Recent Reading in Books Acquired Lately

Recent Reading in Books Acquired Lately

A few inter-related centres of gravity for my interests in understanding the past have emerged from what I've been reading recently. One of these centres relates to the period around 1890 to 1910; geographically the Klondike and Pacific Northwest is what I've kept 'running across' in several of the books I've just now acquired, while the other reading I've gotten into centres around Montreal.

The poet Milton Acorn fits in here somehow, but the collection of poems I've got of his is not from the Montrteal period but rather about Prince Edward Island. (There are essays specifically about PEI history as well as poems, many I am certain were written by Acorn as a young man on the island.)

Since I have got many notions about how all these writings, writers and their subjects seem to work together into something coherent, I will just post short items about them and my thoughts from time to time, without trying to wrap anything up into one neat package. (That's a benefit at least I, if not you the reader, have license to enjoy.

Although I've sold nearly everything of Jack London's I once owned, I still have Irving Stone's bio of him written in 1935. Yesterday I picked up Laura Beatrice Berton's autobiographic "I Married the Klondike". For photos mostly I've been looking through the folio format "The Streets were Paved in Gold" by Stan Cohen. Many other books and collections, including Robert Service's poems, have also influenced my thinking about the two or three poles of attraction I am thinking of here.

Two interesting points: in Dawson a Carnegie Library was built with a $25,000 donation from that foundation in the same year that Laura (née Thompson) Berton arrived to teach kindergarten - on a salary that was more than 5 times what she'd been earning in Toronto. She and the new library arrived just after the gold seams in the Klondike had run out: at least the placer deposits one or two men could get out by digging.

Nearly all the American prospectors had returned home (many a bit richer) or moved on to another Eldorado just as Dawson was being 'institutionalized' with permanent emplacements for the bank, the Mounties, the established churches and this Carnegie Library . . as well as the school where L. Berton was to teach.

I won't even attempt to tell the stories of the Klondike and these people in a post, I've barely digested the stories myself and could spend a year going over what I have here.

The Berton who Laura Thompson married was a miner-prospector, one of the Canadians who stayed on. For 20 years in the Yukon, he as a working journalist, she as a teacher and amateur novelist, they dug in in a rigorously more domestic manner than the first prospectors had accomplished. In the Yukon, the couple raised the famous-to-Canadians man-of-letters Pierre Berton. The Berton seniors settled in Oakville, Ontario in 1932.

Jack London, like Berton senior, was on the early trek up over Chilkoot Pass and up to mining territory by river raft with the first wave. They both braved the worst conditions and yet also lived the early high-times of a boom town that had struck it rich.

Robert Service arrived later. (I see that he figures in the I Married the Klondike narrative, and I cannot wait to dig into read more about how Service succeeded early as a writer-poet and started earning more from publication than the bank manager for whom he worked.)

London had a harder time of it to get good pay for what started out as 'partial publication' of the Klondike stories, even though he had already been well received in print for stories about roughing it -- both at sea and on the western plains all the way to Chicago.

(to be continued)

My Own Info-Cultural Overload

John Murray Gibbon wrote and published in 1935 a history entitled "Steel of Empire" which is subtitled "A Romantic History of the Canadian Pacific, the Northwest Passage of Today". The maps and illustrations are magnificent, including the one of Canadian water and rail routes on the inside covers. No, I did not Google J. M. Gibbon or search for the book on ABE or anything -- I left that task to my friend at the bookstore, who finally sold me this 423 page tome for CAN $10 instead of the $28.95 my other friend, the bookstore owner, had marked lightly on the fly-leaf page.

Yes, I probably will also purchase and read Pierre Berton's "The Last Rail" plus a few other histories of Canadian railroads and railroading.



The really interesting of part of this visit to the neighbourhood bookstore yesterday, however, revolved less around the titles I scanned on the shelves but the conversation(s) three of us had about 'transportation' into Montreal. Turns out that the woman (I forget her name, dammit!), the one who always comes in on Fridays to buy three pop-lit titles, arrived in Montreal by rail from Halifax in 1950 -- at age 3 after a sojourn in a DP (displaced persons) camp in Eastern Europe from birth to her departure to Canada. Her family was from Lithuania and did I ever get an earful about the situation of Lithuanian immigrant to Canada following the last world war (the present 'world war', actually . . the war that never really ended . . in my humble opinion).

You would be privileged to have heard, or to have me recount here, her personal history (which is not at all a private history). But in the 45 minutes or so that we spoke, the topics ranged so widely that it would take a volume greater than Gibbons's to relate the details and enough background for anyone outside my neighbourhood to understand the facts properly. This just shows the complicated state and entertwined themes of personal, local, social, ethnic, religious, world and linguistic histories. And this is no exaggeration.

(The rapport we three experienced and our mutual interest in exchanging stories is typical of the many high-points in interaction with customers that one sees in the typical used-bookstore on a typical day, by the way. Something I find nobody has time for in the retail trade for new books.)

Such conversations, of course, stimulate my interest in finding out more, meeting other Lithuanians and having more conversations with people I've met over the years who were also DPs before arriving in Canada. In terms of piquing my interest in reading, well one doesn't even know where to begin. But is my reaction typical? Aren't most people simply overloaded with all the details and complications of life as we've lived it over the past half-century or so?



Communities of people in my immediate vicinity seem to be so fractured along linguistic, familial and political divides that the last thing that comes to my mind is that they have a common culture, a common literature. The most common literature I can think of would be a book like 'Microsoft XP for Dummies' or some guide for shopping, dining out in or simply visiting in 'City X'; tour guides to the amusement park, in other words.

Sadly, as well, it seems so typical that the notions about 'sharing stories' are mostly being mouthed by narrators who are thinking more in terms of undergrad or graduate courses in lit and creative writing than by the real DPs in our midst. Or, one day I meet an interesting Cuban and learn immediately that her family 'fled Castro' and the next day the Cuban I meet is in a cultural delegation loyal to Castro! It's the same thing with the Chinese, although none of them are formally sponsored by the present regime. The Chinese storekeeper plays the capitalist entrepreneur card AND the card-carrying Maoist card simultaneously! And where does all this leave the 2nd-gen Eastern European who fled both the communists and the fascists and whose parents got jobs with Northern Electric and whose pension and estate melted when Nortel went into free-fall? But, typically, where does this leave the person who doesn't care a damn about politics but who wishes that their parents had immigrated to Los Angeles instead of to Québec. Where do you even start?

It is no wonder that the No. 1 Target being attacked by the performance poets I've heard and seen lately has been the boob tube and/or the instant stardom 'for everybody' epitomized by " Star Academy" shows. But where would we be if the show were called 'Estonian for a Night'?

Conclusion? I guess I'm suffering from information overload just based on one 45-minute conversation in a bookstore yesterday. I think I too will turn on the boob tube and tune out for a little break or pick up an escapist novel I see on the shelf. I don't think I could handle a romantic-historical narrative about how all history revolves around circumnavigating the earth in a timeless search for oriental spices.

Photo Images, Imagination, and Hard-Pan Montreal and Urban Reality in Hindsight

There is an interesting comment thread that ran yesterday on 'neath's' blog Walking Turcot Yards. It's happening under some photo images of Montreal's Sohmer Park from around 1910 and for Blogaulaire the discussion has opened up many issues (and a few books) about the history of industrialization in Canada, Québec and the world.

What's so important about Sohmer Park? Check out the post HERE first and see what it looks like in the images.

First, the park started as a private investment sort of like some amusement parks in the twentieth century - but not the kind many of us are familiar with. (I remember the Palisades Park in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, with the big roller coaster ride, for example).

Sohmer Park gets two types of photo treatments as far as we can find: one treatment makes it look like a Manet painting, almost like a bourgeois urban paradise. The other photo treatment makes Sohmer Park look like some sort of after-birth, some sort of spectacle and fight arena as a sop to the working class out behind the rail yards out beyond the 'Chateau' Viger . . the Viger Hotel and Railway Station.

Perverse as it may seem, I am most interested in the latter view: Sohmer as a low-rent version of Madison Square Gardens for the Francophone workers. But they did hold, over the last quarter of the 19th century, higher brow concerts and orchestral performances with a resident conductor in the concert hall there. So there was a complex reality reflected.

It all has to do with how workers looked at culture and how the real bourgeoisie looked upon the workers. And, especially for Montreal, these realities are far from simple and most difficult to work out conceptually from the perspective of the 21st century.

What is traditionally projected back into time is a notion that the English lived on the west side of town and the French on the east side. Add to East versus West view the notion that the Irish lived south of the Lachine Canal, down around the Victoria Bridge (both of which the Irish came to build - not far from where thousands of them had died of 'ship fever' in the fever sheds) and you start to paint the social history of Montreal the way it has come down through the mists of time.

What such a view of social and industrial history is likely to miss is the rural penetration of piece-work at manufacturing textiles, a trade run by French Canadian entrepreneurs . . and with the total collaboration of the church hierarchy. It is a phenomenon that antedates heavy industry in Lower Canada.

When you scan photos of Montreal taken in the late 19th century or early 20th, it becomes easy to lose all distinction between light and heavy industry and to completely forget about domestic piece-work. The shoe and clothing manufactures were immense industrial operations that spread out from Old Montreal to the east and the machines were run on steam power - burning first coal and then oil. So if you look east, you see smokestack after smokestack and are likely fooled into seeing the east side as the heart of Montreal's manufacturing activities. But it doesn't matter which direction you face: from Old Montreal, look in any direction at this time and the whole thing (as a panorama) looks industrial.

You are 'looking over the heads' of the more traditional bourgeoisie of "La Cité' with any photographic panorama. The well-off districts, the homes of the notaries, the clerical establishment, even of the financiers are still concentrated near the centre of trading activity - clustered around Old Montreal and around the mountain. The manufacturing is also nearby. Textiles, though, are moving east to Hochelaga and then north to the plateau while the metallurgical industry is moving from St. Anne's parish out west along the Canal Lachine over time and with development of the railroads. But because these industries all rely on heavy generation of power in the plant (not from hydro-electric power) they are 'soiling the nest' so to speak of Montreal's urban black-frocked elite.

Photographers and those of us who keep gazing at the documentary records in the image archives may collectively think that we are staying close to the 'best' original sources. But the silver and albumin images lend themselves as easily as do any contemporary novels and belles lettres to a misreading and anachronistic projections of 21st century prejudice backward in time.

There may have been a time in the 19th century when doing piece-work or taking a job in concentrated leather manufacture was considered more dignified than working in heavy metallurgical industry. If anything, it is the trade union struggles that drove wages up in industrial manufacturing and the failure of same in textiles that drove wages down in that sector (today considered tertiary). The same could be said of mining: prospecting for gold is different from digging coal.

Sohmer Park evolved as a venue for concerts into a venue for wrestling and exhibits of brute strength by strongman Louis Cyr. The Chateau Viger moved from a luxury hotel to a bland complex of white-collar offices serving as stenographer to the beer business and the paper-pushers at City Hall and the Palais de Justice. Trying to 'understand' Sohmer Park in 1910 is NOT the same thing as trying to situate the original intent of building a concert hall east of Old Montreal in 1871, and for many reasons including the Great Fire of that year in Montreal (not to mention in Chicago).

Social and economic realities in Montreal are complex. There are elites competing for power over Lower Canada and the Maritimes whose wealth depends either on the Dominion or on more native wealth. There are those whose status depends either on Rome or on Chicago and New York. Some 'capitalists' depend on trade with the interior; others depend on trade with the Mother Country. And there are those in-between. And then there are the ex-slaves be they Black or Irish or what Pierre Vallières termed the 'white niggars of America'. Very complex, indeed!

Note: We need to keep in mind the 'vestimentary' history, i.e., what people wore in the various epochs of modern times. In fact, Charlie Chaplin playing a bum in a bowler hat in the silent film Modern Times should always be kept in mind when reading photographs. I decided to not run photos with this post, but what I could run from the Gold Rush in the Klondike would blow your mind . . . the dresses that the women in Skagway and Dawson 'packed in on their backs' in 1897 . . .

You cannot even begin to read a 19th century photograph until you understand what workers and miners thought about how 'clothes make the man'. And I most certainly include women in this remark.

And you cannot understand a thing about Québec history from photographs unless you conceptualize the competition between manufacture being legitimate IF it is in the hands of the French Catholic merchant-manufacturer versus the "illegitimate" English-Protestant focus upon producing wealth inside a Colony. This distinction, by the way, goes all the way back to the fur trade. But we tend to forget it when looking at smokestacks on the Montreal horizon as we scan photographs taken in the period 1880 - 1910. To be explicit: I am saying that a smokestack is not a smokestack; that in the popular mind it matters very much whether the smokestack bears the name Royal Electric Co.' or 'Hudon Cotton Mill.' And that in this period, more and more of the names on the plants, of light or heavy industry, become Scots, English or colonial. If Sohmer Park evolves from a watering hole for the Francophone bourgeoisie to become an amusement park for the Francophone working class, the change in status reflects more fundamental changes in the division of labour and wealth in Lower Canada generally.

Everyone knows, however, that in the rest of Canada power and population flows North-South, not straight back to the Mother Country. (After all, the railroad was not built East-West overnight. All the 'images' in the West are a reflection of the demographic centre-of-gravity south of Canada's borders.

The entertainers - even out in the backwoods of western Canada - could have come straight from New York's Broadway! And it becomes oh so vulgar compared to what Queen Victoria would have wished for her dominion!

It is like the old joke we used to play when the tour guides at St. Gabriel Farm were all nuns: 'So les filles du roi were sent over from France so that the 'colons' (the King's New France settlers) could have wives and propagate in the colony? And you say these 'filles du roi' were from the 'best families' of France? Well, what about all those abandoned children, the offspring of prostitutes on the streets of Paris and Orléans? What did the King propose to do about them?. Those were some interesting, ironic, conversations with the nuns concerning the 17th century. Back then, the Church did have the aspiration of molding the colony. But in the late 19th century, two hundred years later? Who, then, had aspirations of molding the colony? Was it another King, another Queen, or was it the Church or was it the captains of industry? Or were they all competing over the seat of power? Who?

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (5)

“We are crafting this whole process with our arms open, even for Exxon,” Ms. Palin said. “Come on in and let us know what you have in terms of a proposal to commercialize Alaska’s natural gas.”

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska

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

Robert W. Service

The Spell of the Yukon

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it --
Came out with a fortune last fall --
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

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(Previous posts: 1) annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog; 2) spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD; 3) brass pounder, bristle pig, bronc, caliche, company camp, carbon black, carbon plant; 4) chatter, cheater, cheese box, churn drilling, circle jack, city gate, collar pounder or 'pecker', come-along, condemnation, core boat, crooked-hole country, crowbar connection )
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CRUMB BOSS
A person responsable for cleaning and keeping an oilfield bunkhouse supplied with towels, bed linen, and soap; a construction camp housekeeper.

DEAD OIL
Crude oil containing no dissolved gas when it is produced.

DEAD WELL
A well that will not flow and in order to produce must be put on the pump.

DEEP GAS
Gas produced from 15,000 feet or below, which commands an incentive price because of the high cost of drilling three miles deep into high-pressure formations. Such wells cost in the high-rent neighborhood of 4 to 8 million dollars, depending on the difficulties encountered.

DENSMORE, AMOS
The man who first devised a method for shipping crude oil by rail. In 1865 he mounted two iron-banded wooden tanks on a railway flatcar. (shortened)

DESK and DERRICK CLUBS
Organizations of women employed in the oil industry. Such clubs now exist in about a dozen major oil centers. The purpose of the organizations is partly educational and partly social. (added - not in Langenkamp)

DETROIT IRON
A humorous reference to a large, old car or truck.

DIRTY CARGO
Bunker fuel and other black residual oils.

DOCTOR SWEET
A term used to describe certain petroleum products that have been treated to remove sulfur compounds and mercaptans that are the sources of unpleasant odors. A product that has been so treated is said to be "sweet to the doctor test."

DOGHOUSE
A portable one-room shelter . . . serves as a lunchroom, change house, dormitory and a room for keeping small supplies and records.

DOG IT
To do less than one's share of work; to hang back; to drag one's feet.

DOG ROBBER
A loyal aid or underling who does disagreeable or slightly unorthodox (shady) jobs for his boss; a master of the "midnight requisition."

DOODLEBUG
A witching device; a twig or branch of a small tree (peach is favored by some witchers) that, when held by an "expert" practitioner as he walks over a plot of land, is supposed to bend down, locating a favorable place to drill a well; a popular term for any of the various geophysical prospecting equipment.

DRAG UP
To draw the wages one has coming and quit the job; an expression used in the oil fields by pipeline construction workers and temporary or day laborers.

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from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (4)

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

Ida Tarbell. "History of the Standard Oil Company," from McClure's Magazine, 1902 - 1904.

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

"The price of oil has nearly tripled since President George W. Bush took office in 2001, yet the majority of the people who live in the countries from which the fuel flows still experience grinding poverty. "

Oil Trip: Nigeria, Chad, Liberia

By EMIRA WOODS

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(Previous posts: 1) annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog, 2) spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD, 3) brass pounder, bristle pig, bronc, caliche, company camp, carbon black, carbon plant)

CHATTER
A noisy indication that a mechanical part is behaving erratically and destructively.

CHEATER
A length of pipe used to increase the leverage of a wrench, anything used to lengthen a handle to increase the applied leverage.

CHEESE BOX
An early-day, square, box-like refining vessel; a still to heat crude oil for distilling the products in those days--kerosene, gas oil, and lubricating oil.

CHURN DRILLING
Another name for cable-tool drilling because of the up-and-down, churning motion of the drill bit.

CIRCLE JACK
A device used on the floor of a cable-tool rig to 'make up' and 'break out' (tighten and loosen) joints of drilling tools. (shortened)

CITY GATE
The measuring point at which a gas distributing utility receives gas from a gas transmission company.

COLLAR POUNDER OR 'PECKER'
A pipeline worker who beats time with a hammer on the coupling into which a joint of pipe is being screwed by a tong gang. The purpose is twofold: to keep the tong men pulling in unison and to warm up the collar so that a tighter screw joint can be made.

COME-ALONG
A lever and short lengths of chain with hooks attached to the ends of the chains used for tightening or pulling a chain. (shortened)

CONDEMNATION
The taking of land by purchase, at fair market value, for public use and benefit by state or federal government as well as by certain other agencies and utility companies having power of eminent domain.

CORE BOAT
A seagoing vessel for drilling core holes in offshore areas.

CROOKED-HOLE COUNTRY
Said of an area or field in which there has been a high incidence of crooked holes drilled, boreholes that have deviated alarmingly from the vertical . . . See Pendulum Drill Assembly; also Fanning the Bottom.

CROWBAR CONNECTION
A humorous reference to an assemblage of pipe fittings so far out of alignment that a crowbar is required to force them to fit.

Anderseed's Oilpatch Expressions Defined for the Layman (3)

from R. D. Langenkamp. Handbook of Oil Industry Terms & Phrases. 4th Ed. Tulsa: PennWell Publ, 1984, 347 p **

Yukon Archives

Mayo (Yukon 1933) unloading a barge of oil.
Photographer: Claude Tidd

cheap_priceless_editions (at) yahoo (dot) ca

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"Whimsical looks at words used in an industry which leaves many of us unamused and whose track record few words can even begin to express."

(Previous posts: annunciator, Australian offset, bait box, bastard, bean, behind the pipe, big-inch pipeline, bird cage, and bird dog, spudding bit, bituminous sand, black oil, black oils market, block tree, bobtail, bobtail plant, bogies, boll weevil, boomer, BOPD)

BRASS POUNDER
A telegrapher, especially one who uses a telegraph key. Until the 1940s or so, much of the communication from oil patch to division and head offices was by telegraph.

BRISTLE PIG
A type of pipeline pig or scraper made of tough plastic covered with flame-hardened steel bristles. Bristle or foam pigs are easy to run, do not get hung up in the line, and are easy to "catch." They are usually run in newly constructed lines to remove ruse and mill scale.

BRONC
A new driller promoted from helper; a new toolpusher up from driller; any newly promoted oilfield worker whose performance is still untried.

CALICHE
A term used in the Southwest, New Mexico, and Arizona, particularly for a brownish, buff, or white calcareous material. (shortened)

CAMP, COMPANY
A small community of oilfield workers; a settlement of oil-company employees living on a lease in company housing. In the early days, oil companies furnished housing, lights, gas, and water free or at a nominal charge. ... Camps were known by company lease or simply the lease name, e.g., Gulf Wolf Camp, Carter Camp, and Tom Butler.

CARBON BLACK
A fine, bulky carbon obtained as soot by burning natural gas in large horizontal "ovens" with insufficient air.

CARBON PLANT
Carbon plants are located close to a source of gas and in more-or-less isolated sections of the country because of the heavy emission of smoke.

Breaking the Grip of Mid-Winter Freeze-In and the Block of Ice around Bookstore Sales

As in the Midwest and Atlantic Canada , as well as in Northern and Central New England, here in Montreal and the rest of Québec, generally, the last two weeks have been a virtual freeze-in (or snow-down if that suits your vocabulary) for bookstore owners and book buyers.

Yes, 'speaking for' my two closest bookstore friends, the crop of shoppers dropping in has been sparsely sewn on snow-packed ground regarding all but the mail carrier and closest friends. Yet, for at least two shopping afternoons, the sun did break through, for enough time to avoid a total disaster.

At present, as a sometime supplier, I do not have very many books placed on consignment in either of my friends' shops. In the locale with the most traffic (call it Jenny's), Jenny won't take on my McSweeney's titles, saying that McSweeney box sets are too sophisticated for the indigenous clientele (GRXNBX !! ?? I muttered to myself) and despite the FACT that everything she does take on consignment from me sells quite well. And Jenny gets 50% of the asking price.

Where there is less traffic, at Marilyn's, a few books that have my name tucked inside on a card have been sold and I've been rewarded at 100%. (I'd virtually written then off.) So things keep selling at 14 C below.

Two conclusions: 1) the deep of winter is not completely a 'death zone' in our neighbbourhood, where Montrealers are hardy folks who still get out in all sorts of weather, and 2) I must urgently come to a workable agreement with these bookstore owners in terms of what they will take on consignment and how we divy up the monetary returns.

There have been a couple books (entire genres perhaps) that all three of us have felt in our bones will sell fast: the nicely illustrated, clean copies of books featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover plus and things like the Princeton Edition of the I-Ching. Search me why: we just knew they would sell.

What everybody is hoping for is that SUDDENLY the public's interest will suddenly turn toward exactly our own personal focus for some theme we each focus on in collecting old books.

Or that instead of having (as at present) only one single customer interested in, say, the Harlem Renaissance, or old poetry anthologies from circa 1925, OR EVEN anything about military insignia and regalia, OR instead of that one customer who wants and needs a book about Taoist approaches to male sexuality, . . that there be, INSTANTLY, four or five MORE customers ready and willing to buy up everything along the SAME LINE that comes into the store.

My friends and I need some sort of HANDLE of what people want in triplicate, not in dribbles and drabs.

The real question is precisely this: why, with thousands or tens of thousands of books on the shelf, must one be reduced to making money on the last and latest purchase of some handful of titles that fell out of the sky only yesterday?

All I can say to such questions is this: 'Where there is a will and a wish, there is a way.'

I would wish for a new boom of interest in African fiction authored by Africans . Or that Québec poets from the 1960s and '70s period become numero uno as a HOT ITEM. Fat chance, I know.

What I am thinking about investigating and collecting (no matter who else gives a shit) are VHS videos where there is some hero-star macho type whose job it is in the flic to put out well-head fires on oil rigs. Somehow I am convinced that there are more than one film title in this oh so specific genre. I want every one of them.

So much for my Report from the North this Sunday eve. Now YOU, for YOU my advice is to "Think layers." "Think cotton under wool under Gortex (TM) under down." Keep warm.

This is definitely not motorcycle weather: Forget the leather except for lined gloves . . And Keep Warm.

An American and Canadian Crude Look at Oil

Blogaulaire suspects (backed by careful observation) that the average reader of Cheap Priceless Editions is both a practical person (always on the look-out for a good deal) and a rather bookish person . . perhaps with literary tastes, endowed with a progressive outlook, worldview, et cetera.

Does looking at raw numbers give you the hives? Are you reaching for an ointment for your urticaria, after reading figures for economic projections? Relax, there won't be a test, not even answers from me about any of this.

Call the STATISTICS portion of this post laconic. Terse news. It gets right to the point of all the rest.


We are just introducing -- call it a game, call it a word feature (more on that in upcoming posts as the blog here evolves on its own course - so STAY TUNED TO THIS WEB ADDRESS). But first, the eye candy:

February 18 : Chinese New Year
Celebrated
on the grounds of
the world famous
Calgary Exhibition & Stampede

The Biggest Game in US - CAN Trade -- PETROLEUM

Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports Top 15 Countries:
Highlights Released; February 16, 2007

"Preliminary monthly data on the origins of crude oil imports in December 2006 has been released and it shows that three countries have each exported more than 1.20 million barrels per day to the United States.

Including those countries, a total of five countries exported over 1.00 million barrels per day of crude oil to the United States (see table below). The top five exporting countries accounted for 69 percent of United States crude oil imports in December while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 88 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports.

The top sources of US crude oil imports for December were Canada (1.829 million barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (1.471 million barrels per day), Mexico (1.245 million barrels per day), Venezuela (1.045 million barrels per day), and Nigeria (1.010 million barrels per day).

The rest of the top ten sources, in order, were Angola (0.610 million barrels per day), Algeria (0.421 million barrels per day), Iraq (0.419 million barrels per day), Ecuador (0.254 million barrels per day), and Kuwait (0.163 million barrels per day).

Total crude oil imports averaged 9.584 million barrels per day in December, which is a decrease of 0.253 million barrels per day from November 2006.

Canada remained the largest exporter of total petroleum products in December, exporting 2.409 million barrels per day to the United States, which was a slight decrease from last month (2.598 thousand barrels per day). The second largest exporter of total petroleum products was Saudi Arabia with 1.491 million barrels per day."

What do you say to all that? (Isn't it a bit odd to be reading EIA (Energy Information Administration) data practucally the day it's released?

The major exporters of oil to the US are taking in tons of cash - they are not giving this stuff away! So: if you happen to be in the commerce of words, images, books, new ideas and/or services to the people interested in same, remember the following . . .

. . . the best time to sell a farmer a new tractor is after he has harvested a bumper crop . . .

In fact, if you've got anything to sell, to offer, to provide and it happens to be right after a bumper year for growing (we're seeing fewer and fewer of them), it is the farmer who will seek you out with the cash burning through his or her very pockets.

Rod Proudfoot (far right) congratulates Rod B. and wife Dorothy!
The Winner of (Stampede Casino's) January "Casino and a Movie" draw.
Rod and Dorothy took home a 32" LCD TV and - Sony Soundsaround system. -Worth over $2,000!-

Everybody, by the way, is dependent upon oil. If you live in Mahattan (Blogaulaire is certain) then on your own streets you are seeing more oilmen dressing their part than I am just sitting here in Montreal. Oil money at the top gathers with other money, and Manhattan is still at the top, though one wonders for how much longer.

People here in Canada with little things to sell, things no bigger than a flat screen TV or monitor, things like books, are catching on to a general migration of young and not-so-young residents and members of the active workforce who are headed 'out West to Alberta' where all the jobs are. And the rest of us are saying that this energy dependence on oil can't keep going on and on without the world sinking into its own slime ball. And the people still keep Heading West.

Alberta ex-pats have always been a counter-culture theme in Montreal. These recent transfuges are less and less Bohemian, more and more bourgeois in lifestyle. Some oil patch ex-pats even have enough money to buy books from local used bookstore owners . .


Learn the language(s) of the next frontier, not the last one. Every economic development is social change. Every exploration of a thriving, dying or recycled technology requires a new vocabulary, a different lexicon of terms.

From what we all learned about export-import of oil up top, for the 5 biggest providers of petroleum to the US market, the Official Languages in the exporting nations (the ones taking in the cash as price-per-barrel rises) break down as English (2); Spanish (2); Arabic (1). If we crudely ask whether the transfer of wealth from importing states to exporters represents a shift from one linguistic centre of gravity to another.

As a Can-Am myself, aware that "American" means English, French and Spanish already, (for me at least) the numbers look totally status quo ante . . no big shift, no surprises.

There will be upcoming demographic shifts within nations, regions, and hemispheres toward the world capitals of oil production. It may, eventually, be bust and boom.

In terms of the publishing and book trade, I think that the biggest question is not about the expansion of literacy generally. Arabic, Spanish and English as spoken and read in the Middle East and Central Asia or in Central and South America, and in Western Africa ... well everywhere people will become literate. I think we should concentrate on how functional literacy will change here at home and we should be sensitive to the competition for reader in places like Canada's western provinces.
Will a literacy boom, i.e., more active readers, happen out West? Or will the people moving West just take their satellite dishes with them or have their cable service contracts switched over from Ontario and Quebec to new homes in Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia? And for those who do read on a printed page, does the book trade have anything particularly unique to offer people as this demographic shift emerges? Tentatively, all my answers are Yes, Yes and Yes.

Will it be a boom or an echo?

Semiology 'Runs' to Catch Up with the Internet : On Book Power

"About Umberto Eco"

------------------ Also quotes from a 2002 article
in The Guardian,
Saturday October 12, 2002

"Signs of the times"

by Maya Jaggi


When the former hotel building in Milan where Umberto Eco lives was converted into flats, he preserved the winding corridors as a labyrinthine library, housing some 30,000 volumes. The shrine to learning seems apt for the creator of the 14th-century monastery in The Name of the Rose (1980), the medieval murder mystery that combined metaphysics, theology and the enigma of Aristotle's "lost" tome on comedy, with poisoned monks and the twists of a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit - a "book built of books".

His paternal grandfather was a bookbinder and "socialist typographer who organised strikes". During the second world war it was one of Eco's duties to go down to the cellar with a candle and pick up the charcoal: "I spent hours opening the old books and forgetting the coal." Among books he found were works by Jules Verne and Marco Polo, and included Darwin's The Origin of Species** and piles of adventure comics. His maternal grandmother, barely schooled but a "compulsive reader" who subscribed to a mobile library, stoked this eclectic passion. "She had no real cultural discrimination: she could read dime novels as well as Dostoyevsky and Balzac."

** ( - - Note by Bogaulaire: and "The Voyage of the Beagle" was what U. E. liked most about the book . . I'll bet.)

---------

.
Photo of Umberto Eco by Robert Birnbaum

In 1978 . . Eco's career took a dramatic new turn. At a friend's invitation, he decided to write a detective story . . .
. . . He also decided to make it a demonstration of his own literary theories of an "open text" that would provide the reader with almost infinite possibilities for interpretation in the signs and clues the protagonist must decode in order to solve a mystery.

Set in a fourteenth-century monastery, The Name of the Rose is the story of a monk who tries to solve several murders while struggling to defend his quest for the truth against church officials. A main theme of the novel is Eco's own
love of books, and the solution to the murders ultimately lies in coded manuscripts and secret clues in the abbey's library. Dense with learned references and untranslated Latin, it is both an exhaustively detailed murder mystery and Eco's semiotic metaphor for the reader's own quest to derive meaning on many levels from the signs in a work of art. Its publishers expected to sell no more than 30,000 copies, but the novel became an international bestseller. In 1986 it was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

. . .

In recent years Eco has become increasingly involved in debates of how electronic media and computer technologies will affect culture and society. At the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Science in San Marino in 1994, he organized a seminar on the future of the book that attracted hypermedia experts from around the world. His own observations on the Internet, virtual reality, and hypertext have appeared in Encyclomedia, a CD-ROM history of philosophy that he helped to develop. Recently he has become involved with the Multimedia Arcade, a complex in Bologna offering Internet access, a computer training center, and a public multimedia library.

. . .

"We are marching toward a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist with textual interpretation," he said, but we will need a "new form of critical competence … "a new kind of educational training, a new wisdom" to cope with the sheer quantity of information.

. . .

Writing in The Nation, he asserted that "books still represent the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at very low cost." Books will remain essential not only for literature but for "any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and reflect about it." In his opinion, a device which allows us to invent new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.

. . .

Eco is an avid book collector who has apartments in Milan, Bologna, and Paris, as well as a summer home near Rimini. In addition to running the Program for Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna, he travels frequently to speak and teach. He continues to publish scholarly treatises, which number almost two dozen, and to contribute to several foreign and Italian newspapers.

. . .

See Wikipedia Article HERE.

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?")

500,000 Books and CDs are Buried in a Landfill Deliberately by the City of Longueuil, Québec

La Presse

Tuesday, 13 February 2007
by Émilie Côté

500 000 livres au dépotoir

Paul Saindon, in front of the landfill site at Saint-Nicéphore where his 500,000 books and 30,000 CD disques were dumped.
Photograph Robert Mailloux,

La Presse

(Montréal)

Blogaulaire was book picking in a 'friperie'. He began discussing 'better' places (better prices)with the only other customer, a man searching titles next to him on the next shelf over. And then the guy told him about all these books being trashed on the South Shore, near Longueuil, Québec. So I am blogging this horrible story.

Yes, it is horrible and the City of Longueuil did not have to destroy this huge stock of music, literature, history . . . and who knows what other documentary treasurers! The city had possession of the material, the city was storing the entire lot on city property and decided, through its ultimate domain (and ignorance) to trash everything!

Paul Saindon had a bookstore on Chambly Road in Old Longueuil with a floor-space of 4,600 square feet. Saindon himself (Blogaulaire never visited it) describes the local as a bookmans 'Ali Baba Cave'. As is typical, the landlord raises the rent 25% after the first 5 years of operation and the bookstore owner finds cheaper digs, but smaller; in fact so small he cannot accomodate his stock.

The collection, which runs the gamut from the mid 19th centure to today and includes all the highs and lows of North American literature as well as music - - with all the greats of Québec culture represented in multiple editions and formats - - is left to the whims of an unsympathetic landlord and a city administration uncertain of its role, uncertain of anything it seems.

The city did pressure Saindon to claim his property after putting it in storage. When Saindon could not find a buyer and was unable to come into the municipal warehouse with enough helpers to sort the books, according to the City Clerk, nonprofit cultural associations in the area were offered the books free of charge.

The whole story suddenly becomes confused and cloudy. Interviews to track down who was offered what by whom seem full of contradiction. It does appear that Saindon was making an honest effort to save the collection by contacting community centres, cultural groups, probably the municipal libraries.

Whoever did or did not refuse the collection (which was a total mass of tumbling piles by now) the final decision was taken and acted upon. Everything was dumped like so much rotting refuse into the Saint-Nicéphore landfill dump and is now utterly beyond salvation.

Everything was carted off on January 29, 2007, which is close to the date that on the north side of the St. Lawrence River, Montreal was throwing George Butcher out of his apartment for stockpiling nearly 15,000 books and documents in his home. See the article HERE.

There is nothing yet that I can offer as a conlusion or summary to these stories. These situations are both personal and collective challenges in this and probably in your own community. I blog the news; I invite discussion. I will pick up this thread again.

Consider using the Google Language Tool to read the La Presse article in English if you find wading through the French text onerous. Just copy the address url of the title of this post into the 'Translate this page on the web' box under the language page options offered by Google. Most of the translation will be useful. Just prepare yourself for half a dozen 'false friends' between English and French. A couple phrases are real gems (I tried it) and you will have at least one hoot while you cry over the tragedy of this heritage being destroyed totally by mindless boobs who are paid by the public purse.

Nobody is an Authority on Nuttin' - But We Try

Blogaulaire likes to jerk people's heads around . . around the very same issues he finds his own head is being jerked around. I guess misery loves company, or something like that.

Perhaps I think that I am an iconoclast. I like to break up other people's preconceived notions and the icons of complacency that rule in their thinking in their little niche, their little nest. I would like to think of myself as a radical, able to 'get at' the root of, the core of, things . . without pussy-footing around with other people's preconceived notions.

But what those descriptive, value-laden words above amount to is merely one more of the most familiar North American stereotypes that are current (and have been for a long time) current among the ranks of Young Turks practicing journalism, literature and/or among today's million-member mass of the scribes who blog on the Internet today. So even THAT image of me as an iconoclast is hardly worth a hill of beans!

There are many, many challenges facing the bookselling trade today.
And there are many, many booksellers who are failing to meet these challenges while many others are succeeding financially in today's market. Where I place myself is as one who is outside this sort of mêlée yet one who can, while learning from others, see through many conceptual traps booksellers are laying down for themselves as they attempt to see through each challenge that presents itself.

Blogaulaire refuses to jump into the groove of those who complacently argue that somehow 'we' (the booksellers) will muddle through. And I see a large gap between the successful booksellers who fit neatly into their local community of book readers/bookstore patrons and the unsuccessful ones who have not made a similar organic connection with their own local book-buying public.

At times, pessimistically (with a touch of hubris, admittedly) Blogaulaire smirks at the emails on a listerv written by wise-old book purveyors who seem totally preoccupied with queries about how to connect with buyers on the Internet. I say to myself, self says I, maybe they should first start worrying about their disconnect with their own local community. In fact, I know deep down that these wizened owners of brick 'n' mortar bookstores have given up on their own local community because that particular community is no longer rushing their bookstore to buy more books!

So people who no longer have a face-to-face community are looking for a virtual community. But, wonder of wonders, it seems that everybody and her brother is searching for the same thing! They are all uploading their titles to the half-dozen or more meta-vendor websites and, generally, slashing their prices. The iconoclast in me says "Duh?". The realist in me asks "What do we do about it? How do we resolve all these obvious disconnects between these book sellers and their clienele, and the book suppliers (the pickers) who are suddenly The Competition?"


What I see that is stable and continuing to flourish surrounded by this maelstrom of turbulence is the voluntaristic approach of non-profit book fairs, such as the University of McGill's and the Sir Thomas More Institute's book sales in Montreal or any one of the even more local sales such as Verdun's St. Willibrord's Church's monthly event. (Plus, I could name a dozen mor local book fairs on the West Island).

Obviously, the worst prescription to offer to anyone working to put meat on the table is to tell that person to go out and volunteer their time and forget about earning money. Yet there are elements of the book fair that can be brought into the formula for the commercial boutique bookstore owner.

Let me just name a few for starters with the caveat that more experienced people could parse such a list better than I could discuss these issues.

Publicity. The fairs are announced in public service announcements in the local papers.

Support. Large numbers of residents attend because it is 'for a good cause.'

Price. Everybody expects bargain prices - even the pickers who intend to list their treasure discoveries on ABE and e-Bay.

Timing. The events are announced well in advance and last, at the most, a couple days.

Space. Charity events do not pay rent and they have access, normally, to vast spaces such as auditoriums and church basements.

Volunteers. The grunge work is done by unpaid, usually enthusiastic, members of the community.

Expertise. Retired leaders from the bookish professions serve as unpaid co-ordinators.

Few constraints to turn a profit or pay out a percentage. I think I'm on weaker ground on this one. Maybe there is more pressure from 'the administration' to turn in a good income than some of us realize.

I think I've listed enough elements that describe the volunteer sector of used book selling. Let me just list another, singular, element -- then I can pat myself on the back self-righteously for being an iconoclast:
----------------------------------------------

One thing that
The book fair people know --

HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH
WHEN THE PARTY'S OVER !!!

I think that commercial bookstore owners have a handle on ALL of the basic elements listed above -- or at least they seem to in their own email discussions -- but that as a group they are unwilling to air-out in public purview two subjects. The following points are the dirty laundry of the book trade.


What is not being discussed, in my humble opinion, follows:

When a bookstore no longer enjoys local, public support, the owner has to be hog-tied and practically tortured to admit this is so. Not that I think all this is their own fault. But book people really do need to take personal ownership of how, why and the commercial consequences of losing the support of their local community.

This seems fundamental. Especially in communities where the book fairs thrive and the bookstores do not.

The second point is neither openly discussed by the book fair people nor by the bookstore owners, viz: How do you get rid of the left-overs at the end of the day?

Because, if and when the book event and sales venue has community backing from the grassroots, that same public will inundate you-the-bookseller with all kinds of books, including titles that no one in his or her right mind would want to purchase and take home. And to stock and store these books at your own expense will cost YOU money and/or valuable resources like floor space.

Do you send these leftover books to Africa on the next freighter out? Then pity the poor Africans is what I will add. (But of course you don't send them abroad . . that, at least, is one urban myth of the book trade we can quickly dismiss.)

There remains one final point to all this: The book fair people do try to head off the magazines, old newspapers and unsalable print material at the door before it becomes a burden to their organization. But when the commercial bookseller tries to head off 'trash' coming in from a regular, loyal customer, this puts the store owner in the role of a snarky, penny pinching and mean gatekeeper.

But who knows. Maybe the next load of books this same patron drops off will be loaded with priceless treasures?

You don't want to look mean to such a bountiful supplier as this well meaning customer, now do you?

At the end of the day and the end of this long post, what I advocate is that bricks 'n' mortar bookstore owners try to emulate that same communty-based formula that works so well in the volunteer sector I counsel all of us to remain as graciously in the good graces of even the most benighted client. Be as friendly to them as possible.

The shopkeeper must have a quick EXIT STRATEGEY. A backdoor procedure that centres around some local friend with a good pickup truck. A guy or gal who will help haul all of what is mere 'printed material' from your store's receiving end to the shipping end at the back of the store -- STRAIGHT to the collection bins at the local recycling or paper-drive collection centre!

Short of everybody closing shop and operating out of their own basement or apartment, Blogaulaire's proposal to bookstore owners about reconnecting with their communities (while still remaining Spartan about display and storage space), PLUS the idea of holding big open-door sales evebts, are topics that deserve more wide discussion by book bloggers and subscribers to bookish email listservs.

An Open-Ended, Unending Rant on Used Book Selling

At an open-air flea market about 6 years ago, amongst my junk on a table I had a few books. paperbacks mostly if not entirely. I put a price of $15 on my copy of Naomi Klein's book "No Logo". I just knew I would get the price I asked, never mind what I paid for the book (probably at another flea market) myself. It sold for $15.

This summer, if I sell some junk there again, it will be pretty much the same routine, though my computer parts and peripherals probably won't sell as well as they did back in 2001. I'm not certain what the $15 paperbacks will be, maybe it will include a French-language copy of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi.

What people will want most this year in Quebec is very different from what it was 5 or 6 years ago. At a flea market I have no problemo adapting. But, in a well stocked bookstore, I can see these changes in 'taste' presenting a very serious problem. (One sells 100s of diverse titles 'all at once,' so to speak.)

I remember from days spent in Chicago a period when there was a craze over every printed title about surrealism. Maybe it was local, probably not. I remember from Montreal entire knick-knack and lit boutiques devoted to New Age, to the Cabala and crystals and tarot cards and nuatl-whatever mythology. Folk music and disco were also in, then out.

I know, there still exists a solid-selling literature that includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. I hope this bedrock lit also includes Cervantes's 'Don Quixote' but I forget. I believe Octavio Paz is out today and Carlos Fuentes is in, but I'll pass on that one as well.

The bookseller people who are specialised in one genre, say science fiction or, say, comic books, probably have a better handle on these changes in taste than I do or than most used book store owners as well. And these specialist dealers know which title & author ages so well so they pop that one straight into a Mylar baggy affair. I suspect that many of the mainline booksellers, however, operate on not much more than a hope and a prayer, plus lots of shelf room, when they decide to stock a particular book. Or do they just stock everything that comes their way?

Let us not underestimate the genius of SOME used booksellers to adjust to The Long Tail (the eternity of demand), their sensitivity to local preoccupations and who is or is not a celebrity, or their grasp of the world historical trends. But from looking at sellers closely, I seem to see an equal amount of plain old good luck, like when somebody dumps freebies on one bookseller's doorstep and that lot fetches hundreds of dollars the next day!

What this world needs is a good computer program, distributed widely to the trade we are discussing, that tells sellers what to do in lock-step with what will sell well. Barring this prescriptive, management-by-prediction, hardwired map, booksellers will remain hard done by. End of paragraph.

So far, despite my appeal for a software program to solve every body's problems, I have not said one word about the Internet. Nor am I going to. It's been discussed thoroughly enough, even though you wouldn't be able to read these line without it.

Bookseller are condemned to be "overstocked" when tastes change rapidly and dramatically. Not only would efficient operations require a guerrilla army of suppliers to stay in stock with what's HOT but efficiency would also demand a guerrilla army of disposers (if not buyers) to get rid of what is NOT HOT, what is in fact quite COLD.

Publishers used to dispose of their 'overstock' at a quarter to job-lotters in the remainders trade. (Now that they print less, I guess it's up to fifty cents per book.) The used book dealer, though, living life at the bottom of the food chain, cannot pass on his stagnant paper and board to an even lower bottom-feeding odd-lotter. Wishing it were so does not make it so, so sorry.

This is why I am skeptical regarding the long tail optimistic approach toward the hoarding of books. It is so much a case of the wish being father to the thought that it borders on being pathetic. Relying on the long tail finishes up with what I saw today on Bibliophile Bullpen: an engraved tombstone reading 'The one who has the most books at the end wins.'

My post is here not to offer solutions but to offer very subjective impressions, nothing more. Here are my subjective reactions regarding book hoards.

First: that the dealer has little discriminating judgement. The stock whatever gets tossed over the transom;

Second: that I should low-ball to get the absolute dirt-cheap price for what I would otherwise pay a premium for to own;

Third: that if the entire stock is not readily at my finger tips but is in the basement or behind glassed-in cases, that it is the bookseller who is trying to cheat me and not vice versa (which is how I'd rather it be);

Fourth: (this is the hard one) I feel real repugnance at seeing row after row of titles that were once my true 'flames' but with which I have had a bitter falling-out, viz certain unnamed conspiracy theories, New Age treatments of Atlantis or Nostradamus, recent books about 'Empire', true crime fiction of the poltergeist sort, etc., etc.

I do not intend my oh so subjective list to be a put-down of anyone (I could have used more judgemental language, but held back). I'm merely underscoring some of the dangers of trying to be everything to everyone. And I think that keeping everything from every reading craze threatens being slotted in the customer's mind with being nothing to nobody.

There is a bookseller friend of mine who stocks whole sections of books in Renaissance Literature. These are equal in shelf footage to her offerings in Esoterica as well as her stock in Communism. I take that back, if you include Religion, the esoterica far outweighs the Marxism et al. And the stuff on First Nations and Judaism tends toward the occult. I don't know where to place the vegan cookbooks: do they go with the political or the religious? In any case, this is definitely an 'alternative' bookstore. But the vast majority of her trade is in popular fiction, of which she stocks more than all the other categories combined! Need I add that financially her bookstore is in ruins!

You get the picture. The bookstore might do fine on a college campus, but, unfortunately, is located in a working class district with a 50%+ high school dropout rate. Go figure!

If I had a prescription to offer the owner of a bricks 'n' mortar bookstore it would be to not attempt being all things to all people: something that your customer base is not into. Or at least to have no more than two public faces, one for the carriage trade and intellectuals and another for the local market -- but have all your stock within easy view and arranged based the target market for the books. Classics and Philosophy do not mix well with popular snuff lit and Harlequin romances. If you hve to stock Readers' Digest Condensed to get by, just forget it all!

(This post has been edited to exclude from purview all the complications arising from doing any and all of the above in two languages simultaneously.)

Has David Streitfeld at the L. A. Times Revealed to Booksellers a New Prophet-Poet? Is the Prose Proselytizer of Books Now in Print?

Shop Lewis Buzbee's book "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop," (US $17) online if you want to save mucho. Just use the form box at the top of this and every other page on Cheap Priceless Editions.

Streitfeld's piece is a remarkable one-shot summary of the crisis that metropolitan bookstores in North America have been facing over the past 6 or 7 years. Truly, this is not at all like the stereotypical occupational complaint the way hog and milk producers bitch about subsidy programs. On the other hand, there is always the trap of psychosomatic sympathetic identification with the Californication of Culture. You make up your own mind.

Maybe Ron Silliman is the new prophet-poet of what is happening in the book trade. He's at least eloquent and articulate, coming up with apt comparisons with past techno-family challenges.

Quotes from:

Bookshops' latest sad plot twist
By David Streitfeld
Los Angeles Times
February 7, 2007

QUOTE:
When sliding sales forced Cody's to close its store next to the UC Berkeley campus, the poet Ron Silliman wrote on his blog that it was once the anchor of "the best book-buying block in North America." But in the discussion that followed, the attitude was one of resignation if not indifference.

"Why would anyone want to perpetuate small independents by paying higher prices?" wondered Curtis Faville, a poet who sells rare books on the Internet. "Most of these proud little independents were poorly run anyway."

Less harshly, Silliman suggested in an e-mail that "we're simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old."

It's an unsettling if inevitable process. Half a century ago, Silliman said, he would play chess and checkers with his grandfather as they listened to the radio. "That stopped once the TV arrived, because now we all had to face the same direction," he wrote.
END QUOTE--------------

If you think everything '60s started in California, then you probably think everything '60s will end there.

Blogaulaire thinks that the last thing these California scribes will write about is the large number of ex-patriats who have left the state to discover some other New Eldorado elsewhere. Native Californians would much rather believe that Silicone Valley (with, perhaps, a little help from Seattle) still RULES; that we're all into California Dreamin, one way or the other.

On another personal note, Berkeleylost its magnetic appeal along with The Haight so long ago . . it was almost exactly on my 15th birthday. The point is: the demise of these culture icons up and down Shattuck is not the demise of The Culture ipso facto.

I'm even surprised that Cody's survived in that venue for as long it they did. (Blogaulaire still adores North Beach bistros in San Francisco.)
--Blogaulaire

QUOTE:
"The bookstore as we know it is in dire straits," said Lewis Buzbee, a novelist who spent many years working in the local shops.

"The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop," (US $17) Buzbee's loving memoir of his time as a clerk in the Bay Area (is) interspersed with a history of the bookselling trade, has become a small but genuine hit. It's just gone into its fourth printing, with enthusiastic crowds flocking to the writer's appearances.

"One thing books do is offer us concrete definitions for sometimes hazy feelings," said Buzbee, 49. "My memoir gives people a venue for sharing their emotions about bookstores."
--------
A good bookstore, he notes, is unlike any other retail space. Where else can you linger, sample the merchandise and then casually reject it if not quite right? Your local pizzeria would frown on such behavior. In a culture that worships money, bookstores are one of the few commercial institutions where cost doesn't trump all other considerations. Massive bestsellers share shelf space with the most obscure tomes.
Buzbee exalts a place where time seems to slow but hours can disappear in an instant, where browsers coexist in a companionable solitude, where a chance encounter with the exact right volume might create an explosion in your head.

"Not only could your world change, but the rest of the world could change," he told an audience at the venerable City Lights bookstore in North Beach."
END QUOTE

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.)

"Abandoned Turcot rail yards come to life with creative vision"

By, Andy Riga
The Gazette
Published: Monday, February 05, 2007

Photographs by Gordon Beck

It's a sprawling wasteland scarred by graffiti and dotted with tall, drab, decrepit concrete pillars - a scab on Montreal's landscape that grumbling commuters inch past in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

To you, maybe.

To photographer Ken McLaughlin, the Turcot interchange and abandoned rail yards in west-end Montreal are a visual feast, a hiking trail, an online passion.
To visual artist Doug Scholes, the interchange is a creative inspiration, a temple for the automobile that evokes Britain's Stonehenge.

To archaeologist Daniel Marchand, it's an unfinished work of art that he's anxious to complete, paint can in hand.

Cheap Priceless Editions could just as easily have blogged this item under the banner headline:

Local Blogger Makes The Headlines !!!

CPE has frequently called its readers attention to the blogroll (left sidebar) links. There, Blogaulaire links you to Walking Turcot Yards (WTY) as a photo-commentary site run by colleagues and friends. (There are other interesting links to check out as well)

Today, special mention should be made of one in particular.

The Montreal Gazette just now ran a piece based on interviews of the blog owner over at Walking Turcot Yards (WTY). The blogger and the site got a well deserved, long feature write up, signed by Andy Riga. CLICK on the title ABOVE and CHECK IT OUT.

The upside to all this media attention is that the publicity is clearly favourable: the text gives positive reasons to support the alternatives that concerned residents and urban reformers propose for reclaiming abandoned urban spaces to make the zone accessible, enjoyable and enriching for all local residents.

The potential downside to the attention now drawn to Turcot Yards is that it attracts still more speculators who also read The Gazette like vultures.(These real estate interests keep landing on the blog Walking Turcot Yards as well as our own Cheap Priceless Editions browsing around to check out what we post and see how all this may affect their own, self-interested commercial proposals!)

So all this increased regional attention sort of ups the ante on moving toward better alternatives for the abandoned site. Montrealers who yearn for more green spaces need to be mobilised sooner than later.

Though these considerations are no marginal matter, YOU THE READER have a nice long article to enjoy and maybe bookmark. So we shall get on with the blogged content for your own further enlightenment!

"I'm sure people driving by or stuck in traffic think, 'How can they improve this piece of s---?' " McLaughlin said during a walk on the desolate stretch that he describes as the world's largest urban abandoned space. "But a lot of people have no idea what was on the ground here."

They also probably haven't meandered underneath, appreciating the view. He realizes his walks are illegal, but he has only ever been stopped once - by a Surete du Quebec officer who warned him he risks a $142 fine.

"Image-wise, it is very interesting because it looks so different at different times of the day. I like the shapes, the lines, the lighting, the fact that you've got this huge open space in a big city," said McLaughlin.

Big Sky at Turcot Yards

"I like the dramatic sky - you see a lot of big sky at Turcot Yards," he added, pointing to an expanse that is clear blue but for a few wisps of cloud. "There are also subtle little things - the way things grow here. You're constantly seeing nature trying to grab something back."

McLaughlin has taken 1,500 photos of the place, 75 of which he has posted online: colourful graffiti on pillars; views from a now-demolished observation tower; shots of stuff he comes across - an empty suitcase, piles of rocks, locked bikes.

He also points visitors to other sites focused on Turcot, such as Urban Exploration Montreal, a group of people who trespass to explore, then document their endeavours online. At Turcot, they picked through the detritus of abandoned (now razed) buildings, then posted pictures and videos of the adventure.

On Walking Turcot Yards, visitors find historic photos and tidbits about the area's past. They also view pictures and articles about creative ways other cities are dealing with transportation and other urban projects: a colourful, functional and innovative highway/sound barrier in Melbourne, Australia; a green-and-yellow interchange in Dallas; an urban garbage dump turned into a 3-hectare public park in Cairo.

McLaughlin envisages a park at Turcot - "some kind of public space that connects to St. Henri and that has staircases coming down from N.D.G."

In the summer, he braves swarms of mosquitoes to walk a trail along the Falaise St. Jacques. The poplar-lined escarpment on the property's north perimeter is used by migratory birds and is one of the city's protected "ecoterritories."

The article also discusses St. Henri resident artist Doug Scholes's artistic renderings of Turcot Yards visions on canvas and with photo-montage.

" 'If you're on site, there is a sense of awe and wonder at its sheer size,' an experience he compares to entering a Gothic church."

Scholes, 45, lives in St. Henri, close to the interchange. He has researched its history and sees it as a symbol of 1950s and '60s urban idealism, when the raised highway was like something out of The Jetsons.

"There was always this underlying idealistic view that they were going to somehow make city living better (and) be able to move through the city freely without inhibiting or damaging the communities," he said. "In fact, it damaged the communities, creating fissures."

- emphasis adde by Blogaulaire

Links to websites

Links to websites that find interchange worth exploring

Walking Turcot Yard: http://neath.wordpress.com

Meandres Urbains Essentiels: www.meandres.org

Urban Exploration Montreal: http://uem.minimanga.com/abandoned/turcot/