Book Patrol

Here comes Bookshop.org!

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Have we reached the tipping point? Could this finally be the viable independent alternative to Amazon? Have we accepted the reality that cheap and fast does not equal healthy and does little to foster community sustainability? A tall order for sure but the timing might be a bit better than past efforts to compete against the Godzilla of bookselling. Enter Bookshop.org: Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. We believe that bookstores are essential to a healthy culture of readers and writers. They’re where authors can connect...

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RuPaul visits the library

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  RuPaul hosted Saturday Night Live this past weekend and one of the skits featured him visiting the San Diego Public Library for a little reading time. He tackles such children's classics as Madeline, Corduroy, Eloise,  James and the Giant Peach and Harriet the Spy. Absolutely hilarious. I'm still laughing at his take on the dust jacket illustration for Madeline which he says "I have bad news child, the Eiffel Tower is not in the woods. You better draw France right, bitch."  Watch: [youtube]https://youtu.be/r1xA7B4SY6A[/youtube]

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A celebration of the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez

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photo by Maria Mendez In 2014 the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the archive of the Nobel Prize winning Latin American literary superstar Gabriel García Márquez. In 2015 the archive was opened to researchers and quickly became one of the Ransom Center's most accessed collections. Passport, 1955-1991 In 2017 an online archive of over 25,000 items from the collection was released into the world and now, for the first time, an exhibit of almost 300 items from the momentous archive, including some that have never been seen in public, are on display in the exhibition Gabriel...

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International flavor comes to America: Early Ethnic cookbooks

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Chinese-Japanese Cook Book by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna [pseud.], Chicago, Rand McNally [c1914]. First Edition The folks at Rare Books Digest have put together an informative list of first appearances of various ethnic cookbooks in America. From the 1828 first American publication of a French cookbook to the first Greek cookbook that, amazingly enough, wasn't published in this country until 1942! Here's a sampling.  El cocinero español by Encarnación Pinedo. San Francisco, 1898. This was not only the first Mexican-American cookbook published in America it was also the first written by a Hispanic in the US and to mention...

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Significant LBGT collection goes to the University of London

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Jonathan Cutbill, the co-founder of Gay’s The Word bookshop in London's Bloomsbury neighborhood who died last year, has left his collection of 30,000 LBGT+ items to the University of London.  The collection, which has items dating back to 1760, will arrive having already been completely cataloged and cross referenced by Cutbill. Cutbill has been at the forefront of the LGBT struggle for justice for years. In 1984 his shop was raided by customs officers and he was accused of conspiracy to import obscene material. The charges where later dropped. photo by Stu Maddux Maria Castrillo, head of special collections and...

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