A three alarm fire ripped through the 120 year old church that housed The Great Northwest Bookstore in Portland, Oregon on Sunday. About 70 firefighters battled the blaze and when it was all over the building and the bookstore were completely destroyed.Phil Wikelund, the owner of both the building and the bookstore, said that over 100,000 books where in the building at the time of the fire. Due to the recent economic downturn Wikelund had let his insurance for both the building and the bookstore lapse.The Benevolent Fund of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) will likely provide some...
Bill Murray Gives the First Poetry Reading at the New Poets House
At first glance it looks like a skit right out of Saturday Night Live. Bill Murray in a hard-hat reading poetry to a room full of construction workers. Just think of the comic possibilities.But this was for real. Murray stopped by the then soon to be completed new home of Poets House in lower Manhattan to read some poetry.
Book Planters
It's taken 42 years but it looks like we have come full circle. In the spring of 1968 Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book a collection of eight seed packets with each bearing an original poem. Now the folks at the Italian company Gartenkulture have come up with a line of books turned into pots. Here's what Helena Ekberg had to say about the project at her post over at Casa E Cose: Books are to me one of the more precious art objects around. And they are originally trees that are natures masterpieces. What if we could merge the...
Better or Not? Better World Books adds Donation Boxes, A Book Drive for Haiti and a Partnership with Powell’s to the Mix
It has been a couple of years since we profiled Better World Books here at Book Patrol. I thought it a good time touch base with them. I talked with BWB co-founder Xavier Hegelsen about some of their recent initiatives. Though I still have my doubts about whether or not their model is one that is beneficial to the book world at large it is clear that are continuing to increase their footprint on the book universe.Better World Books warehouse in Mishawaka, Ind. Image by Steve Kagan for The New York TimesBook Donation BoxesBook Patrol: I did a story back...
Art Students Rework The Wizard of Oz
Type designer and illustrator Jessica Hische came up with this project for her students at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia:"I decided to assign one main project with multiple components — book cover design + endpapers, titlepage, and bookplate for a special edition novelization of The Wizard of Oz.""This was literally the first time some of the students had worked with type, so I was expecting to have to do a lot of hand-holding. But, after a very brief lesson, they returned the following week with shockingly amazing type treatments!"You can see more cover designs and all the corresponding...