For anyone who doesn’t already know one of my seasonal traditions (well since ‘04 anyway) is a reading of Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror – an impossible tale of zombie santas, giant fruit bats and small town warrior babes. It’s bawdy, vulgar, and spit-takingly funny. In my top 10 funniest books I ever read.   I recommend the audio – but don’t eat while you listen you’ll choke and die and that would suck.

- yes this is a post rerun -

a review from the Guardian:
The Observer, Sunday 6 December 2009

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis’s sparkling essays on booze make a perfect gift for a man of a certain age, says Euan Ferguson

In the 70s and early 80s, times now so far away the thought leaves you reeling, this splendidly humane old chuffpot knocked out three great little books on drinking, one of the areas of life – along with jazz and bemusement and women – to which he brought grand amateur enthusiasm. Unaccountably out of print – unaccountable until you remember the last 15 dull years – the three have been brought together in this estimable collection and given a feisty (with wise minor barbs) intro by Christopher Hitchens. The result is joyous.

(continue reading)

note: I am reading this book, it is recommended.

First editions: a guide to indentification. Edward N Zempel and Linda Verkler. Peoria:Spoon River Press, 1995, 8vo, red cloth hardcover, 515pps.

Another one of my take to my grave volumes. Alas the 1995 edition, seems to be the last time this lovely book was revised. Inexplicably it has lost ground to Bill McBride’s First edition Identifier. The popularity of the latter doesn’t surprise me as it is a terrific tool, especially now in the digital edition. But the lack of mention about Zempel’s disappoints me. It’s like comparing the text book and the cliff notes version. McBride’s may help you identify a books’ first occurrence, but Zempel’s tells you how it got that way. Documenting the long winding parentage of publisher’s imprints – when Boni met Liveright or John Farrar’s migration from Farrar and Rinehart to Farrar Strauss and Giroux gives one a better sense of publishing history. Maybe I’m just a geek, I like knowing the WHY of things. In the age of bookselling by consensus – where folks only know what they learn on the internet has encouraged lazy minded booksellers. How do YOU know the folks your are cribbing from know their ass from a hot rock? You don’t. You are taking it on faith that the information you are gleaning from online listings is for the most part correct. I was both enraged and amused the other day when a newbie online sellers asked for directions to websites where they could learn bookselling. It’s the kind of question that makes me grind my back teeth. How sad it is to expect to learn about books from computers. The place to truly learn the trade of bookselling is from other books.

The Encyclopedia Of The Book. Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. New Castle Oak Knoll Press 2001 small 4to. paperback. 576 pages. Okay enough pandering to the cheap seats. When I finally get around to featuring a book I usually pick something widely available for the price of a Croissandwich. My thinking is if the book is inexpensive there’s no excuse not to buy it. Well this one is anything but inexpensive and there’s no excuse not to buy it, it is worth every penny. Mine is all curled corners and post it notes. It is probably my most ‘loved’ reference book – next to Johnson’s Manual of Bookbinding. Holding somewhere between three and four thousand bookish terms , depending on who you believe. There hasn’t been any bookselling, binding or printing term I looked up that wasn’t inside. Though usually the definition is followed by ’see also’, meaning by the time I put it down I have also learned 5 other things that I hadn’t meant to know. But that’s what makes it valuable – you even learn stuff by accident.

So this is what they mean by dead of winter? No one has bought anything from me in so long, I am thinking of hanging up a sign that says “pets or meat”; cats do taste like chicken right? So, aside from dusting, inventory and taxes, what does a bookseller do while waiting for someone to suddenly need to exchange cash for wares? Reading comes to mind – though I will admit, I don’t get as much read as I used to. I read the backs of books more than I read their innards. This week’s library visit yielded a little sumthin’- sumthin’ I managed to read in one sitting. Granted, it’s only 116 pages/17K words but what was there was choice.

The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner. An addictive must read little book, perhaps merely from schadenfreude, it is edging onto my MUST own list. I kept wanting to underline things and add marginalia, something I NEVER do. I settled for post-it notes. Judge Posner manages to give us a cook’s tour of the entire range of intellectual fraud and creative imitation, from Shakespeare’s “sampling” and Rembrandt’s rubber stamping to Ambrose’s bestseller factory and the the openly suicidal Opal Mehta affair. He does manage to give old Doris Goodwin a serious bitch-slapping, perhaps over her lack of visible scars. The most fascinating sections are his Talmudic parsing of the concept of “authorship”, not just the division of credit between author and writer, but on down the line with ghost writer, research assistant, law clerk and text book editor and so forth. And with a little fair use, I can share my favorite quote, one of those concepts rarely spoken out loud in our trade: “The desire to be original and the desire to be successful are not wholly compatible. Publishers are not looking for works to publish that are completely original, because they have no idea how the reading public will respond….Publishers are looking for the new thing that’s enough like the old thing to be likely to gain early acceptance by the market, yet enough unlike it to satisfy the public’s taste for variety.” end quote. In the end I got the feeling that he would prefer plagiarism cases to stop clogging up the criminal courts system as the public flogging for anyone worth suing is more damaging than any legal penalty. Fascinating little book, and priced under 10 bucks there is no excuse for not checking out.

- here endeth the lesson, now back to our regularly scheduled copying and pasting of other people’s text in place of originality.

My seasonal tradition (well since ‘04 anyway) is a reading of Christopher Moore’s The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror – an impossible tale of zombie santas, giant fruit bats and small town warrior babes. It’s bawdy, vulgar, and spit-takingly funny. And with so many used ones on the market its now dirt cheap. In my top 10 funniest books I ever read. But I recommend the audio – but don’t eat while you listen you’ll choke and die and that would suck. Makes a perfect present for anyone on your list as sick as yourself.

Caring for Your books by Michael Dirda
No ISBN, Book-of-the-Month Club, 1990, 67pp.

If you don’t know Michael Dirda, you should, he’s been the Washington Posts book reviewer for like ever AND he writes very readable books his own self. Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life and Bound to Please: an Extraordinary One Volume Literary Education. This little ditty was produced for the BOMC clan and sells for under two bucks used. But despite all that it is ENTIRELY readable – so much so that I found it’s one of my favorite things I have read all year. (SO? I’m a little behind in my reading, us old booksellers seldom read new books.)

There are a plethora of books out there on caring for your books – mine included, then why should you scoff up a copy of this one? cause it’s fun. Not only does Dirda cover all the potential injurious things it laces them with anecdotal evidence . . . forget it, I can’t review a reviewer’s book, my writing is totally inadequate for the task.

Here have a taste:

Chapter 1 – BOOKS AND READERS

A book, it has been said, is a machine to think with. We scribble in the margins, underline sentences, argue with the author on the blank end papers, dog-ear favorite pages, mark our place with a pencil, splash soapy water on the dust jacket while reading in the bathtub, and when the author finally goes just too far, fling the maddening, useless volume onto the floor. Or worse.

Rex Stout’s fictional detective Nero Wolfe once ripped the pages from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and tossed them angrily into a blazing fire. Why? Because of the linguistic laxity of the new dictionary, which did not proscribe the use of words like ain’t and the misuse of hopefully. Not having access to a photocopying machine and being too lazy to transcribe favorite passages, the 19th-century writer Thomas De Quincey, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, would take reading notes by tearing out the pages that interested him. The poet Wordsworth used a greasy butter knife to cut open a volume of Burke. And in his old age the philosopher George Santayana would literally take a book apart to read it. After slicing off the covers, he would separate the text into its signatures; 16- or 32-page sections he would enjoy, usually while reclining in bed, and then when finished drop hem directly into a wastebasket.

Did these people abuse their books? It’s hard to say. Each of them looked at the physical book and saw simply a container, a tin can holding the green beans of wisdom and poetry. What mattered was the intellectual nourishment inside.

And yet a book can also be a thing of beauty, a joy forever. Early books were treated as sacred objects, as indeed they might be, since many of them were scripture. To honor them, artists illuminated their pages with pictures, gilding, and gorgeous initial capital letters. The vellum leaves were bound in elaborately tooled leathers, the covers fitted with clasps, inlaid with jewels. The Lindisfarne Gospels, The Book of Kells, The Very Rich Hours of Jean, Duc de Berry, the Giant Bible of Mainz, the Kelmscott Chaucer ­these are among the supreme works of art of their times. To damage them would be-no other word is appropriate – sacrilege.

The attitude of modern readers to their books lies somewhere between these two extremes. We want to enjoy our books, but we’d also like to keep them around for a while. We plan to dip into old favorites again and again; we might like to pass others on to our children; and we may even hope that a few of our particular treasures will go up in value and earn a tidy sum when we, or our heirs, sell them to an antiquarian book dealer. A copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s rare first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), would bring at least $250,000 at auction, probably more. But even contemporary titles in fine condition can be surprisingly valuable. A first printing of Louise Erdrich’s acclaimed novel Love Medicine (1984) might cost a collector $200, with the price going up every day. After all, the book received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, its print run was small, and Erdrich’s critical reputation has increased with each subsequent book.

To keep a home library attractive and bright requires a little care and a lot of common sense. You don’t need to treat books like delicate Sevres vases, liable to self-destruct at the mere presence of a toddler, but neither should they be manhandled like the morn­ing newspaper. Take care of the books you have, and you will have books worth taking care of.

The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski
NY: Knopf; 1999, 304pp. ISBN: 0375406492.

This book’s proper title should be The Book and the Bookshelf : and How they got that way. Most bibliogeeks recognize Petroski as the scribe of the 434 page ode to the lowly Pencil. This book traces the evolution books storage from the scroll cabinets to modern libraries with shelving so strong that it supports the actual library not just the books. Basically a long monograph with only 226 pages of actual text, even padded out with appendix, notes, bibliography and index it is not as long as the Pencil. But how can a true bibliophile NOT like a book that spends 19 pages of the appendix talking about 25 different ways to shelve books? Don’t get me wrong, those 226 pages are thick with bibliohistory and illustrations that can’t be found easily other places. Petroski heroically distilled more than a millenia of history into a conveniently portable package. Laying it on a bit thick for a one sit read . . . both the hard and softcover can be scrounged up for under $5 so I can definitely see it getting picked up and read, it it were say . . on a shelf near the water closet?

something new • As companion pieces for Melvyn Bragg’s Twelve Books That Changed the World, Atantic/Hodder has reinvented its Days that Shook the World series and begun issuing ‘biographies’ of Books that Shook the World. The Guardian gives us a fascinating extract from Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography by Francis Wheeler.

The series so far includes:

• Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens
• Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography by Francis Wheeler
• Plato’s Republic: A Biography by Simon Blackburn
• Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography by Janet Browne
• The Qur’an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence

i’m such a sucker for other people’s research.

Drinking, Smoking and Screwing : Great Writers on Good Times by Sara Nickles, Bob Shacochis
Chronicle Books, 224 pages. (1994) ISBN: 0811807843

Lying, Cheating, and Stealing : Great Writers on Getting What You Want When You Want It by Sara Nickles
Chronicle Books, 220 pages. (1997) ISBN: 0811818209

It seems the more books I choose for the Bullpen Bookclub, the more I realize they are all bathroom reading. Perhaps that is the only time I expect any of us can get any reading done. Here are two ideal choices, I was a tad susprised . . . or should I say alarmed to find that I had read most of the contents in their complete forms. There are excerpts from the Group, Lolita, the Ginger Man, Henry & June mixed with some Spaulding Gray, Anne Sexton, Thurber, Brautigan. For most of us, it’s probably redundant, but for someone who is new to the biz, it does give a thumbnail sampling of writers you probably haven’t tried. These two are common as dirt, and at under a nickle a good investment for the guest bathroom.