Beholding "the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me," Benjamin exclaims: "O bliss of the collector! Bliss of the man of leisure!" With nothing piled up around me but the Kindle and its charger, I may be missing out. But even Benjamin, who managed to see the future of media and technology more than once, knew he was writing an elegy for a way of experiencing books. I like to think he would be the first to recognize that the Kindle delivers a new kind of bliss.
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Beholding "the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me," Benjamin exclaims: "O bliss of the collector! Bliss of the man of leisure!" With nothing piled up around me but the Kindle and its charger, I may be missing out. But even Benjamin, who managed to see the future of media and technology more than once, knew he was writing an elegy for a way of experiencing books. I like to think he would be the first to recognize that the Kindle delivers a new kind of bliss.
The Golden Notebook is housed in a building it owns right in the center of the Town of Woodstock, NY. It consists of a general bookstore with approximately 750 square feet of selling space and an upstairs stock room and office. Right next door is our children's bookstore in a rental space with approximately 600 square feet of selling space and access to a basement for storage. Both stores have garnered a well deserved reputation and have many established customers. Our goal is to find a buyer who will continue to maintain it as an independent bookstore. If interested, direct inquiries to ellen.tgn@gmail.com.
As you can imagine, Woodstock is a pretty neat place (even if the legendary concert did NOT in fact take place there).
Hamilton's title piece took irreverent note of the fact that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-1798) spent the final years of his eventful life as a librarian in the household of Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein of Bohemia, and it was in that dreary castle that he took pen to paper and wrote Histoire de ma vie, the racy memoirs for which he became famous, and which an anonymous benefactor acquired on behalf of the French National Library (BNF). Though the actual purchase price was not disclosed, the figure was widely reported to be five million euros, about $9 million, which, if correct, would qualify it as the costliest manuscript transaction on record. The papers--comprising 3,700 pages of yellowing sheets--were transfered Monday to the BNF in thirteen boxes, and represent the complete, uncensored account of Casanova's amorous adventures. The material had been owned since 1821 by the Brauckhuas publishing company in Germany, and was once thought to have been destroyed in World War II; it was later found safely stored in a bank vault.
Before long she was fully involved in the world of these wonderful professionals whose sole goal in life, it seems, is to provide knowledge and information to others. Johnson's coinage of the word "cybarian" takes note of the changing nature of the business, and of the many ways the people she proceeded to spend so much time with have adapted to the new technologies. She describes the modern librarian as a person whose job is to "create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future."
The result is a most enthusiastic book that is great fun to read (and one which, I feel bound to disclose, makes generous mention of several books that I have written.) Its greatest contribution, I think, is that it pays tribute to an essential public service that so many government officials blithely feel can be cut at will during budgetary crises, reductions made especially easy for them to impose since these temples of wisdom have no well-heeled lobbyists throwing corporate money around to champion their cause. The epigraph to one of Johnson's chapters says it best: "In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste."
When I spoke to Harvard University Library Director Robert Darnton about it in late October, he said he encourages large-scale book scanning but worried about Google's commercial power over the information. About the GBS, he said, "The settlement, in my view, has the makings of something that could be of great benefit to the country, but it requires safeguards." Darnton envisions a universal library, funded by the government, if necessary.
Sparring with the Authors Guild in the February 25th issue of the New York Review of Books, Darnton reiterates his points:
Yet the settlement could be modified to promote the public good. As things now stand, most twentieth-century literature--the great majority of books published since 1923--cannot be made freely accessible in digital form, owing to the excessive restrictions of our copyright laws. This problem could be resolved by legislation concerning orphan works or a revised version of the ASA, which would adapt one of its current provisions for the public good--that is, rightsholders of out-of-print works would be deemed to have accepted the settlement unless they opted out.
Better yet, the federal government could finance a national digital
library by working with Google and the Library of Congress. The Authors
Guild accuses me of utopianism by arguing for this solution, and I
plead guilty. There was a utopian element in the Enlightenment and in
the thought of the Founding Fathers. I think we should draw on it. We
have the means; we merely lack the will. President Nicolas Sarkozy of
France recently announced that the French state would devote O750
million to the digitization of France's "patrimony." Why doesn't the
Obama administration make a similar commitment? For a smaller sum it
could digitize the entire Library of Congress and remedy a great deal
of unemployment at the same time.
Hear, hear!
Mr. Levine's collection includes bullfighting programs Hemingway used for his research, check stubs for routine things like car repairs, and letters by Mary Hemingway, the author's widow. Among those: a carbon copy of a typed note to the sheriff in Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, asking that the shotgun he used be returned.It's a nice look at the creative approach smart book buyers use to assemble their collections. My one quibble is this line:
Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer and friend of Mr. Levine's, said that while Mr. Levine lacks the 'deep Champagne pockets' of some collectors, his reportorial skills have helped him identify interesting items to put together an 'imaginative, elastic collection,' one in which each piece offers a little anecdote -- and some work together to tell a story.The article bears out the second half of that statement very well. But the first -- that Levine lacks "deep Champagne pockets" -- may be tough for collectors on more modest budgets to swallow, especially when the article describes how Levine once "spent several thousand dollars at a Christie's auction on another first edition of 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' -- this one a brilliant copy that Hemingway signed and that includes the author's calling card."
The Society applied for and received two small grants from local banks. With a little publicity on its side, the Society also pulled in a few more hundred dollars from a private foundation, thus enabling it to send the map to the NEDCC for treatment. There, conservators removed the yellow varnish using ethanol and washed the paper. "The decaying cloth backing was removed before the map was lined with Japanese paper. After being mounted on linen for additional support, the map was encapsulated in transparent polyester film (Melinex®) to protect against dirt, handling, and atmospheric pollution." World-class treatment for Sullivan County!
The magazine had suspended its bi-monthly publication schedule in November 2008, but published an edition in Fall 2009. Based on very positive results, the publishers will return the magazine to print on a quarterly basis. The annual subscription price will be $25.
In announcing its plans, the magazine said it would continue its monthly e-letter online and its very popular blog. According to associate publisher Kim Draper, the web site has grown tremendously in the past year, having just topped 50,000 monthly visitors.
"We don't hope to achieve as much readership in print, but we do think print has a certain charm and value that is impossible to obtain online," says Draper. "It remains a conundrum why collectors of print love reading online, but we are delighted to be able to serve both needs."
The online editor, Rebecca Rego Barry, will also serve as editor of the print edition. According to Barry, the content of the magazine will be a collection of some material used online as well as new features, columns, and resources that will not appear online. "We are intrigued with the idea of archiving some of our best online stories in a print format, but we will also be offering readers new content in each issue. It was a formula that worked very well for us with the edition we published last fall."
The magazine said that it plans some operational changes to make publishing more affordable, most notably that it will not process any subscription without a valid email address. According to Draper, "When we looked at our operation, we realized that contacting people via the postal service was just too expensive. We plan to handle all renewals and communication efforts via email, so there's really no point in having a subscriber with whom we can't communicate."
Writers in the upcoming print edition will include Nicholas Basbanes and Joel Silver, two stalwarts of the book collecting world. The magazine will continue its annual directory of booksellers started last fall that featured more than 700 book-related businesses, and it will add a feature called Biblio/360, an annual guide to classes, societies, fairs, and symposiums related to book collecting.
Fine Books & Collections was founded by bookseller P. Scott Brown in January 2003 as OP magazine. It changed names in September 2004 and adopted a color format. In November 2008, Brown returned to bookselling full-time, and the magazine suspended print publication until Fall 2009.
The magazine is published by Journalistic, Inc., a North Carolina-based media company.
Click here to subscribe.
This second paragraph, from J.D. Salinger's first and finest published story, may be the most succinct statement he ever made on his own career. He was a writer who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. To him, the enormous fame he achieved was an irritating by-product of his work and he resented it.
She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
- A Perfect Day for Bananafish
Although he lived to be 91, his exposed life, was quite brief: 17 years, from 1948 (with the publication of the short story quoted above in The New Yorker,) to 1965, when The New Yorker devoted almost its entire issue to a 25,000 word short story, "Hapworth 16, 1924."
It is difficult for those of us who enjoy books and literature to understand why an author would be repulsed by the attention his work receives. Salinger went so far as to insist his agent burn his fan mail.
There is a presumed contract between people who create art and the public that consumes it that there is some sort of quid pro quo going on. There is an expectation that the creator of the art owes us something more than their art; that there's a wink-wink which we think entitles us to a certain amount of voyeurism. Voyeurs, alas, are people who have neatly worked it out for themselves that somehow such contracts only require their own signature.
Salinger's decision to retreat behind a cloak of almost total privacy seems quite prescient. We now live in a world that is filled with people who cannot agree to sign that other half of the contract fast enough, a world of celebrities who seem to be famous merely for their public lives. (Three words: Kate Gosselin's hairdo. One word: Brangelina.)
In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the central character of the story, Seymour Glass, is ascending a hotel elevator dressed in a robe and sandals, having just returned from the pool. A woman gets on the elevator.
"I see you're looking at my feet," he said to her when the car was in motion.And thus, a posthumous lesson in privacy. J.D. Salinger's life was about his words and his work. It was never about his feet. And let's quit being such God-damned sneaks about it.
"I beg your pardon?" said the woman.
"I said I see you're looking at my feet."
"I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor."
"If you want to look at my feet, say so," said the young man. "But don't be a God-damned sneak about it."
"Let me out here, please," the woman said quickly to the girl operating the car.
The car doors opened and the woman got out without looking back.
"I have two normal feet and I can't see the slightest God damned reason why anybody should stare at them," said the young man.


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