This month Of Interest celebrates National Poetry Month by featuring select holdings from particular independent booksellers and publishers that provide a healthy offering of poetry. First up, we pair a couple of Seattle's finest - the bookshop closest to my heart and my alma mater, Wessel & Lieberman, and one of the leading publishers of poetry, Wave Books. Enjoy! Paul Celan. Wolf's Bean / Wolfsbohne. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Delos Press / William Drenttel, 1997. One of fifty numbered copies signed by the translator. $100. Philip Levine. What Work Is. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Winner of the National Book Award. $45.00 Ezra Pound, Personae: The Collected...
The Free Book Incident: Nothing to Buy, Nothing to Return
Photo courtesy of Chris Burnside The Free Book Incident (FBI), a month-long experiment & celebration of books & community. Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers and Olson Kundig Architects have partnered to create a unique environment to celebrate the power of books and investigate what can happen when they are available for free. FBI is inspired in part by The Book Thing of Baltimore, an ongoing free book exchange whose "mission is to put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them". Wessel & Lieberman will be donating the books and Olson Kundig will be creating the space, which...
Bear Love: A Collector Opens His Den
Jon Henri McCracken is not your ordinary arctophile. He has been collecting bear memorabilia for most of his life and in his new book, The Bears in My Life, McCracken takes us on a captivating visual tour of his amazing collection.From the dust jacket:Bears have captured human imagination for tens of thousands of years, simply by being bears. Mysterious, powerful and nurturing of their young, the natural characteristics of bears -- and the many, colorful, human beliefs associated with them -- have inspired creation of bear images in wood, stone, ink, glass, bronze and more. 'The Bears in My Life'...
"Colorful Fortune" : The First Book of Poetry by Composer Harold Budd
Emerging in the 1960s from the American minimalist movement inspired by John Cage and Morton Feldman, Harold Budd has become one of the country's most prolific, consistent and influential composers and musicians. Throughout his career, poetry - or what Harold refers to as "something like poetry, but not the same thing" - has been an occasional companion to his music. His "something-like poetry" now takes center stage in Colorful Fortune, the first published collection of Harold's poems, issued in both paperback and a deluxe, hand-bound and signed editions. The first half of Colorful Fortune presents the debut of an extended...
A Fewer New (er) Books We Like and a story of what can happen at a bookshop
Tomorrow is "Buy Indie Day", the latest foray in the seemingly never-ending quest to help the independent bookseller. Why should we care? It's all about the intangibles. We can't compete on price but the value of what else is offered cannot be duplicated by the chain or online experience. Here's a little example:In 2007, Wessel & Lieberman had an exhibit of the work of Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Amy Stewart was in town with her husband, then editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, Scott Brown for the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair. While in town they stopped by the shop. The visit...