Recently in In The News Category

For the last couple of weeks, the booktryst blog has been running a series of moving tributes to a legendary California bookseller under the collective heading, "A Wake for the Still Alive: Peter B. Howard." People who either don't know Peter or who have never been to Serendipity Books might reasonably regard this as audacious at best, but since everything about Peter is completely honest and candid, it is very much in character. For a case in point, just take a look at his no-nonsense website. "If you're in Berkeley, California, feel free to come in and browse," he writes. "We are usually friendly."

The highly-respected English novelist A.S. Byatt says that women who write industrial-strength fiction are treated by critics as oddities, "like a dog standing on its hind legs."

Byatt said this while firmly standing on the only two legs she has as she addressed the Edinburgh international book festival this week, accepting the James Tait Black memorial prize for her novel, "The Children's Book." Previous recipients of this literary award, Britain's oldest, include D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

POTUS, otherwise known as the President of the United States, is vacationing in Vineyard Haven on Nantucket Island and made his first public appearance today. Emerging from Blue Heron Farm at precisely 11:40 a.m., the President and his daughters, Sasha and Malia, made a bee-line by motorcade to a locally-renowned bookstore, Bunch of Grapes. His selections? Steinbeck's "The Red Pony," Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," and, for himself, Johnathan Franzen's "Freedom."

It is unclear how POTUS obtained the latter, since it is not scheduled to be officially published until August 31st. Perhaps a Congressional investigation will be required.<gr>

On the 4th of July in 2008, the bookstore, a village icon, was decimated by a fire.

This bookstore was also a favorite of Bill Clinton, for whom the bookstore was closed with whatever customers were inside unable to leave or any new customers permitted to enter by the Secret Service. We must presume that a similar protocol was observed today with the current POTUS.

A few days ago, this story popped up in the AP about a trove of nineteenth-century architectural drawings of Central Park features and other public spaces in New York City. It seems that a New Jersey real estate broker named Sam Buckley, who inherited the documents from his father, recently placed many of them with Christie's for an upcoming sale. Buckley said his father told him he found them in a city dumpster sometime before 1960. Now seen as priceless city archives, "The city asked a court to order the drawings turned over or award at least $1 million in damages" reported the AP. My reaction to that is, "What?!" I would love to hear what our readers think.


Incidentally, in this month's digital edition, I reviewed David Howard's new book, Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic which touches upon the same issues. How can anyone determine how an historic document was acquired 50 or 150 years ago? How much time can pass before cities, states, or governments are no longer able to make ownership claims? Particularly if they never attempted to get to back (e.g. in North Carolina), or never even knew it existed (e.g. in New York), or discarded it back in the days when 'institutional archives' were attics and basements with poor security and little professionalism.  

You may soon have an opportunity to purchase America's largest collection of books. The asking price will be steep and you will have to compete with one of Forbes' "400 Richest Americans."

Barnes and Noble announced on August 3rd that it is thinking of selling itself. Why? The push may be coming from billionaire Ron Burkle, who likes to buy and sell supermarket chains and is part owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins. He's been acquiring stock in Barnes and Noble since 2008, although he is not a majority shareholder.

Most discussions about bookstores eventually head down one conversational aisle: e-books. Burkle is convinced that Barnes and Noble should become - wait for it - a consumer electronics company.  He doesn't just mean that Barnes and Noble's e-book reader, NOOK, should compete more heavily with Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad, he feels that Barnes and Noble stores should go all out and become a retailing hydra: selling books, e-book readers and consumer electronics products from Hewlett-Packard. (Think Apple Stores with "Twilight" and Dan Brown novels over near the restroom.)

Burkle has been involved in a nasty proxy lawsuit with the Barnes and Noble board. The Delaware judge overseeing the fight, Vice Chancellor Leo Strine, struck down Burkle's suit, writing in his ruling, "At bottom, Yucaipa is simply positioning an absurd scenario at best fit for a discussion by a Red Bull fueled group of nerdy second year law school corporate law junkies, who find themselves dateless (big surprise) on yet another Saturday night."

Ouch.  Talk about being kicked in the nook.

One of the most extraordinary bibliophiles I have ever met, Irwin T. "Toby" Holtzman, passed away in Detroit this past week at 82, leaving behind his lovely wife Shirley, three children, three grandchildren, and a legacy of tenacious commitment to books and libraries that is unequaled in my experience. Truth be told, I never met anyone quite like Toby, and expect I will not again anytime soon. As a collector, his interests were generally centered on twentieth century and contemporary fiction. At the height of his activity, he collected the works of some 350 authors, and he did it with a remarkable degree of thoroughness. I first learned about Toby in the late 1980s when I was in the early stages of researching A Gentle Madness, and looking for suitable people to profile. When I told Peter Howard, the owner of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, Calif., the premise of my book--the title pretty much says it all--he suggested I spend some time in Detroit with Toby. "He has a native feeling for books that you really have to experience first hand to appreciate," Howard said.

What Peter was saying in a delicate way is that Toby, for want of a more precise description, had a certain intensity about him when it came to books. "Toby can definitely wear you down," he offered, and pretty much left it at that. When I asked Toby about this apparent single-mindedness of his, he offered no apologies, acknowledging that yes, he was an "in your face kind of guy" when it came to books, but that the cause was literature and reading, after all, and what could be more important than that. Indeed, when we first got together in August of 1991, he was already finding suitable homes for his books. Today, his various collections can be found in no fewer than fifteen major libraries around the world, his William Faulkner collection at the University of Michigan, his Russian writers collection at the Hoover Institution in California, his John Osborne collection at the British Library, his American Indian collection at the University of Illinois, his gift to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem of five thousand Israeli books, manuscripts, and inscribed copies, most notable among them.

As a collector of modern firsts, Toby always favored the living and the hopeful, and he took special pride in "discovering" new talent. To get a leg up on the competition, he regularly read the forecasts in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, and he took great pride in being able to say that fully 40 percent of the collectible books he had acquired were bought at their jacket prices. And as much as he loved his books, he had no separation anxiety whatsoever about parting with them--so long as they went to the right places. "You reach a point in your life where you begin to collect by subtraction, not addition," he said.

Following the publication of AGM fifteen years ago this month, Toby and I kept in touch. We ran into each other often, at the New York Book Fair, the California Book Fair, in the basement of the Strand Book Store, wherever book people gather. A few months ago, I gave a talk at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, and we had dinner together with a group from the University of Michigan. It was great fun, and Toby gave me a photo of himself--the one pictured above--seated in a nifty "book chair" he had bought during a recent trip he had made to Italy with Shirley. Yes, that is my book he is holding. Pretty cool, I thought, and so typically Toby.

Totally in character, too, is the request Toby's family made this week of friends and colleagues following private funeral services in Michigan: "Please honor the memory of Toby Holtzman and the values of his life by supporting a library, buying books at your local bookstores and reading to your children and grandchildren."

What an epitaph. And what a bookman.