What a great ending to National Poetry Month. Gary Snyder has been awarded the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. “Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” says Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee. The $100,000 award is one of...
The End of the Travel Guide?
Like the bookselling trade the travel industry has been turned upside down by the internet. With most people now using the web to book their travel the traditional travel agency has all but disappeared. Are printed travel guides the next vicitim?Wayne Curtis's piece in the Atlantic, Weni, Widi, Wiki, gives us a glimpse of what the future might hold.On his trip to Seattle last fall Curtis decided to use only online resources to guide him as he explored the Emerald City. He "would depend on the kindness of strangers," relying "solely on user-generated information" as he mapped out his lodging,...
Dead Central : The Grateful Dead Archive Lands in Santa Cruz
"All of this stuff doesn't belong to us - it belongs to the culture that spawned us,...It seemed like getting it into a campus archive, with access to the people in the community that gave rise to this, was the right thing to do." - Bob WeirIt was announced this week that the University of California at Santa Cruz will be the new home of the Grateful Dead's archive. The archive will be housed in a room dubbed 'Dead Central' in the McHenry Library.The Archive contains 30 years of material including original documents, clippings, media, article and other publications about...
A Little Bookselling Wisdom From Larry McMurtry
"The problem with large bookstores is that they contain usually a lot of junk. My focus as a bookseller is to keep the junk out. Because good books don’t pull bad books up, bad books pull good books down."-From a brief interview with McMurtry by Julie Riggot for the Los Angeles Downtown News.McMurtry will receive the Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award later this week.LA City Librarian Fontayne Holmes says of McMurtry "He really is such a book person in every single meaning of the word, as a bookstore owner, as a book collector, as a writer and as an...
The Day Shakespeare Died
“Chandos Shakespeare” Oil painting attributed to John Taylor, c. 1610. Courtesy of the National Portrait GalleryIt was on this date in 1616, 392 years ago, that the bard left this earth.His reach remains unprecedented, his plays are still being performed in every corner of the globe and he is still taught and read in schools and universities all over the world. His work continues to attract filmakers from all over the world with over 700 film adaptations of his work to date.As his contemporary Ben Johnson said of him; Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time”Encyclopedia Britannica's...