BibliophileBullpen

REQUEST FOR CLASSIC BOOK ADVERTISING

Dwight Garner, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, is compiling a visual anthology, for Ecco Press, of classic book advertising. A good deal of this material is coming from print venues like The New York Times and The New Yorker, but he would welcome advice about other places to look, or advice of any kind. He is reachable at: garner@nytimes.com

To help define exactly the type of ‘classic book advertising’ he is seeking, here is a piece he put together, a slideshow, that shows the type of advertising of books he is seeking, from all ages, not just present:

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/book-ads-the-golden-age-1962-1973/

Ed Smith Books, ABAA

from the WSJ:

Google Plans Service to Store Users’ Data
By KEVIN J. DELANEY and VAUHINI VARA

Google Inc. wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company’s competition with Microsoft Corp.

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

(continue . . . )

sorry guys . . . I am a HUGE cheerleader for anything that frees us from indentured service to Mr Gates. If I can stand all those freaking tv’s at the supermarket checkout without killing a clerk, I can live with a little more Google adsense in the world.

cool tool • Merriam Webster has their new Visual Dictionary online.

Urban Outfitters has a Christmas tree collection.

Charley Brown’s pathetic little twig of a tree ($24).

Straight from Whoville is the Whoville tree ($20).

didn’t die . . . . my hands started acting up when i was cataloging . . . and i got annoyed and stopped typing. i am doing cataloging for a client who wants his collection insured and when i get home i am doing CAT-aloging for the animal rescue group. i had this swift idea to get a few cat themed books donated and then hawk them as donation prizes – so, you give tax deductions to the book donors as well as tax deductions to the book ‘buyers’ – so everybody’s happy, ‘cept yours truly who had this grand master plan and now has to implement it. isn’t that always the way you work hardest for things you aren’t getting paid for?

anyway, the collection i am cataloging is history, LOTS of history, general history with a few sub-specialties and boy is this some obscure crap . . . uh. . . fascinating stuff. needless to say i am all over green. in 28 years of bookselling i have never been able to just pick a specialty. i have gone through phases where i am focused on buying and selling of one kind of book over another. (right now i am doing a crash course in feline-ania – not as much fun as it sounds) but as always happens i get distracted by the next shiny object. if i had a specialty i would actually KNOW what i was looking for when i went shopping. if i was surfing the net, i could just pop in some keywords and we’re off to the races. granted i wouldn’t find as much stuff to buy, but then again i wouldn’t find as much stuff that needed to be bought.

now, when i go into a shop i have to cruise nearly EVERY section . . .yes every one. you never know, people smoke crack and shelve books and you can find the damnedest things mis-shelved. you never exactly know what you will find – booksellers frown on a miscellaneous section so things have to go SOMEWHERE even if it is only remotely close.

this however is the appeal of real world brick and mortar honest to god bookstores, you never know what you are gonna find. and you could find ANYTHING. but when your only shopping outlet is the internet you are kinda fucked. you HAVE to start with a keyword or two, and if you truly try to browse you have to sort in some manner and just basically start with A, or Z if you swing that way.

i am trading some books i don’t want to a seller who has an open shop where they will do much better. in exchange i expect to get some credit for some of their wares – but since they are 700 miles away, i can only see their inventory by remote. so where to expend my capital? would you wanna skim through several thousand records of a database looking for something to blow your skirt up? i don’t, so again i have to put some keywords in and hope for the best.

you know, i don’t have a want list, not really, i have a list of books i want and can’t afford. but i don’t really have a list of books i want and can’t find. basically since the internet came into the house, i whittled that notebook right out of my life. thus shopping in stores has become the only chance i ever have to being surprised. looking for something i don’t know exists is kinda my raison d’etre. when i going to a shop and they ask me if they can help me find something, how do i answer that? i don’t even know what i am looking for, how can they help me find it?

you just can’t browse the internet.

Things you find when looking up other things . . .
I was researching something on the LOC prints database and I found these cool pictures of the INSIDE of their 19th century book conveying system. Best part is the diagram showing its function.

worth reading • the NYT Sunday Book Review – The Letters Of Noël Coward edited and with commentary by Barry Day.

I didn’t take any good pictures at the Boston Book, Print and Ephemera Show last Saturday. I didn’t do a lot of things – I was a little harried and after going back into the house for things like my glasses and wallet, I drew the line and just left. And of course I didn’t bring even one sicpress.com business card or brochure – which is kinda dumb. Whenever I bring tons of these, they do me no good, this time folks kept grabbing my arm and giving me theirs. So basically I had a great time and kept the flogging of my wares to a minimum. I spent the day shooting the breeze with folks and and actually looking at books. So, I didn’t take any even moderately interesting bookfair shots.

But here’s a little sumthing sumthin I think you’ll enjoy. One of the sellers unsuspectingly had this surprise on the shelf: Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High 1st edition in pretty fantastic DJ. However some bonehead previous seller had removed the front and back endpapers and replaced them – sort of. The front had 1 ‘end paper’ glued down with elmer’s glue peeking out from underneath, and so much glue in the gutter that the page prior to the title page, (would be the half title, but only has an ornament) is glued to the front cover. Thus when you open it, the ornament page stands up and salutes you.

This my friends is a case where leaving it alone would have been 1000 times better than what they DID do. Now you have to remove badly glued endpapers instead of merely pasted down pages.

Make a note: When in doubt – leave it alone.