It seems like the Morgan just re-opened after its extensive face-lift. And now here's a story in today's New York Times about the Morgan's upcoming $4.5 million restoration of the McKim portion of the building, which houses Morgan's original library, pictured here, and office. As one who loved the 'old' Morgan's fustiness, I'm wary of more restoration. At least the director says it will be a "noninvasive restoration."
A few days ago it was reported in the New York Times that Verizon has asked regulators if they can mail hard copies of the White Pages in New York and New Jersey only to those who 'opt in.' Likening the printed directory to a "rotary-dialed phone," the NYT reports that the White Pages are viewed as obsolete in the digital age. (Paul Collins took up this topic in Slate in 2008, and his recent blog post alerted me to this interesting new development.)
Of course, what becomes rare or obsolete also becomes collectible. Gwillim Law's website Old Telephone Books is a treasure trove of information about antique phone directories. How does he feel about the Verizon news? "It would probably be good for sales of old telephone books if directories went all-electronic. That would boost the interest of the numerous people with telephone nostalgia. When people realize that something is not going to be around much longer, some of them develop an interest in holding on to it," he wrote by email.
Law also pointed out that the regulators may reject the petition, as they did in North Carolina (where Law resides). It has passed in several other states.
Of course, what becomes rare or obsolete also becomes collectible. Gwillim Law's website Old Telephone Books is a treasure trove of information about antique phone directories. How does he feel about the Verizon news? "It would probably be good for sales of old telephone books if directories went all-electronic. That would boost the interest of the numerous people with telephone nostalgia. When people realize that something is not going to be around much longer, some of them develop an interest in holding on to it," he wrote by email.
Law also pointed out that the regulators may reject the petition, as they did in North Carolina (where Law resides). It has passed in several other states.
Courtney Cunningham, with her Great collection.
Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced the winners of its Nicole Basbanes Student Book Collecting Contest (Sweet Briar alumna Nicole is the daughter of author and FB&C columnist Nick Basbanes, as well as a special collections librarian.) Courtney Cunningham, a classics major, won $300 for her collection of approximately 40 Alexander the Great books. As the first-place winner, she will proceed to the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest. Congratulations!
Print your own. Time Magazine highlights London's Newspaper Club.
How does it work? From the piece...
In an era when traditional newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and staff as their revenues head south, the year-old Newspaper Club is proving there's still untapped demand for the medium -- just not in the traditional sense. The kinds of papers Newspaper Club's clientele tend to print include bloggers' fanzines, literary works, school journalism projects and wedding-day keepsakes. The company also has a growing list of corporate clients, including the BBC, Wired's U.K. edition and smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks. Newspaper Club isn't about the news or the content, explains co-founder Russell Davis, "it's about ink on paper."
Here's how it works: Gather the words, pictures and graphics you want to see in print. Then design your 12-page (minimum) tabloid-size paper -- either by using Newspaper Club's on-site layout tool and your own software and sending the result to the site as a PDF, or by letting the site's in-house designers do the job for you. Newspaper Club then arranges for a printer to handle your press run and ships the finished work to your door. "It's like hitting the print button [on a computer] in bulk," says Ben Hammersley, editor at large for Wired's U.K. edition, which used Newspaper Club to print 500 copies of a compendium of highlights from several issues of the magazine and then gave them away at two events it sponsored.
The Newspaper Club's formula is based on a dirty little secret in the newspaper business: the giant presses that pump out daily papers by the millions every morning or afternoon sit idle for most of the rest of the day. To fill their downtime, printing plants do small press runs at surprisingly affordable prices.
There are so many times I wished I had a bricks and mortar bookshop -- to interact with customers every day, to be able to play with displays of books, and to have the sense that I am, indeed, a real bookseller.
There are numerous reasons why that's not a practical thought at this stage in my life -- one of which is the fact that I want to be home after school and on weekends, when my kids are home, and not at a shop across town. Still, if I had a brick and mortar shop, I could also hang up beautiful posters about books, like this one, in the window:
Then I realize that my website
and this blog are a sort of virtual store. Pretend that you're walking
down the street (to your favorite bookseller, natch) and you see the
above poster in the window of her shop. 
I attended the California Rare Book School, held at UCLA each summer, two summers ago, taking the Books in the Far West course taught by Gary Kurutz of the California State Library (and, not coincidentally, author of the book California Calls You among others). I had a wonderful time and highly recommend it to collectors, booksellers, and librarians. I am already plotting how I can fit in another week away so I can return to Cal RBS. And, yes, some scholarships are available. Go for it!
See you in the stacks!
The news out of the Southwest this week is that after twenty-two years at the helm of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, Thomas F. Staley will be retiring as director at the end of August. An internationally renowned James Joyce scholar, Staley has had quite a run at what is indisputably one of the outstanding research libraries in the world, and in the field of twentieth-century British and American literary manuscripts and archives, pretty much in a class by itself.
Staley was appointed in 1988 at a time when the HRC was at a crossroads, having been vaulted into the top tier of institutional collections by the late provost Harry Huntt Ransom, who had declared in 1957 his intention to create what he called a "Biliotheque Nationale" in the "only state that started out as an independent nation." The decidedly unconventional approach Ransom pursued to achieve this goal became the stuff of legend--it was what I came to describe as a form of institutional bibliomania that transformed what was then a very good library into a great one--and was at the core of a chapter I wrote for A Gentle Madness that I called "Instant Ivy."
When Staley came to Austin, the massive repository was already filled to bursting with millions of pages of documents, the pace of acquisition so frenetic that many thousands of them were not even catalogued yet. One person familiar with the meteoric growth, the English bookseller Colin Franklin, told me at the time that what the HRC needed to get itself on a steady course "and settle down a bit" was a person like Staley, who, as it turns out, did measurably more than act as caretaker. What he did in essence was to build on greatness and create his own distinctive identity, in much the same way that Mickey Mantle followed Joe Dimaggio into center field for the New York Yankees (or, for Red Sox fans, having Yaz take over left field in Fenway Park for Ted Williams.)
As an administrator, Staley raised $100 million for the center's programs; in collection development, he added a succession of remarkable literary archives, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Doris Lessing, Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Penelope Fitzgerald, Stella Adler, and Bernard Malamud among them, and he made headlines around the world when he acquired the Watergate files of Washington Post investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Just as significant, in my view, was a new policy of openness and accessibility that Staley introduced at the HRC, making materials much easier for scholars to use. William Powers, president of the university, summed up his contributions with these words: "We owe a great debt of gratitude and deepest appreciation to Tom Staley."
