Dashiell Hammett’s old studio apartment is up for sale.
(That would be me that socketsite.com refers to as their “plugged-in reader.”)
307 sq ft. *only* $249K
June 14, 2007
Book sorting progress
… of sorts.
Doesn’t help to be tied down here because the solar guys were supposed to put the panels back up on the new roof today but never showed. Maybe tomorrow his nibs will work from home and set me free to sort some more …
Sour Grapes offers in comments re Barchester Towers If I win you can have it. I’ve got it already.
Thanks. I was just feeling left out because I wanted to enter the contest too! I’m pretty sure I have a copy somewhere — probably in a box marked “classics” or “misc” or “fiction” or …
The book sorting goes apace. Well, “at a pace” anyway.
All travel books (except for USA travel) are out of their boxes and shifted over to adjacent bookcases, sorted by continent and country. The BENELUX titles and others of the ilk are a problem. I found multiple copies of some titles, which seems always the case, but not that many multiples. Even with the travel books settled, I get sidetracked thumbing through old travel books about Venice and travel memoirs and … well, I get sidetracked a lot.
After I shifted and sorted the travel books, I moved the cookbooks that were in the shelves over there over thataway to fill in the empty shelves where the travel books had been (adjacent to the bulk of the cookbooks) so now all the cookbooks are in one bank of shelves instead of scattered around. There are still boxes (six or so) that are boxed up because there’s no shelf space plus an additional box with a set of “Grande Diplome” cookbooks that I picked up used somewhere and two boxes that are filled with the Time-Life cookbook series that I picked up used here and there over time. A friend asked if I’d be willing to give her a set of Time-Life cookbooks and I said sure, but she’s got to get herself over and pick them up.
Most of the cookbooks still in boxes are “community cookbook” sorts of titles. I’ve sorted the titles on the shelves into “baking” “country-specific” “barbecue” “old” “San Francisco” “California” sorts of categories.
On the shelves after sorting, I discovered multiple editions of the Household Searchlight Recipe Book: three from different years in the ’30s, two from the ’40s and a couple from the ’50s. (The name changed to the Searchlight Recipe Book in 1942.) Different editions! Keep them all! Well, no. Turns out even though the books have different edition numbers and different publication dates, the contents of the 1st-14th editions are the same, according to this site.
I have multiple editions of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, two copies of Larousse Gastronomique, multiple copies of James Beard books, two copies of Rene Verdon’s The White House Chef Cookbook (and tell me, should that be a general USA cookbook or should I put it in “San Francisco” because Verdon ran Le Trianon here for years?) There are, of course, multiple copies of some Sunset cookbooks, multiple copies of other titles. I filled up two boxes worth of duplicates for the library. The weirdest, though, was the duplicate copy of Madame Chang’s Long Life Chinese Cookbook. Two copies? How did that ever happen?
The cookbooks are pretty well sorted now, although I may find that I have a French dessert cookbook in with dessert cookbooks and another copy in with French cookbooks. Those will sort out in time.
Next up is to start getting the SFF in order. My SFF books are the most likely to have duplicates because my brother and I had copies of the same books in our collections and those collections combined after he died. The most egregious example of too many copies of a title is a Heinlein title for which I wound up with two paperback copies, two hardbacks and one mass market paperback.
I’ll take the empty bookcases that had held cookbooks and setup a rough sort (A-Z by author, ‘natch) of the SFF books and winnow out the duplicates. I won’t be able to get all of them on the empty shelves I have remaining, but I can at least sort through them in alphabetic shifts. Thanks be that I had the SFF boxed separately from the fiction, and labeled so I could find them in amongst all the piles.
After the pass through the SFF is complete, I’ll start sorting through all the boxes labeled MISC and VERY MISC and NFIC and, of course, those boxes that are somehow unlabeled. I’ll get the books organized in some sort of fashion so I can easily see that I have two copies of How to Build Your Dream House for Less Than $3500 and get rid of duplicates. (Yes, I know I have two copies, maybe three of that book. I’d bought one for myself, you see, because I’d loved my parents’ copy. I gave a copy to my brother because I knew he’d love it. I may have bought a spare at some time too. …)
I’ll rough-sort the misc and pull out the fiction titles and the juv and sort the rest into some broad categories: science, essays/memoirs, biography/autobiography, history, reference, gardening, computers … I don’t know. I need to think out the sort before I get seriously into it or I’ll wind up sorting and resorting and …
I also have all the boxes of books that are already labeled “science” and “physics” and “law” and “reference” and whatever that I needs must go through because there was some higglety-pigglety-ness in the boxing up before the move and who knows what may have been tucked into an almost-full box at the last minute.
Once I can lay out all the PHYSICS or GEOLOGY or SOFTWARE DESIGN books in one place I can get a handle on duplicates and other titles that I don’t need to save shelf space for.
Maybe along the way I’ll find my copy of Barchester Towers and Vanity Fair and Morrison & Boyd’s Organic Chemistry. Why own a book if I can’t find it?
Yes, I am being unduly obsessive/compulsive about this (Why do you ask?) but I’m also using the exercise as one enormous procrastination project while I mull over the rewrite on the great American crime novel.
Productive procrastination, I call it. (The dupes and discards will be given to the library to use or sell! It’s for the library! Think of the public libraries!)
(And I have visions of my darlings having to sort through all of Mom’s old books after I take my dirt nap, looking for those of value. Better that I weed the collection now and save them at least some of the effort.)
June 13, 2007
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted – Amy E. Boyle Johnston, LA Weekly.
[...]
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
[...]
“I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV,” Bradbury says in the censorship/television video clip. The collection of clips includes his explanation of how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in a clip titled (oddly enough) FAHRENHEIT 451.
The Bradbury site also includes a wonderful obit for Marguerite Susan McClure (Maggie) Bradbury, who died in 2003.
Anthony Trollope
Welcome to Anthony Trollope
We’re bringing Trollope’s world to life with character descriptions, plot summaries, details of Trollope’s career as well as free e-texts of the novels to download.
It’s the 150th anniversary of Barchester Towers. Stop on by. Grab a piece of cake!
The folks behind the site are giving away 50 copies of Barchester Towers. You can’t win unless you enter. Deadline 30 June 2007.
Must be resident of UK to win. (It’s not fair, Mom!)
Sic Press: Book Repair & Cleaning Supplies for Booksellers
Sic Press not only sells supplies but also a how-to book: UNBOUND: Book Repair for Booksellers ($16).
Sic Press also offers (free!) on-site informative how-to videos with titles like “How to Remove a Bookplate” and “Re-attaching a Single Cover.”
Useful info on the Web for the bibliophiles with beat-up old books amongst us.
Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D
The amazing world of the Web.
Robot Scans Ancient Manuscript in 3-D by Amy Hackney Blackwell
[Action takes place in Venice at the Public Library of St. Mark.]
After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.
[...]
To store the data, the team used a 1-terabyte redundant-disk storage system on a high-speed network. The classicists on duty backed up the data every evening on two 750-GB drives and on digital tape. Blackwell carried the hard drives home with him every night, rather than leave the data in the library.
The next step is making the images readable. The Venetus A is handwritten and contains ligatures and abbreviations that boggle most text-recognition software. So, this summer a group of graduate and undergraduate students of Greek will gather at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., to produce XML transcriptions of the text. Eventually, their work will be posted online for anyone to search, as part of the Homer Multitext Project.
Brilliant use of technology.
June 10, 2007
America’s Most Literate Cities 2006
Someone came through yesterday looking for information on America’s most literate cities. The click on the post from August 2004 went to a 404 site. (Click since updated.)
The most recent information I could find were the 2006 results which showed, among other factors, that San Francisco has the number two slot in booksellers (behind Seattle, WA) when the following factors are considered
- number of retail bookstores per 10K pop’n
- number of rare and used bookstores per 10K pop’n
- number of members of the ABA per 10K pop’n
Overall, San Francisco is #9.
June 6, 2007
The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
SourGrapes commented I can’t wait to see what you’re going to make of a mash-up of Baudrillard, Aristotle and Robert-Houdin.
The mash-up already exists: I’m reading a book the YYG told me I should read: The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas.
I’ve taken to scratching notes when I come across something interesting, unknown, strange. I stopped reading for a while this afternoon to hunt down some of the “unknown”s on the Web.
Also in my notes are some turns of phrase:
- Monday morning and the sky is the color of sad weddings
- it looks like the kind of place you’d come to when you’d retired or given up on life in some other way
Huh? Retiring is the same as giving up on life? Whatever. She’s far younger than I am.
And, sure, I know. That writing may be a bit self-conscious. “the color of sad weddings” tweaks my mind in a fashion similar to “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
In both cases, you’re pretty sure the writer thinks he’s too clever by half, but he is.
More random sites in the next few days, probably. (I only brought up the first collection of notes and there’s probably 4/5ths of the book left to go. …)
The book’s an amazing amalgam of references, everything from Paley’s watch to Lamarck v Darwin, Erewhon (which I’ll now have to go and reread for the first time since I was eighteen), Derrida and Edgar Allan Poe.
May 24, 2007
Old pals, reunited
The younger younger guy is out visiting from Boston for ten days or so. Yesterday we drove over to Santa Cruz to meet up with the older younger guy and his partner, have lunch and visit the family matriarch.
The older younger guy’s partner went back to work after lunch and the three of us decided to kill the time between then and when the matriarch expected us by hanging out at LOGOS Books.
For the last week or two, since his nibs and I returned from a short four-day trip up-coast to visit with an old friend and explore, I’ve been making a stab at sorting through the tens of thousands of books on shelves and in boxes (lots and lots of boxes) to identify the duplicates and the not-wanted to donate to a library effort.
In the last couple weeks with a couple full days’ effort and some partial-day exercises, I’ve managed to shift all the crime fiction onto shelves (about eight bookcases worth, sorted by author and by title within the author) and to start getting the travel books organized. (roughly sorted by continent and country, natch).
The travel books include not only books we bought while traveling but also books we bought new and used in stores and a good number of older books that his nibs’ great-great aunt Burta purchased in her day.
I’ve sorted out five bookcases of travel books and have at least another two cases to go before even starting on the United States travel-related books.
Yes, as expected, I had multiple copies of Chandlers and Christies in the crime fiction collection, multiple copies of JD MacDonalds and Karin Slaughters. I found I was missing Q and R from my run of Graftons (said lack since remedied). What I had not expected were multiple copies of Lowell Thomas titles and multiple copies of “glimpses of Europe” sorts of titles in the travel collection. Along the way I discovered that some books had been masquerading as travel but were actually garden titles or history titles or geology titles.
Yesterday at the LOGOS bookstore. I was poking through the crime fiction, the children’s books, the “how to draw” art books, the gardening books. There in the gardening books was this old book that, when I pulled it from the shelf, looked very much like a book that I’d sorted out of the travel books late last week because it was more a garden book, not a travel book per se.
The book I’d come across last week, with illustrations painted by Beatrice Parsons, was titled something like Old-World Gardens and had pictures and descriptions of European gardens.
I looked at the LOGOS book in my hand. Interesting, I thought. How much?
I opened the cover and found this
… the tell-tale spore of Burta — her initials (MBB) handwritten in pencil on the front free-endpaper.
I probably wouldn’t have bought the book otherwise, but how could I resist? I will reunite it on a shelf with its old pal when I start sorting through the gardening titles.
***
It took until I was driving back to San Francisco to realize just how one of MBB’s books had wound up in a used bookstore in Santa Cruz.
His nibs’ father’s twin brother had lived in Aptos, where the older younger guy currently lives. We hadn’t realized he’d had any, but Uncle Burt must have had at least this one of Burta’s old books. One of uncle Burt’s children must have sold the book or given it away to someone who sold the book to LOGOS.
Thank goodness I thought of a reasonable explanation for how the book wound up seventy-five miles away from San Francisco in a town that Burta, who so far as we knew, had never visited. Very spooky it was to pick up a book in a used bookstore in Santa Cruz and see her scribbled initials.
May 22, 2007
What Should I Read Next?
Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our database of real readers’
favourite books (over 32,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.
e.g.
Enter title and/or author
Enter title: The End of Mr. Y
[click] What Should I Read Next?
App comes back
Did you mean:
The End of Mr. Y – Scarlett Thomas
Click the title above if correct, or amend the details below
[click] title above
results:
The Carpathians – Janet Frame See Amazon UK | US
My Life as Emperor – Su Tong See Amazon UK | US
Charades – Janette Turner Hospital See Amazon UK | US
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon – Jeffrey Masson See Amazon UK | US
The Gourmet Club: A Sextet – Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Anthony Chambers, Paul McCarthy See Amazon UK | US
The Secret World of Og – Pierre Berton See Amazon UK | US
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust – Charles Patterson See Amazon UK | US
Quicksand – Jun’ichiro Tanizaki See Amazon UK | US
Tales of Hoffmann – E. T. A Hoffmann See Amazon UK | US
The Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor – Frank O’Connor See Amazon UK | US
more results …
Interesting app. And, yes, Scarlett Thomas’ other books do not pop up in that first list of suggestions.
Register if you’d like to be part of this Web2.0 app. Site money stream seems to come from those Amazon click-throughs.
[caution: The response time can be a bit slow.]
[mentioned in a post from the Project Wombat list.]