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In case anyone missed yesterday's New York Times (myself included), this fun little essay about book collecting, e-books, Walter Benjamin, and the Kindle. An excerpt:

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.

This was sent to me today by my local indie bookseller, in Woodstock, NY.

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).

 

The news this week that the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris had acquired the manuscript memoirs of the great eighteenth-century Venetian lothario known to one and all as Casanova--Tiger Woods can only dream of walking in this guy's remarkable footsteps--brought to mind a very nice book published a decade ago by Louisiana State University Press, Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. This smart collection of bibliophilic essays was written by John Maxwell Hamilton, an occasional commentator on NPR and dean of LSU's School of Mass Communications; you have to love a book that is dedicated to "all reviewers," and includes the explanation that "only ungrateful asses would pan a book after having it dedicated to them."  

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.

For those truly interested in the role of librarians, especially those coping with so many seismic changes brought on by the twenty-first century, I heartily recommend a new release from HarperCollins, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, $24.99, by Marilyn Johnson. A staff writer for Life magazine. Johnson says that she first became interested in the subject while doing research for her first book, a well received examination of obituaries wryly titled The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. "With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former solder in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians."

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."

In the past few days, two rather large donations to rare book repositories were announced. On Friday, the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book & Manuscript Library (home to 250,000 rare books, as well as the Michael Zinman collection and the Gotham Book Mart collection) announced a $4.25 million donation toward the renovation of the library. According to Penn's press release, "The gift will support the first phase of a $15 million expansion project whereby the collection, study, and curatorial facilities on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center will be transformed into a new Special Collections Center. The redesigned Center will play to the strengths of the rare book library's teaching and digitization program. The Center will encourage the use of special collections in both research and in the curriculum; a fully equipped and staffed conservation suite will ensure continued effective stewardship of Penn's rare book and manuscript collection."

And just in time to celebrate Washington's birthday, Mount Vernon announced a tremendous gift. The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a regular supporter of the historic site, has pledged $38 million to construct a George Washington Library at Mount Vernon. From the press release: "Construction of the 45,000 square foot facility, which will be named the Fred. W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, is expected to begin in early 2011, with a completion date in 2012." Currently Mount Vernon holds 45 books from Washington's original library, as well as 450 letters and manuscripts in his hand, and about 1,500 additional eighteenth-century books and documents. Seems like they have a bit of buying to do -- book dealers, take note.

 

I'm going to say it: I've had just about enough of the Google Book Settlement. At yesterday's hearing, Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York said there was "just too much to digest." He's right -- it's mind-boggling. (For those of you who would like to attempt it, though, here's a report from the New York Times, and another from Publishers Weekly.)

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!

New York Times today has a nice profile of National Enquirer editor Barry Levin and his exceptional Ernest Hemingway collection:

Perhaps given both J.D. Salinger's reclusiveness and his refusal to publish any new work for the last forty-plus years (not to mention his long life - he was 91), the announcement of his death last week seemed to me to have been greeted with more of a whimper than the bang one might expect for a writer of his stature and importance. But he'd essentially been dead to his readers since before many were even initially exposed to his writing. Indeed ironically, his death again raised questions of the publication of posthumous Salinger books, and one could detect in some of the coverage a hope that his passing might mean new Salinger works could finally be given a life of their own.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center, which has very likely handled book conservation needs for all the major rare book libraries, posted a heartening report yesterday about its role in helping preserve a mid-nineteenth-century map for a local community. The Historical Society of Charlestown, New Hampshire, had a topographical map of Sullivan County, published by Smith and Morley, that was "coated with varnish, and attached to a decaying cloth backing."

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!

In this day and age of downsizing print and book coverage, Fine Books is returning to print!

How do you mourn a writer who died this week, but, for all intents and purposes, died 45 years ago?

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.