Author Homes

It's been a rough few months for the former homes of great authors. In January, Robert Frost's home was vandalized by partying teenagers. More recently, both the Mark Twain and Edith Wharton museums face severe budget shortfalls and likely closure or sale. Reading Ahead's Harold Augenbraum wonders what these possible losses could mean:

Perhaps in these cases we are not only talking about the past as a predictor, but as a movement through horizontal space that re-senses our perceptions of the author and his or her literary work. When we visit these homes and imagine Wharton or Twain lolling on the terrace with a cup of tea, we create a literary moment. We write this as a short memoir, and a dialogue with the author.

The new media and our conception of the future will change that movement and our relationship with literary authors. If we don't visit the author’s home physically, we often do so as an imaginative construct with the help of two-dimensional media. Isn’t that what photography and film initiated? A visit to The Mark Twain House in Second Life, anyone? But what does it mean for our experience if we only visit in cyberspace?

I can't help but think that terrible management led to these crises. The Wharton Museum, in a noble but ill-advised purchase, acquired Wharton's 1000+ book library from a private collector for a price well into the seven figures. The Twain House meanwhile embarked on an expansion they clearly could not afford. Perhaps the fundamental problem is this: good book people are often poor business people, and good business people often do not understand books? No matter what the causes, however, it's a tragedy such resources were squandered. Hopefully it's not too late to arrange better and more creative stewardship, perhaps under the auspices of an institutional library.

Luckily, there are some bright spots. Edward Gorey's home has just opened for the season in Yarmouth Port "with a new exhibit of Gorey's childhood drawings, including cartoons published in The Chicago Daily News when he was 12. The exhibit also showcases his drawings for books he wrote and his illustrations for works by T. S. Eliot, Edward Lear, and others."

And those Frost vandals? They've been sentenced to mandatory class time. On anger management? On underage drinking? Nope. In addition to restitution, they've been ordered to study the poetry of Robert Frost.

UPDATE: Maybe not that bright after all. Apparently, guards at Hemingway's Cuban home are trying to sell books from his library. If offered any book from Hemingway's library for a couple hundred bucks, would you do it? For Irish writer Adrian McKinty this question wasn't hypothetical:

He repeated his offer. “Any book in Hemingway’s library for two hundred dollars,” he said in carefully enunciated English.

I nodded to show that I had understood his proposition.

I had spent the last half hour examining the library in Hemingway’s Havana house - the Finca Vigia. There were thousands of books: first editions, engineering texts, old atlases, older dictionaries, galleys mailed to Hemingway for blurbs, review copies, gifts; many of them had been doodled over by Hemingway himself and several were extensively underlined and annotated. A bruised early copy of The Sun Also Rises was probably worth a couple of thousand and at the bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel a man had told me that somewhere in these stacks was a signed Catcher in the Rye which I knew I could flog on eBay for at least fifty grand.

Shakespeare's First Folio

Christie's London will be auctioning a First Folio (along with a second and fourth) in their June 4th Auction. Quoting their catalog:

The preservation of over half Shakespeare's works is owing solely to publication of the First Folio, the undisputed keystone of any serious collection of English literature. In the much quoted words of W.A. Jackson, 'It is needless to emphasise the literary importance of this volume which has preserved twenty of Shakespeare's plays, as well as provided superior texts of eight of the eighteen plays which had already been printed. Though it cannot be called a rare book, it is incomparably the most important work in the English language and will always be valued and revered accordingly.'

The last copy to come to market, one complete and in a contemporary binding, brought over five million dollars in 2006. The pre-sale estimate on the current offering is about $600,000-$800,000 and strikes me as very low, even considering the current economic environment and this copy's faults (a handful of facsimile pages, a later binding, several repairs).

My prediction: $1.75 million.

SEE ALSO:

History of the First Folio.

The Folger's stunning high-resolution PDF version of one of their copies of the First Folio (WARNING: enormous file, but worth it if you have the time and disk-space).

Stanford acquires late professor’s renowned collection of ‘association copies’

Happened a couple of months ago, but haven't seen any comment on it elsewhere. Stanford New Service has the details:

An accomplished and renowned collector, Fliegelman specialized in "association copies." These books have a great, sometimes huge, added value largely because of who owned them. In this case, some of Fliegelman's books once belonged to Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Washington, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and the Empress of Russia. One of them carries the most famous American signature of all, John Hancock.

Bookseller Killed by Falling Books

Law Chi Wah, owner of the "Green Text Book Store" in Hong Kong was killed when a shelf of approximately 20 boxes of books collapsed on top of him. The tragic accident occurred at a small wharehouse. He was found two weeks later buried under the fallen books.

Thanks to Oiwan Lam for the lead. She also alerts us that:
"Douban (zh) has set up a special page for this book martyr. His friends and acquaintances set up a blog (zh) in memory of him and his book store."

The links above are the Google translated versions, both are originally in Chinese.

Commander in Trouble: Bush Adminstration Mug Shots at the NY Public Library

The exhibit is titled Multiple Interpretations: Contemporary Prints in Portfolio at the New York Public Library and calls for artists "to tell a story, to take a stand on political and social concerns, to consider formal issues, and to explore the creative process."

That is exactly what artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, accomplish in their portfolio "Line Up" which features images of members of Bush's cabinet portrayed in mug shots. The work is more than simply images of Bush's cronies in mug shot format. Each photo includes a date that corresponds to a date 'when the “suspects' made 'incriminatory' statements about Iraq" and is accompanied by a DVD where "these and other officials are heard making their assertions; the pop of a flashbulb is then followed by the mug shot of the speaker, growing progressively larger until it more than fills the screen. The screen goes dark, and a metallic clunk, presumably the sound of a prison door slamming shut, ends each sequence."

Portfolio Details:
Line Up
Portfolio of eight digital prints with colophon and DVD
Brooklyn: Madness of Art Editions, 2006

Now we wait to see if, in this case, life will imitate art.

The show runs through January 27

Exhibit page at NYPL
Press release
Article on the exhibition in Newsday

Reader To Reader: A True Library Helper

"Books have a singular power to inspire and change people’s lives" and the organization Reader to Reader exists to provide those books to the people who need them most.

Here is an alarming stat:

60% of underprivileged children do not own a single book.

Consequently, Reader to Reader believes that "a well-stocked school library [is] a critical resource hub that is a necessity not a luxury," and by devising an efficient collection and distribution method for the millions of books that are discarded every year they provide the neediest libraries with the material they need most.

Their target libraries are school libraries in our country's poorest neighborhoods which include many inner city schools, Native American reservations and poor rural towns.

They do their homework to find out which schools have below average test scores, low per student spending, and a high percentage of students from low-income families. They then contact the school librarian to find out what is needed and then they go to work.

Major Reader To Reader initiatives are underway in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Louisiana, rural Mississippi, Detroit, Michigan; Massachusetts; rural Maine; the Navajo Reservation; and Compton, California.

Two new schools are added every month. When a new school is added they immediately get a shipment of 300-400 books, they then receive monthly shipments catering to their specific needs. Currently over 300 under-resourced library's receive help from Reader to Reader.
Also of note: Over 1,000,000 books have been supplied to help rebuild school libraries devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Reader to Reader was founded in the fall of 2002 by David Mazor and is headquartered on the campus of Amherst College.

Supporters include: Writers Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Steven and Tabitha King, Robert Stone and John Logan, and actors Paul Newman and John Larroquette.

There is significant corporate support as well including help from publishers Random House and FSG.

And there is bookseller support too. The Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), Ken Lopez -Bookseller (who's pitch for Reader to Reader in a recent catalog got my attention) and Barnes and Noble have all helped and yours truly donated money to Reader To Reader this past holiday season.


List of schools being served

Happy Holidays

Image 1 via swissmiss
Image 2 via Monoscope

Good News From China: Book Production Costs Rise

Rising paper price ups books prices in China for now and perhaps later the world is the title of Henry Sanderson piece for the Associated Press.

He reports that the government "crackdown on small, polluting paper mills have caused a paper crunch in China, pushing up the price of paper by 10 percent this year and forcing printers to delay books and publishers to raise prices."

"Paper mills, most of them small, inefficient operations, accounted for 17 percent of all industrial water pollution in 2005, according to the Chinese Paper Association, an industry group."

Why is this price increase good news? Because it is another glaring example of how the rush to China is a rush to trouble. Keeping costs and retail prices down by outsourcing is not a positive event. It is becoming more and more apparent that cheaper equals dangerous. The more costs are cut the more dangerous the product becomes for the consumer and the more dangerous the production of that product becomes for the environment. A completely unsustainable equation.

Article lowlights:

-According to Pira International, a research and consultancy firm specializing in the print and paper industries, "publishers in the United States and Europe are turning to Chinese printers to churn out books, reducing their costs by up to 30 percent."

-Penguin UK spends about 60 percent of its manufacturing budget in China.

-"China is deeply embedded in the international book market. It is the United States' biggest offshore supplier of print products, chiefly books. Exports of paper products from China rose 76 percent between 2005 and 2006, according to government statistics, and are projected to increase a similar amount by the end of the decade."

-"In a bid to clean up China's rivers and spur the paper-making industry to consolidate and modernize by using wood pulp, the government has closed hundreds of mills and targeted hundreds more for shutdown by 2010. The restructuring is spurring heavy demand for wood pulp, nearly all of which China must import."

-Unlike the West, The Chinese paper industry has relied on straw and other waste from crops to make paper but crop and straw waste is highly polluting and not as easily recycled as wood pulp.

So now the Chinese, the country that invented paper, is closing many of its paper mills and IMPORTING wood pulp.

Now for some good news. Things are beginning to change. Alan Grimes has a post at the Big Bad Book blog titled Being Green Isn't So Hard where provides updates as to what some of the major publishers are doing to try and get green. He also reminds us of a 2005 study co-sponsored by BookTech magazine, Co-Op America, and Green Press Initiative that found "that “80% of consumers who had purchased a book or magazine in the past six months would be willing to pay more for a book or magazine printed on recycled paper.” More than 42% of respondents were also willing to pay an additional $1 to purchase a book printed on recycled paper. "

Unfortunately, the harsh reality remains that "on average, only about 5% of the paper used by US book publishers comes from recycled paper or paper managed in an environmentally friendly way."

We have a long way to go.

I think this would also be a fitting topic of discussion for the panel of ABA booksellers who are headed over to China for the Beijing Book Fair. Maybe they can add a boat ride down one of the polluted rivers followed by a tour of one of the closed paper mills to their itinerary which includes a visit two Chinese publishing houses and four Chinese bookstores.

Library Thief Uses Her Kids as Cover

Akron, Ohio police have arrested Tammie Ware on felony charges after finding more than 1000 items from the Akron-Summit County Public Library in her house.

Her MO:
Once the fines for overdue material on one library card got too high she would bring her kids in again and sign them up for a new library card using fake names.

I am not sure how many kids Ware actually has but according to library records "she had listed thirty-five children" with her overdue fines totaling more than $8000.

Not only did Ware steal books, CD's and DVD's but she also stole toys from the children's area!

Apparently this went on for years until someone at the library finally caught on.

WKYC in Akron has the story and a video report

Happy Birthday 'A Christmas Carol'

Today marks the 164th anniversary of the publication of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens.

First published in 1843 'A Christmas Carol' went on to sell 6,000 copies in 5 days! I am sure that would translate into bestseller numbers today.

Though known as 'A Christmas Carol' the full title of the work is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas and was written by Dickens to raise money to settle some debts.

The University of South Carolina Libraries has an online exhibit celebrating all the Christmas related books and stuff of Dickens. The exhibit is titled The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens & A Christmas Carol

Sweet Textualities

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested..." -Francis Bacon "Of Studies" (The Essays, 1601)

Book Patrol is pleased to share another guest post from Charles Seluzicki.

******************************

Among the hundreds of confections crowding three full aisles in our local Dollar Store, two particularly attracted my attention:

CANDICRAFT. Delicious Ink N' Paper You Can Eat! The packet contains one liquid candy filled pen and three pieces of candy paper in four flavors.

And

TAFFYTOONS. This taffy bar with crunchy bits exclaims on its wrapper: "You can eat the pictures!"


Think of the pedagogical possibilities: "You may eat your paper once you have written a perfect declarative sentence." Now that is positive reinforcement. Can a Taffytoon graphic novel or short fiction series be far behind? Imagine create-your-own-dessert-buffet haiku parties sweeping the land. And the arts of espionage will be revolutionized when secret messages come in the form of a sweet treat instead of indigestible paper and ink or some dangerous self-immolating media.

Any way you look at it, it's win-win.
Sweet!

Children's Book Week

Children looking through window of Magnolia Branch Library, Seattle in 1943

Since 1919 the week before Thanksgiving has been designated Children's Book Week. It is the longest running literacy event in the country.

Beside all the hoopla and events planned across the country Children's Book Week has always been a showcase for poster art.

Jessie Wilcox Smith did the first poster back in 1919. It was titled More Books in the Home and it was so successful that they used it for five years in a row!

Here is a link to a list of the poster artists and themes since 1919.

Murder They Wrote

Over at the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal true crime and mystery author Harold Schechter shares his list of the top five books written about sensational murder trials. The piece is called "Killer Stories: Sensational murder trials are at their most transfixing in these works."

The top five are:

1. "The Murder of Helen Jewett" by Patricia Cline Cohen (Knopf, 1998).
2. "Dead Certainties" by Simon Schama (Knopf, 1991).
3. "The Minister and the Choir Singer" by William M. Kunstler (William Morrow, 1964)
4. "Compulsion" by Meyer Levin (Simon & Schuster, 1956).
5. "Kidnap" by George Waller (Dial, 1961).

Schecther provides a one paragraph synopsis of each choice.

I'm not sure if Vincent Bugliosi's account of the Charles Manson murders, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders was ineligible for the list because the author was the prosecutor in the case but that one would be at the top of my list.

Drink Books

Camper English has a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today on collectible cocktail books titled Bartenders shake and stir their way through cocktail history.

English, who writes the booze blog Alcademics talks with Josey Packard, a bartender at Alembic in the Upper Haight who also studies recipe history and collector John Burton, owner and instructor of the Bartenders' School of Santa Rosa, about their interest in older cocktail books

Highlights:

-The first known cocktail book is "How to Mix Drinks" by Jerry Thomas and was published 1862.

-"Because of their proximity to sticky liquids, well-used cocktail books often don't hold up over time, which may be why vintage cocktail books from the 1860s through the 1940s are rare and highly collectible."

-In addition to their recipes or desirability to collectors "Modern cocktail enthusiasts use them to rediscover how and what people were drinking when the books were written, what bar life was like in the beginning of the last century, and the history of bartending as a profession."

Cheers!

Top Ten Books People Donated to The Book Thing

As much as the reading habits of the members of society speak volumes about what kind of society it is, what books one wants to dispose of can leave us a few clues as well.

Here is the top ten list of books donated to The Book Thing of Baltimore according to its founder Russell Wattenberg. The list appeared in a 2002 article in the Chicago Tribune.

The Book Thing is a bookstore where all the books are free for the taking, sort of a Goodwill without the commerce or a stationary, less interactive Book Crossing.

The Top Ten are:

1. Iacocca by Lee Iacocca with William Novak
2. Passages by Gail Sheehy
3. Megatrends by John Naisbitt.
4. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
5 Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
6. What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles
7. The Silent Passage: Menopause by Gail Sheehy
8. Readers Digest Codensed Books
9. Harlequin Romances
10.Iacocca by Lee Iacocca with William Novak

Oh and here are the 14 strangest titles donated to The Book Thing according to Wattenberg:

-Alien Abductees Handbook
-How to Enjoy Sex while Conscious
-Handbook of Underwater Acoustics
-How to Read a Book
-Psychological Effects Preventing Nuclear War
-Population Control through Nuclear Pollution
-How to Make a Moron
-Headhunting in the Solomon Islands
-Elephants in pink Tutus
-The Screwing of the Average Man
-1978 Oahu Bus Schedule
-Advice from a Failure
-Suture Self
-Superfluous Hair and Its Removal

What the Rockers Read and the Writers Listen To

Looks like Amazon and the New York Times have crossed wires in the blogosphere.

Over at the new Amazon blog, Omnivoracious, they have a "new series asking musicians about the books they're into--new, old, and influential."

while at Paper Cuts the blog of Dwight Garner, senior editor of the NYT Book Review we have their weekly feature "Living With Music" a series presenting a "playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of book-world personage."

Both have a little global touch this week with Omnivoracious asking members of the Australian rock band The Church whats on their bookshelf

and Paper Cuts asks Canadian mystery writer Peter Robinson what he's been listening to.

Highlights:

-When asked 'how has your reading influenced your music' The Church frontman Steve Kilby says "The literary world cross collateralizes the music world. The two are in constant dialogue."

- Peter Robinson's playlist includes Dark Star by the Grateful Dead and songs by the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
About Dark Star Robinson says "it was the bridge for me from the long guitar solos of the late sixties rock bands back to the jazz improvisations of Miles, Trane and Monk."

I appreciate the holistic impetus behind both these series.

Creativity does not exist in a vacuum.

Fabrication Rebate. It Still Pays to Fib

1,729 readers of James Frey's concoction A Million Little Pieces will receive $15.82 each to soothe the pain they encountered upon finding out that Frey's book included a bit of fabrication.

As part of the settlement, Random House has also agreed to include a warning in the book that not all portions of the book may be accurate. Does this mean they can still call it a memoir?

In addition to the $27,348 to settle the claims Random House will pay $783,000 to the lawyers in legal fees, $432,000 for publicizing the settlement (basically an additional marketing expense) and $180,000 to be split by three charities.

So that's $27,348 going to the people that were "harmed" and almost $1.4 million going other places.

Also keep in mind that the book remained a bestseller for another 6 months after the controversy hit selling almost 100,000 copies and keeping Random House one happy publisher.

Frey is working on his new novel, "Bright Shiny Morning," which is due out in the summer of 2008.

Sadly, nothing much is expected to change as a result of this lawsuit.

Yahoo News story
GalleyCat take

The Day 300,000 Books Fell

"The top four floors of San Jose, California’s, eight-story Martin Luther King Jr. Library, which serves as the public library system’s main branch and the San Jose State University library, were temporarily closed to reshelve books after a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the city October 30."

The building suffered no major damage but the building did intentionally sway back and forth to absorb the shock of the quake and as a result 300,000 books fell of the shelves!

They are almost all picked up.

American Library Association article

Image above of a bookstore after the Bay Area's 1989 Point Loma quake by J.K. Nakata of the U.S. Geological Survey

Rwanda's Biblio Bus

Biblio Bus

Though traditionally an oral culture reading is increasingly on the rise in Rwanda and it is not an easy task providing access to reading material to its people. The cost of books and newspapers remain outside the reach of most Rwandans.

The Biblio Bus is one of the 3B's. A project instituted by a group called Ishyo. The bus carries 4000 books in 3 different languages, Kinyarwanda, English and French, and is decorated by local artists.

Currently the Biblio Bus visits schools and prisons only with the hope of eventually providing service to individuals.

Students can borrow books for up to a month they also have to pick their favorite book and produce a creative work based on it. The children can create a theater adoption, a poem, a painting or drawing and a book with a selection of these works will eventually be published and distributed to all schools.

Beside the Biblio Bus the 2 other B's of the program are:

"The Baracomandos, a group of actors performing short plays based on various books and poems. The third 'B' is BA-B'art, a manifestation where artists will be performing in bars and restaurants with the aim of reviving the pleasure of reading in both children and adults, while giving the audience a chance to interact with the artists."

Sarah Vanden Abeele the project coordinator "insists that a book, besides being a mine of information, also helps one relax and forget about everyday life. She adds that books give a different perspective on life and people, especially teenagers, get a better understanding of what they are going through."

In the last 5 years the budget for the National Library has gone from 8 million francs to over 100 million francs. It will be imperative for the Library system and programs like the 3B's to flourish so that literacy does not remain a perk of the wealthy.

Article on the Rwandan new site Focus Online, The Library Comes to the People


Image above is a poster for the Biblio Brousse (site in french) project. A similar project that serves other African nations. The artist is Ako and the scene is from Burkina Faso.

A Sideways Approach to Reading in Bed

Bed Books has devised a "revolutionary" approach to reading in bed. Print the book sideways! Yep. No more propped up pillows, no more neck strain. Pure reading comfort.

Sounds like a great idea but what about when you got to get up?

It's hard enough to get out of bed as it is now the last thing I need is a book that I can only read in bed.

What's next? A new type of toilet that accommodates you while reading a book that is printed sideways.



Thanks to The Millions or the lead