Seattle Loses More Bookstores

Couth Buzzard Bookstore in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle closes it doors as reported by the Seattle Times. And Couth Buzzard is not the only one, M Coy Books and All for Kids Bookstore also closed this year, among others. Although Seattle still has the most bookstore's per capita then any other city, rents and buying habits are taking its toll on the traditional open bookshops left open.
Yes, you can buy your book from Amazon but you can't get the same satisfaction of browsing a well stocked local store and find the book you weren't looking for. It's what I call the happy accident of discovery that makes the difference.

thanks to Shelf Awareness for the lead.

It Was Great and Bad Beginning

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was announced. Named for the author who brought us the famous opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night". This year's effort was entered by Garrions Spik of Washington, DC:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

I love the taxi reference, good work Mr. Spik!

Bombproof Horses, Nude Mice, and Joyous Chickens

From theBookseller.com a forthcoming book celebrating 30 years of the oddest book titles of the year. An annual prize, The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, will be having a vote for the oddest title in the last 30 years. The people at the Booker prize recently did this but this is so much more fun. "To mark the occasion, Aurum Press will be releasing an illustrated collection of some of the winners and nominees of yesteryears, How to Avoid Huge Ships (£9.99, ISBN: 9781845133214). It features original jackets of 50 of the best-loved titles since the prize began, and an introduction from The Bookseller's former deputy-editor Joel Rickett."
I can't wait to see the book as it looks quite delicious.
Here's a list of some of the winners, enjoy!

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
The Joy of Chickens
The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
How to Avoid Huge Ships
Reusing Old Graves
Bombproof Your Horse
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification

Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.

Roller Coasters, Smoke Jumpers and Amazon Flexes

I just returned from the road on business and pleasure and here's the landscape as I saw it. There's nothing like forgetting the business of books for an afternoon of riding Santa Cruz's famous wooden roller coaster, The Giant Dipper, the third oldest in the country, with your teenage daughter. A great ride, so much fun in fact that we rode it all day. A memorable afternoon with life's rich pageant on the boardwalk.
Yreka, CA at the Oregon/California border has been living in a smoky fog since the 800+ forest fires starting in California. Asked to the locals, it's been like that for months. It's very eerie.
Ashland has several great plays this season; Othello, with one of the strongest casts I've ever seen of this play, and Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge" are stunning productions. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is always a great stop.
Visited several bookshops - Albany, Corvallis, Ashland, Santa Cruz, San Francisco - and the general consensus is that business is well, difficult all over. Everyone is tuning to the 'buy local' campaigns to keep a foothold on the slippery slope of retail book selling. Some are doing better than others, but none are seeing much growth at all if any. In the 90s it was the rapacious targeting by Barnes and Nobles and Borders that buried local independents. Now, its Amazon that's thrusting the final twist of the knife. As more and more people buy on-line though Amazon less people are making the effort to go into their local shops. A shame, as going into a good local bookshop is a far better experience than shopping on line. Couple this with the news when I returned from the road that Amazon just bought ABE Books.com, the largest on-line used book site, it seems only a matter of time before Amazon chases into the corner the on-line book market. The third largest on-line bookseller, Alibris, I predict will be bought out by Amazon in some form within five years.
So it goes, its always a challenge for booksellers and now the landscape will just get more interesting.

A Human Face At The Beijing Olympics

From the New Yorker's Book Bench blog a notice of a cool photography volume coming out about the Olympic buildings in Beijing:

"Last December, the photographer Helen Couchman shot portraits of a hundred and forty-three Chinese laborers at the construction sites of the two most iconic buildings of the Beijing Olympics, the National Stadium (a.k.a. the Bird’s Nest) and the National Aquatics Center (a.k.a. the Water Cube). According to the publisher of her new book, “Gong Ren” (“Workers”), she was able to bypass the authorities and approach her subjects individually—a feat that seems extraordinary, given the government’s intense micro-management of what is essentially the nation’s global coming-out party.
As Paul Goldberger noted in a recent review, these new Olympic monuments were “made possible partly by the presence of huge numbers of low-paid migrant workers”; the construction crew for the Bird’s Nest alone “numbered nine thousand at its peak.” He expressed reservations about the price exacted for the sky line’s glory:
In both conception and execution, the best of Beijing’s Olympic architecture is unimpeachably brilliant. But the development also exemplifies traits—the reckless embrace of the fashionable and the global, the authoritarian planning heedless of human cost—that are elsewhere denaturing, even destroying, the fabric of the city."

Summer Reads, how about 411,422 choices

An intertesting post from the Boston Globe reporting from Bowker, the publisher of Books in Print, that the number of book titles printed last year by American publishers was 276,649, a slight increase from 274,416 the year before. This includes discrete titles; that is, books with separate ISBN numbers. Bowker further notes that if you include public domain titles and print on demand titles that number grows to 411,422.

And the death of books is when? There was talk of this more than 10 years ago with the introduction of the e-book and it still hasn't happened. But there is always new technologies and ways to try to interest the public to publisher's offerings.

From the LA Times an article about new publisher tactics in getting the word out in new formats:

"At Random House, publishers produced four "webisodes" telling an original, live-action story that bridges the time from the end of one Dean Koontz "Odd Thomas" book to the next. More such videos are planned, possibly for other, less well-known authors."

"Barnes & Noble, the nation's largest book chain, has created an online "studio" with more than 1,000 author videos, making it one of the largest such online sites. The goal is to link the ambience of a bookstore -- including author appearances, musical performances and other events -- with desktops and mobile devices."

Innovation is always important in any industry but I can't imagine getting the "ambience of a bookstore" through my desktop. It just doesn't compare to visiting any of the local bookstores near you.

50 Best Cult Books, Or What Haven't You Tossed Since College

The London Telegraph has a great article of the 50 best cult books. I'm a sucker for book lists and I particularly like the British take on things.

"Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon."

Is there anything better in the book review world than a terse British take on a volume? And this list is full of them. Here's their view on Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly which took the world by storm: "For decades, the cowed menfolk of the world ambled about in pinafores, dusting ornaments and saying "yes, dear". Then Robert Bly wrote Iron John, invented mythopoetic masculinity, and the daft creatures all rushed off into the woods together, hugged, bellowed, wept, painted their furry parts blue and felt re-empowered to wee standing up."

They also point out beautiful novels that defy time:

"TheMaster and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) Satan

live and in person, a man sized black cat, a magician and his
helpmate, Pontius Pilate… Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you’ll struggle to find a Russian who hasn't read it. Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper."

It interesting to note what's left off, they include Ann Rand's Fountainhead but leave off Adam Smith, both canons of Republican sway.


And I can't imagine anyone involved in the home birth revival of the 60s without a copy of Spiritual Midwifery by Ina Mae Gaskin by the bedside. But all in all, its a wonderful list to contemplate and to see if you still have many of these stashed beside all those colleges book you never tossed.

Best of the Booker Prize Goes Public, Vote!

The short list was announced today for the Best of the Booker Prize Award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known in short as the Booker Prize, is the literary prize awarded each year for authors of novels from England, the Commonweath, or Ireland written in English. It is considered one of the important literary awards of the year.

This year the Booker vote goes public as readers world-wide can cast a vote for the six novels on the short list, Pat Barker's The Ghost Road; Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda; J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace; JG Farrell's The Seige of Kishnapur; Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist; and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

This is great list of novels and its interesting that the Booker Prize is allowing public votes. What better way than this to get the public involved and turning its attention to some of the best novels written in the last 40 years.

What They Read, A Look into Literary Libraries and Bathtubs

An interesting link from PhiloBiblos from the VSL webpage covers the contents of famous libraries from the LibraryThing webpage. Its an interesting look to see what they held dear to their shelves.

Here's a link to a collection with the wonderfully offbeat name , The Bathtub Collection. "The Bathtub collection consists of fragments found in the old and rare bindings of the NLM’s rare book collection when items were rebound and conserved in the 1940s and 1950s. It is called the “Bathtub Collection” because then-curator Dorothy Schullian took the leftovers of conservation work home and soaked them in her bathtub to retrieve the often interesting bits and pieces of medieval manuscripts and early printed ephemera she found." Thanks to Sara Piasecki the History of Medicine Librarian at OHSU for the link.