BibliophileBullpen

Obit of note • Molly Ivins at 62.

If all the money bigpharma expends marketing Viagra to nation that thinks that all women really want is a high hard one, was put into finding a cure for breast cancer. We’d cure it by like Friday noontime.

calendar •
1872 – Zane Grey is born Zanesville, OH (d. 1939)
1901 – Chekhov’s Three Sisters opens at Moscow Art Theater
1915 -Thomas Merton was born (d .1968), author of The Seven-Story Mountain.
1923 – Norman Mailer is born Long Branch, NJ
1929 - Erich Maria Remarques publishes All Quiet on the Western Front, in Berlin

“It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour’s bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.” (from All Quiet on the Western Front)

1929 - Leon Trotsky is banished from the Soviet Union
1935 – Kenzaburo Oe is born on the island of Shikoku, Japan.
1948 - J D Salinger‘s first short stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared on this day in The New Yorker
1973 - On his 50th birthday, Norman Mailer gave a gala party at the Four Seasons, to which he invited 5000 persons but charged a $50 admission. Only 500 came.

obit of note • Sidney Sheldon at 80 master of the potboiler

obit of note • Cookbook author Sharon Tyler Herbst, The Food Lover’s Companion

google gobble • From the New Yorker Jeffery Toobin writes about Google’s quest for the Universal Library.

Bullpen Store item ‘Got ink? book bag’ featured on the Daily Shirt Blog. That was nice of them – I’m gonna have to add them to my RSS feeds.

worth hearing • from NPR’s Hear and Now Rosemary Sullivan author of Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille which chronicles the efforts of an underground movement to shelter individuals such as André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich.

banktoaster • the Simpler Dollar Blog has a nice addendum to my Talking to Yourself post, a review of the Free online service, Remember the Milk – which allows you to set up automated lists.

dystopia alert • A new report claims that the Bush administration has suppressed scientists’ climate-change work. am i the only one not surprised here?

Having looked today at a good number books described as absolutely new, mint and “very fine”, I wanted to suggest some other terms for those whose books rise even above the many, but pedestrian, mint and very fine copies of books and djs out there. Abbreviations also provided:

• Finetastic (FT)
• Very Finetastic (VFT)
• Finetabulous (FB)
• Very Finetabulous (VFB)
• Very Mint (VM)
• Newriffic (NW)
• Aristotelian (but only use if it really fits) (A)
• Very Aristotelian (VA)
• Archival (AR)
• Very Archival (VAR)
• “A near Igneous example of this edition” (IE)
• Swaddling (S)
• Very Swaddling (VS)
• Uterian (U)
• Very Uterian (VU)
• Virginal (VR)
• Very Virginal (VVR)
• “monastic in its absolute limited editionness of 2000 copies” (MALE)

Please offer others. It is crucial that the trade apply a proper and meaningful vocabulary to our books.
Gene @ Motte & Bailey Booksellers

calendar •
1749 - American Printer Isaiah Thomas is born Boston, MA (d 1931)
1775 – Walter Savage Landor was born (d.1864). His life was one filled with ill-tempered quarrels with those around him. He left England after losing a libel suit and lived in Florence, where the Brownings cared for him.

1815 – The burned Library of Congress was reestablished with 6,500 volumes from Thomas Jefferson’s library. By 1814 Jefferson had acquired the largest personal collection of books in the United States. Jefferson offered to sell his library to Congress as a replacement for the collection destroyed by the British during the War of 1812. Congress purchased Jefferson’s library for $23,950. A second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851, destroyed nearly two thirds of the 6,487 volumes Congress had purchased from Jefferson. [LOC recreated Jefferson's library for an exhibition.]

1818 - John Keats composes his sonnet “When I Have Fears.”
1912 - Barbara Tuchman, historian (d. 1989)
1928 - Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude premiered in New York.
1935 - Ezra Pound met the Italian dictator Mussolini and read from a draft of his Cantos which he gives to him as a present. Mussolini had literary pretenses, having written a bad novel himself. When Hemingway interviewed him, however, he saw Il Duce pretending to be reading a book he was holding upside down.

1956 - a Newsweek reporter asked Robert Frost why he did not write free verse. Frost said that would be like “playing tennis with the net down. “

worth hearing • Susan Cheever author American Bloomsbury guested on NPR’s Studio 360

worth reading • a piece on the writer’s ‘Chinese rejection’ from Canada.com, just read it, take too long to explain.

something new • from the LATIMES a review of The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner

blog of note • from ABE’s Reading Copy blog, Abe has added some use friendly and informative online magazine ‘rooms’ to its site.

banktoaster • Senduit.com allows you to upload a file online and receive a custom URL to download the file from Senduit’s servers. This address can be shared by the user freely and can be used to download the file a reasonable number of times. The address expires in an amount of time designated by the user (between 30 minutes and 1 week)

steakknives • SyncBack is a freeware program that helps you easily backup and synchronise your files to: the same drive; a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc); an FTP server; a Network; or a Zip archive.

worth seeing • A public service type instructional video from a series called “The Significant Occupation Series” circa late 1950′s. [via book patrol]