Book Sort is an exhibition of 25 large photographs by Theresa Rae currently on view at The North Bank Artists Gallery in Vancouver, WA. The series, which is part of Rae's larger body of work titled Questions of Identity, documents Rae's process of unpacking and re-shelving her library after a move.


Rae says:

Everyone has their own way of finding answers. I had to rebuild my world through sorting and solitude. Book Sort documents four days of living with my books as they transitioned from storage to shelves in my home. Because these books have contributed so much to my identity,
I needed to re-bond with them en masse and give myself a sacred time and place to rediscover them individually, in order to decide which ones would remain with me. As an artist, I gave myself permission to step away from conventional methods and experience this transition in my own personal way, without judgment or parameters. I let the project evolve according to its own needs. The camera allows me to be "in the moment" and build my own context. The quietness of the barn, an hour from town--on the hillside by the river, the closeness to nature, time to think and be, personal time with idea people and their books--gave me room to grow and become myself. I am building my life by my choices.

                                There has been much in the press recently about
                                libraries - most of it bad - culminating in the case
                                of one where piped muzak has been introduced
                                because 'libraries are not just about reading anymore.'
                                                              - ABA Newsletter, May 2009


[Censored] Library Chief Administrator Kevin Pine-Coffin looked at the screen, re-read his handiwork and sighed with a mixture of relief, pride and horror. "Who ever imagined it would come to this," he thought. "Can't sell books to raise money, can't layoff staff. Damned book bloggers." He put the final period to the end of the upcoming Calendar, then clicked Save before his blood congealed and he died of embarrassment. "Master of Library Science, Huckster, and Fund-Raising Wizard" he bemoaned. "They said 'it shouldn't be done' but what choice did I have? We need money, honey!"


Schedule of Events for June 2009.

We've turned the economic crisis into an economic opportunity here at the Library with all sorts of fun for the whole family!

June 3. 11AM-12Noon: Book Signing w/Jenna Jamison. The porn star will be signing copies of her new book, I Lost It at the Library. Photo-ops $10. Jenna's cherry-flavored lickable bookmarks will be available for sale.

June 8. 7:30PM-9PM: Books On Ice! Tonight our multi-talented staff debuts their new zero centigrade spectacular. The Main Reading Room will be cleared, a fast sheet of ice will be laid down, and you'll experience the magic of singing librarians skating their hearts out. Nancy and Irma will limn a dramatic reading of Edward Lear's nonsense verse while performing axels with a full twists and spins. Don't miss it! Tickets: $15.

June 12. 2PM-4PM: Immodest members of the local chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America will be on hand to appraise your old books for a modest fee. You will be awed by arcane, pedantic narratives about your books. Proceeds to go to our Tiki  Snack Bar Building Fund

June 14. 7PM-10PM: Bowling For Books! Our new 20-lane bowling alley is now open and our fund-raising tournament begins. The entry fee is only $20 and all money will be used to finish construction of our state-of-the-art movie multiplex which we anticipate will throw off a cool $500,000 in annual profit to be used for adding books to our collection or paying down our massive debt.

June 18. Novelist-poet turned celebrity chef Erica Jong will sign copies of her new book, Fear of Frying, and hawk sets from The Climax Collection, her line of non-stick, water-soluble cookware.
.
June 21. 7PM-9PM: Ultimate Fight Night! It's no-holds barred when staff member Jimmy "Call Me a Wimp and Die" Wilson takes on all comers in the Cage of Maximum Destruction located on the 2d floor adjacent to the Conservation and Preservation department. For only $10 you can take your chance to rip Jimmy from his binding, break his joints, and crack his spine. Disclaimer: Library not responsible for subsequent recasing of unsuccessful contestants.

June 22. Christening Ceremony for the new Saul and Minnie Moskowitz Men's Room and the Sal Hepatica Ladies Room. Cocktails served.* Proceeds from use fees will be budgeted strictly for acquisitions.

*Reminder: Every hour is Happy Hour at The Wishing Well, our fabulous new cocktail lounge located in the Children's Reading Room. Hoist a round of Seven Dwarves of Dynamite, a flight of seven special jiggers of fine single-malt scotches, while enjoying the antics of classic Disney characters at play. Photo ops available for $5.

June 26. Smoot-Hawley Wedding. Open event, all welcome. $35 per person tariff for all you can eat and read at the same time. Time: 5:30 sharp. Late fees will be assessed.

With all the recent talk about Library-Themed Weddings, why not take it to its logical conclusion, hold your ceremony and reception here, and make your nuptials a knockout?

Nancy, our Mistress of the Reference Desk, will assist you with all your planning needs. No matter what your budget - "I do. We're done. Let's go" to a Prince Charles and Diana-like extravaganza - she's sure to put the steak in the ceremony and the sizzle in the reception.

The Library is available for all special events including, but not limited to:

?? Sweet Sixteens
?? Bar Mitzvahs
?? Confirmations
?? Circumcisions
?? Business conferences
?? Pajama Parties
?? Gang Rumbles

Announcement: We are helpless to report that the sweet, somnambulant, cascading strings of Mantovani can now be heard throughout the entire library and not just in the elevators. Going down!

ERRATA: Nat Herold, referred to below as an employee of Valley Books, is actually the co-owner of Amherst Books.

********************************

After 34 years Valley Books of Amherst, MA, one of the oldest used and antiquarian bookshops in New England, is closing.

Owner Larry Pruner says "Every good thing has to come to an end, and when it's no longer a good thing, it comes to an end sooner."

He then shares this:

"The used book business is like an ecosystem that's been thrown off balance by e-books, the Internet and the recession. It's hammering away at a world that used to exist but doesn't in the same form anymore."

Nat Herold, an employee at Valley Books added this nugget:

"The Internet has made everyone more cosmopolitan, but it has made Amherst more parochial"

This really is, in many ways, an unprecedented time in the history of bookselling.


Full story at Amherst Bulletin

Received today via the Ex-Libris email list from Terry Belanger, University Professor, Honorary Curator of Special Collections, and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Full disclosure: Professor Belanger will be teaching the course I am planning to take at Rare Book School this summer. Also, USF President Stephen Privett worked at my alma mater, Santa Clara University, before moving on to USF. I did receive permission from Professor Belanger to reprint his post to the Ex-Libris list in its entirety:

From Professor Belanger:
"The following, just in from a source I trust:

'During his tenure at the University of San Francisco (USF), President Stephen Privett has been devoted in giving all his time and energy to its benefit. In the current economic crisis, he is tasked with painfully difficult, thankless, and unpopular decisions: to identify academic programs to discontinue and assets to sell, if necessary, to stabilize USF's finances. On Sunday, 10 May 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story on the cancellation of USF's M.A. in Theology program amid protest. Earlier, on April 30th, the lead story in the campus newspaper, The Foghorn, told of assets identified for possible sale, primarily USF's renowned rare book collections, but even including the possibility of the Lone Mountain campus. The story may be accessed here (or search Google for "foghorn rare books").

Faculty and library donors and supporters have been appalled and dismayed that the Library could be stripped of its collections, virtually all of which were donated to the Library or purchased with donated funds. In the last 50 years, under the visionary leadership of Fr. William Monihan, S.J., Bay Area families and others worldwide have generously contributed books, manuscripts, artworks and funds to create the Gleeson Library and its Donohue Rare Book Room which, together, State Librarian emeritus Kevin Starr has described as "an epicenter of Jesuit Humanism" and "a library second to none." Donors reasonably anticipated that their collections might have a permanent and secure home there.

Unfortunately, President Privett, has not only identified library treasures for sale, he has already quietly and anonymously
started to consign them for sale at auction. He recently stripped from the Timken-Zinkann Collection, an early founding core collection of the Library, a series of original woodcuts and engravings - mostly iconic images of Catholic and Christian tradition - by leading Renaissance artist and author, Albrecht Durer, in effect destroying the integrity of the collection. Together with an early, original Rembrandt etching, the Durer prints were anonymously offered for sale at auction Tuesday morning, 11 May, at Bonhams, despite a valiant last-minute effort on the part of faculty and library supporters to persuade Privett to suspend the sale.

See this link to the Bonhams website for a record of the sales.

In a down market, only the Rembrandt and a few of the Durers sold. Those of us who support the integrity of the Library's collections, hope the unsold items may be returned to their home of many years for the continued benefit of students, researchers and faculty.

According to the Foghorn Online story cited above, Privett insists that, if the items compiled from the Rare Book Room were ever sold, they would be "non-book items, duplicate volumes, or single volumes, not part of a series or collection." As for the Durer collection, Privett said, "They (the prints) were discovered by accident. We have an art gallery, not a museum. We didn't have a place for them."

Sadly, one of the Durer engravings sold (for $67,100 including buyer's premium) is "St. Jerome in His Study," an image which noted author Stephen Mitchell has described movingly in his writing. St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians whose feast day is September 30th. Traditionally, every September his engraving was exhibited in the Gleeson Library to bring blessings and protection to the Library itself, to the librarians who selflessly work there, and to all those who research and patronize it. Whose or what image will now bless and protect USF's Gleeson Library? Perhaps, come next September, some one will hang black mourning cloth where once the image of St. Jerome was displayed.

Ironically, President Privett has stated that money made from the sale of Rare Book Room items will go towards the renovation of the room itself. Once collections are compromised and books, manuscripts, artworks, ephemera and related items have been cannibalized from them, for what pupose will the Rare Book Room be renovated?

Both history Professor Martin Claussen, claussenm@usfca.edu, and Gleeson Library Associates Co-President, Walrave Jansen, wallyj@ix.netcom.com, have written eloquently about saving USF's are book collections and are actively working to do so. President Privett has agreed to meet with faculty tomorrow (Thursday 14 May), to discuss the situation.

President Privett emphasized in the campus newspaper that he was only making worst case scenario contingency plans. The fact that he had already quietly and secretly consigned items from the Library for sale at auction - courageously uncovered and exposed by history Professor Martin Claussen - belies the contingent nature of his plans. Contingencies have a way of becoming realities all too quickly!

When one thinks of Gleeson librarians Father William Monihan and D. Steven Corey, and all the collectors and donors who
contributed to make the rare book collections of USF what they are, it is dismal to recognize what is happening today.
In addition to Prof. Claussen, Walrave Jansen, Gleeson Library Associates Co-President, has been doing remarkable work to attempt to staunch the bleeding of the Donohue Rare Book Room holdings. One thing that amazes me is that the University President seems to have taken over and is attempting to micromanage deaccessioning, something that I would think should be the responsibility of the Library Dean and Library staff members.

Should you wish to express yourself to USF President Stephen Privett, or Library Dean Tyrone Cannon, they can be addressed respectively at privett@usfca.edu and cannont@usfca.edu.'

I have not yet been able to verify all of the details of this story, but (for openers) it's clear that the prints were indeed auctioned off. The most offensive part of this sad tale is that the sales were conducted surreptitiously.

I think that the first order of business is to alert journalist friends and colleagues; there's an important story percolating here."

-Terry Belanger

UPDATE: Jeremy has been able to post about this topic with the commentary I wish I had time to write. Click here to read.

UPDATE #2: More commentary from Book Patrol.

In March of 2008 writer and librarian Scott Douglas and then library assistant Diana Vizcarra got married. From the invites to the table settings their book love paved the way to what had to be an event to remember.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm giving a talk on Thursday in Columbus on the end of the printed book. Here's a brief preview:

The subject of the end of the printed book, presaged by the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eBook, is often accompanied by an analogy to the replacement of vinyl records with CDs and now MP3s. This is not a useful comparison, except in that MP3s and e-books are both digital media.

A book is not like a wax cylinder, however.

Recorded music is a new technology. Music playback devices are just over 100 years old, and they have evolved constantly and rapidly during that time. No one from even twenty years ago would recognize this device as a replacement for the LP or CD.

Yet most contemporary readers would recognize this as a book, although it dates from the Middle Ages.

Books are a very mature technology, and therefore hard to replace. But not impossible.

It would be nice to take some solace in the fact that electronic books are far inferior to printed books, yet the history of the book shows that we (readers) have always chosen cheap and convenient alternatives.

Illuminated manuscripts were replaced with unadorned printed books. Hand-painted miniature illustrations were replaced by crude woodblock prints in books. Letterpress printing was replaced by crude machine-powered electrotyped books. Cloth bindings replaced leather. Paper textured to look like cloth replaced cloth. Paperbacks supplanted hardcovers as the preferred medium. Vibrant chromolithographs were replaced by 3-color halftones. And that's why ebooks will replace printed books. And now they're calling my flight. See you  in Columbus.

That's the subject of my talk tomorrow night (Thursday) at the Aldus Society in Columbus, Ohio. The meeting will be held at the Thurber Center, 91 Jefferson Avenue. Socializing begins at 7:00 PM.

If you're in the area, come to heckle or commiserate.

Author of the great succès de scandale of 19th century literature, on January 1857 Gustave Flaubert and his publishers were taken to court for "outrage to public morals and religion."

Madame Bovary was the reason for the scandal. But while adultery and earthy language were the reasons why Flaubert was (unsuccessfully) prosecuted, he might just as well have been prosecuted for poor penmanship. Had he been in Mrs. Stallone's third grade cursive writing class in P.S. 2, he'd still be at his desk with her standing over him drilling on flowing curves and fancy loops.

Flaubert was a compulsive-obsessive writer. As Brigid Grauman writes in the Wall Street Journal "The nihilistic, anti-bourgeois Flaubert spent four-and-a-half years writing it, sweating over every word, every sentence, every paragraph...Flaubert's obsession with style is legendary, down to his technique of bellowing his sentences out loud to make sure they worked musically, like poetry. His identification with the bored, highly strung, aspirational Emma Bovary is also widely documented. What is less well known is that he kept every one of the novel's many drafts, going so far as to say that he wanted to be buried with them."

That did not, fortunately, occur. After the novelist's death, his niece, Caroline, donated the manuscript to the Municipal Library of Rouen, the French town where Flaubert wrote the book. Seven years ago, the Library decided, despite a lack of funding, to make every word of Flaubert's various drafts available online.

The entire project can now be viewed at Les Manuscrits de Madame Bovary Edition Integrale sur le Web.

The manuscript must be seen to be believed. Cross-outs, substitutions, and side notes abound. The appearance of the manuscript - all 4500 pages of text all online; yikes! - foreshadows Dada Surrealism. Suffice it to say, as compulsive as he was if Flaubert had used a computer word processing program he'd still be, 152 years later, making changes; the curse of revision made easy.

A final word on Flaubert's penmanship skills: non-existent, like a monkey on meth. The major effort on the project was deciphering Flaubert's handwriting for transcription for, wisely, the project has each page of the original manuscript displayed next to a readable transcription of it.

Since the site's debut last month, it has been deluged by visitors. For a great swim into the world of Flaubert and Madame Bovary, dive into the flood.

                                                                                            

Though I have always been a reader, I did not become a serious collector of books until I was in my mid-30s. I have always loved "things," however, and it was not without reason that my mother called me a magpie for all the junk I hoarded as a kid. My earliest pursuits as a child were rocks, an interest I have retained to this day, especially while walking on beaches, and postcards, which I kept under my bed in a tattered old valise I had rescued from the trash. I began to gather these fabulous little curiosities around the age of seven or eight, and kept at it well into my teens, when other interests began to kick in.

I undoubtedly had this childhood fascination for postcards in mind back in 1984 when I bought, at a small auction put on by the Friends of the Goddard Library at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., 4,800 of them filed judiciously in eight boxes, all gathered over many years by the late Francis Henry Taylor, who from 1931 to 1940 was director of the Worcester Art Museum, followed by fifteen years at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, then back again to Worcester, until his death in 1957. Taylor had gathered most of these pieces of graphic ephemera while traveling the world to build the collections of the two museums, and used them, from what I have been able to determine, as a kind of pre-Internet form of search engine to gather information, not only for his art quests, but also as background for his writing; he was the author, in 1948, of "The Taste of Angels," a best-selling history of art collecting.



What has prompted me to recall my interest in postcards, and to mention my sub-collection of Francis Henry Taylor (which I wrote about, by the way, in "Among the Gently Mad," pp.32-36), is a fabulous exhibition showing now through May 25 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the publication of a splendid catalog to accompany it, "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard," by Jeff L. Rosenheim (Steidl/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 408 pages, $65.

Walker Evans (1903-1975), of course, was one of the great photographers of his time, acclaimed by some as the poet laureate of the medium in America. A master of the documentary approach, Evans is best known for the 1938 monograph of his work, "American Photographs," and for his collaboration with the writer James Agee in 1941 on "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" a powerful commentary on life among tenant farmers in the rural South during the Great Depression.

The exhibition at the Met includes a number of Evans' photographs, but the principal thrust is on showcasing several hundred examples of a collection that consumed him for more than fifty years--the gathering of some nine thousand postcards--and the way they informed his vision as an artist. "A surprising number of highly accomplished writers, picture makers, and performers are obsessive collections," Rosenheim, a curator of photography at the museum, writes in the monograph, noting the butterflies of Vladimir Nabokov, the bakelite bracelets of Andy Warhol, the vast collection of paintings by other artists coveted by Edgar Degas as just three examples.

In the instance of Evans, the postcards--most of them dating from the early decades of the twentieth century--are in the permanent collection of the museum, part of the Evans archive which it acquired from the artist's estate. "He collected postcards when they were new and he was young, and when he was old and they had become classics," Rosenheim notes. Evans also collected such things as printed ephemera, driftwood, tin-can pull tabs and metal and tin wood signs that he photographed in situ, and then removed from their moorings. Altogether my kind of guy.

Not content to merely collect postcards--which covered a vast range of subjects, from the purely pictorial to the nutty and the whimsical--Evans researched their history, and wrote about them as a cultural phenomenon distinctive of their time. In 1963, he gave a lecture at Yale University on them that he titled "Lyric Documentary," a phrase he coined to describe their function as a window into American cultural life.

The book includes color reproductions of 400 examples from the collection; Rosenheim's text is richly informed, and represents an important contribution to the study of this largely unappreciated form of popular art, and makes a very strong case for the premise that his photography was greatly influenced by it. A terrific book--and a terrific exhibition; by all means take it in if you find yourself in New York over the next couple of weeks.

Kid's Republic is a book haven for the children of Beijing. It opened in 2005 and was designed by Japanese architect Keiichiro Sako. It's stocked with picture books from all over the world and has an activity room that hosts storytelling events and anime screenings. It also offers one of the coolest settings for both kids and grown to interact with books.


On the design, via Luxurylaunchs.com:

36-year-old Japanese architect Keiichiro Sako's design for children's bookstore Kid's Republic gives full play to the innocence, fun and inquisitiveness of the young, conjuring up images of childhood that are sure to enchant anyone walking through the doors. Twelve bands of color weave their way around the activity room to create a rainbow-like décor for a space used for storytelling and anime screenings.

Recesses in walls and ceiling accommodate light fittings and displays, and the stepped floor forms a natural stage and auditorium. The carpet provides a comfortable surface that invites children to sit or sprawl wherever takes their fancy. A ribbon of rainbow colors starts at the bottom of the stairs next to the entrance and winds its way up to the floor above, metamorphosing into various objects along the way. Functioning in places as bookshelf, table and gates, it twists and twirls to form counters and even ceiling parts, traveling a hundred meters before finally turning into a backdrop for the handrail that leads back down the stairwell to where it all began.

What a treat.


Thanks to Pratham Books for the lead