Book distribution company (AMS) files for bankruptcy. Losses huge.

from | Dear Author.Com |


Advanced Marketing Services, Inc is a book distributor to warehouse clubs, speciality retailers, e-commerce companies, and bookstores.

The Group provides product selection advice, specialized merchandising and product development services, distribution and handling services to membership warehouse clubs.
Via Business.com

This morning, Publisher’s Weekly reported that AMS is filing for a Chapter 11 restructuring. Chapter 11 allows the business to basically refinance its debts by either discharging them (which means that the company doesn’t have to repay the debt) or restructuring the debt. It’s debts owed are meaningful:
Random House, which is owed $43.3 million

Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette Book Group are all owed more than $20 million each. HarperCollins is owed $18 million.

Note: I would have pointed to Quill & Quire (in Canada) for discussion of the threat this poses to Raincoast Books (of British Columbia), but Q & Q requires readers pay for a subscription before reading what they posted. (Go to the library for the hardcopy in a month. Phsst on that requirement.)

Raincoast is partly owned by the defunct AMS.

Walking Turcot Yards -- Flying in This View

Walking Turcot Yards:

At the image-rich photo website you reach by clicking on the linked title, Blogaulaire's colleagues remark that an aerial photo looking east across the Turcot Yards is about the best overall image you will ever see of the entire site. I am certainly impressed.

Some day, all of the documenting and imaging we see on W.T.Y. will become a book, maybe even a documentary movie. That has not happened yet, so you are invited to see the groundwork toward documenting this and many other urban, forgotten or neglected, open spaces from around the globe.

Remarking on the remarkable shot from an airplane:

"The length of Turcot is somewhat compressed here. For anyone who is interested it takes about 40 minutes to walk from the Turcot Interchange in the backgrouind to the Angrignon Overpass in the foreground, providing you don’t stop to check anything out."

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 6 January

from Justin Wintle

"The barn rat has more grain than he can possibly eat; but what does the plough ox have?"

. . (23) Chinese

If a Book Was Worth the Same Price to Everyone, Poor People Would All Stay Illiterate

What a title for a post! I sometimes surprise myself.

You could declare exactly the opposite: if the value of a book were the same for everyone, all the rich people would stay illiterate.

If you have not caught my drift yet, I am taking a stab at some of the contradictions regarding the buying and selling of books.

You must admit that in many industrialised countries there are outlets for used books that are sold at such low prices that even the poorest resident can afford to purchase a few. With a little effort, reading material in such developed countries can be procured free of charge, in a public library if nowhere else. Yet here in Canada, when I give a poor person a book or magazine with something of specific interest to them, they act as if I were a magician or a saint. At least regarding that one little gift. People rarely ask me how they themselves could find such material on their own for little or no expense.

Today I gave away Spanish editions of two Readers Digests (Selecciones) to a couple people from two different Latin American countries. Each issue cost me 29 cents. But if a third party came along before either one of these individuals had finished reading the article about their homeland in the issue I had given them and then offered to buy it from them for 29 cents . . or even $2 . . the 'buyer' would be turned down, and the offer would be refused, I am certain. So the copy of Selecciones is now worth, say, $4 or $10 to the person who has little money but who values the copy of this magazine for its particular content (and the presumed scarcity, i.e, the cost of replacing an article that interests them).

There is an element of the commerce in reading matter (like the booktrade), something about this sample of the buying and selling of hardcopy information, that is antithetical to 'The Education of the Masses' regardless of 'Income Status'. Everyone knows this is true.

In the 19th century, the dime novel came into existence because several technologies were marshaled to make it possible for publishers to make a profit in the book business while lowering costs -- so low that it resulted in almost universal accessibility to reading matter for the British and American people. And people gobbled up the reading material very swiftly all across the industrialised world as this lifestyle expanded.

I, as a beneficiary of this lifestyle, have also lived in another world, despite the fact that I am as middleclass and as insular as you might imagine anyone.

I have lived in a world of constant bombardment by information, most of which was in sound and image without regard to the printed word per se. Much of what I 'learn' is by hearing and seeing messages and it would be simple as pie to become functionally illiterate regarding 'print' and still get by as a functionally adequate citizen of my community - by sight and sound as it were.

The fact that a large percent of any given Western population IS functionally illiterate is a big challenge to the booksellers among us. Booksellers are, in fact, selling to a minority of our populations. (Sometimes, however, we focus on an even smaller minority within a larger minority: divisions within divisions.)

We could become advocates for 'popular' education and go out door-to-door handing out things to read that are targeted toward specific groups, even toward specific individuals within subgroups . . . We could do a whole host of nice things to improve everybody's quality of life and ability to make informed decisions. (As pie-in-the-sky as you want.)

But we don't do all this activist stuff for a whole host of self-interested reasons. One reason might be that we are pessimistic and defeatist about our chances of competing against television, satellite FM radio and oral communication generally, the sort of communications that interrupt anyone and everyone who tries to stand back and just think or who is trying to read what has been written. Maybe we are habituated with isolating ourselves from the rest of humanity just so that we can engage in reading without being interrupted by all the 'noise' in the agora, the marketplace.

Well the irony for all the lonely (REAL) readers is (for the REAL literati) . . the irony for both the elite and for the masses is that the marketplace is having its revenge. Maybe, in future posts on Cheap Priceless Editions, I can think up some convincing metaphor(s) for how mistaken Bogaulaire has been about how the world of books is actually working today.

Anyone who saw the movie 'The Name of the Rose' or who has read Umberto Ecco should understand where I am coming from by flaunting the oxymoron 'Cheap Priceless Editions'. There is a contrast and contradiction in such word associations as 'rare book' , that is, if we are discussing a book printed on a mechanical press. Rare 'printed book' is an oxymoron by definition. A mass-produced book is rare only relative to the demand for the title, relative to the number of books printed, or relative to the book's survival through time in a particular condition. If the content (what is IN the book) is still 'in demand' and if the supply of the book is limited, we have a rare book that is marketable as such. What this amounts to is that the seller who wants to increase his or her price seeks a market where demand is high and supply is limited. (In contemporary publishing, it is only price that is 'fixed' using market'ing' restrictions; demand and supply are maximized

The grand irony (or one of them) is that despite today's high prices for new books, the real democratic forces historically, the forces that worked toward an expansion of literacy, were not the rare book dealers in whose interest a restriction of supply would work wonders, but the real 'democrats' are the forces who work constantly to increase both demand and supply - to wit: publishers. Publishers are in one of the only professions that stands to profit by supplying the most books for the largest market. (Corollary fact: without public education and public libraries, publishers become their own rare book dealers; note the history of luxury, limited and signed editions, especially in European countries and among 'artistes' in North America.)

In a sense, many of the 'rare' bookdealers dealing in the used (secondhand) market are like pilot fish living off the rich. They have adopted what they presume are the elitist attitudes of their patrons. (Even the dealers caught stealing from rare book depositories adopted this elitist posture.)These booksellers buy their supply from their rich patrons, who sell at a fraction of what a rich person pays for an original title. This fact is nearly self-evident. But any dealer buying his or her 'stock' from the Masses of book readers (in the mass market) is not much of a rare bookdealer, because the Masses are reading mass market, mass produced, printed material. These folks (the majority of dealers online today) are in a game of winnowing through millions of books, frantically trying to sort out the 'sports' which for one reason or another are harder to find in the marketplace of books. That takes a great investment of time, space, and energy . . plus total dedication to the process and the book trade. It also implies and imposes low margins.

But at the end of the day, to whom are 'rare books' sold? Bite my ass. I cannot answer that question. If I could, I'd probably be selling off all my own stock in books! Of course, the answer differs depending on the title. But, again, at the end of the day, it certainly looks like an attempt, on everybody's part, to reconstruct a medieval system of patronage, i.e., the relation between rich patron and dependent artisan.

So we have come full circle back again in terms of the contradictions inherent in the book trade, at least in terms of the used book trade -- with all the used-book dealers attempting to turn their collections of 'sows ears' into 'silk purses' by turning mass produced books into collectors' items worth premium prices: not exactly 'cheap priceless editions'.

But I keep being drawn back to what I sincerely believe are the FACTS. Given the fiscal, the tax-related realities of publishing, there is the real danger that many worthwhile, backlisted book titles will dry up and disappear from the marketplace, titles by authors a notch or two below the status of a, say, Charles Dickens to mention an English-language author. And I see the tens of thousands of dealers attempting to sell books on the meta-vendor sites as a deposit library for such titles: as a reserve army ready to flood the market with worthwhile books should publishers fail to meet the demand generated by public education.

Bogaulaire never claimed to be clear about what is happening vis a vis the book trade, especially nothing more than unclear about his own comprehension regarding the book trade's current manifestations. Tentatively, I will say that I hope that booksellers by and large will continue to put the accent upon the positive, upon the quality, and not the rarity, of what they offer for sale in the agora. At least in the book blogs, if not on the vendors' sites, this is what I think is coming down at present.

Table-Top Images of Books Referenced by CPE Recently

Yesterday, I posted here about buying sheer, white curtain material.

Things are starting to 'fall into place'. (See images below.)

As I experiment with in my set-up for imaging the reading material displayed on Cheap Priceless Editions, I am noticing many positive differences with less wasted effort in the preparation before snapping the shutter.

There will be little mention, from now on, of the equipment or the arrangements . My reasoning is that you could just as easily be using a flatbed scanner and your own imagination to achieve better results than me.

Using photo-editing software to stitch and combine images is worth exploring. Even (Especially!) my daughters have more skill at using Adobe PhotoShop and other image-editing software than I have. What I do do for imaging is to adapt a few emulsion film techniques I learned as a photo student and studio assistant.

I am adapting these techniques to the wider latitude and greater speed that digital equipment affords. I am being totally opportunistic in taking the benefits and casting off the old constraints of the darkroom. In many ways, once a photographer has a basic set-up, knows his distances and exposures, most of the rest of his or her bag of tricks involves practice and shortcuts and the application of down-and-dirty compromises to avoid fussy fiddling around with all the variables that can so rapidly get out of control and mess up a day of 'shooting film.'

Here are two books that Blogaulaire has used or acquired and mentioned in recent posts:

----------------------------------------------------------------- 1 of 2 images

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This literary and political biography includes many references to Tillie Olsen.

The original Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994 edition would have cost me $50 new. I bought the book through the Internet before I had even heard of the Advanced Book Exchange or any other meta-vendor sites offering used books for sale.

Amazed, today, I cannot fathom how I figured out how to order the damn thing without using a 'bookfinder' vendor website to order it.

(You should stay in touch with your customers; if the bookseller who sent me this Wixson title had written back by email to stay in touch with me, I would have sent more business his way at the drop of a hat.

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2 of 2 images

This is the Cespedes book, the one given to me gratis at the Spanish market after I showed the owner a book of poems by Amado Nervo . . . which I also got that day for a song in a friperie.

I'll be shopping more frequently in that Spanish market, that's for certain!

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The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 5 January

from Justin Wintle

"Women have twice the appetite of men, four times the intelligence, and eight times as many desires."

. . (20) Burmese

(c)Maggie Taylor

Talk About Being a Klutz - I Must Be One Too !

Random Thoughts

I cut up today to just enjoy today's Montréal version of our own episodic 'winter of globalwarming discontent'. It ended up being an 11-hour jaunt from my breakfast venue, where they hadn't even turned on the lights yet when I arrived at 7:00 am, and then a bus-metro ride up past Jean Talon Market, past Little Italy, to pick up cheap books at my favorite friperie. Finally (though it must have amounted to 6 or 7 hours of a slow saunter south through the Plateau Mont Royal), I made my way down The Main on my return trip by foot.

Along the way I read some interesting books, including a broadsheet by Stéphane Mallarmé in a deluxe edition. So, from a literary standpoint, my day wasn't entirely wasted.

Everywhere I went, books fell on the floor around me. Except in the funeral parlour, thank God'. . . "Funeral parlour!" I know you're asking, but be patient, we'll get there.

At the friperie I picked up sheer polyester material to use as a backdrop and as a diffusion screen for my photo lightbox ($4.00 worth = two French-gathered full-length curtains). I also buy $8.00 worth of secondhand books, including titles that ALL local undergrads are always shopping for - things like Hernann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, a 'gender studies' title or two, et cetera -- Hell, I don't remember all of the titles: it's stuff I have coming out the yazoo anyway. Stuff that I buy to trade-off. (Though I love both authors - don't get me wrong.)

PLUS I discovered and buy (included in the $8 price-tag) what I dearly strive to collect wherever I can. This includes today's "Le Passager", by Gilbert La Rocque (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 1984) and "jimmy', by Jacques Poulin (Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1969). Both are what I call cheap priceless editions, quoi? I'll blog both titles sometime soon, including photos of the covers.

Another klutz thing I did: I immediately, upon leaving the place, imagine that I have lost my wallet in the secondhand junk emporium (friperie) I've just left. That somebody has picked my pocket. So I go back and raise a stink and get everybody on-edge. Then I reach in my backpack to discover that I had placed my wallet in the same bag as the books - wrapped inside the curtain material. Well, everybody at the friperie was as relieved as I was at that final dénoument to me being a klutz.

So where do I end up next? After walking around Jean Talon and its juncture with Boulevard St. Laurent to get my bearings, I head south. And end up in a friggin funeral parlour, that's where!

I see this sign that advertises a 'café-bibliotheque-bookstore' thingy; a sort of bookish café. That's my bag: arts cafés that sell books. So I go in. But, despite the artsy aspect of the place, it turns out to be a friggin real funeral parlour! Toute la patente. The real thing. I ask, naturally, and they tell me that the café is upstairs, above the salon where bodies are 'exposed'.

So I go upstairs. All the friggin books are about how to deal with mourning - le deuil. Or religion; or . . get this: tons of poetry. By poets I love. Stéphane Mallarmé is there in 'luxury editions'. This, my friend, is a funeral parlour like no other you have ever, ever seen. This is Art in the service of Death, or, if not Death per se, in the service of taking as many dollars from the folks left mourning a loved one as is possible by selling them Art and Poetry to carry them through their sorrows! It is a restaurant attached to a funeral parlour. Both are immaculately up-scale and, as they say, branchés (translation: 'hip').

Am I indignant? No. Am I flabbergasted? Yes. Do I know what to think about it? No.

I was not born yesterday; or, in French, dans la dernière pluie. Urgel Bourgie, the chain of funeral parours by far the best known in Montréal, can afford to set up both an Art Gallery and a café-bookstore for select clients; it is 'On The Main' in Montréal. Do you have such a thing in your community? Where the 'Art' sells for +$1,000 and galley folios of famous poems for over $60 ? Well bite my ass! In Australia, Massachusetts, in Maine and the U.K., in France and in Des Moines you all have such high class, literary and hip funeral parlors? Bite my ass double-time! (Kurt Vonnegut, (remember his Iowa City days?) once imagined this industry of 'cool' dying in a novel. Sorry I mentioned it.)

So from there I saunter down St. Lawrence Street, down toward haunts with which I feel inordinately more familiar. (I did not pop $60 for the Mallarmé poem nor any 'lesser amounts' for all the religious, esoteric, or the 'dealing with loss' pop lit that Urgel Bougie offers for sale in their café .. er funeral home . . er . . WHATEVER. (If I had the money though . . Urgel Bourgie would have made another pile of dough!)

What I did 'pop into', eventually, was a familiar secondhand, used bookstore further on down the line. (I know the owner and his cat.) Here, at W's bookstore, I lounged around with a little less trepidation than in the funeral parlour cum lit-café. After discovering what I wanted as book "purchases", including two books by Tillie Olsen and a novel I'd ignored the existence of = "By the Sound" by Edward Dorn, in a Black Sparrow Press edition,

I end up trading off what I had found in the friperie for what I REALLY wanted to buy, but could not otherwise afford.

You could say that already I am ahead of the game. And despite the unusually warm weather and fact that our entire planet is going to hell in a handbasket.

I, at least in the imagination of one day, stay on top of the game. (Do I feel guilty a bit? ùyes. This could be my last hoorah. Who knows anything, with this globally warm weather? I don't. Nobody around Québec knows what to make of the weather . . what to make of this bizaare winter in Canada. Does Urgel Bourgie) the funeral director?

But 'yet and still' your entrepid reporter has more territory to conquer. I drop into a Spanish books-groceries-kitchen-utensils store on The Main and shop the literature in Spanish. Through some fluke, some misunderstanding about how to translate the word 'listado', the owner-clerk gives away (she actually says 'take it') the Augusto Cespedes title "Metal del Diablo: La Vida de Rey del Estano" after I show her my (recently acquired at the friperie) copy of "Antologia Poetica" by Amado Nervo. I'm not complaining, though I do suspect I've just now engaged in some weird form of shoplifting. Aided by my weak mastery of Spanish.

So all-in-all I'm a happy camper, a successful player of hooky, today. Maybe I have a stack of books that nobody would buy if I decide to offer them for sale on the Internet. (I doubt that, though.) I go home happy. And enlightened about books, poetry and about Montréal as our town evolves.

I do have second thoughts about poetry, about what I like, and about the industry of death that is so profitable. Maybe I should go into another line of work.

Sinn Fein Protest Sale of 1916 Memorabelia

Ireland's National Museum was bidding for items unique to that nation's history of rebellion against British rule. (How such items ended up in private hands in the first place is not reported on this short video newsclip, but this sort of thing is a common occurence globally.)

No need to say much more than what's on the v.o. for the video. Sinn Fein protesters, both inside the auction room and out on the street mounted a vigourous protest. After arrests, the persons detained were released.

Thanks to MyFineBooks blog - http://blog.myfinebooks.com - for calling our attention to this book-related news item.

Tillie Olsen, author of 'Tell Me a Riddle,' dies at age 94

AP Wire | 01/02/2007 |

"I'm trying to get used to the idea of a world without Tillie Olsen," Feminist Press publisher Florence Howe said Tuesday. "She gave me `Life in the Iron Mills' in our first year, when we thought we were going to do biographies and children's books. She changed the whole direction of our press. I had never heard of some of the books she was telling me about."



Olsen did little writing in recent years, but she remained an activist. She participated in a protest against a local retailer, demanding better wages for employees. She also joined the fight in the mid-1990s to stop the San Francisco Public Library from cutting support of books in favor of computers.

"She was remarkable, right to the end," Howe said. "In her last days in the hospital, she would walk around carrying a volume of Emily Dickinson. Tillie's memory was gone by then, but she would read the book aloud, from cover to cover, without missing a beat."

A native of Omaha, Neb., Olsen was the second of seven children of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father, Samuel Lerner, was a farmer, factory worker and paper hanger and an official in the Nebraska socialist party. While some reference works listed Olsen's year of birth as 1913, Laurie Olsen said her mother was born a year earlier.

Educated in the "school of literature," Tillie Olsen never went to college. By age 18, she had joined the Young Communist League and by her mid-20s she had moved to San Francisco and married fellow activist Jack Olsen, who died in 1989. They had four daughters.




Thanks to j. godsey at The Bibliophile Bullpen for pointing C.P.E. to this news item.

'One Tree Hill' gives High Marks to Yours Truly - CPE

Thank you 'One Tree Hill' for rating 'Cheap Priceless Editions' as a 'Good Pick' for the Boxxet RSS feed.

It was my Christmas Day post here on Cheap Priceless Editions that rated these high distinctions:

Only a Madman (woman) Never Thinks of Those Less Fortunate -- by Blogaulaire

(If there is a Unitarian minister reading this who would like to use the content for the 2007 Christmas service, I'll try to set up a direct deposit line to my bank account so you can buy it. It will only cost 20% of the collection plate, so we certainly are talking small change here . . :) )

Here, on Cheap Priceless Editions you can go directly ("Do Not Pass O.T.H.") to the same post by clicking HERE.

Blogaulaire knows about RSS feeds, I used to gorge myself on them in another life. But how in hell I would know who reads this blog by automatic feed versus by actually landing on the URL . . well that escapes me. I think it was jgodsey at BIBLIOPHILE who stated that Google Resources offers a tool to keep track but I'll let it ride for now. Feel free to comment if you know more about such monitoring and recommend that bloggers keep track of who reads and who feeds.

(Nota bene: My family comes from a territory close to 'Lone Tree' and my genealogic associations have a more hardtack, gritty side than One Tree Hill's take on such features of the landscape. Seems there were horse thieves operating around Lone Tree where my folks hail from -- that was where they were strung up if they got caught!)

My Mind Freely-Associating with Flashes of Susan Sontag

As I age I recognise more and more my weaknesses (and strengths) in spelling. Is there a double 'mm' in 'accomodations', two 's'es but one 'L' in 'succesfull'? So I use a dictionary more often, not less, as time wears on.

Being an editor and a translator, there are many, many print-on-paper dictionaries right here at my fingertips as we speak.

Here is a word I didn't look up: 'mneumonics'. Did I get it right? Using what something sounds like, rhymes with, or memorizing a little jingle and verse to jog the memory; is that right as well? I need mneumonics I guess.

I think of a whole host of things when I'm reminded of the late New York City writer Susan Sontag. But most I think of the military-medical metaphor: winning the 'war' on cancer, that sort of image. Pathogens as invaders that evade the host's defense perimeter.

Well I was just this instant reminded of Susan Sontag in a bizarre manner. (I had to look up bizzare in Webster's BTW.)

I thought of Sontag when I grabbed a big blue dictionary to spell 'accommodation'. By mistake, I grabbed Mosby's Medical & Nursing Dictionary instead of my copy of the Nelson Canadian Dictionary. For about 3 seconds, I kept turning the damn dictionary around, certain that my eyes couldn't focus because I was holding the right reference work only holding it upside down; that is, until after 3 secs I figured out my mistake and then grabbed the right reference work.

It strikes me that so much of what I read on blogs and on webpages is like those confused three seconds. It takes me more than an instant to figure out what, exactly, I'm looking at as I browse the blogs: all because, as they say in French, 'I grabbed the stick by the wrong end' (J'ai pris l'affaire par le mauvais bout.).

Blogging is quite different from participating in a discussion forum, although both activities can be a matter of adapting to several personas. Participants are presenting roles in public. But landing on a blog, it is easy to become confused as to which public this particular blogger wants to direct his or her message and whether you are or want to become a part of that public. (I know, that's what blogrolls and links to bloggers are all about.)

Back to Susan Sontag. I just pulled her out of a hat. Then I pulled one image, a constellation of metaphors out of a hat. Finally, I pulled a French expression out of a hat. Am I trying to connect with people like me who can connect with all three rabbits I pulled out of three different hats, or am I trying to impress people, or, finally, is this a public service being provided in the same way a reference librarian provides a service? I imagine that in a discussion forum composed of reference librarians my persona could comfortably fit into all three roles. But I continually scratch my head wondering about blogs, especially younger blogs like Cheap Priceless Editions where there are no pertinent prerequisites for viewers nor for participants.

Does anyone have a nifty metaphor that is nicer than the military medical metaphor Susan Sontag exposed? Are we playing at the beach and writing in the sand at the wave's edge?

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 3 January

from Justin Wintle

"When rats invade the castle a lame cat is better than a swift horse."

. . . (10) Chinese

Carolyn Burke's Biography of Mina Loy - Jacket # 5

You can read more about Mina Loy in Jacket #5.

Part One of 'Cheap Priceless Editions' Summer Reading Picks for the Southern Hemisphere . . . (While the rest of us curl up under blankets an freeze . . .)

CLICK HERE

TEASER -- quoted from JACKET 5
For us, decades later, her name opens the door to an era of spirited exchanges between American and Continental vanguards. It conjures up smoky art classes in prewar Montparnasse, costume balls at Mabel Dodge's Florentine villa, Futurist soirées where enraged audiences hurl vegetables at the stage, Dadaesque poetry readings, gossipy visits with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, dinners in Brancusi's studio among half-finished blocks of marble -- all scenes that reveal the shapes of the modernist imagination.
/END TEASER

I FIRST HEARD of Mina Loy when I was living in Paris twenty years ago. A fin-de-siècle English painter, she had made her name, quite unexpectedly, as a writer of vers libertine -- the sort of free verse that in the 1910s seemed to lead to free love. To the modernists, she was the first to chart the sensibility of the 'new woman.' Ezra Pound praised her intellect and her refusal to traffic in sentiment, the staple, he judged, of women poets. (Her poems bristled with such intelligence that Pound coined the term 'logopoeia' to describe them.) William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and E. E. Cummings all learned from her example. In the 1920s she was as well known as Marianne Moore, the other female modernist with whom she was frequently compared.

In her many years abroad, Mina Loy also befriended Gertrude Stein, John Reed, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Peggy Guggenheim, Tristan Tzara, Natalie Barney, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, to name a few of her 'crowd.' She makes brief, brilliant appearances in expatriate memoirs: one catches sight of her in New York during the Great War, in the hectic avant-garde of postwar Berlin, at the opening of a risqué Paris nightclub or a clandestine Surrealist film showing in the twenties. By the mid-thirties, however, she had disappeared, and her poems were out of print.

'Unknown Weegee, 'Photographer Who Made the New York Night Noir' - A Phoenix Rises after 70 Years

'Night Noir' - New York Times. Not a New Genre - But the Next Genre

'Four a.m., bars close. Guys asleep in Bowery doorways. But just before dawn is the worst: despair city. The jumpers start, out the windows, off the roof. I can't even look. So that's the night, New York. Ain't it grand? What a life.'

The imagined speaker is Arthur Fellig, better known, and very well known, as Weegee (1899-1968). From the 1930's into the 1950's, he was a photographer for New York tabloids, the kind of papers Ralph Kramden might have read.

Tireless, loquacious, invasive, he cruised the wee hours. For him the city was a 24-hour emergency room, an amphetamine drip.

WEEGEE AT WORK
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Car Hits 3d Ave. L - One Dies, Two Hurt. Under double-bill movie marquee, body of Stanley Stanley, was covered with newspapers and coats by police. Technical charge of homicide was lodged against Frank Whalen, who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for observation. Another passenger, Joseph Mahoney, also was hurt. PM Photo by Weegee
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Can You Read the Marquee?
'Joy of Living: Don't Turn Them Loose'

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Have 'they' been turned loose in 2007? I'm only asking.
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Blogaulaire's guru says not to make predictions about the Year 2007, or only 'devils" will laugh.

But there are a few things we can know about culture and media for certain: okay, a new Norman Mailer novel will come out (the first in a decade) within the first half of 2007; we know and can view the trailers for many Hollywood films not yet released but coming in 2007; someone, somewhere, can reliably predict something new in jazz music.

So, who needs to predict this stuff? Anybody who wants to ride the culture trends to their zeniths, that's who. People whose careers depend on it.

If noir fiction is 'in' on all script-based fronts for a few more years to come, I'll predict one thing: that reviewers and television spinsters will have a hard time giving this trend in 'noir' a humanitarian twist, as they tried to do with Weegee in the years following the Depression (which was the height of his career as a photo-journalist).

Maybe I'm in a 'noir' mood. Yet what I see happening to photo-journalists is that they are being killed . . killed in the Philippines, killed in Afghanistan, killed in Oaxaca, Mexico, killed in Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) . . killed around the globe. (So, this IS a pitch for Reporters Without Borders. Do support them, please.) Noir like the sort Weegee did is a bit blacker in 2007.

Yet noir is noir. All communication is humanitarian, today is no exception. Yet there it is: noir is black. Communication of noir is black - AND (as communication) it is always humanitarian. What is humanitarian is not the content of what is being communicated: that is still noir. You go and figure out the rest. Bertolt Brecht told us over and over again that to say that noir is white is a form of fascism. BB was right. The question is simple: Who is doing anything to translate all this into humanitarian acts, humanitarian policy? We can no longer pat ourselves on the back and say 'Upton Sinclair cleaned up the packing house industry through his exposes.' So noir, in 2007, promises to be very noir.

You who are French from France who write 'noir': what the 'f' are you doing by trying to Americanize it? There is plenty (more than enough) noir being written in its American idiom, if you know what the label Americain really means. And this American lit is being written in the French language - always has been. It is being written in Quebec and has been written in Quebec for a long, long time.


There's Nothing Noir in Toronto (Big Laugh from the Audience)

Canadians will know what I mean. 'T.O.: City of the Good' But also 'Toronto: Hog Town'. This and similar contradictions, I predict, will start to fall in 2007 as Toronto tries to catch up with Noir in the Arts. The Arts, especially in Canada, are about to eat her young and her innocent. The poets did it, where else can it go? Somebody, everybody, will try to compete with Vancouver's success with noir and (I hope) Montreal's renewed recognition abroad in this genre in 2007.

Certainly, the mega media will try to make us laugh to keep from cryin. New Orleans, with traditions going back to black face vaudeville already tried to do that. What do you think New Orleans holds in store for the culture now, though, after the flood? Another MASH series, with anarchist volunteers at clinics and soup kitchens standing in for Allen Alda? No. It shall be noir. Maybe as early as 2007, who knows?

Now, finally, it is time for advice for the Europeans. Why not start (restart) getting down and dirty about your own backyards? Is there not enough grit in Eastern Europe? Not jazzy enough? Are you tired of all the translations from 'l'Americain'? Then learn joual (street French in Quebec). That is Americain enough to do you for the next 200 years.

I know that what I am writing here is going past my US readers at 110 MPH. All you have to do is think 'Death and Dying in Las Vegas' by Hunter S. Thompson and think about some Frenchman writing it in French all the while attempting to make the novel more black, more desperate. Why bother? That is the question I am asking here. (Spare me though. Sales will be strictly European. And you thought there exists such a thing as 'World Lit'? What ever happened to Europeans like Orwell doing 'Down and Out in London and Paris'?

If North America has the rest of the world 'by the balls' as far as cultural hegemony and the media goes it is not merely a matter of owning a monopoly over satellite and cable communicatations. Both of those transmission lines can go down with one or two simple seismic disruptions. What will really count is the number of cultural workers producing in many languages who have moved to North America and who are being encouraged inside North America to write their narratives in both their own language and in English.

Am I wrong or is not Paris the capital of West African fusion music? The same could happen to world lit and world cinema and still be based in North America. Where this sort of phenomenon starts to explode on other fronts is your guess. Will the nationalist backlash in the home territory be reactionary or progressive? Is (for local readers) the Cirque du Soleil at 3 or 4 venues in Los Vegas progressive for Quebec? Without a nationalist backlash? No accusations about cultural appropriation by billionaire masters of deceit who run hotel-casinos?

Maybe all that matters is the cheap week-end air travel and accommodations sold to folks wanting to catch the shows? But remember, Cuba is cheaper still for all but the USians (who could lose their passports for going there).

So far, much North American writing dealing with an immigrant writer's childhood somewhere in rest of the world (are the plastic arts or cinema different) is pure nostalgia or (les)miserabl(es)iste (you could say naturalist, of the Zola sort); but writers are turning ever more toward the 'noir' with increasing boxoffice success. Noir is becoming Universalizing.

In the 1960s, Pierre Vallieres, from Quebec, during his political incarnation, was most successful with his autobiographical book about the Quebecois as "White Niggers of North America". The book wasn't jazzy, but the self-identification with '60s Revolt was more than evident - as evident as the nationalist sentiment. And Vallieres was 'touching' every side of the double-edged sword of noir, subculture, revolt and 'on the road' hipsterism with the title. Everything like that was Universal, though dyed in the wool nationalism never mixes well with the Universal Message. In 2007 Noir wins out over Nationalism, I predict, to the chagrin of the status quo if all this blackness retains its strongest elements of revolt - even against the nationalists or the Black mayors in power.

I'm way, way ahead of myself here. Noir lit is coming at us fast. The culture's gatekeepers will try to turn the genre away from revolt. It may turn out to be a losing battle on both sides. Maybe we will end up with just a bunch more of that self-loathing Rap and romanticized Reggae (or worse, bad art) that makes a smooth move to the airwaves like all crossover rhythms we hear transposed from their, say, Caribbean roots. I surely do not know.

All I CAN say is this: the really cool stuff in most languages other than English will either focus upon what is happening in or near the respective mother country or, if the cultural stuff tries to tackle and win over North America, it will come from immigrants and native speakers of Spanish and French (or whatever) living inside North America. A simple idea, yet so easily misunderstood by those who think it will all be absorbed into the middle class media mill. I think there will be too much of such cultural production in 2007 for the 'machine' to handle and I cannot wait to consume the good stuff that spills over and costs nothing. Like the poor kids did along the railroad lines tossing coal off the open cars for people to pick up as best they could. Maybe 2007 will be a cultural feast, a moveable feast in more ways than one.

Photographic images ©1994, International Center of
Photography, New York, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox.

Text ©1997 International Center of Photography, from
Weegee's World by Miles Barth, A Bulfinch Press Book,
Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.

The Dragon's Almanac - 1 January

from Justin Wintle

"Talk of the year ahead
and the devil laughs."

. . (1) Japanese

Overview of Book Publishing - Notes

IS 561: Paperback Book Publishing Lecture Notes:
History of Paper-Bound Books, notes of William C. Robinson
University of Tennessee

Early Days In Europe
In the beginning, books were quite expensive and were often issued in paper covers with the expectation that the owner would have the book bound according to his taste in something more durable and attractive.

Earlier in the history of the book, the change from leather binding to cloth binding substantially reduced the cost of book buying. A cloth book cost about 17 percent of the cost of a leather one. A mass market paper edition costs more than that when compared to the cloth edition.

Although they became visible in the U.S. just before the second World War, paperbacks have a long history. In Europe, popular paperbacks appeared as early as 1845 by Christian Tauchnitz in Leipzig who introduced a popular reprint series. For quite a long time, there were relatively few original paper editions. Paper bound books were also common in France for most of the 19th Century. Early paperbacks did not fit in pockets, had tiny type, and unattractive covers. Growth in paperback production and sales was related to development of railroad transportation which provided people with an environment where activity was limited and reading was possible. Travelers desired small editions that were easy to carry and read while on the road. Inexpensive paper bound books were also disposable.

Cheap paper reprints had been available in Britain since the Victorian era (Routledge's Railway Classics or Pickering's Diamond Classics for example), but the books were of poor quality and dated. They were considered to be 'cheap.'

Early Days In the U.S.

The first paper bound full-length novel published in the U.S. was Charles O'Malley which was issued in 1840. Others soon followed. Traditional book publishers asked Congress to ban paper bound books. In 1843, Congress increased postal rates for paper bound books and the market collapsed.

The rapid expansion of the railroads in the 1850s and 1860s led to "railroad" literature, usually cheap crime, romance, and joke books. The Beadle Brothers issued the first dime novel in 1860, Malaeska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter. These 96 page paperbacks did have a sewn binding. The "dime novels" were popular into the early 1870s and inexpensive paper allowed for quite a low price.

Click on this post's title to continue. (Part of an well organized, college level course on publishing.

The Dragon's Almanac - 31 December

from Justin Wintle
"Books do not catch every word and words do not catch every thought."
. . . (1459) Chinese

Penguin Paperbacks & Pulp, History & Collecting, from Vintage Voice at Popula

from - Vintage Voice at Popula by Oliver Corlett:

The First 20th Century Paperbacks

A landmark in the history of the paperback in the English-speaking world was the arrival of Penguin, the first really 'respectable' paperback imprint, in 1935. The story goes that Allen Lane, Chairman of The Bodley Head, a London publisher, was returning by train from a weekend in the country with one of his authors -- Agatha Christie -- and her husband. The Bodley Head, like many publishers of the time, was suffering precipitously declining sales, and had been since the onset of the Depression, and Lane was looking for a way to save his troubled business. Browsing the station kiosks for something to read while he waited for the train, he could find nothing to buy except slick magazines and low-quality paperback fiction (like the cheaply produced Routledge's Railway Classic reprint series). It occurred to him that good quality fiction and nonfiction might find a wider readership if only books were more affordable, and on July 30th, 1935 he introduced the Penguin imprint to an unsuspecting world.

Early Penguins, with their distinctive orange/blue/green, white and black covers (no pictures, just a title, the Penguin logo and an author), were all priced at sixpence (that is, 2 1/2p in today's British currency, or about 4 cents at today's exchange rates) - about the same as a pack of 10 cigarettes, or a fifteenth the price of a typical hardcover at the time - and for the first time were sold not just in bookstores but in mass-market outlets like Woolworths and, naturally, railroad station kiosks. Lane took care that the type, the ink and the paper were of good quality, to match the content. The low price was allegedly made possible not, as many assume, because the covers were paper rather than cloth, but because the covers were paper rather than cloth, but because print runs were substantially larger than for hardcover books - 17,000 copies was the breakeven volume; hence, Lane took a substantial gamble that there would be sufficient demand in the British market to meet a run of this size. In the event, of course, he was right. Within six months of the introduction of the first 10 titles, about one million Penguins had been sold; and Penguin Books sold over three million copies in its first full year, 1936. This was really what started the ball rolling for the modern paperback industry.



The first ten titles?

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
Madame Claire by Susan Ertz
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Poets Pub by Eric Linklater
Carnival by Compton Mackenzie
Ariel by Andre Maurois
Twenty-Five by Beverly Nichols
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers
Gone to Earth by Mary Webb
William by E.H. Young

In 1939, Penguin opened an office in the US, under the direction of an Englishman named Ian Ballantine, a man who was destined to play an important role in shaping the paperback industry in the US in the following decades. (In 1945 Ballantine, together with Bennett Cerf, founded Bantam Books, and in the early 1950s he founded Ballantine Books; both of these went on to become significant factors in the US and world publishing markets).

From Lowbrow to Nobrow - Peter Swirski

Google Book Search:

'From Lobrow to Nobrow' demolishes the elite argument that popular fiction and popular culture are the underside of civilization. In this innovative book, Peter Swirski goes beyond demonstrating that 'high-brow' has been transformed to 'low-brow,' showing that nobrow art is the interactive factor in the relationship between popular art and highbrow art.

Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers, and not a source of ideological brainwashing or the result of declining literary standards. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory.

Swirski then turns to three 'nobrow' novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of 'ascertainment' in Karel Čapek's 'War With the Newts,' Raymond Chandler's 'Playback,' and Stanislaw Lem's 'Chain of Chance,' crossover tours de force, 'From Lowbrow to Nobrow' throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics.

'I would rank this book among the top five in popular culture studies.' Gary Hoppenstand, editor of 'The Journal of Popular Culture' and 'Popular Fiction: An Anthology'

From Lowbrow to Nobrow, by Peter Swirski
Published 2005
McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
224 pages
ISBN 0773530193


If you click on the title of this post, you will land inside the Books(dot)Google site. Here you have an interesting interface where books are introduced using annotated sample pages off of scans.

Two reasons for pointing this out here on 'Cheap Priceless Editions': 1) this is my first time using the Books(dot)Google site (I had to sign in with my google ID and PW); 2) my first hit there was in a search of pulp fiction and the scan reader showed several book covers from classic romance titles so well I know I soon will be using this web feature for other searches.

I'll Have My Trashy Fiction Wry, Thank You. Or Should I Say 'Serve mine with rye, please. With a dash of limey.' ?

This is a mere experiment. I'm trying to give readers a taste of the tongue-in-cheek descriptions written by Angus Wilson in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (Penguin, 1958).

I think it is possible to just slap down a scan from the book as an image and let you read that, if I make the thing large enough. If you cannot read the text, which I will attempt myself on a cheap monitor tomorrow, just click on it a couple times and it should return enlarged on a separate page - we'll see. If that doesn't work, I will OCR the thing and upload the text. Here goes:



From page 55.

With Camera Angles Straight, Lights Right, Nail It All Down and Snap Away

This is a shot without much diffusion because the light is aimed at the opposite fabric screen with what spills onto the book's cover raking across the surface. A shot like this will show every bumped corner, crease, as well as edgewear. Sometimes this is what is called for by the customer considering a book purchase.



This example is apt. The childrens book has a gnarled upper corner (to your left).


The small accessories, such as tape, a measure, et cetera, are all familiar to photographers who have done product shots.



This image of a black, 35 mm film camera could use still more fill flash than I gave it. The same material used as a backdrop was drawn forward over a cross beam made from a monopod camera stand and attached well over the 'nature morte' arrangement. Computer screen monitors vary and the low resolutions I use for all image uploads hide the fact that the original image DOES have detail in the darker shadows.

Sorry about the 1% lean to the right. I was just being lazy about image editing.

Light Box Folds Up Neatly After Giving Nice Image Results

Where are images? Jeez, is this ever taking a long time to load!

The greenish cast (in the image below of the carrying case), not the one above (taken INSIDE my newlighting setup), is caused by reflections from the table's green surface. It is exactly the sort of ambient light that using a lightbox prevents from spoiling your images.

I have attached a strap to the bag that is long enough to sling across the shoulder in such a way that it stays snuggly against your back if you are, say, riding a bicycle.

In the next post, you will see all the standard equipment and accessories that any and every table-top photo exercise requires. All of this stuff is inside the case, except the tripod which is attached to the side by its strap.

Under $20 Photo Light Diffusion Unit

To photograph books (or any table top arrangement of small objects) I have assembled inexpensive supports for a backdrop, a base, and two diffusion screens.

In a post here I stated that this could be done for under $20 with a bit of scrounging in flea markets. Well I got everything I needed for almost exactly $20 despite the fact that I bought the main light new at a hardware store for $13.

It is impossible ,in a single post, to load all the photo images needed to show readers how the setup is assembled and how I transport the various items for working on location in a bookstore. So I will run consecutive posts with headers that point to the relevant images from this morning's 'dry run' to test various lighting arrangements on various objects.

The first two items I found were standards to hold fabric for diffusing the light from two high intensity lamps. You could also use the neon variety of screw-in bulbs, each in a reflector. (Price = 2@ $1.99 = $3.98)

Next I found a flat plastic affair with creases that divide the unit into two tall panels and a slanting platform. You will see it; it's the blue contraption. I place a book on the slanting section after draping a towel or other backdrop over the back, front and sides of the boxlike frame. (This thing was made to fold shirts. After draping a shirt over it, one folds the panels on the side and then the front section and the shirt has straight folds for packing or for stacking in a drawer.)
(Price = $0.50 Balance = $4.48)

Finally, I bought a new goose-neck high intensity lamp that holds a 20 watt halogen quartz bulb. (Price = $13.00 Balance = $17.48)

This is starting to add up like the card game Blackjack, or 21. My outlay of cash did break the $20 challenge I set myself if you include the halogen quartz bulb I purchased to replace one that burned out on a lamp I intend to use for a second light. That cost $7.98. But since I did not use this lightsource in any of the photo images you will see here today, we won't count it.

Total cost: $17.98 Refer to the post HERE to look at a commercial unit costing $99.

All

The Dragon's Almanac - 30 December

from Justin Wintle

"Make a fire in seven places and smoke will rise in eight.."

. . . (1457) Chinese

Dar es Salaam to Magical Zanzibar - via dcm's iPod

dcm is blogging as he hitchhikes up the east coast of Africa.

I caught the following from this dcm travelpod entry:

Dar es Salaam to Magical Zanzibar

Nothing prepared me for the Chirundu entrance into Zambia. It took 1 hour to get my passport stamped, then we had to take EVERY item off and out of the bus, so the customs officers could pick through them with a fine comb. Upon further investigation I was told it would take us at least 4 hours. I removed my backpack from seat 35 and headed for the border. This time I forgot my shoes – I told myself to stop doing that!

I walked through the big black gates and started looking for a ride to Lusaka. The pack of money changing vultures were the only ones interested in taking me for a ride. I found a very big yellow luxury bus – with aircon, reclining seats and wait for it – Nigerian Movies.

They felt sorry the pink-faced Mzungu (white person) and let me board for K20,000 – around R40.

I fell asleep on the cool bus, my iPod drowning out the noise of the drunks drinking Mosi beers and playing ‘pick up your fucking phone’ ring tones. I sat next to a big Zambian Mama who was more inquisitive than I was – 20 questions became 50 – including how religious I was and if I would be interested in black woman. After an hour I shut her up after telling her I was born Jewish but didn’t really practice anything, and that I had been married and divorced twice and lost 3 children. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the trip.

Wyndham Lewis ? 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
edited by Peter Boxall
Cassell £20, pp960

On one of these blogs that exist with just one post on them . . the ephemeral sort that draw me back to see if the author has returned after abandoning his or her initial web posting . . I discovered an unlinked, unattributed list of books that are must-reads.

Browsing, I found the source and a pertinent review of the list (from last winter) on the Guardian site:

Sunday February 26, 2006
The Observer

1001 Books and surveys of its kind exist to remind us of what we have known and half-forgotten, what we are vaguely aware of but have never quite fully apprehended and what we have never even heard of.

. . .

Part of the snobbish parlour-game appeal of compendiums such as these lies in spotting the omissions, but, in all truth, why would anyone want to read - or read

about - no fewer than 11 books by JM Coetzee and seven by Wyndham Lewis, and yet forgo making the acquaintance of Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann, Olivia Manning, Rex Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, AL Barker or Ivy Compton-Burnett?

The review makes a passing mention of 'Man Without Qualities' (1933) by Robert Musil, calling his book an ' exhaustingly cerebral novel . . . '

Regarding the Musil book (and many others listed in my opinion) Guardian review states:

Bearing in mind the death sentence hanging over our

heads, we might balk at spending precious time reading

2,000 plotless pages.

My own (Blogaulaire's) scanning of the 1001 books listed revealed some huge gaps in my reading, especially for authors published within the past half century:

177. Vertigo - W.G. Sebald
178. Stone Junction - Jim Dodge
179. The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
180. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
181. A Home at the End of the World - Michael Cunningham
182. Like Life - Lorrie Moore
183. Possession - A.S. Byatt
184. The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi
185. The Midnight Examiner - William Kotzwinkle
186. A Disaffection - James Kelman
187. Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson
188. Moon Palace - Paul Auster
. . .
212. The Afternoon of a Writer - Peter Handke
213. The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
214. The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
215. The Pigeon - Patrick Süskind
216. The Child in Time - Ian McEwan
217. Cigarettes - Harry Mathews

Click THIS LINK to see the entire 1001.

This blog you are on is 'Cheap Priceless Editions' and, in keeping with the name, there is a search box at the top of every page that lets readers search for secondhand books across nearly a dozen vendor sites for used books. But that is not the way I would go to 'discover' the authors I do not yet know.

What I will do, if I ever decide to read the ones I've ignored so far (before I die) is to look for these books in brick 'n' mortar bookstores (before USED BOOK BOOKSTORES die and disappear).


By my calculation, to fill a few gaping holes in my reading list, I need to make up a spending budget.

Knowing in advance that some of the books I have not read nor heard of are unavailable at local used bookstores, I am facing either the cost of shipping and handling plus purchase price OR many, many trips to my local and our provincial library collections. Even at that, I keep staring at unread authors and titles (especially specific titles) that will probably have ticket prices high enough to break even a $2,000 budget . . with a mere dozen books. (Maybe, I hope, I'm being overly pessimistic.)

The problem lies in finding the precise title, not just any title, by a given author.

Of course I can quibble with the list. But if I have enjoyed one or two books by an author yet have ignored the title on the list, how can I claim that it is not far and away a better pick than the title I've been lucky enough to find and to have read?

I give up. Screw the list. I'm back to catch-as-catch-can for my fiction reading.

The review in The Observer Magazine (a Guardian tip-in publication) concluded with its own pared-down list:

10 heavyweight must-reads

Clarissa Samuel Richardson
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
Ulysses James Joyce
USA John Dos Passos
Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro
Bleak House Charles Dickens
Middlemarch George Eliot
A la recherche du temps perdu Marcel Proust
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky

I still cannot decide whether my reading glass is half full or half empty. Damn these reading lists . . and the reviewers tauting every new title as if it tops all of the 1001 by every measure.

(Does it strike you reading this that the unique female author listed used a masculine pen name or that the British rate three books while Americans and the rest of Western Europe come it at but one? And then what about Canada, Australia, Africa?)

The Dragon's Almanac - 29 December

from Justin Wintle

"A teacher should never abandon his books, nor a poor man his pig."

. . . (1450) Chinese

Angus Wilson: Cruel-Kind Enemy of False Sentiment and Self-Delusion

Margaret Dabble Says I Made the Right Move Picking Up Angus Wilson in a 1950s Penguin Edition:

The New York Times
January 29, 1995
Books

Angus Wilson: Cruel-Kind Enemy of False Sentiment and Self-Delusion
By MARGARET DRABBLE

The writers we discover for ourselves hold a special and lasting place in our affections and our imagination. I first read Angus Wilson when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1950's. Nobody had recommended him: I found him for myself. 'Anglo-Saxon Attitudes' had appeared in a Penguin paperback in 1958, and maybe this was the novel that introduced him to me -- or maybe it was a volume of short stories, or his first novel, 'Hemlock and After,' also available in Penguin. However I came upon him, I rapidly read my way through all that was available, and began to wait eagerly for the next volume. I can remember to this day the sheer physical pleasure of sitting on the flat roof outside my tower room at Newnham College, in the warm sunlight, when I should have been studying for some examination or other, reading Angus Wilson instead and knowing myself to be in the company of a master. . . .

. . . The excitement of discovery had a subversive element. Cambridge in the 1950's was heavily dominated by F. R. Leavis and his Great Tradition: we were more advanced than Oxford, for we were permitted -- indeed enjoined -- to read and admire D. H. Lawrence. But there all curiosity ended. . . .

. . . His critical energy, in the 1950's, was akin to that of the heroes of his own youth, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, and he spared neither young nor old -- horrible and pretentious children as well as pompous and sadistic venerable bullies abound in his work. But his writing also had a great and growing humanity: later novels showed a profound and compassionate insight into the lives of women in a society that denied them choice, autonomy and dignity.

I knew this pile of Penguins from the 1950s was a precious find. The covers, a far cry from the artsy invitation to design our own covers for 'My Penguin' Classic (see the Penguin Blog), do it for me more than the 3-D variety for pop fiction so current today.

Packin it in on Richard North Patterson's 1984 Novel "Escape the Night" on Page 102

This secondhand fiction find was promising because it combined the NY City publishing world, the anti-communism of McCarthyite redbaiting of writers and the angst of forbiddingly distant fathers.

The plot is just too dependent on omniscience: the sort that gets into a badguy's head and still tells you point blank he's a looser and out for Oedipal revenge. Not very complex a complexe, ehh? If the sex is supposed to be graphic, why should it be linear?

No. Book Closed.

. . I wish I remembered where I put down that Sillitoe or that E. L. Doctorow novel Daniel . . I put them away for later when guests arrived for the holidays . . . Then there are eight or so novels printed by Penguin Books in the 1950s in simple off-white and orange covers, all by authors I've barely even heard of, let alone given the attention of careful reading. You know the Penguin's I mean: on the back cover it invariably reads: 'Not for Sale in the U.S.A.'

My two guests were both reading novels by recent Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk -- but neither one of these novels was left behind, only a couple older pop lit titles were orphaned in the livingroom this time . .

. . maybe this French from France blues and boxing title no one but no one outside the writers' coop publishing circle knows . . .

FINALLY ! It Looks Like Some Serious Snow Fell Last Night

Snow cover that stays will make my day what with our lack of the brilliant, bright, beautiful substance right up through Christmas day this year in southern Quebec.

Yipee!

Now I know I will get out there and 'taste' it with my ankle-high boots. (My trusty lace 'n' latch military-style boots, with long black tongues, the better to lick snow with.) I have only worn these things twice since last September -- and that time only for working in the mud.

SNOW . . SNOW . . SNOW . . DEEP MOUNDS OF IT A SNOWMAN IGLOO BUILDING ICE SCULPTURE SKIING SLEDDING SNOWBALL FIGHTS TOBOGGANS FROZEN MOUSTACHES

Here are some Canadian critters (they've grown tremendously since this photo) snoozing through Montreal's Snow 'Fest of Winter '05 - '06. They did not yet have to pull a 'traineau' yet they already had snow in their bloodstreams:




I hope I do not have to explain to YOU how snow before, during and after the holiday season in Canada is like a thermometer for environmental health (as well as for the thinking citizenry nowadays) and that until the snow started to fall yesterday (though that bunch melted away) and now again today, up until now, we had failed to pass the grade and saw a miserable endgame coming in this game of chess with Mother Nature.

On a longdistance call from South Africa we tried to explain to a relative from the American Pacific NorthWest Coast the importance of snow. She had just been out looking at tiny penguins that have never seen ice and seem perfectly content. Well thanks but no thanks. We don't need our polar bears turning black!

The Dragon's Almanac - 28 December

from Justin Wintle

"Warriors and gold may be idle but they never rust."

. . (1448) Japanese

"I wish I could say the same for motorcycles." . .(0001) Blogaulaire

Big Versus Small Press Publishers: Writers Prefer Support to a Cash Advance for Their Latest Title

Recently, the Canadian book blog Bookninja blogged US blogger Maud Newton's piece under a title that should have been edited to read "Maud examines the recent trend of big time authors who opt for "small"(er) publishers."

My edit was made to reflect the fact that these publishers are only relatively 'small'; relative to the majors who had already printed and distributed umpteen other, earlier titles by said major authors cited in the source articles Maud used for her own post.

Somehow (duh!) Bookninja blogging a US blog to run in Canada and using the words Small Press Publisher in the first paragraph is misleading. At least when the subject is really about top-name-recognition US authors. This fact means this small press talk is all about promotion and distribution within the Big Leagues of Fiction Titles, where book promotions costing tens of thousands (if not hundreds of k) are common practise.

From 'Maud' via Bookninja:

Increasingly, even established writers like Kurt Vonnegut are looking beyond big-name publishers. They’re signing small press deals that guarantee heightened publicity and higher royalties; in return the authors accept drastically reduced advances.

I just switched from a fairly big name press to a small one for my next book. It’s a different story for us poets, but it comes down to the economics of the whole thing. The decision was partly political, partly practical. If you’re treated like afterthought dirt at even the largest press, you’re still just afterthought dirt. Besides the increased production values and care given by smaller presses, you also get more personal attention from the people trying to sell books. They really care about what they’re publishing and do nothing out of habit. This is the advantage of living so close to the edge. It keeps the senses sharp. At my former press, poetry is really just a charity program that’s now done out of habit. They do believe in it, in principle, but have no resources or time to devote to it when there are lucrative fiction and nonfiction titles to promote. So four books a year get published and left to stand on their authors’ reputations. However, if you’re still developing that reputation….. So, what’s the point of having all that name-brand muscle behind you if no one lifts a finger to help? And regardless of where we poets go, we all have drastically reduced advances.

Posted by George of Bookninja

If a reader using a browser goes behind the blogs to check out the articles cited, we discover an honest cynicism regarding any new title being promoted by the book biz:

From The Boston Globe

A book and its cover
The work of fiction in the age of blockbuster publishing
By Sven Birkerts | December 17, 2006

Cynical, yes, but I go to bookstores, I keep tabs; I've seen what happens to megaliths like National Book Award-winner Norman Rush's "Mortals" (712 pages), or (Indian novelist Vikram Chandra's) countryman Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" (1,488 pages!). They loom in forbidding ziggurats for a month or so, then they are returned, to be bought up by remainder houses, whereupon they loom again . . .

. . . Writing might be the most solitary and soul-concentrated of vocations, but once a book enters the publishing sluice, it is a collectively-finessed object -- and the greater the investment, the more finessing.

Then there's the genre factor. "Sacred Games" (by Vikram Chandra) may be a work of high literary ambition, but it also offers a lovely hook. Bombay (Mumbai) noir. The novel tracks the progress of a world-weary cop through the labyrinths of the city's gangland underworld. The descriptions have it thick with seamy texture, with criminals and harlots high and low.

I have to keep pinching myself (up until the moment I read the dollar figures being bantied about when discussing these novels) to remind myself that the subject is US and not Canadian publishing with all this multi-ethnicity. I even let myself be mislead into believing that a bookblogger named 'Maud' had to be a Canadian by name if by nothing else!

The clincher regarding the sort of Small Press being examined (and proof that we do not need a microscope for this investigation) is abundantly offered in the following citation taken from one of the sources in the mainstream media for all this blog commentary above:

From The Wall Street Journal

"Traditional publishing functions as an assembly line," says Mr. Morrell (a writer of thrillers, including 'Scavenger').

"Often by the time a book is published the project has gone through various departments and the memory of why certain decisions were made weren't passed along, so nobody can understand what's going on." By contrast, Mr. Morrell says he is involved in every step of the marketing at Vanguard, which plans on publishing only one or two books a month for the near future.

Vanguard says it is responding to the rapid-fire changes that have given the once-sleepy publishing world a distinctly casino-like atmosphere. Increasingly these days books have only a week or two to establish themselves as big hits; otherwise they're quickly washed to the back of the store.

"Publishing is now very much like opening weekend grosses in the movie business, it's about exploding out of the box and selling as many copies as quickly as possible," says Roger Cooper, Vanguard's publisher.

Although such writers as James Patterson, Mitch Albom and Mr. King have been able to successfully ride that wave, many authors with good track records and established fan bases have been cut adrift, he says. Often their publishers are forced to concentrate on each season's biggest bets.

Such authors may still sell well, but often they feel under-published. Vanguard, by contrast, says it focuses on marketing its books three months before publication -- and then three months after publication. In theory, this means writers will have a richer opportunity to reach their fans."

Being published by a Small Press within Canada's borders does not mean that an author's book is out of the running for winning a major literary or nonfiction award, either nationally or internationally. But it does mean that the publisher cannot afford the 'richer opportunity to reach their fans' as meant by the Wall Street Journal piece quoted above. That is if the number of 'their fans' starts getting above a four- or modest five-digit figure.

What Hope Pharmacie Esperanza? Doors are Closed without Notice

For the past week or two, the doors to the café Pharmacie Esperanza have been closed. There is no notice posted to explain matters. Though I have seen customers who have walked up St. Laurent Blvd or east along St. Viateur for 5 or 6 blocks only to face these closed doors, none of us seems to have a clue.

Now the rumour is circulating that they were closed due to either a code violation or a liquor permit restriction. These rumours tell that the back room was the target.

If anyone reading this knows the answer about this closure, knows whether it is temporary or permanent, please post a COMMENT here. Many music, performance and discussion events will be cancelled and rescheduled if Pharmacie Esperanza must stay closed for any longer period running into January, 2007. I hope they can re-open soon.

NOTE:

The restaurant-café Pharmacie Esperanza, 5490 St-Laurent, Montreal, is a layback venue where writers, artists, and musicians (outnumbered by laptop-toting McGill undergrads whose thirst for 'a unique underground caché' never sleeps) table hop or spread out on huge sofa-divans giving each other sideways glances . . .

On this blogger's world tour site the P. E. made it onto the list of a couple dozen highlights for tourists.

The Dragon's Almanac - 27 December

from Justin Wintle

"Even an impartial magistrate will fail to settle a family dispute."

. . . (1445) Chinese

Only a Madman (woman) Never Thinks of Those Less Fortunate

Christmas means many things to many people; Hannukkah, Kwanza (which begins tomorrow) or Ramadan (in the 9th month) are the same: yet it is my conviction that during these celebrations, whether you think mostly divine or banal thoughts, about family or the celestial host, there is something wrong with your head if you do not pause for a moment and consider the condition of people you sincerely believe are less fortunate than yourself.

I have seen Christmas collections of food and money (the passing of a hat) among groups of people who I was convinced were the very ones in need of the charity of others. It did amaze me at one point in my life. Piety or the expression of pious sentiments (which are not the same things) do not strike me as the highest form of either charitable conduct nor as the most effective forms of building solidarity. But even that last sentence is so chock-a-block full of abstraction that I consider it mostly hot air. Yet I cannot fathom how people can imagine they are celebrating a festive day of any significance around the globe without making time to think about people who are less fortunate.

Perhaps all pious phrase-making comes down to parsing these expressions. But whoever thinks of others must, in every perspective I can imagine, be able to look upon the condition of some fraction of humanity and think 'there but for the grace of God go I'. (Capitalize the words that make sense to you: 'Grace', 'god', 'i'. Even Friedrich Nietzsche seems to me, scanning over the Teutonic intelligentsia and tradition, to be saying the same thing.

In this spirit (if not explicitly calling for prayer) I offer a cut 'n' paste from a volunteer Western Euro-American who blogged a diary entry from the East African nation Kenya, where she took a walking tour of Kenya's notorious slum, Kibera:



KIBERA DIARY

I brought over about 70 pounds of supplies from some of the money you all collected and am distributing it to a few different places. The sad thing is you have to be careful because the people that run it take it from them and bring it to their own children. You see absolutely nothing that was left from the other volunteers because it just goes missing. I have lots of friends here now that are here for 6 months to a year and know the right places to give it. That is also where i will be giving some cash too. There is a program that helps out with Kibera, just down the street from us, that is in the most desperate need. Ahh...Kibera....a story unto itself!!

We went for a proper tour of Kibera on Wednesday. Now when I say tour, it is not a fun and pleasant Disney type tour, it is just that we were able to go to places that you would normally be hurt or worse if you ever went alone. It's the size of Central Park and has a million people living in it. Sewers-none, garbage disposal-none, homes bigger than 13x13-none! We were taken by a man named Peter who was a Kibera consultant for The Constant Gardener. He met us early in the morning at a clinic and first took us to his home. We all assumed he (Peter) lived outside of the slum but he walked us into a dark small, room the size of about 13x13 that his wife, two teenaged sons and 2 small daughters. It was neat and tidy, and he is very proud of his home. He shows us a copy of National Geographic from 2005 in which he is featured. The title of the article "You think you know Africa? You don't know..." We left his home to travel along the tracks and enter the main part. He is so well respected in his community because of the volunteer work that he does that nobody messes with him or anyone with him. The only time you are in danger is if there are riots and then you must get out.

We travelled to Mama Tunza's another orphanage we are working at. It has been recently upgraded and now has cement floors and a blue painted tin door. It is a small space in the midst of rubbish and rotted out cars. Yet the children are sweet and so welcoming! I brought a world map which they instantly grabbed and Wallace, one of the biggest, wanted to show us where we were all from. He is so smart and says he learns where all the volunteers live so that one day when he can come visit he will know how to get there. I fell in love with him. He is so smart. He is so eager to soak up any information you will feed him. I will be bringing some stuff to all of them. Especially Wallace! We took pictures, they took pictures and we were back on our way. Down the track...if you see the movie, you will see how it looks.

It is amazing though how pictures cannot capture the reality, the sounds, and smell. The children will run from everywhere when they see mzungus and they all shout 'HOW ARE YOU?' We say 'mazuri sana (i'm very fine)' and they laugh!!!! They are lovely. They run to shake your hand no matter what they were doing. They want nothing, they just want to touch you. I will be taking another tour with Peter so I can video tape as you have to hear them calling out! We kept walking through the garbage, and literally human waste and go to a Nubian family's home for babies. I believe this group of people are originally Ethiopian and have a slightly different version of Ki-Swahili. They were lovely. We had delicious chai massala and I held the babies. It was quite bizarre as among all of the poverty this house had a tv in which we were watching the WB show 'One Tree Hill' while drinking tea...bizarre! We left them, said our goodbye's and moved uphill so we could overlook the entire area.

It is overwhelming, the site that you see! We walk back through the streets again fighting the waste and murky water only to come across a rotting dog and someone that looks as if they had just recently died laying right in the 'street' with children playing all around him. I felt sick, but knew there was nothing I could do. I wanted to cry. Cartoon, our other guide (the sweetest kid) just grabbed my hand and pulled me by. I don't know how anyone could live like this, but I know it is not my place to judge. I just so desparately wish I could fix the situation for people like Peter and Cartoon who want so much more. Cartoon-his nickname btw is a muscian and volunteers at Mama Tunza's. He is 21 and goes to play guitar for the children. In the pics, he is the one in the red Arsenal shirt. He was excited for you all to see the pictures when i told him I was sending them home. I would like to see if I could help him some way. So we finish off our tour with lunch at a local restaurant for 50 ksh which is about $1. That includes rice pilau with a bit of beef and a cold coke in the bottle. I cannot believe the places I am eating at. Nora, I take back all my laughter about your plates in China....trust me!! I hope you can all see the movie sometime to give you a sense of what I am seeing. I do love it, it is crazy, but i love it.

Well, I am off to prepare for my children's Christmas morning. I am giving out sweets, and some toys and stickers and books. I am buying plums and bananas so they can eat them right away and will bring bread as well. Some of my friends here are joining me so it will be more fun for them!! We are having a big football and caps match during the day....then we are off to Mama Tunza's for the afternoon. The night will be reserved for a nice expensive dinner out and lots and lots of Tuskers (beer)--it's for the children--we have to collect the bottle caps.

I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and Happy New Year's!! We're off to Maasai land tomorrow, so I will let you know how it is!

Love me!

The Dragon's Almanac - 25 December

from Justin Wintle

"For every man sent by Heaven earth provides a grave."

. . . (1436) Chinese

Diffusion Lightbox for Tabletop Digital Images of Books

The photo of book spines here:
. . . was taken using ambient light at the McGill Bookfair last fall. It's not an ideal image because the light was harsh, coming from overhead fluorescent tubes. There was a small window immediately behind the books with diffuse sunlight somewhat balancing the colour-shift toward greenish 'neon' tones.


The result is better than having only one flash on the digital camera that sits extremely close to the lens.

-------------------------------------------



This set-up, with the camera on a stable tripodlike stand, two photo floods (like high intensity reading lamps), and a three-sided diffusion-screen lightbox is a nifty setup for taking digital photos of small objects. This particular model sells (when it is in stock) for US $100 plus shipping, taxes and customs duties.

When I have finalized my own secondhand purchases and re-invented this wheel (so to speak), I will post images of the setup I can come up with for well under $20 (not counting the tripod to hold the camera).

If this works out, my lightbox will be even more portable, lighter and more flexible in terms of the size of books and other articles it will accomodate. I believe it will be possible to effectively light and reduce glare or hotspots upon any object up to the size of a coffee table.

The Dragon's Almanac - 24 December

from Justin Wintle

"Don't drink what you can't carry."


. . . (1430) Chinese