The Repo Man's Code Doesn't Cover Books

A library in Pensacola, Florida is hiring a collection agency to track down their overdue books and dvds. Assistant Librarian Steve Horn says, "We have over 700 patrons who owe us in excess of 25 dollars and that totals out to about 54-thousand dollars. For us to be losing things at the rate we're losing them by people not bringing them back is pretty horrendous." Link

Librairie Du Jour (sans compter que le nôtre, naturellement)

While perusing the webpage, Cartoonbrew.com, I came across this awesome looking bookstore.
All photos, descriptions, layouts, paragraph spacings and accompanying video are care of, copyright, stolen without permission from Cartoon Brew.

Un Regard Moderne (Paris)

"A few months ago, I solicited suggestions from readers about what to see and do while in Paris. I never did a follow-up but today I wanted to write about a highlight of that trip: Un Regard Moderne, one of the coolest bookstores I’ve ever visited. The tiny shop, located at 10 rue gît le coeur 75006 Paris, is a place that claustrophobics would be well advised to avoid. It houses thousands of volumes, mostly related to art, comics and pop culture, in two crowded rooms, with all the books precariously piled atop one another, in seemingly random order, and quite ready to topple at any given moment. The store is cramped so much so that the owner only allows four to five people in the store at any time. When we there, there were only four people and it was quite a challenge moving around.

What impressed me most was the owner’s stock which was extremely up-to-date. In fact, we found many books there that we didn’t find at the better known comic stores in Paris, including titles like Three Trees Make A Forest, I Am 8-Bit and The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora.

Also fascinating was the owner’s encyclopedic knowledge of every book crammed into his shop. My travel companions were author and video game designer David Calvo and Marseilles-based musician Guillaume Pervieux, and when my friend David inquired about an obscure graphic novel that he’d been looking for, the owner had dug the book out of one of the piles within a few minutes.

The owner generously allowed me to take a video of his store and I posted it onto YouTube a while back. The quality is fairly poor but it should offer some sense of what the store is like. Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood."

Book News, In Brief

Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill are back with a third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, titled The Black Dossier. This time around, the comic will not be serialized. Instead, it will be released on Nov. 14 in one hardbound, $30 package, including a 3-D section and a small 'Tijuana Bible' insert. For a sneak peek at the first four pages, click here.

In Australia, an imprisoned drug dealer and gangland murderer made things even worse for himself when a tell-all memoir that he wrote about his own exploits was seized by officers of the prison that he is housed in. While the corrections officials are claiming that the only reason the book was taken was to protect the author, it's probably safe to say that they're also going to be scouring it, looking for anything illegal that they might have missed the last time they had him in front of a judge. Prison officials also used their brief moment in the press' spotlight to critique the reprobate's prose, saying, "I couldn't see him giving Jeffrey Archer a run for his money...I think it's safe to say it would need a fair bit of ghost-writing." Shanks...er, thanks for the advice, warden.

Disgraced Canadian press baron Conrad Black may be barred from his homeland, but that didn't stop him from holding a book signing there this past Monday. Black used a do-hickey called the 'LongPen', a device which was designed by Margaret Atwood to allow her and her fellow authors to 'virtually' sign books from afar. According to an article in CTV.ca, "the LongPen comprises a video screen and digital writing pad at one location and a video screen and automated pen at another. People placed their books in the device at the Toronto bookstore, while Black wrote his message in an electronic writing tablet in Florida with a magnetic pen. Once he pushed 'send,' the pen inscribed the book, in real ink, at the other end."
Should that Aussie author doing twenty to life ever get his book published, I see this as a great way for him to hold meet and greets.

Book News, In Brief

J.K. Rowling began her US book tour in Los Angeles yesterday. In addition the usual crowd of silver spoon debu-tots and Hollywood royalty were a Benetton ad's smattering of lower-to-middle class and/or mixed race children. For photo ops.

Random House takes one small step towards the future (the Google Book Search), one giant step away from the past (bookstores like us!). PCWorld.com gloats.

The 2007 Ignatz Award winners have been announced. It's a comic book award. Yes, comics count as books. Oh, wait, we're calling them 'graphic novels' now, aren't we? Anyway, if you're up for a laugh, take a look at the gaping difference between the winners of the Ignatz and those of the Wizard Fan Award. Is there no common ground for geeks?

The Grief That Made 'Peanuts' Good by Bill Watterson

A Review of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis
(Swiped whole from The Wall Street Journal, without permission.)

The comic strip "Peanuts" was more than a decade old when I started reading it as a kid in the mid-1960s. At that time, "Peanuts" was becoming a force of pop culture, with best-selling books and a newly burgeoning merchandising empire of plastic dolls, sweatshirts, calendars and television specials. The overwhelming commercial success of the strip often overshadows its artistic triumph, but throughout its 50-year run, Charles Schulz wrote and drew every panel himself, making his comic strip an extremely personal record of his thoughts. It was a model of artistic depth and integrity that left a deep impression on me. While growing up, I collected the annual "Peanuts" books and used them as a personal cartooning course, copying the drawings with the idea of someday becoming the next Charles Schulz.

At that time, most of the strip went over my head, and I certainly had no understanding of how revolutionary "Peanuts" was or how it was changing the comics. "Peanuts" pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it's hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale -- in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow. David Michaelis's biography, "Schulz and Peanuts," is an earnest and penetrating look at the man behind this comic-strip phenomenon. With new access to Schulz's personal files, professional archives and family, Mr. Michaelis presents the fullest picture we have yet of the cartoonist's life and personality.

Born in 1922, Schulz always held his parents in high regard, but they were emotionally remote and strangely inattentive to their only child. Schulz was shy and alienated during his school years, retreating from nearly every opportunity to reveal himself or his gifts. Teachers and students consequently ignored him, and Schulz nursed a lifelong grudge that so few attempted to draw him out or recognized his talent. His mother was bedridden with cancer during his high-school years, and she died long before he could prove himself to her -- a source of endless regret and longing for him. As a young adult, he disguised his hurt and anger with a mild, deflecting demeanor that also masked his great ambition and drive.

Once he finally achieved his childhood dream of drawing a comic strip, however, he was able to expose and confront his inner torments through his creative work, making insecurity, failure and rejection the central themes of his humor. Knowing that his miseries fueled his work, he resisted help or change, apparently preferring professional success over personal happiness. Desperately lonely and sad throughout his life, he saw himself as "a nothing," yet he was also convinced that his artistic ability made him special. An odd combination of prickly pride and utter self-abnegation characterizes many of his public comments.

"Peanuts" launched in 1950, appearing in just seven newspapers. The comic strip grew slowly at first, but as its vision expanded and the characters solidified, it caught fire with readers. Schulz's fixation on his work was total, and his private life suffered as a result. Mr. Michaelis uncovers quite a bit of Schulz's more personal tribulations. Schulz's strong-willed and industrious first wife, Joyce, grew disgusted with his withdrawal, and she often treated him cruelly. As the marriage finally unraveled, Schulz had an unsuccessful affair, and he later broke up the marriage of the woman who became his second wife. Schulz's life turned more peaceful after he remarried, but he never overcame the self-doubt and dread that plagued him. Work remained his only refuge. At the end, deteriorating health took away Schulz's ability to draw the strip, a loss so crushing that it can only be considered merciful that he died, at age 77 in 2000, the very day his last strip was published.

It's a strange and interesting story, and Mr. Michaelis, the author of a 1998 biography of artist N.C. Wyeth, paces the narrative well, offering many insights and surprising events from Schulz's life. Undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the book is the juxtaposition of biographical information and reproduced "Peanuts" strips. Here we see how literally Schulz sometimes depicted actual situations and events. The strips used as illustrations in "Schulz and Peanuts" are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

The cartoons are also terrifically funny and edgy, even after all these years. The wonder of "Peanuts" is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously. Children could enjoy the silly drawings and the delightful fantasy of Snoopy, while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip's stark visual beauty. If anything, I wish Mr. Michaelis's biography had devoted more space to analyzing the strip on its own terms as an art. Knowing the sources of Schulz's inspiration does not explain the imaginative power of the work.

I was also surprised that Mr. Michaelis largely glossed over the later years of the strip, despite major shifts in its focus and tone. As newer characters developed into dominant voices, Charlie Brown receded, becoming almost avuncular, and "Peanuts" abandoned much of its earlier harshness. It would have been interesting to learn how Schulz's conception of the strip changed over the years and what Peppermint Patty, Spike and Rerun offered him in the way of new expressive possibilities. I was not always enthusiastic about Schulz's later choices, but it says something for Schulz that he resisted the simple, robotic repetition of a successful formula. In this, too, "Peanuts" was unlike most other comic strips.

For all the influence that "Peanuts" had on me, I was content to admire Schulz from afar, and like most of his millions of readers I never met him. Mr. Michaelis has done an extraordinary amount of digging and has written a perceptive and compelling account of Schulz's life. This book finally introduces Charles Schulz to us all.

Mr. Watterson is the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

News Bits, In Brief

Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) writes about fairy tales for the GuardianUK. This should excite fans of Gaiman's, but surprise no one. Not only is Gaiman a master of fairy tale writing himself, he's also got a movie based on his and Charles Vess' Stardust to promote.

Another GuardianUK plug, this one having to do with Richard T Kelly's Ten Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists. So what do they offer? A review? A interview with the author? Better: excerpts. Reprinted are Joel and Ethan Coen's Five Films We'd Like To See, Steven Soderbergh's re-evaluation of Chinatown, Mike Figgis' Five Films With Great Sex Scenes and Ryan Gilbey's Five Great Drag Acts.

This week's award for Non-Committal in Book Review Form goes to Marcel Theroux and The New York Times, for their review of Douglas Coupeland's The Gum Thief. What did they think of it? Well, it's good...except when it's not. It boldly attempts to push the narrative boundaries of fiction, but doesn't, not really. It's profound, yet conventional. It satisfies in the '84, Charing Cross Road'-meets-'Ikea furniture' way, and still, 'you’re left with a tinge of regret' that the book didn't deliver on its 'promise'.
Congratulations, M.T. & NYT -- you've written a review of distinct indecision.

Bonus!
The free prize at the bottom of today's blog post is a link to Douglas Coupland's Time Capsules mini-features for the aforementioned/maligned NYTimes. Enjoy.

NYTimes Best Sellers: Fiction (now with excerpts)

To read the first chapters (or, in the case of stingier authors and/or publishers, brief excerpts), simply click the titles.

1. Playing For Pizza by John Grisham

2. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks

3. Dark Of The Moon by John Sandford

4. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

5. You've Been Warned by James Patterson and Howard Roughan

6. Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

7. Run by Ann Patchett

8. Shoot Him If He Runs by Stuart Woods

9. The Orc King by R.A. Salvatore

10. Dead Heat by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

Weekend Links (It's really just another way of saying 'Book News, In Brief,' isn't it?)

Hot trend alert: Lately, more and more mom and pop bookstores are housing homeless cats in a misguided attempt at marketing their 'indie street cred.' I want to warn these stores, and any other shops currently considering treading down a similarly paw printed path, that you just might be doing the very thing that that the corporate 'fat cats' at Borders and Barnes & Noble want you to do. One of the feline community's many magical powers (used just as often and proficiently as their ability to make single women feel whole and their natural knack for trapping breath-stealing trolls) is smelling like cat urine. And believe it or not, folks: no one likes their books to smell of cat urine. Statistically, it's pungent, pee stained books -- not shopping-at-home convenience -- that drives most people to Amazon.com.
(Special thanks to Galleycat for the urgent 911!)

Just in time to have fallen off of the radars of all of you, er...us Banned Books Week people, a British teen has been arrested for owning The Anarchist Cookbook. Apparently, the powers that be still frown on this sort of thing six years, three nationally televised telethons, two major motion pictures, and countless country tribute songs after 9-11. What 'The Man' seems unwilling or unable to realize is that everyone heals in different ways. One man's Anarchist Cookbook is another's Chicken Soup For The Soul. Oh, no. Wait a minute. The article goes on further, doesn't it? Police who searched the 17 year old's bedroom reportedly found 500g of potassium nitrate and 250g of calcium chloride. That certainly raises some questions, no? Not the least of which is: How much does this kid get for allowance?
(Shout-outs to Readers Read for the bold -- and some might say anti-establishmental -- reporting. You're the real heroes.)

Bookslut's 'weekly interview feature from Elizabeth Merrick' this week features an interview with Neal Pollack. Among Pollack's other accomplishments, he is shepherd to a flock of hipster parents over at Offsprung, author of Alternadad, and a former cog in the wheel of (Oh, crap. I already used the word hipster in this sentence!) trendmaster and tastemaker boutique publisher, McSweeney's. Not that you asked, but I personally find Pollack to be one of the funniest writers writing today. He doesn't come off like a pretentious ass or a pretentious ass trying his damnedest not to come off like a pretentious ass, and these days, that's some of the highest praise someone of my stature can give.

Book du Jour: M is for Metal

At last, a baby book made especially for the children of carnies, Dungeon Masters, and Gene Simmons' 3000 groupies. Billed as 'The loudest alphabet book on Earth,' I'm currently using it to re-teach my older brother (a former meth addict and mosh pit casualty) to read -- and it's working! When he's not licking the brightly colored pages, he's mumbling along to such catchy rhymes as:

Z is for Zeppelin,
we followed, they Led,
stairway goes to heaven,
then off to bed.

SF Author Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize For Literature!

via BBC.co.uk:

"British author Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The 87-year-old has been honoured with the 10m kronor (£763,000) award for her life's work over a 57-year career. Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark. Lessing said she was 'very glad' about the honour - particularly as she was told 40 years ago that the Nobel hierarchy did not like her.

She told BBC Radio 4: 'I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice.'

She recalled that, in the 1960s, 'they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn't like me at the Nobel Prize and I would never get it. So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?'

The author, who turns 88 on 22 October, said she thought she had become more respectable with age. 'They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off,' she said.

Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the prize, considered by many to be the world's highest accolade for writers, since it started in 1901."

For Wikipedia's bio on Lessing, click here.

Book News, In Brief

Publisher's Weekly has a brief interview with Walter Mosley (Devil In A Blue Dress, Maximum Fantastic Four) about his new Easy Rawlins novel, Blind Faith. One question that's asked, but never definitively answered: Is this the end of Easy?

An old library copy of the the first edition of the first Harry Potter book is going up on the auction block. Although the book is being described as having "a few minor defects," estimates for the final price range from the ridiculous $15,000 to the ludicrous $20,000. Interested children are advised to get a cash advance on their allowance, a reeeaaally profitable paper route, or immediate adoption into the Jolie-Pitt family.

Martis Amis put both of his handmade, Italian leather loafers into his mouth recently with a few less-than-loving comments he made towards the Muslim community. Amis apparently called for strip-searches for people who "look like they're from the Middle East," and constant 'suffering' until they "get (their) house in order."
As-Salāmu `Alaykum, you ignorant bastard.

This is why I only ever send anonymous, an**rax tainted letters to politicians: A book of over 300 fan letters written to Hitler is being published this year in Germany. Yikes. Can you imagine the questions you'd have to answer in the office if your dad or granddad ended up having one of their gushing missives to Der Fuerhrer published for all the world to see? My sister used to dress like Boy George back in the eighties, and I'm still trying to live that down.

It's Not Considered Propaganda When It's Done In Pastels

Not content with simply shoving religion down your children's throats? Why not add a pinch of politics to their social scarring! According to News.com.au, "A slew of children's political books has crowded US booksellers' shelves as partisan authors peddle their opposing liberal and conservative beliefs to an audience that is much too young to vote." The most recent (and most heavily hyped) is Jeremy Zilber's Why Daddy is a Democrat, the sequel to his 2006 tome, Why Mommy is a Democrat. Hmn...sounds to me like Zilber needs to branch out a little. Democrats are supposed to be a progressive people, right?

Terry Pratchett on BBC4

Everyone Goose-steps?

When I first heard about Joseph and Chico: A Cat Recounts the Life of Pope Benedict XVI -- the upcoming children's book that uses a poorly drawn cat to tell the story of the new Pope -- I was slightly curious as to how it was going to address his Holiness' years spent as a member of the Hitler Youth. I cynically assumed that they'd simply skip over that portion of his life. I mean, they'd have to, right? Nope. A recent press release promises prospective readers that the feisty little tabby is gonna don the jackboots for at least a couple of pages. Now I don't know about y'all, but I'm crazy-curious to know how the writers/publishers/Pope are going to handle this. Do they dare talk about the millions of people killed in concentration camps at the hands of the Nazi party, or will it be put to the kids via more of an 'everyone makes mistakes' angle, ala Everyone Poops?

NYTimes Best Sellers: Fiction (now with excerpts)

To read the first chapters (or, in the case of stingier authors and/or publishers, brief excerpts), simply click the titles.

1. Playing For Pizza by John Grisham

2. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks

3. You've Been Warned by James Patterson and Howard Roughan

4. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

5. Shoot Him If He Runs by Stuart Woods

6. Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

7. The Orc King by R.A. Salvatore

8. Run by Ann Patchett

9. Dead Heat by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

10. Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Weekend Links

Jim Hill gives a picture-heavy review of the recently release book, Walt Disney's Cinderella. The book is a gorgeous piece of film history, filled to bursting with Mary Blair's unique pastel and chalk conceptual artwork. Seriously, even if you're a cynic and/or just hate all things Disney on principle, it's still worth clicking over to check out Blair's one of a kind work. She was a visionary.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, Spectrum.ieee.org has posted a brand new interview with author Arthur C. Clarke (Prelude to Space (1951), Childhood's End (1953), (1955), EarthlightThe Deep Range (1957), A Fall of Moondust (1961), Glide Path (1963), The Nine Billion Names of God (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rendezvous With Rama (1973) -- and that's just his long form fiction!).
An excerpt:
SPECTRUM: You, Frederick Durant, and Ernst Stuhlinger were all in Barcelona at an International Astronautical Federation meeting on 4 October 1957. What was your reaction when you got the news about Sputnik?
CLARKE: Although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, I still have vivid memories of exactly when I heard the news. I was in Barcelona for the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had already retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations by the time the news broke. I was awakened by reporters seeking an authoritative comment on the Soviet achievement. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!
For the whole kit and caboodle, click here. Thanks to BoingBoing.net for the heads up.

James Ellroy (LA Confidential, White Jazz) writes a nice bit about fellow hard boiled auteur, Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon) for the GuardianUK. Where many critics nowadays tend to focus on the borderline fascist elements of Hammett and his protagonists, Ellroy chooses to see them as something slightly more complex -- as men whose 'jobs defined them.'
An excerpt:
Hammett views politics as crime most cancerous and genteel. It's crime buttressed by unspoken sanction. It's crime facilitated by a callous legal system. It's crime enforced by vicious cops in hobnailed boots. Hammett treats politics-as-crime in deadpan fashion. He assumes that the reader knows this: politics is The Manoeuvre as public spectacle and reverential shuck. That means America was a land grab. That means all political discourse is disingenuous. That means his workmen heroes refuse to soliloquise or indict - they know the game is rigged and they're feeding off scraps of trickle-down graft.
Hammett saw himself as complicit. The realisation may have fuelled his self-destructive path with alcohol and women. He was a Pinkerton. He signed on to work for an enforcement agency that squashed workers flat. He knew it was wrong. He knew he was wrong. He did the job on an ad hoc basis and couched his Manoeuvrings within The Manoeuvre in a personal moral code. The monstrous force of systemic corruption cast his code and his own job holder's life in extreme miniature and rendered everything about him small - except his guilt.
Okay, so he's a dedicated and hardworking fascist, then.

Book News, In Brief

Via GuardianUK: "(Poet) Sean O'Brien has pulled off an unprecedented third victory in the Forward prize, taking this year's £10,000 prize for best collection with The Drowned Book." O'Brien says that it's not the awards that drive him, though. It's the groupies. The groupies and the coke.

Sheer silliness: The folks at BeaucoupKevin have taken still images from the goofy old Adam West Batman television show and captioned them with hard-boiled narration from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. The result is hilarious...for geeks.

The Washington Post's online outpost has just launched a podcast series titled The Book World Podcast. So far, their 'Book World' has a podcast population of two: one with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones and Robert Draper, the author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, the other with Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the New Yorker and author of The Nine, and Paul Theroux, author of a new book of novellas, The Elephanta Suite. Registration is required.

Book News, In Brief

Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac has posted a small gallery of the illustrations he has done for the re-release of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. If you don't remember, a contest was held a year or so ago to find the illustrator. Personally, I was rooting for Tomer Hanuka.

USAToday has posted a rather revealing review of Rosie O'Donnell's new memoir, Celebrity Detox: The Fame Game. And when I say revealing, I mean bare a** nekkid.
An excerpt of their review:
"This is a train wreck of a book — part self-help psychobabble, part searing memoir — by a grown woman who lost her mother as a child. It's baffling and fascinating and brutally honest, although some stories defy logic. As a child, O'Donnell says, she broke her own hands and fingers with a wooden coat hanger and a small baseball bat. And nobody noticed? She also has fuzzy recollections of a man climbing in through her window as a child to molest her — until her mother cut down the tree. Too-much-information is not a concept O'Donnell embraces. You will learn how fame affected her bowel habits, that she "inseminated" her partner, Kelli, and that her son once told her, in the bathtub, that he didn't like her fat belly. (She told him she didn't like it either.)"
Egads.

We Sell 'Banned Books' (but only after the ban is over) (and only if it's politically correct to do so)

Banned Book Week is the book industry's annual celebration of their own self-satisfaction and self-importance. Bookstores everywhere (including us) hang signs in their windows and around their stores boasting that THEY. SELL. BANNED. BOOKS. They get a write up in the local paper, place little white cards around their store and (inevitably) blog about it, and for what? To make themselves feel progressive and important. But of all the books that they are so 'bravely' selling, how many have been considered 'dangerous' in the past ten years? How many have been banned in a marginally enlightened society in the past twenty years? None. Ooh...you sell Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huck Finn. How cutting edge! That really sticks it to The Man. Are you serious? I bet you Bill O'Reilly wouldn't even say anything bad about freakin' Huck Finn. But how many copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook does your store have on hand? Or Mein Kampf? Or the Tin Tin in the Congo book featuring offensive racial caricatures that Little, Brown recently decided against publishing? There are import editions available from a variety of distributors. If you're truly against censorship -- and not just the antiquated/outdated examples of censorship -- shouldn't you be carrying such a book? I'm not suggesting that bookstores start a 'Hate' section, but if you want to crow about your unadulterated selections, you'd better not be playing the behind-the-scenes censor with your own stock. To do so is hypocritical. Free speech is the right of everyone. Providing unencumbered access to the literary works created under the auspices of free speech (all of 'em -- not just the ones we agree with or approve of) is our business. Bookstores shouldn't have to rally around themselves once a year to proclaim that they hate censorship and the banning of books. Such a concept should be an integral part of every book store, library and reading room. It should go without saying, really.

Book News, In Brief

Last week we linked to the NYTimes' re-evaluation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Today, we link to Hinton's own thoughts on the book. Next week, who knows? Maybe we'll use a Ouija board and some unlicensed, homo-erotic fan-fic to summon Dallas and Johnny and ask them what they think.

In an effort to lower taxes, Bridgewater, MA residents have voted in favor of closing their public library. How much will be saved by this immensely stupid move? Less than 2 percent of the town's total municipal budget! Great job, folks. (Bridgewater residents: Ask a literate friend to read this to you.)

Followng in the footsteps of Al Gore, former president Jimmy Carter is releasing a film to go along with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. No word yet as to how the Leonardo DiCaprio and the Toyota Prius will factor in to all of this.

Terry Pratchett's Making Money is currently, well, making money, charting #4 on this week's NYTimes Best Seller List. The 33rd(!) book in Pratchett's Discworld series, new readers may feel a bit daunted. Fear not. Krzysztof Kietzman of Lspace.org has created the Discworld Reading Order Guide, which puts the main storylines of the Discworld books in their chronological sequence, with dotted lines showing how each storyline intersects with the rest. (Via: BoingBoing.net)

Malcolm Berko, the financial guru over at the Oklahoman.com warns his readers to stay away from investing in Barnes & Noble (and bookstores in general), saying, "Barnes & Noble is a very poor choice. You don't want BKS in your portfolio because future revenue gains will be miserly because of competition from video games, the Internet, TV and a declining literacy rate. Many Americans between ages 10 and 40 are infected with a genetic intellectual deficit. (We are observing a phenomena called 'the dumbing down of America” and what Dan Rather calls "the dumbing down of the news.')"
While it's hard to argue with the 'dumbing down' comments, I'd urge future/current bookstore owners/investors to ignore the rest of Berko's dreary portents, instead following the sage advice of a different Malcolm -- Malcolm X: By any means necessary.