A three alarm fire ripped through the 120 year old church that housed The Great Northwest Bookstore in Portland, Oregon on Sunday. About 70 firefighters battled the blaze and when it was all over the building and the bookstore were completely destroyed.Phil Wikelund, the owner of both the building and the bookstore, said that over 100,000 books where in the building at the time of the fire. Due to the recent economic downturn Wikelund had let his insurance for both the building and the bookstore lapse.The Benevolent Fund of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) will likely provide some...
Obama Mesmerized by Book on Moses
Last evening, after enduring what seemed like 7 taxing hours at the health care summit, President Barack Obama returned to the White House to preside over the ceremony for the 20 recipients of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal.Winners included Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Frank Stella, architect Maya Lin and Elie Wiesel.Among the humanities honorees was historian Robert A. Caro who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. In his remarks Obama mentioned that he had read Caro's book when he was 22...
The Unbearable Whiteness of Book Covers
Meet Sticky. He's the guy third from the right and one of the main characters in the The Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart.Now here's a close up of Sticky from the illustration that appears on the dust jacket of the latest book in the series.Ironically enough, the title of the latest book in the series is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, which given that Sticky's color is locked away between the boards sheds a whole new light on the term 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.Here's the product description as it appears on Amazon:Join the Mysterious Benedict Society...
Burning Books to Stay Warm
As a record setting cold snap grips the United Kingdom some people are taking to burning books to stay warm.Since 2008 the cost of gas has risen 40% and electricity has risen 20% leaving many pensioners in a quandary on how to stay warm on a fixed income.Enter the good old hardback book. It has now become less expensive to burn a hardback then to burn coal.Charity shops are reporting "that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves." Big thick books like encyclopedias are selling well because they can...
The Good "Book Reverend"
Reverend Martin WeskottIn 1987 President Ronald Regan made his now famous plea, "Tear Down This Wall," to Mikhail Gorbachev in front of the Berlin Wall. Nowhere in his speech did he say Tear Down This Wall and Throw All the Books Out.Twenty-nine months later the wall was gone and with it went upwards of 100 million books published in East Germany that were simply thrown away.Enter Reverend Martin Weskott. After seeing an image in the newspaper of thousands of books in the Leipzig garbage dump Weskott went to work. With a truck and a few friends he went down to...