banktoaster • online Puzzle Museum, so cool it hurts. . . gahd, I am SUCH a geek.

Antiquarian Bookseller Trade Associations

US MWABA - Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association (US) RMABA - Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association (US) WABA - Washington Antiquarian Booksellers Association (DC) ABNJ - Antiquarian Booksellers of New Jersey (NJ) CABA - Connecticut Antiquarian Booksellers Association (CN) CVABA - Central Valley Antiquarian Booksellers Association (CA) FABA - Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association (FL) GABA - Georgia Antiquarian Booksellers Association (GA) ABDI - Antiquarian Book Dealers of Indiana (IN) LIABDA - Antiquarian Book Dealers Association of Long Island (NY) MABA - Maine Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ME) MARIAB - Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers Association (MA & RI) MMABDA - Mid-Michigan Antiquarian Book Dealers Association (MI) NHABA - New Hampshire Antiquarian Booksellers Association (NH) VABA - Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association (VT) International IOBA - Independent Online Booksellers Assocation ILAB - International League of Antiquarian Booksellers ABA - The Antiquarian Booksellers Association (UK) ABAA - Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (US) ABAC - The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Canada (CAN) ANZAAB - Australian & New Zealand Association of Antiquarian Booksellers (AUS & NZ) SBASA - Secondhand Booksellers Association Of South Australia (SA) ABF - Danish Antiquarian Booksellers Association (DK) VEBUKU - Swiss Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (CH) SLAM - Syndicat National de la Librairie Ancienne at Moderne (FR) VDA EV - German Antiquarian Booksellers Association (DE) Antiquarian Booksellers Association Of Japan (JP) ILAI - Association Booksellers Antiquarians of Italy (IT) CLAM - Belgian Professional Chamber of Antiquarian and Modern Booksellers (BE) NVvA - Dutch Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (NL) SAY - Finnish Antiquarian Booksellers Association (FN) SVAF - Swedish Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (SE) NAF - Norwegian Antiquarian Booksellers Association (NO) other TomFolio - TomFolio Booksellers co-op Antiquarian Book Dealers Of Indiana (IN) in progress . . . . please forward any additional listings

Rules of thumb - Road Tripping

Okay so I took yesterday off for a little road trip. Rebekah Bartlett from Coelacanth Books and I took in a book auction up in the wilds of New Hampshire. (why are auction houses ALWAYS hell and gone from civilization?) Here's a few thumbs I cobbled together - BEFORE YOU GO BRING MAPS - Buy new ones at least once a decade - mine tend to find their way to the floor of the truck and then acquire decoratively placed muddy boot prints. Regardless of how many I have, I always end up with 3 of one state and only half of another. I hate it when I drive off a map and onto a new one I don't have. I like to make small marks on the maps with MM/YY when I find an out of the way goodie, like an off the grid bookshop or good place to eat. I even scrawl radio station info, so I don't have to spend ages scanning the dial. If this bugs you get a seperate set of maps for notations. BRING A DIRECTORY - the regions Book Association Dealer directory - ALMOST everywhere has an association of old bookies and any org worth their salt has a directory with a map. When you see them grab FOUR - one goes in the car, one goes on your desk, one gets lent to someone else and one gets lost. You can always visit an association site and print out stuff before you go. Also bring any directories of Antique Malls or thrift stores. You may not plan your trip around them, but if you are off on a stretch between bookstores you may do some exploring. I found a antiuqe mall booth with 50% decent books yesterday cause I was killing time waiting for the auction to start. BRING YOUR CAMERA - it's not just for travel snaps anymore. With the no cost of digital photos, I take pictures of things I want to remember instead of writing them down. A signpost, a store front, a restaurant, even a meal or a book. A phone with a camera is a terrific toy for surreptitiously shooting a book in a store. BRING YOUR OWN BOX and/or bags - I hate it when I buy an expensive book and they put it in a grocery bag or if I buy several and all they have is a banana box with no decent bottom. I save them money and me aggravation, by putting them directly into my own box or bag with handles. You can tear up whatever they gave you and use it to keep them from sliding around. BRING A TO-GO BAG - my glove box is already full of garage receipts, flashlights, wd-40 and whatnot. So, I keep a canvas bookbag hanging on the chair by the door - with maps, directories, pens, notebook etc . . . It all comes back it the house on top of the box of books. If anything it is a place to put the days receipts and flyers. WHILE OUT AND ABOUT HAVE A FLEXIBLE DESTINATION - I learned this doing photography, find a destination point. It doesn't even HAVE to be a bookstore. You may stop many times before you get there you may even change your trip and NOT get there. But when you have one, you can always swing your compass back to it when you are stuck for a decision. TAKE THINGS - flyers, anouncements, free mags - the flyers and annoucement cards can lead you to a store or a sale you didn't know about and may help you plan your next trip. And the free mags are good for packing material after read them or decide your aren't going to read them. FOLLOW YOUR NOSE - if you see someplace curious STOP - the odds are good you won't remember it the next time you go back there. You never know what you will find. There are ENDLESS tales of booksellers stopping unplanned at a thrift store and finding a gem. USE THE FACILITIES - remember when your mother told you to go before you go? booksellers you don't know personally may not have a public restroom. Use the ones in the fast food joints, like Mickey D's, BK adn Dunkins - you DON'T HAVE to eat there - trust me it's okay - they really don't care. STOP AND EAT - regardless of whether you are just starting out or writing off the whole trip. TAKE time to stop and eat. It will at least give you a chance to make notes, check your time and map and make your next decision. If you are on a strict book only budget - bring food and drink in a small cooler with ice and don't bring crappy road food, bring a treat - something nice you don't normally make and stop at those odd side road monuments, that's what they put them there for! I once made my own lobster rolls and ice tea and was eating by a babbling brook off a side road in Warren, New Hampshire when a deer walked right past me - I kid you not! If you have a more flexible allowance - stop someplace that LOOKS interesting - not a chain. Either the food will be great or just as mediocre as fast food kind - either way it is better than eating in your car. TAKE A LOAD OFF - If you aren't driving your own vehicle or are somewhere you had to fly to get to think about shipping. If you are visiting a bookseller you know collect up your hoard and ship it home ahead of you from their place. (I did that from California and was sooo glad I did) It may be pricey to stop and ship from a 'shipping' store - but depending on the weight of your books, their value and your chiropractic bills it may be worth it. If you are worried about your new acquires, ship your clothes home and put your books in your luggage*. I like to bring empty soft suitcases stuffed inside each other JUST to fill with books. KEEP AN OPEN MIND - Don't clutter your head with a search for just the stuff you WANT to find - you will blind yourself to stuff you didn't know you were looking for. So? you find a few non-book things that you can eBay, or you find some decent books that AREN'T your specialty you can resell to another dealer. "Never THINK you are going to find anything when you look, just look, with an open mind. Most people CANNOT DO THIS, what with their egos getting in the way, etc. I mean it. One of the absolute hardest things to do is NEVER THINK YOU WILL HIT THE LICK, just have an interest in things and OBSERVE, trying to LEARN SOMETHING. There is a certain chemistry involved with luck, I believe, and, if one does not lay the groundwork for the luck, ie; do the open mind thing and don't let GREED enter in to your preparation, you can pick up every book in sight for the next million years and all you will be doing is "lifting." * in from Ed Smith Books TAKE SOME CHANCES - Blind buy stuff. Most booksellers DON'T live and die by ScoutPal, we use our head and instincts. We buy stuff, we research it and we file that knowledge away so that we can make better guesses the next time. What you learn by merely researching a book can usually outweigh the cost of the book. You are honing your knowledge and over the years you make fewer and fewer 'bad' buys. One of the first things a bookseller ever told me is that "You never regret the books you buy as much as the ones you don't" You HAVE to take some risks, because THOSE are the lessons you remember. special thanks to Ed Smith @ Ed Smith Books, Carole Delle @ Wray's Books Madlyn Blum @ Old Bag Lady Books

yesterday was National Milk Chocolate Day

and I missed it - damn. birthday boys • 1869 - Booth Tarkington (d.1946) American novelist and dramatist 1878 - Don Marquis (d.1937) American newspaperman, poet, and playwright 1905 - Stanley Kunitz, American poet (d. 2006) 1918 - Edwin O'Connor, American novelist and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner (d. 1968) worth reading • The Guardian Pays tribute to Julian Maclaren-Ross, the model for X Trapnel in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, who died of a heart attack brought on by drink and drugs in 1964. A literary dandy whose contemporaries and admirers included Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh, Maclaren-Ross was the laureate of London's post-war literary demi-monde. tentacle boy • Amazon.com is making its first foray into the movie business after picking up the film rights for Keith Donohue's fantasy novel The Stolen Child. lost & found • Virginia man finds 188 year old Bible in dump bin see what happens when you recycle? naughty naughty • Norman Buckley, faces jail after he admitted stealing some of the treasures of Manchester Central Library where he worked and putting them up for sale on the internet. obit worth reading • Fantasy novelist David Gemmell at 57, best known for stories such as Legend and Waylander. unnews • there is ACTUALLY an AP Wire story about how the DaVinci Code fad is finally fading. I kid you not - because sales and interest are on the wane, someone PAID someone to write 476 words on how the DaVinci Code is NOT news anymore. Sheee-it, I want a job like that. ziplock fresh • regarding the book found in an Irish Bog, Slate.com's Explainer explains how bogs keep things fresh. something new • review of Richard Kurin's Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem.

WOD • watermarks & chain marks

from Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology watermark n. A distinguishing letter, design, symbol, etc., incorporated into a paper during manufacture. True watermarks are a localized modification of the formation and opacity of the paper while it is still wet, so that the marks can be seen in the finished sheet of paper when viewed by transmitted light. chain lines ( chain marks ) n. The widely spaced watermark lines, about 25 mm apart, parallel to the shorter sides of a sheet of laid paper, caused by the "chain wires," i.e., the wires to which the finer laid wires of the MOLD (1) are attached for support.

1814 • Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley elopes to France with 17-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on this day, despite the fact that he's already married. oops. thursday's birthday boys • 1870 - Hilaire Belloc, English writer (d. 1953) 1908 - Joseph Mitchell, American writer (d. 1996) friday's birthday boys • 1909 - Malcolm Lowry, English novelist (d. 1957) 1927 - John Ashbery, American poet audio • NPR reports on the Archimedes Palimpsest which resides at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. more audio • NPR's Susan Stamberg gives a nifty piece on a Parisian Art Supply Store open since 1887. beat scrolls on • The version of On the Road that Kerouac wrote on a 119-foot scroll of nearly translucent paper three-week frenzy of creativity in spring 1951 will be published for the first time in book form next year. blog of note • a new blog worth watching called The Fifth Carnival of Children's Literature in from Win Schaeffer banktoaster • for those senior moments in life, a reverse dictionary. Bullpen Events Calendar July 28-29 CA • San Francisco Center for the Book 10th anniversary Exhibit opens. TN • The Sewanee Writers' Conference begins MA • Antiquarian Book Fair At Searles Castle TX • The Latino Book & Family Festival

bullpen video • my toolbox

I am still getting the hang of this new camcorder, this one would have been easier if i had used the tripod and the remote, but hey, it was a test drive, cut me some slack. personally i don't see much difference between it and the cheapo camcorder - must be the compression rate. I still have lots of tools scattered about, but the traincase is very useful for taking back and forth, and keeping small stuff safe from desk goblins.

in want of a rainy afternoon

Okay, so the last few days in New England haven't been exactly rainy, it's been rather sunny, hot in fact, damn hot to be precise - though not as hot as those parts of California where Mr Soleil has become rather a pain in the ass - so, naa na na na naa (ed. is there an index for spelling shit like that?) So, after ALL the rain we have had, I decided to save this post up for a day when I would welcome a little agua del cielo. Bookstores were MADE for rainy afternoons. To spend one hacking away at a keyboard filled with Doritos crumbs and cat hair just isn't much of a substitute for the scent of mold and book dust. Recently I have been bemoaning the fact that with the death of my friend Laurie Petch and the closing of Broadway Books in Derry, NH, there was no longer a 'real' bookshop within 25 miles, but at 25.7 miles, Greg Powers was kind enough to open up a used book shop that is just exactly 'rainy afternoon' sized. The eponymously named Powers Rare Books in Manchester, NH, is like nearly everything along the Merrimack River, in an old brick mill building. (personally I think old mill buildings are the ideal structure for old bookstores, they have the floor/ceiling support to actually HOLD all the damn weight) I had run across Greg at the Vermont BookFair, and ever since had been trying to find a few contiguous minutes to run up to Manchester to check out his store . . . and I did. And I even found stuff to I could afford to buy, color me shocked and surprised. Greg must be doing well, he can afford to staff his joint with a published children's book author: Muriel Dubois. He has a decent balance of collectibles and readables, and even some stuff I hadn't seen before. . . and some I was eerily familiar with. Have you ever SEEN copies of books that you used to own in a strange shop ? I dont mean a book you SOLD to to someone, I mean clumps of books, and you can't explain it. Occam's Razor: I sold books to Broadway Books and Greg bought Broadway Books stock, so there, no mystery. But it was still eerie - cause I almost bought some of them back. Yep, done THAT before. Must get back up there next rainy afternoon.

who are these clowns?

Netflix sent me the Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). (for those who haven't tried it yet, Netflix isn't perfect, but it's the only place you can actually RENT anything that isn't mindless) I finally got a chance to watch it, while I was avoiding work and playing with the kittens, the ones who actually LIKE me are leaving tomorrow. That sucks but if you KEEP them, they turn into cats. This comedy troupe from Canada tours around and puts on shows that literate, witty and downright silly. What they do to Bill S.'s work on this dvd is illegal in eight states and at least 2 countries - but well worth watching. They have also managed to butcher, American History (that seems to be all the rage these days) as well as the Bible (no comment) and are presently touring with a riff on the sacred cash cow Hollywood. I would advise seeing them in public but in lieu of that, watching and/or buying the dvds or at least the Book: Reduced Shakespeare the Attention Impaired Reader's Guide to the World's Best Playwrite. I haven't seen it yet, but I can't see them getting that vast amount of manic energy into 256 pages. But I will give them the benefit of the doubt. Richard Armour took a few stabs at this sort of thing. If they are half as funny, it may be worth the $12 bucks. (reduced. of course)

birthday boy • 1856 - George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1950) lost and found • A one thousand year old has been discovered in an Irish Bog. It was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries. AUDIO from NPR. banktoaster • Penguin is producing downloadable podcasts with interviews from its authors. in from Win Schaeffer better late • dateline - Vineland, Kansas - 100 year old librarian sighted. cause when she was only a 99 yr old librarian it wasn't real news. talking head • NPR talks to Juliet Barker about her new history of Henry V and her book Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England mitzvah • Monterey CA resident Ed Leeper had been giving away 10,000 books from the bed of his pickuptruck, 'Liquid Books' until his pickup & books were both stolen. But not to worry they were soon recovered. banktoaster • Send your self an email in the future, or would it be from the past if you got it IN the future, but if you sent it now, would it be to the future? Whatever . . . here you go, FutureMe.org. audio • from Talk of the Nation, a round table discussion about the film adaptations of Philip K Dick, who may very well be one of the most important writers of the 20th century - guests include Jonathan Lethem.

In the future everyone will have a blog and Amazon is out to make sure.

With Amazon Connect, Amazon is giving authors a place to blog regardless of whether they want to or not. With this recent example of Robert B Parker, who posts 42 words and gets 69+ responses from fans who have been absolutely dying to tell them how much his writing has meant to them over the years. Yeah, it's kinda like a press tour that never ends. For a complete list of Amazon Connect participating authors whether under duress from their agents or not. is it just me? i have never heard of 99% of these people. RSS feeds for these things is available, which is actually a clever idea, (I LOVE RSS), it lets you get notified when a blog gets updated, so you don't HAVE to remember to check the author's blog. Cause that was SO weighing on MY mind.

poets will vblog for food

the Bibliophile Mailing List's own Michael Mart has a super nifty deluxe video blog called of all things Poetry Vlog. Videos updated weekly feature original poems read by the poets, in its archives can be found these poets : Jesse Ball | Rhonda Ward | Mario Susko | Duane Esposito | Marcia Slatkin | Amy Ouzoonian | Thomas Fink | George Wallace | Patti Tana | Alan Semerdjian | Victoria Twomey | David Axelrod | Mankh | Mindy Kronenberg | Graham Everett | Tammy Morgan

signature archives

Tomfolio has added a nice little Autograph archive. Purple House Press - Author Signatures archives. P. Scott Brown's - Author Signatures archives Faded Giant - Author Signature archives. please send in any more you may know of, thanks.

Furinalia the Roman festival in honour of Furina, the goddess of robbers

spent all day yesterday playing with our new minidv camcorder, which now has a battery which will hold a charge. it's not top of the line, but will hopefully give us a sharper image than the crackerjack prize, which i will still keep around as a safety. so please feel free to make suggestions about which book repairs you would like to see filmed. 1897 - Writer Jack London sails to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he will write his first successful stories. 1905 - Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born writer, Nobel Prize Laureate (d. 1994) audio • from NPR More than a dozen states are considering laws that would restrict price increases for college textbooks. With many books now costing more than $100, college students and their families are facing huge bills on top of tuition costs. I'd like to SEE that happen it will probably force the publishers into some type of POD or digital form of textbook. worth reading • small clever commentary on thesimon.com about formulaic possessive book titles: .The Editor's Oversight. penny care • Yahoo is running Bookfinder.com's announcement explaining the BF's decision to display all prices as postpaid. Hoping that by comparing total prices, rather than base prices, the search engine can save buyers up to 45%. Hey, i'll try anything once. But then I usually just lift the info and try to deal directly with the vendor. essay • from the Boston Globe a piece about Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, which is seeing its Modern Library debut.

1901 - O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank. for a list of O. Henry prize winners 1919-1999 1974 - Watergate Scandal: The United States Supreme Court unanimously rule that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. ah the good old days. talking head • Utah's Deseret news interviews Sandra Scoppettone birthday girl • 1929 - Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author birthday boys • 1802 - Alexandre Dumas père, French writer (d. 1870) 1878 - Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett), Irish writer (d. 1957) 1895 - Robert Graves, English author (d. 1985) 1916 - John D. MacDonald, American novelist, creator of detective Travis McGee. (d. 1986) worth reading • the Daily Kos has a couple of useful posts on todays publishing pitfalls - part 1, part 2 Leading to Preditors and Editors a fascinating resource for sorting the wheat from the chaff in the publishing industry, includes big red warning signs. clever • an independent bookstore owner in CA thinks outside the box and comes up with a bookstore with no books.

DIY USPS post cards

Well at least some part of our government knows the internet isn't a series of tubes. Using Premum Postcards (USPS) you can generate a REAL full color postcard, with a printed message and recipient address (from an address book you can import) and have as many or as few as you want directly MAILED. It's .84 for one and obviously less for more. 1 - 249 $0.84 250-499 $0.82 500-999 $0.80 1,000-2,499 $0.78 etc . . . . If you consider the costs of full color printing AND postage, that's really not all that bad. Heck even BUYING a post card in a shop is a buck or more. On the whole I think it's kinda clever. I am sure it won't be long before someone else sets up a site to do it better and cheaper than Uncle Sam. You can also buy direct mailing lists (priced per address) from parameters you set.

importance of being Ernest

At the 26th Hemingway Days Festival, a Texas commercial real estate developer won the annual Ernest Hemingway look-alike competition against a field of 131, rocking the house at Sloppy Joe's, the writer's favorite Key West drinking hole. the real papa.

update: the kittens have been returned to the fold. now i can sleep. 1829 - In the United States, William Austin Burt patents the first typewriter. 1973 - Robert Anton Wilson, the occultist/philosopher, either achieved contact with extraterrestrials from Sirius or started a long-term period of having wild hallucinations, depending on which way you want to look at it. birthday boy • 1888 - Raymond Chandler, American-born author (d. 1959) caveat ebayer • someone wrote a handy dandy guide to alert people about the rash of fake USB drives on ebay. Nice of eBay to let em post it up - would be nicer if they just canceled the auctions for fraudulent items, but that's too easy eh? site worth seeing • wirednews blog has posted some lovely covers of old comic books. worth reading • the Santa Cruz Sentinel has a pre-signing article about Lewis Buzzbee's book of biblio essays 'the Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.' blogs of note • Paul Collins' blog, Weekend Stubble has an ode to bookseller catalogs esp Maggs Bros. in from Brian Cassidy, Bookseller worth checking out • the trailer for Lasse Hallström's upcoming film the Hoax is up on the net. Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving stiring up a fantastic media frenzy in the 70s selling his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a publishing house. reminder • back to school sales mean stocking up on erasers and cheap brushes for gluing. in from Helen Crow @ Pogo's Place

pardon our appearance, i am backwards in my work, i spent the last 48 hours staking out cage traps to recover my kittens and have been check the traps all night and trying to sleep in the day. So, far we haev recovered one orange and sighted the grey, so only one more night of this crap. I did get a new camcorder for more bullpen videos, which should give us more sharpness in the image, but the battery is dead, so until then keep those cards and letters coming. banktoaster • Rebekah @ Coelacanth Books is sharing with us her father's recipe for cleaning books that would otherwise be thrown away. Jim Bartlett's Recipe for Cleaning Mildewed Books 1 Gallon cool water (not warm or hot) ½ cup of household bleach ¼ cup Greased Lightening® (or other citrus based cleaner) Mix together Wring out solution until almost dry and clean the infected area, may require more than one treatment. While damp put in freezer for 4 days (in a plastic bag if freezer has a defrost cycle). Then air dry in the sun for several days. Important - Use cheap synthetic sponge, the kind they sell at the dollar store that don't hold much water.

Pi Approximation Day*

1598 • The Merchant of Venice is entered on the Stationers' Register. By decree of Queen Elizabeth, the Stationers' Register licensed printed works, giving the Crown tight control over all published material. Although its entry on the register licensed the printing of The Merchant of Venice, its first version would not be published for another two years. birthday gals • 1859 - Emma Lazarus, American poet (d. 1887) 1908 - Amy Vanderbilt, American author (d. 1974) birthday boys • 1882 - Edward Hopper, American painter (d. 1967) 1898 - Stephen Vincent Benét, American author (d. 1943) 1936 - Tom Robbins, American author event • Comic-Con more than 140,000 people are expected to swarm a comic-book convention in San Diego, CA this weekend. something new • from NPR a review of Sarah Bird's new book The Flamenco Academy by Veronique de Turenne worth reading • a nice syndicated AP piece about the growing number of people taking up bookinding. in from Win Schaeffer audio • NPR's On Point from WBUR has Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America on to talk about the value and history of laziness. Hmmm . . . I could get behind that. unstirred • A new James Bond novel by a mystery writer will be published next year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bond creator Ian Fleming. I'm confused haven't they been cranking out ersatz Bonds for a while now? banktoaster • Tourist Remover . . . a free utility at snapmania that removes unwanted objects from your photos - I kid you not. events • NYC Harlem Book Fair TN The Sewanee Writers' Conference. *July 22, which is written as 22/7 in international (little-endian) date format; 22 divided by 7 is an approximation of π.

lets try this again, my browser keeps upchucking and i keep losing my posts. but it's a day for losing things, 2 kittens escaped from the carrier on the way to the vet. argh. 1925 - Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100. birthday boys • 1899 - Hart Crane, American poet (d. 1932) • 1899 - Ernest Hemingway, American writer, Nobel laureate (d. 1961) • 1911 - Marshall McLuhan, Canadian author (d. 1980) • 1933 - John Gardner, American author (d. 1982) cool tool • Among other tools, the toolhaus.org has an negative eBay feedback tool which is a fast way to look up a eBay seller's negative dings without having to scroll through buyer feedbacks, page after page. cool. mapping stolen goods • Yale has released its list of stolen and missing maps. As obvious as it may seem to us, the FBI has yet to prove that Yale owned some of the copies of maps previously sold by the brigand Smiley. Who they F*k else do they think stole them the TOOTH fairy? cookies • the list of 14 books being considered for the first Dylan Thomas literary prize have been announced in the late poet's home city of Swansea. Susan Barker - Sayonara Bar Lucy Caldwell - Where They Were Missed Kira Cochrane - Escape Routes For Beginners Rodge Glass - No Fireworks Joey Goebel - Torture The Artist Ian Holding - Unfeeling Nick Laird - Utterly Monkey and To A Fault Emily Maguire - Taming The Beast Mathew David Scott - Playing Mercy James Scudamore - The Amnesia Clinic Talitha Stevenson - Exposure Rachel Tresize - Fresh Apples Liza Ward - Outside Valentine obit worth reading • Dave Walter at 63, author and Montana Historical Society research historian.

International Chess Day

This is my life and it's ending one commute at a time. birthday boys • 1924 - Thomas Berger, American novelist • 1933 - Cormac McCarthy, American author 1932 - In Washington, D.C., police fire tear gas on World War I veterans looking for their bonuses who attempt to march to the White House. the more things change, the more they stay the same eh? 1945 - The U.S. Congress approves the Bretton Woods Agreement. Pay attention, this was important. It was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states. It established the IMF and what became the World Bank. Without it there would be no Paypal, no credit cards, no wire transfers, no uniform currency conversion. It's probably the only thing the nations of the world ever or will ever agree upon. Doesn't that just make one go all warm and fuzzy? (origami shirt) banktoaster • did you know there is a version of Wikipedia for people who aren't fluent in English? neither did i - it's called simple.wikipedia

Bookwormz

Bookwormz is a user-supported database designed to find and thereby support independent bookstores throughout the United States. Now if we can get them to expand to the entire planet we will have something. Add yourself or a bookstore you love to the database.

1692 - Salem Witch Trials: Sarah Good, Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Rebbecca Nourse, and Sussanah Martin are hanged for witchcraft in Salem, MA. 1848 - A pioneer women's rights convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Amelia Jenks Bloomer introduces the new women's fashion by wearing a pair of "bloomers". 1898 - Novelist Emile Zola flees France to escape imprisonment after being convicted of libel against the French army in the notorious Dreyfus affair. birthday girls • 1850 - Margaret Fuller, American writer (b. 1810) 1860 - Lizzie Borden (Lisbeth A. Borden) (d. 1927), American murder suspect. She was accused of axing her parents to death in 1892; she was acquitted in 1893. Her home in Fall River, MA, (the crime scene) is now a Bed & Breakfast & Museum. banktoaster • Daniel Pinkwater is serializing his entire new book The Neddiad on the internet between August 2006 and April 2007. banktoaster • Someone has finally google mapped somethings i care about - the Atlas of Fiction real places imagine by great writers. classifieds • Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY needs a nipping press for its book arts program. If there is any available for sale in the NY metropolitan area, please contact: Robbin Ami Silverberg statistics • the Pew Internet Life project has just released a study on blogging in the USA. in progress . . .

things you find while looking for other things

I was going through all the nooks and crannies in my hovel the other day looking for my 25 year old Cosmic Wimpout game, and lo and behold I found my book charm bracelet in an old jewlery case. I remember I had to stop wearing it as the charms kept catching on things . . . I don't know how people who loose jewelry get any work done. All of the charms are 'books' cept for the moose reading a book on one end and the daisy on the other. . .oh AND the money bag...and something that looks like the Fat Man hydrogen bomb, I don't know why that's there. NOW if I can just find my gold Star Trek class ring I will be happy.

bookshop guardians - Maxxer & Yummo

Yummo is the “watch cat” and is responsible for security. He has a way of sleeping, yet staying vigilant. Also, I have caught him reading “on duty” but I can live with that. He is an Abby, 11 years old Maxxer is our #1 cat. 12 years old, we have had him since he was a baby. He likes people food, and he always sleeps in one of two baskets (made up with lambs wool, of course). He is the smartest cat I have ever known, and can actually translate human language into cat language and back again. He loves the heat, and also likes a good yarn. they live with Ed Smith Books, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida

World Kissing Day*

* does that mean we should kiss the world? 1925 - Adolf Hitler publishes his personal manifesto Mein Kampf. birthday girl • 1902 - Jessamyn West, American writer (d. 1984) birthday boys • 1906 - Clifford Odets, American writer (d. 1963) • 1939 - Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist, creator of Gonzo journalism (d. 2005) by age 10, Thompson was publishing his own two-page newspaper, which he sold for four cents. By his early teens, he had already launched on the life of drinking, vandalism, and pyromania that would turn him into a bestselling writer. At age 18, he was jailed for robbery. something new • the Guardian reviews Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature audio • Bat Segundo has a new podcast interview with John Updike. video • Bibliovideo podcasts via the write up at Fine Books and Collections blog. Direct Link to bookstories. they may have a better camcorder, but she doesn't have my sexy phone voice. product placement • NPR's John Ydstie reports on how publishers are using movie trailers to market their books. classifieds • The Maryland Institute College of Art is looking for several small book presses, preferably in the Baltimore/DC area. If anyone has one to sell or donate, would you please contact Abby Uhteg at MICA. obit of note • NYT Mickey Spillane at 88, writer. audio • NPR interviews Max Allan Collins about Mike Hammer. cool toy • No you can't buy it. Bookminder is a dandy little item, you can build yourself out of Lego pieces. in from Chris Lowenstein

he's got a point

to read Adam@Home everyday.

obit of note • Mickey Spillane at 88, mystery writer and creator of Detective Mike Hammer. I, the Jury was written in only nine days, but it became such success that Spillane quickly produced six more Hammer novels, five of them between 1950 and 1952. The Long Wait (1951) sold 3 million copies in a single week in 1952. • "If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day." • "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar. • "I'm a commercial writer, not an "author." Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book." • "Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book." Everyone once in a while I like a cheeseburger, about one a year. That's how often I read Mikey Spillaine, that's one a year for a lot of years. It's misogynistic, misanthropic, vulgar trash and I like it. Running around with the wrong element raised me to mock the man, the patter, the punch in the face that crumbles a thug like a sand castle kicked over by a bully. For years I read tripe by other authors that wound its way through a book like tourists in a garden maze, no matter how much you digested you never got anywhere good. For better or worse, Spillaine's words are alive, they told a story, the painted a picture. When Betsy drills holes in the bad guy you smell the powder, you feel the heat of the barrel. Mike Hammer wasn't a guy you wanted to meet in a dark alley, he wasn't even a guy you wanted sharing your universe, he was big and scary and totally unhinged. He wasn't flesh or carved in marble, he was molded out of paper pulp. He strode to the tune of Harlem Nocture. You read him cover to cover and it was good. -ed. Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 7:58 PM To: Bibliophile Bullpen Subject: Re: [b] RIP Mickey Spillane "No, Charlotte, I'm the jury now, and the judge, and I have a promise to keep. Beautiful as you are, as much as I almost loved you, I sentence you to death." (Her thumbs hooked in the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A sun-tanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstetched she walked toward me. Lightly, her tongue ran over her lips, making them glisten with pssion. The smell of her was like an exhilarating perfume. Slowly, a sigh escaped her, making the hemispheres of her breasts quiver. She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck.) The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out. I stood up in front of her and shoved the gun into my pocket. I turned, and looked at the rubber plant behind me. There on the table was the gun, with the safety catch off and the silencer still attached. Those loving arms would have reached it nicely. A face that was waiting to be kissed was really waiting to be splattered with blood when she blew my head off. My blood. When I heard her fall I turned around. Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief. "How c-could you?" she gasped. I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. "It was easy," I said. (from my slightly beat-to-shit first edition/second printing of the Signet paperback edition of "I, The Jury") Cordially, -Jerry- Jerry Silverman Chicago, IL

collectors plates

I go the heads up today about a new blog from Philadelphia Book Plate collector Lew Jaffe called obviously Bookplate Junkie. Lew not only gives us images of some rather spectacular plates but a little tidbit of history or wonder to go along with it. I wish I had spent more time lifting plates than selling the books they were attached to. His site is rather young yet, but it's going on the Bullpen sidebar, and will be a added to MY RSS feed. Bibliophiles grow old and die, but their bookplates wander on. If only I had the gall to actually PASTE something into a book that wasn't supposed to be there, I could be immortal too. 8( in from Michelle @ Bookmaven thanks Michelle! j

Yellow Pig Day*

1944 - Port Chicago disaster: Near the San Francisco Bay, two ships laden with ammunition for the war explode in Port Chicago, California, killing 232. not quite dead • Art Buchwald defies science & medicine and refuses to die just yet. The Boston Globe covers his move from the hospice to his home on Martha's Vineyard. birthday boy • 1889 Erle Stanley Gardner is born. site to see • ESG virtual museum. spun sugar • the Toronto Star has a piece about Abebooks, which is supposed to be an exposé but is surprisingly fluffy. it's that time of year • Money columnist Michelle Singletary has a syndicated piece on saving money on college textbooks. memento mori • a plaque has gone up at the Norfolk(UK) pub where Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Dancing Men. long yarn • A Bible written on a piece of silk 5,007 metres long, has been given a place in the Guinness Book of Records. avast • Online piracy of comic books is on the rise, an informal survey finds that 30% of the readers of online magazine Comic Book Resources have downloaded comics. event • The San Francisco Center for the Book hosts "X Libris," the Center's Tenth Anniversary exhibition. Highlights include the Hyakumanto Dharani, the world's first printed book, paste-ups for the first unexpurgated edition of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and the Center's first novel on a wall --'A Guy, a Girl, a Landscape. The exhibition opens on Friday, July 28th. worth reading • E. B. White makes it into columnist Marcia Mercer piece about numbers and identity. banktoaster • The National Film Board of Canada has put 50 of their brilliant animated short films on line for free viewing. The collection spans 60 years and includes several Oscar nominated shorts. *it's a math thing.

rendered myths #112

The New Bookseller and the 19 Books. Once up on a time . . . Newbookseller found 19 titles at the local thrift store and put them up on eBay one at a time. He started the bidding at $1 with no reserve. The first 18 sold for $1.01 each, the last, alas, did not get a bid. So, Newbookseller was 18¢ to the good, minus shipping, of course. Being a newbie Newbookseller did not understand shipping. Four dollars for gas was also spent that day, plus $5.97 at Taco Bell. With the shipping for 18 books (all media mail), for a total of $38.52 (18 books, one each to a different location), plus the $4 for gas, plus lunch of $5.97 (forget the money for TUMS), Newbookseller paid out $48.49. Subtract the profit of 18¢ from the expenses and you arrive at MINUS $48.31. However, Newbookseller had to pay $1.20 per listing on eBay for a total of $22.80 plus eBay's 5% fee on all sold items, or 5% X $18.18 (18 sales at $1.01 each) or 91¢. Now Newbookseller is in the hole, with all fees, minus the 18¢ profit, now down $72.02. Newbookseller made another 'error' highlighting each eBay listing, all 19 of them, for an additional $19, now Newbookseller is MINUS $91.02. Newbookseller was learning the ropes. Newbookseller got 4 of his 18 sales returned, his description failing to mention obvious flaws (yes, a return on a $1.01 book). This set Newbookseller back an additional $3.85 each since the 4 separate buyers returned each book priority, to get their refunds quicker, plus shipping; $3.85 x 4 is $15.40, added to the MINUS $91.02 one finds MINUS $106.42, and then add the $1.01 x 4 (4 refunds) or $4.04 net; the newbie is now down $110.46. Newbookseller was starting to question his newfound profession and had half made up his mind, when he realized Paypal was charging him 3.8% on his $18.18, or robbing him of an additional 18¢ . . . so far Newbookseller was down $110.64. Three of the finds Newbookseller had sold were ACES, books worth about 4k each. However, since Newbookseller misspelled several words in the SUBJECT LINE, nobody but a sharp-eyed bookseller from Florida, had FOUND the listings (simply by misspelling in the search box on purpose.) Adding 50% of the potential profit from the 3 misspelled listings, at $2k each, is another $6k. Newbookseller didn’t know any of this yet or know that the paypal and eBay fees on this amount would make his INSIDES TWIST. Newbookseller had another $6k marked in the MINUS column. Now down $6,110.64. To reach the status of BOOKSELLER, Newbookseller ATE his loses, and . . . hoped tomorrow would be better. It wasn’t. Newbookseller is now counted among all the other “booksellers.” PS: for the record, Newbookseller initially paid $95 for his 19 books, plus 7% tax, or $6.65 each, or a new price of $101.65. The total the NO LONGER NEW bookseller is down is only $6212.29(net). But now, being a REAL bookseller, all the new bookseller could say was " . . is that all?” Ed Smith @ Ed Smith Books

Bullpen Video • How to remove a bookplate

If the bookplate refuses to release, it was probably put on with an acrylic adhesive and should be treated like a sticker.

Bullpen Book Description Contest - winners

since it's my contest i get to make the rules and i declare everyone a winner. each entry had its own special appauling silliness and eerie accuracy. winner • forrest proper's 2nd entry winner • p.scott brown's entry winner • robert mc lean's entry winner • darrel griffin's entry winner • carol delle's entry winner • janet gezork's entry winner • jill linden's entry winner • forrest proper's 1st entry so each winner gets a free copy of the Methuen Garden Club Cookbook - published in 2004 by your's truly. btw i still have a caseful of this book, so expect a lot more contests. congratulations. one an all.

1951 - The novel Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger published audio • from NPR commentator Francesca Segre confesses to rearranging the shelves at bookstores to make her book easier to find. worth reading • a story from New Delhi, 34 year old house maid Baby Halder, is now a star author. clever solution • Newberry Library and Midwestern Universities having been splitting the ever increaing costs of rare book acquisitions. The Newberry, an independent research library, when a desirable rare book comes up for sale, the library puts up two-thirds of the money and one of the schools one-third. The Newberry keeps the book eight months a year; the school can have it for four. something new • a small review of Cowboy Logic the new book by Kinky Friedman, author, musician and gubernatorial candidate. audio • NPR gives a us a piece about Sotheby's First Folio auction. talking head • NPR's Terry Gross interviews Edmund Write about his new book Lives

new trick for old booksellers

How to shrink the photos you email so they don't scroll off the recipients' screen. In Windows XP, click to select the photos you want to send from My Pictures or another location on your computer. After you have selected the pictures, click in the "E-mail selected items" option in the task pane. You can also right-click with the mouse and select "Send to Mail Recipient" from the pop-up menu. In the resulting box, click the button next to "Make all my pictures smaller" and then on the link for "Show more options" to see a selection of resolutions to use for the picture attachments.

WOD • what is methyl cellulose and why do i care?

Methylcellulose (or methyl cellulose) is a chemical compound derived from cellulose¹. A white powder that dissolves in cold (but not in hot) water [unlike gelatine], forming a clear viscous solution or gel. It is sold under a variety of trade names like Citrucel® and is used as a thickener and emulsifier in various food and cosmetic products, and also as a treatment of constipation². Like cellulose, it is not digestible, not toxic, and not allergenic. And it is also the main ingredient in K-Y Jelly® and artificial tears and is used in the porn industry as artificial semen . . . but enough about my private life. Methylcellulose is also employed as a mild glue which can be reversed with water. Methylcellulose is the main ingredient in many wallpaper pastes³ (the other ingredient is wheat starch). There you have it. It's sticky when wet, it dries, and get's sticky again when rewet. It isn't strong enough for spine work, but works plenty well for paper repairs. Wheat starch paste is use much more by conservators and binders, but that requires cooking and has a short shelf life. RECIPE: Stir 1 rounded tablespoon methylcellulose into 1/2 cup distilled water. Let stand and thin with water if necessary. Acid-free, non-toxic, odorless and vermin-proof. Most of the book supply vendors sell it in large quanitites, but if you check the art suppliers, you will find the 1.5 oz Lineco® container. ¹ A complex carbohydrate, (C6H10O5)n, that is composed of glucose units, forms the main constituent of the cell wall in most plants, and is important in the manufacture of numerous products, such as paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and explosives. ² When eaten, methylcellulose is not absorbed by the intestines but passes through the digestive tract undisturbed. It is used to treat constipation, diverticulosis, hemorrhoids, irritable bowel syndrome and diarrhea. go figure. ³ When the book isn't particularly valuable or I don't actually HAVE any methyl cellulose on hand, I reach for the wallpaper paste and mix it VERY well and very thin.

National Tapioca Pudding Day

1799 - Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta, by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard. birthday boys • 1606 - Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch guy, liked to paint. • 1796 - Thomas Bulfinch, American mythologist (d. 1867) • 1931 - Clive Cussler, American author birthday girl • 1919 - Iris Murdoch, Irish writer (d. 1999) audio • Rembrandt's Unsparing Eye from NPR by Susan Stamberg video recommendation • Rembrandt (1936) dir Alexander Korda, w/ Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. delightful. in progress . . . i'm back . . . it's over 90º here in the Merrimack Valley and everything comes to a screeching crawl. what started as one errand - turned into a 3 hour series of stupid errands. my ersatz grandmother wanted a 'housecoat' with snaps. when was the last time you saw a housecoat in a store? or anywhere OTHER than on your grandmother who bought it during the johnson era? So after visiting every '-mart', in a 5 mile area, i ended up at the Salvation Army thrift store, where of COURSE all the housecoats with snaps can be found. I almost bought several, but she's 95.5 now, i don't think she's gonna be needing too many more. anyways, I picked up a bunch of 10 for a dollar kids books from my brother's kids and scooped up the items i needed to pull off another video. . . and i THINK the new camcorder is in this box that came in the mail. I swear i don't know how people with regular jobs pull of a blog everyday. something new • NYT reviews 'District and Circle,' by Seamus Heaney.essay • from the Washington Post, David Stanton, talks about John Gardner and Grendel. another essay • from the Australian: Nobel winner Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm was rejected by 12 publishers. squeezing the tube • Peter Pan in Scarlet, the authorized sequel to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan will be published in October. No wonder they were fussing about Moore's Lost Girls. mitzvah • from the Chicago Tribune : Used books open up a brand-new world for schoolkids in Africa lost n'found • After 65 years, Wild Flowers An unpublished manuscript by artist Emily Carr will finally be published by the Royal BC Museum in Victoria

Bastille Day

1789 - Bastille Day is the French national holiday, celebrated on 14 July each year. It is called Fête Nationale (National Holiday) in France. It commemorates the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789; the Fête de la Fédération was seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern French "nation", and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the First Republic, during the French Revolution. blogs of note • John Reinhart at Bibliobloggin has a nice post today on visiting to the Des Moines, IA book sale prep site. • Michael Allen the Grumpy Old Bookman has give the Bullpen another nice plug along with his other friday blurbs. birthday boys • 1860 - Owen Wister, American author, the Virginian (d. 1938) • 1904 - Isaac Bashevis Singer, Polish-born American Nobel-winning Yiddish author (d. 1991) . 1903 - Irving Stone, American author, The Agony and the Ecstasy (d. 1989) birthday girl • 1868 - Gertrude Bell, English archaeologist, writer, spy, and administrator (d. 1926) Sometimes called the mother of modern day Iraq. no comment. S•O•S - Talebones a semi-pro magazine featuring science fiction and dark fantasy from established and up-and-coming writers which debuted in 1995 is on it's last issue #33, but they are sending out a plea, if they get enough people to buy issue #33 they will produce a #34. banktoaster • nice little list of common mistakes in English that AREN't mistakes at all.

something smells funny

Artoons • Twice a week, WBUR cartoonist Leo Abbett pokes fun at all things artistic in the news.

it's one of those days with a Y in it.

okay, folks for most of today, i was totally and obliviously convinced that today was tomorrow. right up until the moment when i arrived for a hair cut that was scheduled for the real tomorrow, not the fake tomorrow that i was living in. i was convinced it was friday, i don't know what convinced me, perhaps torrents of rain or the dark skies, or just that fact that i WANTED it to be friday. so after they cut my gray hair, i was seriously depressed, more so than normal. i had done all my friday errands early and had to go home and do all thursday's stuff too. so, after i stopped on the side of a 4 lane road and rescued a tortoise from getting squash-you-all-flat, i decided to keep on pretending it was friday. I took myself out for a nice leisurely lunch, did a few more errands, bought a few art supplies and stole an armful of 'free' newspapers for the kitten cage. now your friday will be my thursday. come to think of it, it's not a lot different from my wednesday, but there is usually chinese food on thursday. birthday boy • 1934 - Wole Soyinka, Nigerian writer, Nobel Prize laureate worth reading • from Canada's National Post, we have a nice feature on 40 year veteran antiquarian bookseller David Mason. cool tools • Redroller.com is up and in beta test, the site provides cost comparisons between five shipping options for your package. in from Donald D. Ramsey @ All Books Considered lost n'found• A 20-page pamphlet with a 172-line poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which has been missing since 1811, has been found. obits of note • Dorothy Uhnak at 76, mystery writer was inspired by police experience. Flemish author Hubert Lampo at 85, who was best known for his work The Coming of Joachim Stiller. blog of note • Scott Brown's The Fine books and Collections blog has the best piece about old book buying I have read on the net in ages I wish I had it on the bullpen worth reading • the Guardian has a lovely long piece about one of the extant 230 Shakespeare First Folios, which will be on the block at Sothebys. banktoaster • Leadholder.com is an online museum to . . . wait for it . . . drafting pencils, I kid you not. Boy howdy, do I love the internet.

Bullpen Bookclub - Biographies of Books

something new • As companion pieces for Melvyn Bragg's Twelve Books That Changed the World, Atantic/Hodder has reinvented its Days that Shook the World series and begun issuing 'biographies' of Books that Shook the World. The Guardian gives us a fascinating extract from Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography by Francis Wheeler. The series so far includes: Thomas Paine's Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography by Francis Wheeler Plato's Republic: A Biography by Simon Blackburn Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography by Janet Browne The Qur'an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence i'm such a sucker for other people's research.

Bullpen Video How to tighten shaken hinges

crumbly cookie • the winner of the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Contest is . . . Jim Guilgi of Carmichael CA. 1859 - A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is published. 1960 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is first published. 1937 - Dylan Thomas marries Caitlin Macnamara birthday boys • 1899 - E. B. White, American writer (d. 1985) 1913 - Cordwainer Smith, American writer (d. 1966) 1930 - Harold Bloom, American literary critic cookies • Robert Minhinnick author of Nuclear, has won the £10,000 Wales Book of the Year award banktoaster • didjaver try to email a large file over and over and get nowhere? yeah me too. A friend of mine showed me this www.yousendit.com which lets you upload large files and sends notification emails to the recipient with the files location. From what I can see it's free as long as you don't want the premier service. monster mash • Grendel, a new opera based on the novel by John Gardner opens in New York Tuesday night. The show tells the classic medieval tale of Beowulf, but from the monster's perspective. in mourning • the San Francisco chronicle attends the wake of Cody's Books. super shopping • A 383-year-old First Folio edition of a text containing a number of Shakespeare's plays is being auctioned off at Sotheby's in London. clerihews • I think Clerihew Day was this week. " The clerihew is a four-line poem with a rhyming scheme of AABB. The first line traditionally is, or ends in, a person's name; the meter is often mangled, if not ignored altogether; and the overall intent of the poem stresses entertainment over instruction, humor over fact. The term "clerihew" comes from Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who wrote the first known clerihew as a schoolboy." Father Brown Gained wide renown. Not for prayerbooks or hyminals, But for collaring criminals. How to write a clerihew at giggle poetry.

guest post - Sally Spooner

Hello everyone, On our way from Connecticut to Massachusetts yesterday we stopped at Traveler Food and Books just off Route 84 in CT near the Massachusetts border. It's hard to miss from the huge sign that can be seen from Route 84. The building itself has a bright yellow roof and Bud Light signs in the windows. There's an enormous moose sculpture outside. A fun place with signed photos of writers on the walls and book shelves filled with books upstairs and downstairs. They have gift items too. The staff is friendly. This would be sort of the opposite of a shop that charges for browsing. Here browsing and even many of the books are free. You get to choose from a selection of free books to take home after your meal. You can read with your meal too, if you want. What they charge for is the modestly priced food and the beer. A novel approach to the distribution of used books. It's satisfying to know a place like this exists. In the middle of the afternoon it was moderately busy with eaters and browsers. The sweet potato fries are very good. We were in a big hurry and didn't have much time to browse, but will mark this for another visit at a more leisurely pace. We might even have to stop in for the sweet potato fries every time we go by on Route 84. Sally Spooner PS The latest Fine Books and Collections is another enjoyable edition. It's hard to imagine a magazine with articles on an exhibit of the history of the Bible, comic books and Harry Stephen Keeler all in the same issue. It's about as varied as you can get. All those articles and the rest are very readable and just about as approachable as Traveler Food and Books.

new trick for old booksellers

neat trick • Renaming more than one file in Windows Explorer at the same time: Highlight all the files you want to rename. Once all the files you want to rename are highlighted, press F2, or right-click on one of the files and select Rename. All of your file selections will disappear except for one, but don't panic: Type in your new name and click Enter. One file will be now be named "renametext" and the others will have sequential numbers in the format of "renametext (1)" and "renametext (2)" and so on.

event • Registration is now open for the Guild of Book Workers Centennial Celebration to be held in New York City on October 12-14, 2006. super shopping • The finest private collection of Samuel Beckett's work is to be sold by the family of Alan Clodd, a Dublin-born book dealer who died almost four years ago and who devoted much of his life to cultivating a friendship with the reclusive playwright. banktoaster • If you have Gmail (Google's online mail application) you get 2 Gigabytes of space . . and YES you can use it as online file storage. PC Magazine has an article from '05 about the Gmail Drive extension which works with MS Internet Explorer but if you skip half way down, it explains how to just upload files directly into Gmail as email attachments. the next small thing • It seems the world has finally caught on to what we have been telling them for the last 30 years, that digitally storing data isn't as secure as WRITING THINGS DOWN - but they decided to go us steadfast book freaks one step further. Introducing Norsam's High Density Rosetta (HD-Rosetta) which provides analog storage of information and images that will last for thousands of years. 196,ooo letter sized pages inscribed on a nickel plate 2" square and 1/4" thick, retrievable by electron microscope only.

1925 - Scopes Trial begins In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial". John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. audio • this week's On the Media from NPR has a piece on the history of the Freedom of Information Act. birthday boy • 1871 - Marcel Proust, French writer (d. 1922) a recipe for Madeleines. audio • from NPR reviews of The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl, and Louis Bayard's The Pale Blue Eye which both prove that Edgar Allen Poe isn't really dead. birthday girls • 1923 - Jean Kerr, American author (d. 2003) - Please don't eat the daisies. • 1931 - Alice Munro, Canadian writer sounds reasonable • A woman moving from Butte, Montana to Portland, Oregon, would rather give 35-thousand books to a charity, than transport them. something new • a review of Jason Roberts' book "A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler" banktoaster • Pigpog a blog for unleashing creativity, has a field guide to mechanical pencils as well as one on pens. The things you find while looking for other things.

old bookseller trick - never ending end papers

Okay kids, this is one of those tricks that no one talks about. If you handle a lot of damaged books like ex-libs, or books where the ultra paranoid have torn out their name, you are going to have to replace an endpaper from time to time. Unless you want to run out and buy a new old book that matches your repair perfectly you may want to build up a collection of endpapers from deceased books. We all have our own idea what makes a good dead book, for the sake of argument let's just agree that a deceased book is one where the parts are more valuable than the whole. Once you have harvested the book parts, you can save the endpapers and blank flyleaves in one file drawer. Group them by width and height, let the age, color and material take care of themselves. That way when trying to match, you start with folder nearest the original size and work your way up through the sizes. Remember large epigraph or dedication pages make good cutdowns for smaller books. Some of the more ambitious repairers will also save skived book cloth, boards, labels, ribbons whatever can be salvaged. If you STILL can't match the endpaper, you can always take the rear free endpaper and flip it over and make it the front free endpaper. (a missing rear endpaper is much less noticable) Here endeth the lesson.

Bullpen video - How to tip in a page

Our first Bullpen Video, my first video period. yes, the dvrecorder sucketh, get over it. it cost me 40 bucks on ebay and is one step up from a crackerjack prize. when someone rich dies and leaves me a better video recorder, we will have better video. this video is 1 minute 17 seconds long, if you have dialup connection and can't watch it, email me I will put it on a disc for you for a dollar.

worth reading • the NYT gives us a piece on the Green Press Initiative and how publishers can save the planet 'one book at a time' food fight! • eBay/Paypal has had a corner on the online payment market for a long time, too long in fact. Yes, there is Billpay and a few other people with their toes in the water, but Paypal is the great white. Now that Google, trying to be all things to all people, has introduced Gbuy, a petty shitstorm is upon us all. Ebay has banned Gbuy from its site claiming it is protecting its customers from harm. 'insert hysterical laughter here' now they are firing the head of Paypal because he didn't see Gbuy on the horizon. My money's on Google, I think all the bad experiences customers have had over the years with eBay and Paypal are gonna finally bite eBay in the ass. July 7 - 1907 - Robert A. Heinlein, American writer (d. 1988) missed this yesterday slow learners • The ceremonial burning of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank by far-right extremists in eastern Germany was condemned by the German government amid calls to intensify efforts to stamp out neo-Nazi activity. audio • from NPR by Bret Anthony Johnston Why 'Lolita' Remains Shocking, and a Favorite obit of note • Noted novelist Raja Rao (96), who earned fame for his contributions to Indian English literature, died in Texas. sans newsprint • Back in the day I used to get four newspapers delivered to the house . . .everyday: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Eagle Tribune. And after reading them my ex- used to leave them where they fell, hence my home looked like a hamster cage. Newsjunkie that I am I slowly cut back one paper at a time, and 3 years ago went to online only. I can survive with online headlines alone, but not without my comics - gocomics.com, gives me my daily fix of For Better or for Worse and everything else. I am reminded of this right now, because I have 5 kittens and NO NEWSPRINT! argh..... event • Organizers are looking for volunteers for the Kentucky Women's Book Festival Sept. 22-23 at Spalding University in Louisville. banktoaster • Imagination Cubed offers us an online wipeboard, hey it's cute and it's free. I did THIS with it. cooltoy • while reseaching the Bookseller Action figure, found out that the G I Joe Ernie Pyle figure had gone out of print, so to speak, and was NOW selling for $$$. Then when I saw one on eBay for 20 bucks I just had to have it. Hmmm i'm gonna need a shelf for these things soon. My guess is the $$$ price tag is due to the fact that this particular figure makes a good body for a custom made X-phile Skinner there is no other way to explain the washboard abs - cause they ain't historically acurate.

new trick for old software

As always I found this when looking for something else, figured i'd share - i haven't found a personal use for this yet . . . but i am always amazed to find there are clever things built into windows instead of the hundreds of factory installed bugs. Using MS Notepad for joural entries. Open a blank Notepad file Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first line of the file, followed by Enter. Save the file and close it. Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after. Type your notes and then save and close the file. Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it. F5 will also insert the date and time. .LOG 11:24 PM 7/7/2006 now is the time for all good men 11:24 PM 7/7/2006 quick brown fox jumped over the lazy white man 11:39 PM 7/7/2006

you noticed i skipped a thursday . . . never could get the hang of thursdays. Hera give me strength • DC Comics has signed New York Times list best-selling author Jodi Picoult to write a five-issue series of Wonder Womancomics to be published next year. Sure now watch them hire some illiterate fanboy to write the movie. everybody has one • Last month travel site/blog Worldhum.com posted its Top 30 Travel Books now every body who's anybody (Rick Cahill, Pico Iyer etc . . .) gets to add their 2 cents. much ado • from the NYT Charles McGrath speculates about pushing Harry Potter over Reichenbach Falls. hmm . . . wait maybe I was just thinking that. you say that like it's a bad thing • An invitation to a book burning in French Lick, IN. . . and NO, I am not making this up, but perhaps they are. Granted I think a lot of old books, would be best spent warming houses in winter time, but to make a blanket decree that books that cost a penny are burnable is rather narrowminded. in from Perry Werner @ Pawprint Books something new • the Weekly Standard has a review of Harvard University Press's A Loeb Classical Library Reader by Tracy Lee Simmons. poetry.gov? • game designer Yehuda Berlinger has put the The U.S. Copyright code, into verse "These verses describe All the copyright code Of the U. S. of A. Written down as an ode" banktoaster • Office Depot is offering free downloadable office forms Just in case you want to terminate someone and need JUST the right form. I am such a sucker for free forms. from the Bullpen Events Calendar: NY • Harlem Book Fair Buffalo 2006 JP • Tokyo International Book Fair JP • Michinoku Sf Festival Zuncon

Media Mail Subject to Inspection

gee, think that's sign's BIG enough? sorry about the image, i was using a cell phone to take a picture in a government building, i didn't want to be wrestled to the ground and spend the rest of the day meeting nice young men with guns and nothing but time on their hands.

Workaholics Day

continuing in my week long attempt at sloth . . . . btw the kittens now have a new tripled decker home - but surprisingly still no self cleaning litter box 8( 1687 - Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. can you hear me now? • UPI reports authors are now going around their publishers refusals and are producing their own audiobooks. obit of note • Philip Rieff at 83; Noted Sociologist Wrote Books About Cultural Decline. something new • Bookslut has a review of Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life by The Washington Post’s Book World editor Michael Dirda. birthday boy • 1889 - Jean Cocteau, French writer (d. 1963) banktoaster • the Desk Drawer a Free Writing Exercise Workshop cool tools • another free piece of software is called Dark Room, a full screen word processing software which is eerilly reminiscent of the old dos word processors some of us remember all too well. The concept is sound - to remove all the crap around the edges of the screen which helps fight the unnatural distraction of writing on a PC. • For those MS Word users who don't want to go all the way to black, but like the idea of cutting back on destractions: from MS Word choose >TOOLS>OPTION>GENERAL, check 'blue background, white text' - then under >VIEW>FULL SCREEN. super shopping - • A notebook containing some of the last penned words of Jim Morrison – who died 35 years ago yesterday – is expected to fetch £100,000 at auction later this month. • The private collection of Pierre Beres, a legendary Paris book dealer fetched high prices late on Tuesday in the most closely watched auction of its type in years. • The Cornelius J. Hauck book collection had been sold for more than twice the pre-sale estimate of $4.5 million at Christie's New York in from yiah

1054 - A supernova is observed by the Chinese, the Arabs and possibly Amerindians near the star Tauri. For several months it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula. 1845 - Near Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau embarks on a two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond (see Walden). 1865 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is published. 1966 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act into United States law. birthday boy • 1927 - Neil Simon, American playwright losing something • A Turkish publisher faces up to six years in jail for "insulting the Turkish identity" by translating Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. alone together • After July 11, 2006, users of Windows 98 and Windows ME will have to fend for themselves, and Microsoft will no longer be releasing updates for those two operating systems. event • Kansas Book Festival: Celebrating Books, Art & Kansas Heritage, is planned for Sept. 29-30 at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium in Wichita. Free and open to all Kansans, the festival will be a showcase of Kansas authors and illustrators, and feature musicians and performers. The two-day celebration will be a signature event of the Countdown to Kansas Statehood. banktoaster • now THAT's Wallpaper! real Damask wallpaper patterns for your PC backgrounds and webpages frm the Inspiration Gallery.

I took Sunday off, mostly cause I was busy - either doing a boat load of idiot paper work or driving around trapping kittens for the rescue shelter. images What's book work without cats underfoot? 1886 - The New York Tribune becomes the first newspaper to use a linotype machine, eliminating typesetting by hand. birthday girls • 1908 - M. F. K. Fisher, American writer (d. 1992) • 1860 - Charlotte Gilman, American writer and women's rights advocate (d 8/17/1935) birthday boy • 1937 - Tom Stoppard, Czech-born playwright. talking head • NPR has a conversation with Art Buchwald, the "columnist who would not die." something new • NPR's David Lipsky reviews David Foster Wallace's new book of essays Consider the Lobster. essay • from Oakknoll's site we get the text of Bob Fleck's speech to Texas A & M "Then Now, Maybe Tomorrow: Booksellering as I see it." in from David G Anderson Books laurels • The Spanish holiday island of Mallorca has honoured the novelist, poet and scholar Robert Graves, its most illustrious British expatriate resident. sites worth seeing • Fine Books and Collections Magazine has revamped their website and added a lot more online only content. obit of note • Roderick MacLeish at 80, author, journalist event • Red Emma's bookshop in Mount Vernon, MD is ready for this weekend's Mid-Atlantic Radical Bookfair. in from Jill Linden banktoaster • Folded Space is offering Twenty mp3s of Great Songs from 1901-1920 for free.

Fête du Canada

1858 - The joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society. birthday boy • 1869 - William Strunk Jr., American grammarian (d. 1946) • 1899 - Indiana Jones's birthday. birthday gal • 1804 - George Sand, French writer (d. 1876) helpful hint • When you don't have a bonefolder at hand and are creasing what seems like an endless number of dust jacket covers, a small nylon kitchen pot scraper can be very helpful for getting a sharp crease. in from Lee Kirk @ the Prints and the Paper worth reading • from the Concord NH Monitor we have a feature declaring " It's increasingly difficult to profit on used books." well duh! cool tool • For those of you who wonder how anyone on the net has time to read blogs and websites - a lot of us use feader readers or news aggregators to collect it all and serve it up in edible portions. If you noticed that little box on the sidebar marked FeedBlitz. I use that to give me one email every day with all the site updates from the day before. Most blogs and sites have a feed url, usually the site's name with '\feed' or 'atom.xml' as an extension. I plug that into my Feedblitz page and whenever Forrest writes a new 'State of Denial' post, I get it in the mail along with all my spams and spoofs. blog note • Fine Books and Collections blog has a post about the passing of Collector Frank Streeter banktoaster • Mediachance has a great collection of free photo & digital camera software that handles a variety of tasks, from making "thumbs" to quick and really excellent digital image enhancement. Photo tools (including thumb-maker) and digital camera tools. in from Rebekah @Coelacanth Books

new trick for old booksellers - thumb drives

Recently I have had the occasion to pay homage to the inventor of the thumb drive, technically called a USB Flash Drive. Micro discs, floppy disks, zip disks, tape drives, backup drives, over the years we have tried them all to preserve our data in case of tragedy. Now these popular little buggers, available in assorted sizes including 1 & 2 gigs, hold a ridiculous amount and allow us to keep our precious data literally close to our hearts. USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports are popping up on everything. Every new gadget plugs in - keyboards, cameras, fans, vaccums, even coffee mugs. But the best plugin so far is the humble flash drive. Using drag and drop, you can either copy your data or use automated backup applications to do it for you. Last week, I had to replace 2 computers at my day job and if I hadn't been wearing the most important data around my neck I would have been in a panic. Customer files, documents, Quicken files, book databases, even utility programs, software setup programs, printer drivers, all live on my thumbs. In case of fire, a thumb drive on your keychain can save your sanity. Simply reinstall your major programs drag & drop your datafiles and you are up and running anywhere. On a further note, the new trend in the wind is AWAY from desktop or even laptop dependency. Surfing through life from computer to computer with only a thumb drive may be in your foreseeable future. There are already many applications that RUN right off a flash drive. There are portable version of Firefox browser, Thunderbird email and OpenOffice, and more coming. Toss that in with the new trend towards Web-based applications (software that runs off the net not installed on your PC) like Google's, Calendar, Gmail, Writely, and Spreadsheets, as well as file sharing websites like Google video, Flickr, YouTube - we may never have to buy or install software again.