In 1953 Hungarian architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer designed the Grosse Pointe Central Library in Detroit. From the Detroit Free Press article:Getting Breuer to design the library in the Pointes was considered a coup. He crafted a small but elegant structure, two stories tall, with a front façade that was partly unadorned brick to echo the traditions of Grosse Pointe building materials, and partly a series of tall windows that created a transparency inside and out.In 2007 the" community's library board plans to demolish the Grosse Pointe Central Library and replace it with a newer, bigger structure"No renovation, no...
Picturing Independents
Opening today in The Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon is the U.S. debut of "New and Used" an exhibit of photographs by Marc Joseph. Joseph traveled across America photographing "the spaces and objects of independent book and record stores". Steidl has recently published these photos in the book version of "New and Used". The book is accompanied by "a set of essays, short, fiction, and poetry by contemporary writers and musicians" who relate their own " used and new experience". Contributors include Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Lethem, Shelley Jackson and Stephanie Snyder,...
The Disappearing Book Middle -Class
Much like the disappearing middle-class of American society the world of used books is being redefined as the market for mid-price books ($25-75) is slowly vanishing.Within the last 10 years, the influx of technology, the advent of online bookselling and widespread internet connectivity, has brought into the market millions upon millions of books that were simply unaccounted for.The book resale market has become a petri dish of supply and demand economics. Here the true free market is deciding price points.This flood of available material has taken many of the books in the $25-75 price range and reduced them to $1-$15...
I Love Libraries
That is the title of a web initiative being undertaken by the American Library Association (ALA). It will be a portal for library advocacy and be available through the ALA website and I believe will be able to be accessed through all member websites.I sat in on a focus group held during the mid-winter meeting. Though in its early stages the concept is a good one and if executed successfully will be an asset to our libraries.The highlight: listening to the feedback from a few members of the ALA emerging leaders program who were in the focus group. They were...
The Top Writers of the Pacific Northwest Hit the Newspaper
Talk about a sense of place.Here are the first inhabitants of the new Seattle P-I Writers in Residence project:Sherman AlexieRebecca BrownCharles CrossPete DexterIvan DoigTimothy EganEllen ForneyDavid GutersonCharles JohnsonJonathan RabanTom RobbinsAnn RuleTell me one publisher that wouldn't want that lineup. A healthy dozen. The Northwest 12.Here's the plan:-One writer will be spotlighted in the PI each month.-The material can only be "new work, unpublished past work or work excerpted from upcoming books"Kudos to PI managing editor David McCumber for getting it going. He created the prototype for this when at the San Francisco Examiner but here the writers are strictly regional....