I'll never forget my first visit to Minnesota. Being born and raised in New York there had been few reasons to venture west of the Hudson River. I was in my early 20's and coming off the disco years. Rumor had it that Minnesota was the perfect place to dry out. So off I went. It was late March and winter was just finishing up. In the cab from the airport, I kept seeing lots and lots of little shacks huddled close together off in the distance. Every few miles they seemed to appear again. Finally, after a handful of...
Gary Snyder Gets the Lilly
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...
Emory University Unleashes The Danowski Poetry Collection
Emory University kicked off National Poetry Month with a bang. They had three Pulitzer Prize winning poets (Mark Strand, W.D. Snodgrass and Richard Wilbur) headlining a conference titled “A Fine Excess: A Three-Day Celebration of Poetry.” It was during this event that Emory took the wraps off what some say is the most important collection of English-language poetry in the world. It was the first public display of the fruits of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library which they acquired in 2004. The 75,000 rare books, posters, periodicals and recordings that make up the collection is "a nearly complete record of...
Radiohead: Band of the Year
I'm not sure I've ever heard one of their songs but in my world these guys are the band of the year. They just released their latest album without the help of a record company and all they asked was for their fans to pay what they want for it, no strings attached. Start at free and go from there. Here are the early results: How this applies to the book world? Clearly the publishing industry has not experienced the upheaval taking place in the music industry but it's coming. Remember we have been printing books alot longer than we...
Shakeup at Abebooks
It is never a minor event when the COO of a company departs so no matter how Abe tries to minimize the transition this is a significant event