It seems everywhere you turn library budgets are getting slashed. In some cases the budgetary reality it's so ugly that the management of public library services is being outsourced to private companies.But here in Seattle things are a bit different.The Seattle City Council has adopted a $2 million increase for The Seattle Public Library’s 2008 materials budget.They already know that libraries matter. In 1998 the citizens of Seattle voted overwhelmingly for the "Libraries for All" bond measure, a $196.4 million infusion to build new, and remodel existing, branches citywide. This is where the money for the Rem Koolhauss designed Central...
The Color of Romance
"Between the kitty litter and the toothpaste, on a lonely aisle of your supermarket, they cry out for love. Highlander Untamed! Unleash the Night! To Pleasure a Prince! The Boss's Wife for a Week! Willingly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded!"So begins Brian Miller's piece in the Seattle Weekly, A Billion Dollar Romance Novel Industry, And its Lonely Black Author. Miller profiles the Seattle romance novelist Edwina Martin-Arnold and in the process gives us a peek into the world of Romance publishing.How big an industry is it:The genre accounts for 26.4 percent of all popular fiction salesIt annually produces around 6,000 titlesHarlequin, the...
The Reminiscences of a Seattle Bookseller
"That was the day that I really understood I could buy books and sell them for more money. That was the day I got hooked by books."Taylor Bowie has been selling books in Seattle for over 40 years. My first job in the book trade back in the early 1990's was working for Taylor at Bowie & Company. At the time I was working as a residential therapist at an in-patient facility for troubled kids and was beginning to show signs of social service burn. Taylor's friend happened to be the cook at this place and Taylor and I would...
Book Madness in Seattle
There is so much book related stuff going on this week in Seattle that Mayor Greg Nickels has designated it "Book Collecting Week."Here's what's happening:The premier non-new book event in the Pacific Northwest, The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair & Book Arts show, takes place the weekend of the 13th and 14th at the Seattle Center Pavilion. With close to 100 exhibitors from around North America and as far away as Germany you are bound to see some of the best books, manuscripts and ephemera currently on the market. The exhibitors this year are particularly strong with many being members of...
The Growing Bestiary of Briony Morrow-Cribbs
The "Cabinets of Curiosity" of the 16th and 17th century is the jumping off point for Morrow-Cribbs. These rooms of mythical constructs blur the boundary of fact and fiction, where the real and the imagined share the stage.Morrow-Cribs says she "uses the mediums of print and the book arts (and occasionally ceramics) to create a graphic connection between the recognizable 'real' world and my invisible, 'fantasy' world.Her latest project is providing 11 aquatint prints to accompany the first book publication of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's prose poem Iskandariya. The book is designed and published by Rollin Milroy at Heavenly Monkey.Milroy says...