Rare Book School

I attended Rare Book School at the University of Virginia (thanks to a scholarship from the IOBA) at the beginning of June and took the course The History of the Book, 200-2000.  The course was taught by two rare book librarians, John Buchtel and Mark Dimunation, who were incredibly knowledgeable, as well as entertaining and quite funny (sometimes even breaking out in song and dance).  Since we covered 1800 years of history in 30 hours, the class was of necessity fast and slightly overwhelming in the amount of material presented.  It was taught in show-and-tell style, with many opportunities in the classroom and UVa's Alderman Library to see and handle objects from cuneiform tablets (replicas) to illuminated manuscripts, books, prints, bindings, and printing equipment.  The course also covered the cultural, social, scientific, and religious impacts of printing and book production.

One of the high points was a field trip to The Library of Congress (three hours each way by bus), where we got a quick tour of a small part of the library which is impressively decorated in book-related murals, sculptures, and mosaics, as well as a glance at The Gutenberg Bible on display, before settling into the Rare Book Reading Room where we saw many beautiful manuscripts and books.  Each student got to choose some book in particular they wanted to see, and I chose Alice in Wonderland.  Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, happened to have a copy with some original John Tenniel drawings tipped in.  Other favorites viewed at LC were plates from the elephant folio sized (because each print was life-sized of the bird represented, and thus had to accommodate a turkey) Audubon's Birds of America; a block book--the equivalent of a graphic novel for the 15th century; Galileo's Starry Messenger, which he printed himself and appears to have his hand print; as well as a really cool book called Astronomicum Caesareum that was full of colorful paper calculators ("vovelles", one of our vocabulary words) that could be used instead of brass instruments for navigation.  That's just to name a few.  We saw literally hundreds of examples during the course of the week long class.

Most of the other RBS students were librarians, and most from the East Coast.  I stayed in a dorm room on the lovely UVa grounds, which were quite pretty with red brick and white columned buildings and lots of green space and gardens. It was hot there; quite a change from Seattle where summer doesn't start until after the 4th of July.

I had never been to the Library of Congress before (in fact, I had only been to Washington D.C. once in a brief stopover between NYC and Baltimore), and was quite impressed.  I'm interested in spending some more time exploring their website, which is where the digitized WPA poster above came from.

Reading Notes
After reading about her a couple of times in The New Yorker, I picked up a book by Paula Fox, Desperate Characters, to read on my flight home from Virginia.  It's a short novel, written in a realistic and precise, stark style about some indeed desperate characters.  I liked it and have passed it on to Sean who is currently reading it.  He kept saying, "Nothing is happening, except this woman got bit by a cat," so I'll be interested to see what he thinks when he's done.  Unfortunately for me, I finished the book by the time I got to the Atlanta airport where I had a four hour wait.  I took a look at the offerings on display at the airport bookstores and was totally horrified by the lowest common denominator represented.  Icky.  Of course, the same can be said for all aspects of airports and flying, from the terrible food to the inevitable blasting televisions.

When I got home, I picked up a couple of more Paula Fox books, and have just finished her memoir of her lonely and unconventional childhood, Borrowed Finery.

Open and Closed

"For the historian, there are no banal things."  I love the bright orange cloth cover of this book on a subject I didn't even realize was a subject. 

In local bookstore news, Pilot Books, a small "indie lit" store on Broadway closed this month after being open for two years.  They had a goodbye party with readings the weekend before last.  Left Bank Books has re-opened after renovation (earthquake retrofit) of their space in The Pike Place Market.  They are having a benefit art sale and social hour at Gallery 1412 just up the street at 1412 18th Ave. on Friday, June 3,  6:00 - 9:00 pm (free!):  

Come on out and support your local independent, worker-owned anarchist book store!  Left Bank Books is currently celebrating 28 years of rabble-rousing and radical book-nerding, and recently went through a difficult temporary relocation due to renovation at Pike Place Market.  They are back in their old space again, but they still need your support and love! 

This will be an art show of works done by the Left Bank collective and friends, that will all be for sale, probably via silent auction.

Free to attend!  Snacks and beverages will also be available for a small donation.  Please come check out all our amazing creative talent and support our project!  Also, if you have anything (including sculpture, knitted goodies, etc.) you'd like to donate/show please email directly to gardensnotgrass@riseup.net

Reading Notes 

I just finished a novel called Model Home by Erich Puchner.  This was a fast read, a not-necessarily-plausible story of a family going through some pretty melodramatic changes in the eighties, including the father investing (and losing) all their money in a housing development by the dump, affairs, punk rock, running away, and an explosion.

I'm also reading Granta #109, Work.   In an essay called "Life Among the Pirates," writer Daniel Alarcon describes the widespread publishing of unauthorized editions of books in his native Peru.  In Peru, most people can't afford to pay $20 for a book, but they might be able to afford the $3 pirated edition.  Alarcon visits street  book peddlers, actually hoping to find his own book for sale as a pirated copy.  It was really crazy to read about a place where books are so scarce and valuable, given the glut of books so easy to find in the U.S. at book sales, thrift stores, and online for a penny.

Help Desk

Our friend and former staff member Nathan has updated Retail Hell on our website, adding the fourth and fifth rings of Retail Hell to the already existing three rings.  We pulled out the actual composition notebooks all these entries were originally written in by hand, and reminisced about old Pistil days.  We were so young then, as attested to by the photos stuck in the store journals.  Pictured below are Sean, Tim, Amy, and Nathan.

Robin from Caffe PettiRosso played this YouTube video for me when she heard I was going to be taking a class on the history of the book.  Hey, this was new technology not so long ago.

Illuminated

Sean and I just returned from a trip to Istanbul, Turkey.  We saw amazing mosques, walked down tiny twisty roads that also somehow accommodated cars (a bumper passing by inches from your ankles was normal), ate delicious Turkish food, visited a fishing village on the Asian side of the Bosphorus and an island with only horse-drawn carriages (no cars!).  We also went to quite a few museums, one of which was the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum where we saw many beautiful illuminated Korans, like the Ottoman period one in the photo.  These, of course, were under glass and so open to only one set of pages, making us wonder if all the pages in the thick books were as intricately gilded and decorated.

Reading Notes
I have been continuing to make my way through the reading list for a course I'll be taking in June on the History of the Book, 200-2000 at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia:

John Carter. ABC for Book Collectors.
Christopher de Hamel. Scribes and Illuminators
Michael Twyman. The British Library Guide to Printing: History and Techniques.
Warren Chappell. A Short History of the Printed Word.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.



Scribes and Illuminators was quite interesting (especially in light of seeing the illuminated Korans), describing the creation of a book from the  preparation of the vellum or parchment,  the quill pens, paints and inks used, to the writing of the scripts and the final gilt and ink decoration and illumination of the book and the distribution by stationers and booksellers.  I must say The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe is slow going -- very academic and clunkily written, in my opinion.


For run, I read The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo, which was quite hit-or-miss (and the series editor speaks of the disappearance of literary magazines in America, perhaps leading to fewer submissions to choose from?).  One story I quite enjoyed was "All Boy" by Lori Ostlund, about a gay eleven-year-old boy, a voracious reader, who starts the story literally in the closet.

Nuke-Rebuke

Just got our first order from Japan since the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster:  Nuke-Rebuke: Writers and Artists Against Nuclear Energy & Weapons.  A little heart-wrenching.  I'm sending along a copy of Helen Caldicott's Nuclear Power is Not the Answer as a gift.

On a completely different note, we just received our first check from Book-It Repertory Theatre from sales of books we filled their newly launched lobby book cart with.  The books are selling for $3 each and we are splitting the proceeds with Book-It.  I'm really happy to have such a good venue for passing along books that aren't up to snuff for the extremely competitive internet sales market, but are perfectly good, readable and valuable.  Their next show is Sense and Sensibility in June.

Current Events

Above is pictured an amazing piece of sculptural book art by Brian Dettmer.  You can see more photos and read about his art on My Modern Met.

There is a connection between what's happening in the world and what books sell.  With the current headlines about events in Libya and Japan, some of our recent sales have been Escape to Hell and Other Stories by Qaddafi; Americans At Risk:  Why We are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do; and Fighting Radiation and Chemical Pollutants with Foods, Herbs, and Vitamins.  If we suddenly receive simultaneous multiple orders from different bookselling websites (we sell on ten) for a single title or author, that usually means that book or writer has been in the news recently.  Sometimes, sadly, a rash of orders is an indication the author has died.

Reading Notes

I have been remiss as to updating this blog with what I've been reading, so my list is a bit long this time:

Breast Cancer:  Reduce Your Risk with Foods You Love by Robert Pendergrast
A Short History of the Printed Word by Warren Chappell
Rick Steves' Istanbul
Time Out Istanbul
Strolling through Istanbul 
Lonely Planet:  Turkey 
Out Backward by Ross Raisin

The Pendergrast book really didn't have much more to say about diet and health than I've already read in books by Dr. Andrew Weil (eat a variety of organic vegetables and fruit, omega 3 fatty acids, real food, not processed food; exercise)  but it was refreshing to see a publication that talks about breast cancer as a preventable disease; not something that can only be screened for, as the mainstream medical establishment seems to believe.

I quite enjoy when two books on completely different subjects unexpectedly intersect somehow, as did a mention of Turkish writing in A Short History of the Printed Word describing how the Turkish government  decreed in 1928 (along with abolishing the fez) that Turkish be written in Latin characters rather than Arabic; a change that instantly rendered many people illiterate and even reversed the direction of script from right-to-left to left-to-right.  I had just read about the secularization and westernization of Turkey under Ataturk in several of the many guide books I've been perusing in preparation for an upcoming trip

Out Backward is a novel I picked from a pile being culled from our shelves to make room for the new.  It's the first person story of a 19 year-old social outcast (and accused molester) sheep farmer on the English moors who becomes obsessed with a 15 year-old neighbor girl who moves with her family from London--a definite clash of cultures and class.  The language is full of lively, expressive sheep farmer slang:  "glegg" for look, "tidgy" for frail or spindly; "sprog" for child; "trunklements" for things.  The Harper Perennial trade paperback of this book has essays and interviews with the author at the end, and there's a nice essay on the state of farming in the U.K.  The same old story about consumers wanting cheap food prices and agribusiness putting small farmers out of business.

 

A book by any other name...

There's been some talk on a discussion list for members of the IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association) regarding an invitation from a member for fellow booksellers to advertise for free on a bookseller resources directory  called Smelly Books.  Quite a few of the booksellers who replied to this discussion said they didn't want to associate their books with smelliness.  Others said they loved the smell of old books and appreciated the humor of the website name.  Once a customer returned a book to us, saying it had an "acrid mildew smell," although when I received the offensive book, I could detect nary an odor.  Apparently (from my readings of bookseller discussion lists) this discrepancy in interpreting the smell of a book from no smell, to delightful scent, to stinky is a not unusual state of affairs.

Reading Notes
Sean and I have been reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart out loud.  The protagonist in this satiric novel, Lenny Abramov, is a reader and has a Wall of Books (which he does spray with pine sol)  in his apartment at a time when everyone has a constant stream of images and data via their äppärät (an object apparently a step above an I-phone) and books are generally regarded as smelly old things most people would be embarrassed to be caught handling, much less reading.   The depiction of a corporate controlled society, consumer culture, social networking, police state, and media limited to Fox Liberty-Prime and Fox Liberty-Ultra is a little too much like reality.