Bob Dylan is the subject of a new anthology of poems edited by two retired professors from his home state of Minnesota. Whittled down to 100 poems from a pool of 500 Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan is a collection honoring Dylan by poets in various stages of their careers. Contributors include Robert Bly; Charles Bukowski; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Patti Smith and Anne Waldman as well as this lost musing from Johnny Cash that appeared in the liner notes for Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” and won a Best Album Notes Grammy: Complete unto itself, full,...
Of Interest: The Book, A Pop-Up book, Handbook for Tyranny, The Art of Reading, The Illustrated Dust Jacket
The Book: An Homage by Burkhard Spinnen. Illustrations by Line Haven. Translated by Aaron Kerner. Published by David R. Godine, 2018. First American Edition. A German bibliophile spreads the love including musings on Book Usage (The Loaned Book, The Vanished Book, The Book Left Behind...) on the Book Trade and on The Book Collection Note: As of this writing the book is less than $3 on Amazon Zahhak: The Legend Of The Serpent King (A Pop-Up Book). Published by Fantagraphics, 2017. Art and Design by Hamid Rahmanian. Paper Engineer: Simon Arizpe. When Robert Sabuda blurbs "This is on of the...
Of Interest: Where I’m Reading From, Regrettable Superheroes, The Librarian, Compulsion, naked in the woods
Here's the latest batch of recently published books that we've enjoyed reading here at Book Patrol. Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books by Tim Parks The New York Review of Books, 2015. Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I’m Reading From, the novelist and critic Tim Parks ranges over decades of critical reading—from Leopardi, Dickens, and Chekhov, to...
BiblioTech: Keeping Hope for Libraries Alive in the Digital Age
John Palfrey's lucid, passionate account of the state of American libraries reminds us both how important public libraries are to a healthy democracy and how close they are to going the way of the dodo bird. We are in the midst of a tectonic societal shift from print to digital and without a concerted effort to transform the library into its 21st century equivalent we just might lose these hubs of democracy for good. The disconnect is huge; survey after survey remind us how important libraries are to their communities while in budget after budget funding for libraries continues to...
The House of Twenty Thousand Books
There is no end to the praise of books, to the value of the library. Who shall estimate their influence on our population where all the millions read and write ? ~Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Address at the Opening of Concord Free Public Library” I was having dinner last week with a neighbor who, with his team, recently had a meeting with Bill Gates to discuss their project within the Gates Foundation. One of the words he used to describe Gates was "polymath." He spoke of Gates as having an incredibly deep knowledge in a wide variety of subject matter and...