July 30, 2009
Bookish books in the post
I only just noticed that the two books I received in the post today both have books on their covers. On the left, we have The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, a library-set novel. I’d actually requested it from the library, which was fitting, I thought, but when I found I was 146 on the holds list, I decided to buy the book instead. I discovered this book via Melanie’s review— it’s structured as a collection of incident reports logged by employees at a public library. As a former library employee myself, I can vouch that these might be as bizarre as you like, and wonder if the fiction will be as wild as fact is. The other book is Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick, whose Fine Lines column I absolutely adore. As she does in the column, Skurnick rereads “teen classics” in this new book (with guests columnists including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner). The reviews are hilarious, insightful and bring back long misplaced memories.
I think that both of these books are going to prove delightful in their own particular ways.
July 16, 2009
Good Text
From the Descant blog, Katie Franklin on her feminist erotic bookclub and desire for books: “In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes insists, “the text is a fetish object, and the fetish desires me” (Barthes 27). As a librarian I see how the public forms relationships with their books. Patrons come in exacerbated if the paperback they’ve put on hold hasn’t come in yet: “What do you mean my book hasn’t come in? I need it now!” Such outbursts of desire, which may seem more natural in the bedroom, are often common expressions at the circulation desk of the library. However, I don’t blame them for their yearnings. Everyone is entitled to some good text.”
July 9, 2009
Awful Library Books
My friend K. (of the unfortunately now-defunct Pop-Triad) sent me a link to my favourite website of the day, Awful Library Books, which includes texts such as the one whose cover is seen here. The site features books that might be listed as “required weeding” from American public libraries, and I enjoy the bloggers’ commentary as well (“I think the guy in a wheelchair is saying to the woman, “Do I really have to dress like Mr. Rogers?”). You’re also invited to send your own submissions.
July 8, 2009
Harriet joins the library
Yesterday, at the tender age of six weeks, Harriet became a card-carrying member of the Toronto Public Library. She slept through the ceremony, but did seem to enjoy reading Eco Babies Are Green last evening, and seemed incredibly impressed and grateful when I explained to her how lucky we are to live in a city whose fantastic library resources are available to everybody for free. She also liked the Raffi CD we borrowed (and did you know that he is Victoria College’s most illustrious drop-out?).
May 9, 2009
Thatcher knew the type
“Thatcher knew the type. They broke spines, they dog-eared pages, they scribbled obscene comments in the margins and squashed bugs between the covers, they branded the text with coffee rings, flicked ashes in the binding, wiped freshly excavated ear wax on the end papers, used rusty bobby pins and strips of bacon for bookmarks. Small potatoes, he realized, petty vandalism, but not unconnected to great offences. Thatcher had a panoramic vision when it came to crime, a comprehensive view that took in the roots of evil as well as the fruit. All thanks to the firm, guiding hand of his mother, a long-suffering librarian who filled him in like the empty pages of a notepad, sparing no detail. A child who forgets to return a library book, she had warned, may well grow up to be the kind of person who “forgets” to take a knife out of someone’s back…” –Terry Griggs, “Tag” from Quickening
April 22, 2009
Further excitement
My new issue of The New Quarterly has finally arrived! Honestly, never has there ever been an issue of a lit. journal I’ve so wanted to devour– Elizabeth Hay interviewed, Rebecca Rosenblum on Sassy, even Kim Jernigan’s Editor’s Letter is delightful. And speaking of Rosenblums, this particular one has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for her story “Linh Lai” (published in TNQ). I was also excited to see my favourite poet Jennica Harper up for a poetry award. Further excitement: Margaret Atwood’s Adopt a Word to Create a Story story has been revealed. It’s called “Persiflage in the Library” and it’s very cute (read it here).
April 10, 2009
"On" for just two dollars
Today at my local Toronto Public Library Branch (big ups the Spadina Road massive!) I purchased the word “on” for a new short story by Margaret Atwood. This is part of the Adopt a Word to Create a Story fundraising drive ongoing at TPL branches throughout April. For $2 per word, the story will unfold and be revealed in full at each branch and online on April 22nd. What a fabulous initiative!
March 16, 2009
Catalogues
Like most people who’ve spent time working in libraries, I’ve got a thing about cataloguing. And it’s alpha-order for me as a rule, which you’d know if you’ve ever seen my own library, or my CD collection. I get a bit horrified when I hear about libraries ordered by size or colour, for example, which might be gorgeous to see, but how do you ever find anything? It also makes the books less books than decor, which is gross. The colour chaos of my own alphabetized spines are pretty mesmerizing anyway.
But today I had two overlapping experiences of cataloguing/classification that were quite remarkable. First, we went back to Good Egg in Kensington Market (because the weather was sunny and warm, and evidently most of the city thought the Market was a good destination.) My husband has grown very tired of having to venture in there over and over again to visit “my book”, Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros. (It was actually her other book Falling Cloudberries that I originally coveted, but I decided Apples for Jam would be more practical, and it was almost just as beautiful.) I wasn’t about to just buy it, as it’s quite expensive, but having had enough of lingering in bookstores (he enjoys it less than I do, and it was the second one today), Stuart yanked the copy out of loving arms, and proceeded to the till. So now I own the book of dreams (this week), and can die now.
I’ve written about Good Egg before, how it’s a treasure trove. The books obviously selected with care, but the method of selection not always immediately obvious. That the children’s section contains Alligator Pie, The Carrot Seed, No I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato, and sushi yuppie baby board books. In the window, Omnivore’s Dilemma (obvious) was on display beside Wetlands (for the avocado photo on the cover, I presume). Just the widest interpretation of “food books” imaginable, and I love it.
I love also Apples for Jam, just as much as I thought I would. And how brilliant that the whole book is organized, not by ingredients, or courses, or kinds of dishes, but by colour. Each chapter a colour, except the last two which are “multi-coloured” and”stripes”. So that strawberry sorbet is featured alongside tomato lasagne, beetroot gnocchi with baked ham and cheese bread pudding, white risotto in spinach broth and lemon rice pudding with roasted peaches. The whole book is a rainbow, and the order makes sense. I look forward to trying these recipes, and then the eating. Yum.
March 11, 2009
A cynical deception
“It sometimes seemed to Molly that the library was a place of silent discord and anarchy, its superficial tranquility concealing a babel of assertion and dispute. Fiction is one strident lie– or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is just pushing a product. As for autobiography… And all this is just fine. That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return. If the library were to speak, Molly felt, if it were to speak with a thousand tongues, there would be a deep collective growl coming from the core collection up on the high shelves, where the voices of the nineteenth century would be setting precedents, the bleats and cries of a new opinion, new fashion, new style. The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.” –Penelope Lively, Consequences
January 6, 2009
Thoughts about used books
(Via Bookninja): Should we be ashamed of buying used books online? The article discussing secondhand sellers who work through sites like amazon specifically, where you can get a book for a penny plus the shipping/handling costs. I have used amazon second-hand sellers to purchase books, though usually as a last resort because a) the book I wanted was available nowhere else including the library, and my local bookshops or b)I was a student and couldn’t afford it otherwise (and also couldn’t find it in my local bookshops. I always looked first, never missing out on a reason to visit a local bookshop of course, and also because once the shipping/handling was involved, a used book online or off was about the same price). I would suppose that buying new books this way (incl. review copies, which are often available before the book is even in stores) is more than a little tacky, however. But then it is only in the past two years that I’ve become so privileged to be able to spread my bookish dollars so lavishly– not everybody can afford to drop $40.00 on a hardcover in order to feel (deliciously) smug about doing the right thing.
A bookninja commenter makes the very good point that using the library at the very least would provide authors (in Canada) with a small amount of money through Public Lending Rights— nothing a writer could live off of, but it’s the principle.
The problem is not with used books, however, but rather the emptiness of the online exchange. The NY Times article makes a comparison between such exchanges and Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff’s “classic account of a woman in postwar New York who bought her books from a London shop she never saw” noted as being “ahead of its time.” But the whole book captures the rich exchange between Hanff and the booksellers at Marks & Co. Antiquarian Booksellers, who encouraged Hanff’s book buying habits for years and years, supplementing her own requests with their recommendations– in short, doing what local used bookshops are meant to do, which is fostering a literary community, albeit via epistle. Local is a decidedly a relative term, and Hanff’s story is not the same at all.
I enjoyed a piece on the Guardian blog last week about Britain’s charity bookshops. Suggesting it lessens the compunction of depriving authors of the royalties if you know a few quid is going to Oxfam instead. The article noting the impeccable organization of most of these shops, the skill of their clerks at spotting a special book’s value. There is a charm to their shelves, which will always feature a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Fludd. When I lived in England, I was an avid browser, and found many a treasure that brought me to the till. And I feel that authors did ultimately benefit from my purchases, or at least the ones who’re still publishing did, because these shops gave me a route to their discovery and so many of them I’m devoted to now.
Are there any cousins more distant than new books and used ones? One eventually becomes the other, of course, through a certain evolution, but takes on a new kind of value with the change, will become a different kind of cherished. New books have their crispness, their cleanliness, and their smell– their margins at least are a tabula rasa, and a reader can feel like an intrepid explorer venturing out to see the world. Whereas used books wear their history on their pages, with their stains, their own peculiar smells, and stray hairs stuck inside. The names written in and then crossed out on the inside cover suggesting the hands that may have flipped through these pages, the people who might have read them. Suggesting all the readers in the world.
Any reader with integrity will understand that used books have their place, that new books have quite another one, and the problem really isn’t the system at all. Rather, the problem is these supposed “sheepish” bargain hunters who keep bargain hunting anyway, and whose articles should probably be headlined instead, “I’m cheap and a bit of a wanker.”
