Booksellers Do Not Have All Their Bases Covered

Between finding a book and selling a book, the preservation and the display of a collection of books is an integral part of the bookseller's trade. As an important part of the trade in books, apart from the title catalog or the arrangement of displays inside his or her boutique, the bookseller also narrates stories about and educates the public regarding diverse aspects of literate culture in order to keep people interested in books; books as both artifacts of a common heritage and as worthy of their purchase price.

Despite the niche markets and categories in the book trade, booksellers elect on their own to sell books - they self-select with few gatekeepers or hurdles to jump over in becoming a bookseller. Yet, having learned their business, bookshop owners and effective dealers can rightly claim that they serve as cultural guardians and, in their realm, sentries for how people imbibe in culture and traditions through written and recorded language.

Despite how vaunted some of this description may be, how rightly or wrongly it fits the trade as a whole, book dealers as a class exercise little social or economic power and enjoy less and less social status (along with the medical profession one should add).

On an entirely different plane, each level of government, in its turn, exercises a greater and growing power over the professions and commerce.

See the post below about the City of Longueuil, Québec exercising eminent domain and dumping the half million book, document and recording titles of an impecunious bookseller into a regional landfill dump.

In response to this news, IN THIS POST, j godsey at Bibliophile Bullpen remarked,

I'm starting to get the serious feeling that our society as a whole is distrustful of anyone in possession of voluminous numbers of books, regardless of whether they are just a collector or truly a professional bookseller.

I share those feelings. I am confident the author of those remarks was much angrier than the words sound after reading the post, at least I am angrier than my words!

Why am I controlling my anger? Because I think that all of us in the book trade, now in touch with one another by email and on several websites, need to pool our thinking and our resources to come up with alternative solutions to protect the used and antiquarian booksellers from the most savage tendencies that are threatening the book trade from on high and from three sides.

It's impossible to anticipate what the future solutions will be. Will the proposed solutions favor senior dealers with proven track records or favor the new entrants, who for the first time recently uploaded a ton of books to the Internet vendors' sites? Are scholars more in need of protection than house-bound retirees earning extra cash. I do not have an answer, yet.

The simplest solution to the problem of the bankrupt bookstore I can think of is to have the means to truck away the stock in documents to a safe locale before the landlord or the local mayor hauls the entire stock to the dump. Something simple like that and something direct. I am convinced that we need to face such situations as a book-trade-wide challenge.

I have read a few posts on interesting blogs about photo-documentary projects to image bookstores across the North American continent. That is fine and good. But wouldn't it be ideal to have confidence that what happened to Paul Saindon, shown (below) standing before the Saint-Nicéphore landfill site with nearly his entire bookstore amidst the rubble . . wouldn't it be ideal to have some assurance that such a fate as this will not befall any one of today's bookstores shown in the photos with their doors open?

I can just see the 12-wheel tractor-trailer rig rolling down the Interstate with the logo emblazoned on the side: 'Another Bookstore Saved by the ASBBASN (whatever that means)!


(

In the spirit of a personal blog, but not to sound maudlin:

As I type these words, I am listening to a privately recorded 33 1/3 vinyl of a religious women's choir from Rwanda. The phonograph record was cut in a Montreal studio for a Catholic religious order. There is a photo of the choir members and the names of the arrangers and technical notes are printed on the record's sleeve. The music is beautiful.

I rescued (have not yet catalogued) this disque from a pile of familiar commercial LPs at a junk emporium. You can fill in your own blanks regarding how precious these songs may be as personal artifacts - for someone who survived the Rwanda genocide more than a decade and a half ago.

I keep asking myself: "What records of our culture were destroyed when the Saindon collection was destroyed?")

Violent Death by Assassination Still Haunts Ivory Coast

The gunshot death two nights ago of Michel Niacel, EU officer in charge of staff security in the southern zone of Côte d'Ivoire, has turned into a civil police investigation and not an international affair involving political recriminations.

Staff writer Emmanuel Akani for the Abidjan Matin, however, exaggerates when he implies that it is typical Western paranoia and prejudice that tries to make more of a domestic murder or suicide than is warranted simply because it happens to occur in Africa. Only three days prior to the death of Niacel, there was an attempt on the life of the Ivorian commander Captain Kipré, at the headquarters of the militarised demarcation-line between northern and southern zones. His adjoint, Lieutenant Drihé, was seriously injured by a grenade rigged to explode when anyone opened a bureau drawer in Kirpé's office.

Given recent Ivorian history of violent politico-military reprisals, assassination, and even death squads controlled remotely by Ivory Coast's highest officials, every violent death of a prominent figure in the multinational peacekeeping operation becomes cause for suspicion and alarm.

We, living peaceful lives in industrially advanced countries, like to get our African Realities in movie theatres and suspence-filled novels. We give prizes to the creative authors and directors of the sort of drama that lets us shed a tear for our imaginary Africa. For us, politics goes on in Ottawa, Washington, D.C., London and Paris while what happens in African capitals is intrigue and conspiracy (frequently genocidal).

Given the shroud of doubt about the death of Michel Niaucel at age 53, while serving 'our' West in 'some part of' Africa, while he sleeps with a Western wife in his Western bedclothes . . Given the joint police investigation being closely supervised by French officials, I guess the rest of us can get back to literature and the seven arts.

We still have a raging debate to engage over which is better cinema: "Babel" or last year's "The Constant Gardener". (But first I'll have to rent one and go out to see the other.)

Breaking News: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire: EU Diplomat Murdered

06 to 07 February 2007
Last Night
Tuesday to Wednesday

A diplomatic representative of the European Union residing in Abidjan, Michel Niaucel (aged 53) was murdered by gunshot in his home last night. Police in the Ivorian capital did not offer a motive for the attack. The murder was officially confirmed by the foreign office in Paris overnight.

Neither Niaucel's wife nor his 13-year-old daughter were physically harmed, although both were present in the family's residence when the murder occurred.

M. Niaucel, a former commander in the French armed forces (gendarmerie), worked with the European Union commission in Abidjan and was charged with the security of staff and officials posted in that civil war torn West African nation.

Background (provided by the Agence Français de Presse) and details are quoted in French below. For the Internet source, click on this post's title.

As of 5:00 AM Atlantic Time, there were no other news releases available via Internet, not even from reliable French-language media in Abidjan.

Michel Niaucel, un ancien commandant de gendarmerie de 53 ans, était notamment chargé des questions de sécurité à la délégation de l'UE à Abidjan, selon des sources diplomatiques concordantes.

M. Niaucel a été tué par balles à son domicile, situé dans une résidence de l'UE au Plateau, le quartier des affaires d'Abidjan, dans des circonstances qui restaient obscures mercredi matin, selon ces sources.

A Paris, le ministère français des Affaires étrangères a confirmé la mort d'un ressortissant français travaillant pour la Commission européenne à Abidjan.

L'épouse et la fille de M. Niaucel, âgée de 13 ans, étaient présentes au moment des faits, selon plusieurs sources diplomatiques à Abidjan.

Aucune hypothèse -- assassinat pour des raisons politiques ou crime crapuleux ordinaire -- n'était privilégiée mercredi matin, selon plusieurs diplomates.

-----------------------------
06 - 07 February 2007

The assassination of Ivorian civil and military officials has a 'long tradition' in Ivory Coast. So do attacks against French officials. Given this West African nations present situation, divided between national forces loyal to Pres Gbagbo and the New Force 'rebels' in the northern third of the territory, all ears will be to the ground listening for rumblings of a heightened level of state or rebel-sponsored violence directed at the Gbagbo or rebel leadership.

The background below relates how French civilians were already evacuated over the past 4 years following the outbreak and fallout from the civil war. Peacekeeping military forces in Ivory Coast have reinforced a cordon sanitaire between the opposing sides, further dividing the territory geographically between a more Christian and developped south and a depressed agricultural north, where Muslims and adherents of indigenous religions are in the majority. Class, caste and revolt against French neo-colonial control are big factors that fuel violence and incidents such as the assassination of Michel Niaucel have potential to precipitate or figure into new outbreaks and fresh attempts to precipitate such outbreaks deliberately.

Les relations entre Paris et Abidjan, autrefois partenaire privilégié de la France en Afrique, se sont détériorées à la suite de la tentative de coup d'Etat des FN contre M. Gbagbo en septembre 2002. La France est depuis régulièrement accusée par les partisans du président de soutenir la rébellion.

Elles sont devenus glaciales à partir de novembre 2004, lorsqu'un bombardement de l'aviation ivoirienne a tué neuf soldat français à Bouaké (centre). En représailles, l'armée française avait détruit l'aviation ivoirienne, provoquant une série de violentes manifestations antifrançaises à Abidjan et des affrontements meurtriers entre soldats français et manifestants ivoiriens.

Près de 8.000 expatriés français avaient alors été évacués en catastrophe par l'armée française et rapatriés en France.

Environ 3.000 civils français (hors binationaux) vivent encore aujourd'hui à Abidjan, contre 50.000 dans les années 1980.

L'armée française, par l'intermédiaire de sa force Licorne, compte de son côté quelque 3.500 soldats, chargés de faire respecter le cessez-le-feu entre les FN et le camp présidentiel, qui contrôle toujours le sud du pays.

DISGRACE, J. M. Coetzee

A short pre-review here. Nothing serious. I'm on p 47 of this novel (it's already Chapter 6) and suddenly the way Coetzee narrates his tale of a post-age-50s lust for simple sex and one attractive student . . . well what is left out in terms of the exposed profs inner turmoil is too much like adventure pop lit which hops from scene to scene without getting into a character's consciousness. I may go to the shelf with Nabakov's Lolita and re-read that novel instead.

Canadian poet Dennis Lee didn't turn me on with a secondhand collection I ordered from Alberta: Riffs. That surprised me. So I continue to 'give the guy a chance'. I found the childrens book he did the poems for: The Ice Cream Store, illustrated by David McPhail. For me, and most children I can imagine, the poems and pictures jump around too much, from this to that. Too many of them for a solid kids lit title.

There are 3 types of poems with illustrations in The Ice Cream Store that I do like, some I think could grow on anyone who repeats the words aloud a few times. The poems that seem to be 'D. L. does Mother Goose', in other words, completely derivative poems; poems that use the sounds of towns, countries and cities (or make words up) to evoke sharp, soft or watery sound-images; and third, poems that are acts of complete innovative creation, poems unlike any other kids poems.

The notes and credits for Riffs (Brick Books, 1993) do not mention The Ice Cream Store (HarperCollins Alligor Press imprint, 1991) although the latter won some prestige in its genre. The Ice Cream Store could have been 3 or 4 award-winning titles in the hands of a good editor and through more work on themes and illustration on the part of the McPhail - Lee team. Surely it wasn't a potboiler for both of them? But without a theme, the best parts are easily forgotten.

That brings me back to Coetzee. The best parts so far were in the beginning. On p 47 it speeds up too much with no depth. Will the book redeem itself if I read on into the night?