A recent discussion on a bookselling email list about things to bring to a book fair elicited this interpretation from Rare Book School's Terry Belanger, for whom the "list reminded me of the Mouse's tail in Alice in Wonderland":[Click for full-size image]Thanks Terry!
Books Hit the Campaign Trail
Looks like the photo of Barak Obama holding his copy of The Post American World during a stop in Bozeman, MT might just be the beginning of a biblio-campaign.The book quickly jumped 3 spots on the Amazon's Top 100 moving from #7 to #4. The following day campaigning in Florida Obama responded to a question about possible running mates with this biblio-reference:I can tell you this. My goal is to have the best possible government. And that means me winning. So, I'm very practical in my thinking. I'm a practical guy. One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln. Awhile back,...
Stimulated Reading
The Written Nerd has been one of my favorite bookseller blogs for some time now. The author, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, details her experiences working at one of NYC's best independent bookstores (including this jealousy-inducing run-in with Jonathan Lethem), all the while planning to "have a bookstore of my own in Brooklyn." Stockton recently won the $15,000 Power Up! business-plan competition sponsored by the Brooklyn Public Library in order to help bring her bookstore plans closer to fruition. And closer to fruition they are: I opened a small business money market account with the prize money, which will also be the...
The Library in the New Age
Robert Darnton in the current New York Review of Books on the continuing importance of physical libraries and books:Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready...
How Would You Like Your Book Today?
The window of Bookman's Corner in Chicago.via