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.

Illuminated Manuscript, Modern Interpretations

"In the 8th Century, near what are now Scotland and England, Benedictine monastic scribes created a Bible that today is one of the longest surviving monumental manuscripts in the Western world.
Nearly 1,300 years later, renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson approached the Benedictine monks of Saint John’s University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, with his life-long dream: to create the first handwritten, illuminated bible commissioned since the invention of the printing press. The Saint John’s Bible uses ancient materials and techniques to create a contemporary masterpiece that brings the Word of God to life for the contemporary world."

Coming to Tacoma Art Museum is this remarkable document, The St. John's Bible, the first illuminated bible since the invention of the printing press. And it's not small feat.  More than 1,000 vellum pages measuring 2 by 3 ft. Done by artists the world over using ancient techniques and modern interpretations this is a monumental effort.  

We're also looking forward to the talk by Beautiful Angle co-founder Lance Kagey “Typography through World History”, 7 p.m. July 17. It should be a great event for the Puget Sound region.

Sea Queens, Pirates, And a Pop-Up Moby-Dick

New arrivals for Tacoma grand festival of Tall Ships - a visit of over 20 masted vessals including the great three masted CGC Eagle. Impressive weekend for Tacoma which was voted the best port for the previous Tall Ships festival in 2005. This year should prove to be bigger and better.

Jane Yolen, the great children's author, has just come out with a great new young adult title, Sea Queens - Women Pirates Around the World. Yolen brings us to Artemisia, the admiral-queen of Persia in 500 BC; Grania O'Malley, the Irish "pirate queen" who challenged Queen Elizabeth I's British ships; Madame Ching, who sailed the South China Sea in the early 1800s; and then other female pirates on their ships, in battle, and in disguise.

Another great book for the festival - Moby-Dick, A Pop-Up Book, by Sam Ita. The epic struggle of Ahab, Ishmael, and Queequeg as they chace the fabled whale across the seas is redone in a pop-up graphic novel. As Robert Sabuda says, "Unlike any other version of Moby Dick ever created."

Both books will take you back to the days of sails, yardarms, and chanties. And what a great weekend to take in the sea and watch the ships go by.

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."

Engulfed In What It Is, A Lush Choice of Books

Some fine options for the suitcase of your summer kick-off reads.


David Sedaris packs in smoking, Japan, and more sharp observations in hid latest take on the human condition with When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Sedaris will be visiting Tacoma's Pantages Theater in October. Don't leave your butts outside for this.

Lynda Barry has a wonderful new volume out about what it takes to be creative, What It Is. A "crazy book" destined for the "crazy book section". In typical Barry fashion she brings to light a great melding of art and memoir. There's a nice write up of her from Philly.com. I'm not surprised she'd end up living in a Wisconsin town named Footville fighting windmills.

Richard Price's latest novel, Lush Life, is a stunning tour de force examination of the lower east side of NYC and the vast array of humans trying to navigate life there. Part procedural, part sociological study, part tenement history, Price weaves all these elements in a timeless study of too many people fighting off too many demons.