The Seattle Public Library, one of the crown jewels of "The Emerald City" will be closing its doors, both real and virtual, for an entire week beginning Monday, August 31. The fact that one of the most book-friendly cities in the United States cannot keep its libraries open due to lack of funding is distressing in the extreme, and does not bode well for other municipalities.Nationwide, public libraries are being used more than ever according to the American Library Association. The trend is evident at the San Francisco Public Library which reports increases of 30% in customers, and 15% in...
This Is Your Brain On Books
There has been a spate of recent books covering new research upon how our brains work and the human decision-making process. Madeleine Bunting, at the Guardian, nicely sums up the science and its implications. It turns out that just about all of our assumptions about free-will, autonomy, and rationality in our choices and decisions are chimerical.I was reminded of this just the other day when I received the following note from a close friend and rare book collector with a Ph.D,, and who has been certified as sane. His first note limns an extraordinary find in which serendipity smiled upon...
Collecting Non-Existent Books
When Cynthia Gibson, a bookseller in New York, casually mentioned “non-existent books” in a recent note I presumed she was referring to deascensions from Milton Berle’s joke library:The Old Man, the Bull, and the Boat. Hemingway’s melding of his two favorite pastimes, deep sea fishing and bullfighting, set within the confines of a small dingy. The fish are biting. The bull is charging. Drama and suspense ensue.Tom Jones in Vegas. The sequel to Henry Fielding's novel of a foundling follows our randy hero to the nadir of his existence as a tin-eared troubador singing eighteenth century songs to highly aroused...
Fighting Crime One Book at a Time
We are very pleased to welcome Nancy Mattoon to Book Patrol with this, her first post. Nancy will be walking the library beat, covering news, issues, and human interest stories from the stacks with her thirty years of experience and perspective as a librarian.As librarians are well aware, even in the book world no good deed goes unpunished. Getting the right book into the right hands seems innocent enough—until it isn’t. Headline hungry scribes sometimes seek to link books and crime; the permanent stain on “The Catcher in the Rye” after being found in the possession of both Mark David...
ABC’s of Book Collecting : Antique
ANTIQUE(1) This has one specialized and superficially misleading use: for bindings (mostly calf or half calf) which are in fact modern but have been executed in the style of some earlier period. Alternativedescriptions for this tactful approximation to the book’s original dress would be ‘old-style calf ’, or ‘half calf, period style ’. Calf antique is also sometimes used to denote divinity (oroxford) calf. Genuinely antique binding, if not precisely datable, will be described as original, contemporary, early, or simply old.(2) A kind of paper, with a rough, uncalendered finish, either wove or laid.Previous ABC's of Book Collecting postsCarter, John...