Earlier this month, Ammon Shea published a new book in the books about books genre, The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads (Perigee paperback, $14.95). Shea is also the author of 2008's Reading the OED, and he was recently featured in FB&C's "How I Got Started" column. Shea is an avid collector of lexicons.
 
In this new book, Shea relates the history of the phone and the phone directory with wit and enthusiasm. Particularly interesting (and disheartening) is this data he offers: In the 1979 NYC yellow pages, booksellers took up 7 1/2 pages. Today booksellers fill about 2 pages. What other trends can examination of old phone books reveal? Well, that's part of the point. These books are full of cultural information; discarded and discontinued, we lose something important. 

Shea features collectors of phone books (some months back, we interviewed one of them on this blog), as well as artists (also see here) and politicians who have utilized phone books for their own odd purposes. Not to mention all those two year olds at the dinner table...

Unlike its subject, this Phone Book is slim and sometimes stretched, but full of interesting trivia and quite enjoyable to read. 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary....

Is there anyone left who still ponders over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?

A few of us, perhaps ... though nowadays our numbers seem to be greatly diminished.

Of course, you could do something to rectify this sad state of affairs if you really wanted to. Wouldn't take much effort, really. A little judicious gift-giving....

You know all those Halloween parties coming up next weekend? Well, being the cultivated person that you are, you are going to bring a small gift for the host or hostess, are you not?

So why not forego your usual gift of blood-red wine, or that bouquet of black roses, in favor of something likely to last just a little bit longer ... a book!

As promised, though a bit late, a brief overview of my day in Syracuse. First stop: Bird Library (seen here at left; the exterior is unaltered since my undergrad days there). I met some very lovely people, including the dean of the SU Libraries Suzanne Thorin, director of library communications Pamela McLaughlin, Sean Quimby, director of the special collections research center, and Peter Verheyen, head of preservation. As I had hoped, I had the chance to talk with Peter (who is, by the way, featured in our autumn issue) about what's going on in the book conservation lab these days. One thing that surprised me is the use of Shrink-wrap as a preservation 'enclosure' for older books in the circulating collection. Neat!

The Little Rock Public Library—known since 1975 as the Central Library of Arkansas System, or CALS—is observing it's hundredth birthday this year, an ongoing celebration that I was pleased to participate in last week with a talk at the main library, a bustling operation that last year accommodated close to 2 million customers, some 37,400 visitors a week, and on track now to exceed that number for 2010. The figures for book circulation, 2.3 million volumes, 44,300 a week, are also up 11 percent from 2008, yet another indicator of just how essential the public library remains as a cultural institution in our daily lives. 

What really knocked me off my feet on this trip, though, was the fantastic second-hand bookstore owned by CALS in downtown Little Rock, the first such public library initiative of its kind to my experience, and operated since 2001 in support of the library. Called River Market Books & Gifts, the store occupies three floors in the Cox Building, a beautifully restored machinery warehouse that dates to 1906, and includes a chic cafe, art gallery and creative center for various library programs. The variety of used books is spectacular, I must say, and because all are donated, they are offered for sale at exceedingly fair prices (and in remarkably decent condition as well.)

Some highlights from the first two weeks' worth of October auctions:

Early writing developed independently at four spots around the ancient world: Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica.  For the first time in 25 years, examples of writing from all four civilizations are on display together at the Oriental Institute's new exhibition Visible Language, viewable now through March, 2011 at the University of Chicago.  

For those of you who read and enjoyed Anne Trubek's essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar from our summer quarterly, I'm happy to report that Anne's book, A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses (University of Pennsylvania Press), is being published this month and is available to order from the bookseller of your choice. She'll also be doing readings/signings in Oberlin, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Lenox, NYC, and Washington DC, so check out her website if you might be able to attend one. 

I was lucky enough to receive a galley of the book, and I so thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Anne takes us to Whitman's house in dilapidated Camden, NJ; to the slick shrine to Hemingway in Key West, FL; to the 'boyhood home' of Mark Twain in Hannibal, MO. At each stop, she takes a good look around and tries to separate fact from fiction, writer from building. It's a travelogue combined with literary history, written with humor and humanity. 

If you've been reading along with me for the past year, you may remember that I'm a big fan of Thoreau. I've made the "literary pilgrimage" to Walden Pond maybe eight or ten times, even brought my then one year old on a tour of the Emerson House on one of the trips. Bad idea. In one of the chapters in A Skeptic's Guide, Anne goes to Concord--former home to so many literary luminaries--and finds herself "preternaturally anti-Concordian." I laughed at this, as I can completely understand how odd our strange devotions to these writers' haunts can be, and yet I can't help but associate that feeling with the desire to buy first editions. I suppose I'm hoping to see or experience something the way that author saw it, something very personal, like the view from her library window, his hat hanging on the hook by the door, or the first edition of his first book, if only for a moment.