June 2007
67 posts
More Trouble In Bookland For Oprah
Today was a big day in Oprahland. It was the day that reclusive author Cormac McCarthy confided in Oprah during his first ever television interview. A man who is barely seen in public, was asked during the interview if he “cared that millions of people were now reading his words” and replied “in all honesty I have to say I really don’t,” was now confiding in Oprah....
Bookshop call
“ Ring, ring...
Me: "Good afternoon, Tavistock Books"
Caller: "You guys do appraisals, right?"
Me: "Yessir, we do."
Caller: "On houses too, right?"
Me, in an incredulous, & somewhat baffled, tone: "This is a bookstore....????"
Caller: "Oh, so you don't appraise houses?"
Me: "No sir, we don't. Just books."
Caller: "Oh. OK, thanks."
Click”
An interview with Paul Buckley, Art Director of... →
“Chain outfits like Borders or Barnes & Noble cater to people who know what...”
– Judging cities, bookstores by their covers
The End of the Free Reading? →
A Way to Give Authors a Lucrative Second Platform - New York Times Getting paid to read beats giving a reading. The publishers say “they are responding to common industry trends: fleeting tastes in mass-market books, shrinking shelf lives in bookstores, disappearing book review sections, and the brief attention span of a media audience hooked on celebrity sound bites and Hollywood...
Chicago Reader | Spring Books 2007 | A Little... →
Letter from Austin: Final Destination: Why Do the... →
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair
Shelf Talk: The Sorted Books Project of Nina...
Since 1993 Nina Katchadourian has assembled more than 130 “book clusters” for both private libraries and public collections. She gets there by “culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of...
Shelf Talk with Nina Katchadourian →
Thoughts on the Book Pyro
Talk about an independent bookstore going up in flames. Tom Wayne just had his 15 minutes of Warholian fame. How long he will live in infamy is another story. You see Tom Wayne has decided to burn all the books he couldn’t sell and hide his actions under the umbrella of protest. He was protesting “what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.” He called it...
What the Candidates Should Be Reading
There has been a little buzz recently around presidential candidates and books. In a recent post about Presidential Libraries I proposed that every candidate have a Shelfari or a Librarything page so we can have a look at what books are in their library. I know it would be a tremendous help in my process of choosing who gets my vote. Then the AP did a story asking candidates what the last book...
Poetry and action
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Interview with Gary Snyder about environmental and social responsibility from the Prague Writers’ Festival
Mutterings of a Mad Bookseller: Bookselling World... →
Great take on ABE’s new bookseller rating system
On the Hunt for First Editions - WSJ.com →
How Far Will The LongPen Reach?
In a few hours Margret Atwood and company will unleash LongPen on the BEA. From London to Walla Walla authors will be signing books for BEA attendees from the comfort of their own home (or publishers office). It is billed as “the world’s first real time, pen and ink long-distance autographing device” which produces “legally valid” signatures. LongPen is the next...
May 2007
6 posts
Walter Benjamin has a blog-like essay called “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting.” In it, he details and establishes the importance of his (a book collector’s) activities in the tactical sphere. e.g., putting the collection in some systematic order; strategizing about acquiring books at auctions; getting to know, in intimate detail, the provenance of each book; collecting not just...
“38 Mexican cities, including the luxury resorts of Acapulco and Cancun, are...”
– San Francisco Bay Guardian : Article : An American Sahara
Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal... →
