USED BOOKWhat luck—an open bookstore up aheadas rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,and then to find the books were secondhand,with one whole wall assigned to poetry;and then, as if that wasn’t luck enough,to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone ofmy chapbook, out of print since ’83—its cover very slightly coffee-stained,but aging (all in all) no worse than fleshthrough all those cycles of the seasons sinceits publication by a London press.Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:The man I thought would love me till I died.Julie Kane is an Associate Professor in English at Northwestern State...
Barbara Hodgson: Trading in Memories and Other Ways of Seeing Books
In her new book Trading in Memories: Travels Through a Scavenger's Favorite Places Barbara Hodgson takes us on an unforgettable trip around the world. From the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul to an ephemera show in Portland, Oregon we get a front row seat as Hodgson works her magic unearthing relics of material cultural. As the collector knows, the pursuit, in many cases, is as fulfilling as the acquisition.The fruit of travel is in "collecting fragments of people's material lives" says Hodgson in the introduction; in Naples it was tearing posters off the walls, in Portland it was a mugshot, in...
Book Lunacy
The unassuming-by-all-appearances softcover, Lunacy and Arrangement of Books as cleverly written by Terry Belanger brightened a dark, dismal, and chilly winter morning fairly recently and evoked a smile of sheer delight. (I usually glower rather fiercely and silently.) Although very modest and slender in appearance, it managed to cover quite nicely many strange and peculiar treatments of volumes -- from Samuel Pepys risers to make all the books level along the top edge to architectural failures in a reading room where large books couldn't be opened due to the low lighting fixtures.The writing is direct and contents presented without preamble...
Thomas Wharton’s ‘Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books’
The book is "a sequence of variations on the experience of reading and on the book [as] a physical and imaginative object," and is packed with little gems like this one where Wharton humanizes the lingo usually reserved for a book's description."Corners bumped. Spine still straight, front part of head slightly faded and creased, with negligible hair. Endpapers missing. Minor damage to knees and ankles, stiff and inflexible in damp weather. Sporadic scribbling in margins throughout. Two-inch scar on stomach, some alterations to subtext. Several memories carefully excised, others foxed and unreliable. Otherwise fine."There is also this timely nugget on...
Starbucks Meet Anne Fadiman
Honoré de Balzac: The Patron Saint of Coffee Coffee is the name of the essay and it appears in Anne Fadiman's new book At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist published by Alan Lane in the UK.Fadiman is fully caffeinated the entire time she is researching and writing the essay, sharing the same caffeine buzz experienced by the literary giants who populate her essay.Who knew that it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance," who first summoned a chemist to see what the magic ingredient...