Friday, November 30, 2012

Five Brooklyn libraries hit hard by Sandy still closed - will cost $10 million for building repairs and books

Nearly 80,000 books, magazines and DVDs destroyed in the storm
by: Reuvan Blau

The Coney Island library branch was severely damaged by Sandy.

 Five Brooklyn libraries severely damaged by Sandy are still shuttered nearly a month after the storm - and will cost unprecedented millions to get back up and running.

“We were hurt,” said Brooklyn Public Library VP of strategic planning Jeanette Moy. “But we are leveraging every asset we have and every partnership that's possible to bring services back to the community.”

The repairs will cost an estimated $10 million in total, BPL officials said. That includes massive structural repairs and replacing 75,852 books, magazines and DVDs that were ruined by flood waters.

The most seriously affected branches are Gerritsen Beach and Coney Island, which will likely remain closed for months and need new electrical systems, doors, chairs, shelves, and computers.
Not a pulp fiction! But a tragic reality and Hurricane Sandy destroyed 35,000 books, plus computers and DVDs at the Coney Island library. 

Both spots lost the majority of their book collections, with 35,177 books and DVDs destroyed at Gerritsen Beach branch on Gerristen Ave. on and 35,177 at Coney Island on Mermaid Ave.

Library officials were unable to predict when those sites will be reopened.

“We are aggressively trying to get the sites open,” Moy said.

The other sites still down include libraries in Gravesend, Red Hook and Sheepshead Bay - which are expected to open over the next few weeks, officials said

The storm damage puts a further strain on a library system already reeling from more than $250 million in badly-needed repairs to its branches, some of which are more than 100 years old.

The Bloomberg administration has typically only allocated $15 million a year for library repairs.

BPL officials are hoping to get additional money from the city for storm repairs as well from FEMA and insurance companies.
Hurricane Sandy badly damaged five branches of the Brooklyn Public Library – doing at least $10 million worth of destruction.
City Councilman Domenic Recchia Jr. (D-Coney Island) said businesses and homes in his entire district are slowly rebuilding - but the local library remains far behind.
“The public library...is one of the central focal points in our community so the damage sustained by the building and the fact that it remains closed is clearly of concern,” he said.

Recchia, the Council's finance chair said he would do everrything in his power to “ensure that its inventory and services are fully restored.”

City Councilman Lew Fidler (D-Marine Park) said hard-hit residents in Gerritsen Beach who just got power back last week could use the library as a shelter if it was repaired soon.

“There are hundreds of people without homes,” he said. “Not to minimize the importance of the library, but right now it would be more useful as a shelter.”

But that's not the BPL's current plan.

In an effort to continue services, the BPL has dispatched four Bookmobiles equipped with charging stations and free books and activities for children. More than 1,4000 books have beenhanded out for free via that service.

from: NY Daily News

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Hamlet rewritten as choose-your-own-adventure game book

Graphic story offers chance to explore the 'fun, crazy' plot choices Shakespeare rejected

by: Alison Flood

A choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet featuring jokes, ghosts and the previously unseen pirate fight scene, has raised more than six times its goal on Kickstarter in less than a week.


Ryan North, a Canadian comic book writer, launched his appeal on 21 November. In three-and-a-half hours it had raised its goal of $20,000 (£12,500), and today is at almost $150,000 and counting. His version of Hamlet will be called To Be Or Not To Be, and will be an illustrated, chooseable-path adventure story.

Readers will be able to opt to Hamlet ("an emo teen in his early 30s"), Ophelia ("She's got a +1 science stat, but she's also got a -1 weakness against water") or the King, Hamlet's father, "who (SURPRISE) dies on the first page and becomes a ghost. And then we make fun of you for dying on the first page, but you can become a ghost and must INVESTIGATE YOUR OWN MURDER that you TOTALLY SLEPT THROUGH because you got SLEEPY IN AN ORCHARD. ("Shakespeare wrote this part," said North.)

Readers can opt to follow the same choices as Shakespeare's characters, with "little Yorick skulls beside the 'canonical' choices", but North points out that "Shakespeare's choices didn't lead to the best ending for the characters. Not by a long shot." And although the story is told in modern language, there is the option to see the "big speeches" in Shakespeare's "original beautiful and fancy language".

"I've used the story of Hamlet as a starting point, but a) that's already a great story because it ends with pretty much everyone in it getting stabbed in the body and b) the story can go in all sorts of fun, crazy directions when you make a choice that Shakespeare didn't," said North. "Also unlike Shakespeare I didn't skip over the pirate scene in Hamlet. You get to fight PIRATES. With SWORDS. And yes OF COURSE you can choose which body part you cut off. Why would you write a book where you can't do that is my question."

The more money that is raised on Kickstarter by the appeal's end-date of 21 December, the more North will add to the book, including new illustrations by a range of artists – "the more money we raise, the more deaths get illustrated, until we have all 110 deaths done" – and a mini prequel adventure called Poor Yorick. The book will be published with Breadpig, which will donate 100% of its share of profits to the Canadian Cancer Society (North's wife was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma earlier this year).

"While we've been lucky enough to have a cancer that's been responding to treatment, cancer is still a terrible, terrible disease. By supporting this book, you're also supporting research for a cure. That is really cool," said North. "But all that aside, I've worked to include every amazing thing possible in a book like this. There's loops, alternate endings, secret paths and things that I'm pretty sure haven't even been done before in the medium."

As of Tuesday morning, 4,353 readers had pledged money to find out more.

from: Guardian

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Former OED editor covertly deleted thousand of words, book claims

Efforts to rewrite the dictionary in the 70s and 80s to omit entries with foreign origins described as 'really shocking' by author

by: Alison Flood

Robert Burchfield worked on four supplements to the Oxford English ­Dictionary, produced between 1972 and 1986. Photograph: Jane Bown

An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.


Robert Burchfield's efforts to rewrite the dictionary have been uncovered by Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist, lexicographer and former editor on the OED.

Ogilvie worked for 11 years to research and write Words of the World, published by Cambridge University Press, which challenges the widely held belief that editors of the OED between 1884 and 1933 were Anglocentric Oxford dons obsessed with preserving the Queen's English, and that it was not until Robert Burchfield's four supplements, produced between 1972 and 1986, that the dictionary was opened up to the wider world.

"I observed a pattern, that actually it was the earlier editors who were dealing with words in a really enlightened way. They certainly weren't these Anglocentric, judging kind of editors – they were very sensitive to cultural differences and they seemed to be putting in a lot of foreign words and a lot of words from different varieties of English, which must have been amazing for that day when colonial varieties of English were just emerging," said Ogilvie.

She undertook a detailed analysis of Burchfield's supplement, comparing it with the 1933 supplement by Charles Onions and William Craigie. She found that, far from opening up the OED to foreign linguistic influences, Burchfield had deleted 17% of the "loanwords" and world English words that had been included by Onions, who included 45% more foreign words than Burchfield.

Examples of Burchfield's deleted words include balisaur, an Indian badger-like animal; the American English wake-up, a golden-winged woodpecker; boviander, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race living on the river banks; and danchi, a Bengali shrub. The OED is now re-evaluating words expunged by Burchfield, who died in 2004, aged 81.

"This is really shocking. If a word gets into the OED, it never leaves. If it becomes obsolete, we put a dagger beside it, but it never leaves," Ogilvie said.

In tracing the discrepancy back to its origins, she found that the dictionary's first editor, James Murray, in the 19th century, was harshly criticised for including contributions by correspondents from as far away as Ceylon, Mexico, and New Zealand. One reviewer wrote: "There is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words."

But Murray pressed on, as, later, did Onions, helped by readers from around the world.

As well as Americanisms and other regional variations in English, there were also those which entered English globally, such as typhoon, okra, abattoir, svelte and bamboo, or those restricted to a particular region, for example pak pai in Hong Kong, which is a car used illegally as a taxi.

The first version of the OED, released in 1884, contained words from all round the world, from aard-vark and aard-wolf to acacia. Murray also included the rodent, the agouti; the South American howling monkey, the alouatte; and the Philippine textile, abaca.

"If a word was used in an English context, it qualified as an English word. After all, from the OED's beginnings, it was considered to be a dictionary of the English language, not merely a dictionary written by and for the people of England," said Ogilvie. Murray actually put out a public appeal for English speakers around the world to send him quotations including exotic varieties of English.The myth that the dictionary's early editors were Anglocentric originates, believes Ogilvie, with Burchfield himself.

"I traced it back and it all started in the early 1970s with Burchfield. If a dictionary editor says this to journalists and scholars, they will believe him. But no one checked either dictionary," she said. "He said he opened up the dictionary, and put in swearwords for the first time. The swearwords claim is true. In that sense he was the first to bring the dictionary into the 21st century. But this stuff about world English wasn't true. The only way I can explain him doing it is that, in the scholarly word of linguistics, the 1970s was when the first work on varieties of English started to come about. Maybe he wanted to be seen as part of all that."

A spokesperson for the OED's publisher Oxford University Press said one of the dictionary's current policies was "to re-evaluate any terms which were left out of the supplement by Burchfield" and it was constantly adding new words "from every corner of the English-speaking world".

"Decisions on which words to include in the OED have changed over the course of its 180-year history," said the spokesperson. "This includes choices on which words 'borrowed' from other languages should be included, and where quotations should be taken from. These decisions have been influenced by a range of factors, including space constraints in print editions."

The spokesperson added that Burchfield "was insistent that the dictionary should expand its coverage of international words in English and, although he omitted minor terms from the supplement which he was revising and extending, he added many thousands of more fully researched international entries".

Examples of words with foreign origins deleted by Burchfield

Shape A Tibetan councillor

chancer A verb from American English meaning "to tax"

Calabazilla A wild Mexican squash

wading-place Used to refer to a ford

swamp fuchsia Common name in Australian English for Eremophilia maculata, a species found in Queensland

from: Guardian

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

China spends big to build libraries for all villages

Since 2007, China has spent a massive amount of money to ensure that all villages have access to libraries with well-selected books, newspapers and audiovisual products for people in rural areas.


The Ministry of Finance (MOF) said Wednesday in a statement posted on its website that it has appropriated a total of 5.9 billion yuan (937.99 million US dollars) to subsidize the construction of such rural libraries.

In 2012 alone, the MOF earmarked 1.2 billion yuan for subsidizing rural libraries in a bid to put an end to the project of building libraries for all administrative villages in China, according to the statement.

The project is one of the nation's key cultural programs to bring tangible benefits to people living in rural areas, the statement said.

China kicked off the project to build libraries in rural areas nationwide in early 2007, aiming to cover all villages by the end of 2015, according to the State Press and Publication Administration.

However, the country announced in late September that it had completed the project by the end of August, and a total investment of 18 billion yuan has resulted in the construction of 600,449 rural libraries.

Each library owns at least 1,500 books, 30 different newspapers and 100 audiovisual products that meet the needs of people living in rural areas.

from: Global Times

Monday, November 26, 2012

Canadian history, heritage at risk from cuts to Libraries and Archives Canada, say academics

by: Christopher Curtis

OTTAWA – On the tail end of a year that saw the Conservatives spend $28 million reenacting the War of 1812, some historians say the federal government is contributing to the erosion of the country’s historical institutions.

York University professor Craig Heron told Postmedia News the Conservatives are “bleeding Canadian history dry” with cuts to Libraries and Archives Canada outlined in the 2012 budget. He is among the growing number of academics denouncing the spending cuts.

Representatives from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) will be on Parliament Hill Thursday to unveil a campaign aimed at restoring funding to archives across the country.

“It’s absurd the money that went into celebrating a war that essentially touched southern Ontario, that was highly inconclusive, and could hardly be said to have shaped Canada,” said Heron, the former president of the Canadian Historical Association. “But while millions in public funds finance (the reenactment), the actual institutions that preserve Canadian history are being badly slashed.”

About 20 per cent of the 500 workers at Archives and Libraries Canada will lose their jobs under the Tories’ budget cuts. The layoffs will also close libraries at the immigration, transport and public works departments.

“Expertise is being lost, longtime knowledgeable workers are being pushed out the door and it’ll be much harder for Canada to record and write its history,” said Public Service Alliance of Canada president Doug Marshall.

The PSAC represents over 170,000 federal employees, including most of the outgoing archivists and librarians.

Responding to the calls for additional funding, a spokesperson for the heritage minister said Libraries and Archives Canada has enough money to fulfill its mandate.

“Library and Archives Canada is working to digitize its collection,” said Jessica Fletcher. “This means Canadians in all regions of the country will have access to our history, at less cost to taxpayers.”

However, under the 2012 budget, digitization staff will be cut by 50 per cent.

Marshall contends that the cutbacks affect more than just public sector employees. In May the Canadian Council of Archives saw its $1.7 million annual funding slashed. The council awarded grants to hundreds of community-based archiving programs throughout Canada.

“This was a model program, it wasn’t an expensive program and it allowed hundreds of communities to better understand where they came from,” Marshall said. “That’s all over now.”

The library debate comes as the government prepares for two important commemorations: the 100-year anniversary of the First World War in 2014 and Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017. Heron said he worries that the Tories will spare no expense to politicize both occasions.

“We can probably expect another extravaganza in 2014, filled with politically motivated notions of history,” he said. “It’s clear the government wants to make war and the military tradition a rallying point for Canadians.”

The Conservatives have often been accused of playing favourites when it comes to Canadian history. Compared to the fanfare that surrounded the War of 1812 bicentennial, the celebration surrounding the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—a Liberal initiative—was relatively muted.

“The real problem is that this is seen as something that just affects historians but it’s much more far-reaching than that,” Heron said. “This will affect students, teachers, genealogists, artists and anyone with a keen interest in research or history.”

But when it comes to actually recording history for future generations, I don’t expect any serious efforts from (the Conservatives).”

from: Calgary Herald

Friday, November 23, 2012

News Corp. Eyes Book Publisher .

by: Christopher S. Stewart and John Jannarone

News Corp., owner of HarperCollins Publishers, has expressed interest to CBS Corp. about acquiring its Simon & Schuster book business, according to people familiar with the talks.


The people described the discussions as preliminary and cautioned that a deal isn't imminent. News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.

On November 8th, WSJ's Simon Constable sat down with CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, for a wide ranging interview. In this segment Mr. Moonves discussed the future of his publishing unit and whether there was a price tag on Simon and Schuster.

The conversations come about a month after the owners of two publishing rivals, Random House and Penguin Group, agreed to merge their books businesses into a publishing powerhouse.

News Corp. made a last-minute expression of interest in buying Pearson PLC's Penguin but never made a formal offer. Instead, Penguin agreed to combine with Bertelsmann SE & Co.'s Random House.

For book publishing, an industry dominated by a half-dozen big companies, consolidation is viewed in part as a way to weather the transition to digital media. Combining forces can allow publishers to gain more heft in negotiating terms with retailers, including Amazon.com Inc., industry executives say.

Simon & Schuster, which was founded in 1924 and publishes about 2,000 titles annually, had $1.6 billion in revenue and $90 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2011, according to CBS regulatory filings.

News Corp. is in the process of splitting into two listed companies, one containing its entertainment assets, such as the 20th Century Fox film studio and Fox News cable channel, and the other housing publishing assets, including Dow Jones and HarperCollins.

While HarperCollins is relatively small to News Corp. in the media giant's current form, it could account for more than a fifth of the new publishing company's roughly $500 million of operating income for the fiscal year ending in June 2013, according to Michael Nathanson of Nomura Securities.

The new publishing company is expected to have a significant amount of cash on its balance sheet, potentially to be used for acquisitions. One motivation for the split is the flexibility to pursue the purchase of old-media companies that may have turned off current News Corp. investors, according to a person familiar with the company's strategy.

News Corp. recently has shown an appetite in other sectors as it prepares for the split, which is expected to be completed by next June. On Tuesday the company said it had agreed to buy a 49% stake in New York regional sports network YES.

A person familiar with the matter said that deal values the network at about $3 billion. YES's key asset is the right to broadcast New York Yankees games, considered more valuable than those of any other baseball team in the U.S.

The publishing talks come at a tense moment in the publishing world. A recent Justice Department settlement with a few publishers, including HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, will allow discounting on e-books. Publishers view this as a threat and worry that Amazon could gain even more leverage over them.

What's more, publishers face a host of new competitors, including self-published writers, new digital imprints from literary agents and startups by industry outsiders such as media mogul Barry Diller.

A combination of HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster could create the second-largest publisher in the U.S. market. Random House and Penguin have a combined 28% to 30% of the market, while HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster together account for 18% to 20% of it, according to Albert N. Greco Institute for Publishing Research Inc.

HarperCollins publishes an array of fiction, nonfiction and children's titles in the U.S., including books by such writers as Edward P. Jones, Harper Lee and Maurice Sendak. Simon & Schuster's top titles include Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics" and Larry McMurtry's "Custer," a biography of the general who fell at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.

from: Wall Street Journal

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Penguin to Expand E-Book Lending

by: Leslie Kaufman

Major book publishers and libraries have been sparring for months over acceptable terms for making e-books available for lending. From time to time, they find some common ground.


The Penguin Group plans to announce on Monday that it is expanding its e-book lending program to libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland and surrounding areas though a new distribution partner. In a pilot program that will begin this year, Penguin has worked with Baker & Taylor, a distributor of print and digital books, to start e-book lending programs in the Los Angeles County library system, which will reach four million people, and the Cuyahoga County system in Ohio.

The terms of lending will be the same as those they have been testing through 3M systems in New York public libraries since September: Penguin will sell any book to the libraries for lending six months after its release date, each book may be lent to only one patron at a time and at the end of a year the library must buy each book again or lose access to it.

Tim McCall, Penguin’s vice president for online sales and marketing, said the company was happy with the 3M pilot, which will continue and expand. “We are learning every month, but I think we have a model that works.”

Through a third partner, OneClickdigital, Penguin will also begin lending digital audiobooks to any library that is interested.

Since 2004, American libraries have largely relied on OverDrive as the distribution system for e-books. In the last fiscal year, the New York Public Library lent more than 600,000 books through OverDrive, said Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulations operations for the library.

Many publishers, including Random House, make their collections available through these systems. But others, like Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, do not make e-books available to libraries because they have not been happy with current practices. That has frustrated the American Library Association greatly and it has been urging these publishers to participate.

Penguin withdrew from the OverDrive distribution system in February, saying that OverDrive was not adequately protecting its content, but it has been looking to develop other systems.

from: NY Times

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Wanna buy a book from the Biblio-mat?

by: Alexandra Grigorescu



For the past few years, The Monkey's Paw on Dundas West has garnered a reputation for doing things a little bit differently. From their notoriously eclectic and rare collection of books, to their unusual window displays, they've always upheld one of my personal mandates--that from strolling through musty bookcases, to being drawn in by particularly odd cover art, every book should feel like a surprise. Owner Stephen Fowler is now taking that a step further with the world's first and only book vending machine, the Biblio-mat. Fowler says that "it's an extension of the shop--people come here expecting to be startled."


The Biblio-mat came in a few weeks ago, and yes, it's an actual vending machine by Craig Small (of local animation studio The Juggernaut), but rather than dispensing diabetes-inducing treats, it drops down books (nourishment for the mind, dontcha know). The look follows from the "self-consciously antique vibe," of the shop, and references old vending machines and signage.

Unlike a vending machine, there's no choice involved, and for $2, you'll get a mystery used book out of the 100 or so titles that the machine holds. Due to the general bent of the store--"weird non-fiction"--you can expect books (both small and large, and mostly hardcover) in that vein.

Fowler puts me on speaker-phone with two customers who just used the machine, Martha and Naz, and they both love their books--an illustrated book of Spanish poetry about mothers, and something called Legend of Ghost Lagoon. They deem it "really fun and unique." But due to its crapshoot nature, it might be your next favourite, or maybe not, as with the occasional dissatisfied customer. Fowler gamely chalks it up to a fundamental abundance or lack of imagination. One customer was heard to loudly complain that "everyone else got something really good." His book? A guide to repairing antique dolls. Case in point.

Despite the seemingly random selection, Fowler hand-picks each title. "They're not $50 books," he tells me. "We end up with a lot of interesting and old books that don't quite meet the standard of our stock, but are too good to throw away." Ergo, cultural artifacts, like what popped out in an interview with NPR earlier today--Slavery and Slave Ships. The Biblio-mat, it seems, has a knack for comic timing.

It's a very clever take on the book-buying process in general. On paper (pun intended), a book might sound fantastic, but upon reading it, you might find it lacking. And if you're the romantic sort of reader who ascribes meaning to the books you haphazardly stumble across in bookstores, this is a surefire way to feel as though whatever pops out of the Biblio-mat was somehow meant for you. Even if it is something like Does God ever Speak Through Cats? or C Is for Chafing (and we can really only hope).

from: BlogTO 

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Puck Stops Here: A Hockey Lit Survey by David Davis

IN THE WINTER OF 1955, the editors of a newly launched magazine called Sports Illustrated sent William Faulkner to watch an ice hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens. The novelist was a puck novice — the article was entitled "An Innocent at Rinkside" — and he knew little about the sport's strategy or culture. But his brief essay captured hockey's relentless tempo, its improvisational surges, its attendant carnage:


[The game] seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child's toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers — a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.

Then he learned to find the puck and follow it. Then the individual players would emerge. They would not emerge like the sweating barehanded behemoths from the troglodyte mass of football, but instead as fluid and fast and effortless as rapier thrusts or lightning — [Maurice] Richard with something of the passionate glittering fatal alien quality of snakes, [Bernie] Geoffrion like an agile ruthless precocious boy who maybe couldn't do anything else but then he didn't need to; and others — the veteran [Edgar] Laprade, still with the know-how and the grace. But he had time too now, or rather time had him, and what remained was no longer expendable that recklessly, heedlessly, successfully; not enough of it left now to buy fresh passion and fresh triumph with.

Faulkner never again wrote about hockey. As far as we know, he never attended another NHL contest. Still, "Innocent at Rinkside" resonated because, for so long, the literature of hockey was "oddly limited," as George Plimpton put it, "odd because its world [...] is rife with storytellers and legend-keepers, and because hockey has a long and absorbing history."


This was true in Canada, where the rink is sacred ground, as well as America. Indeed, while the likes of Ring Lardner, Jack London, A.J. Liebling, P.G. Wodehouse, Norman Mailer, Fred Exley, Bernard Malamud, W.C. Heinz, John McPhee, Dan Jenkins, Donald Hall, Philip Roth, David Halberstam, Willie Morris, and Plimpton himself (among many others) were creating a small, vital, sports-lit cannon that revolved about baseball, boxing, football, basketball, horse racing, golf, and the Olympics, there was no must-read hockey novel, no classic memoir, no go-to oral history. Only in the works of Mordecai Richler could readers catch glimpses of the ice. (Hollywood made one contribution: Slap Shot (1977), with an uproarious screenplay written by Nancy Dowd based on her younger brother's minor-league hockey experiences. The next year, Dowd won the Academy Award for Coming Home.)

Perhaps this silence was caused by hockey's cult status. At the time of Faulkner's visit to Madison Square Garden, the National Hockey League had only six (count 'em — six!) franchises, all of them clustered in cold-weather climes: New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, and Toronto. The players were almost exclusively Canadians, the sons of miners from far-flung places like Flin Flon, Manitoba, and Trail, British Columbia, who learned to skate (and brawl) on frozen-over rivers and backyard rinks. They played without helmets or masks; even the goalies stood against 100-mile-an-hour slapshots without any protection. Their faces were grooved with stitches. Salaries rarely topped $10,000.

This, of course, is now considered the NHL's Golden Age.

Beginning in the late 1960s, as college, professional, and Olympic sports transformed themselves into commercialized products for television, a series of radical changes jolted the NHL from insularity. In 1967, the league doubled in size to 12 teams, an expansion that pushed beyond the north-northeast region into lucrative, warm weather markets like Los Angeles.

Five years later, the NHL faced direct competition for the first time. An upstart rival, the World Hockey Association, outbid the NHL for superstar Bobby Hull and lured the immortal Gordie Howe from retirement. Eventually the WHA snatched up the rights to a teenage phenom named Wayne Gretzky, who would soon be the face of the sport. (The two leagues merged in 1979, bringing Gretzky into the NHL fold.) The search for talent expanded beyond North America, to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.

In 1972, an all-star team of Canadian NHLers faced off against the national squad from the U.S.S.R. Every pundit from Vancouver to Newfoundland predicted that Team Canada would win what would eventually be known as the Summit Series. Instead, with methodical brilliance, the Russians out-played the Canadians and nearly pulled off an historic upset. Team Canada only escaped ignominious failure by scoring the winning goal in the waning seconds of the final game.

Hockey's tumult — rampant expansion, the influx of money and new talent, the near-surrender to (horrors!) the Russians, and more — roiled traditionalists. It also seemed to provide succor for writers, as if they needed to experience hockey's profound changes to find sources of inspiration.

The first such work to break through, interestingly enough, was a children's story entitled The Hockey Sweater (Le Chandail de Hockey in the original French) in 1979. Author Roch Carrier begins by recounting the glorious youth he spent in small-town Quebec during the 1940s, when he and his buddies played hockey outdoors throughout the shortened winter days. They rooted for the Montreal Canadiens, all of them proudly encased in the team's bleu, blanc et rouge-colored sweaters ("sweater" means "jersey" in hockey lingo), and they worshipped Maurice "The Rocket" Richard, the same Richard referenced by Faulkner, going so far as to comb their hair like their hero.

Having outgrown his holey sweater, Carrier's mother decides to order him a new one from a mail-order catalog. What they receive, to Carrier's horror, is a blue-and-white jersey of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the hated rivals of Les Habitants. Carrier's mother refuses to return the sweater, forcing Carrier to wear Toronto's colors. He is mortified and summarily shunned. The story ends with Carrier, in church, praying for "a hundred million moths" to eat up the despised jersey.

Hockey Sweater is a deceptively simple parable that manages to encapsulate the country's French-English cultural divide even as it hearkens to a halcyon era, when hockey equaled innocent fun and Canada reigned as hockey's unquestioned champion. The popularity of Carrier's delightful story has not waned. It's since been turned into a symphony and an animated short film; a line, in English and French, was used on the back of a $5 (Canadian) bill.

Soon afterwards came two season-in-the-life books: radio host and essayist Peter Gzowski's The Game of Our Lives, which followed the Edmonton Oilers throughout the 1980-81 season as a stick-wielding magician named Wayne Gretzky began his ascent to legend-hood. Then, goaltender Ken Dryden scored with The Game (1983), Dryden, it must be said, was not your usual jock. He starred at Cornell University before playing goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. He led the team to four Stanley Cup victories even as he studied (and took a one-year hiatus from his career) to become a lawyer.

The Game chronicles Dryden's final year in the NHL (1978-79). It's a probing examination of a sport, a team and an existence — not excluding the desultory practices, the intimate banter of the locker-room, the pulse-racing anticipation of the playoffs. The majority of his time is spent waiting: for the next game, the next airplane, the next shot.

Here, Dryden recounts a goalie's chores:

Playing goal is not fun. Behind a mask, there are no smiling faces, no sweaty grins of satisfaction. It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return. A goalie is simply there, tied to a net and to a game; the game acts, a goalie reacts. How he reacts, how often, a hundred shots or no shots, is not up to him. Unable to initiate a game's action, unable to focus its direction, he can only do what he must do. It is his job, a job that cannot be done one minute in every three, one that will not await rare moments of genius, one that ends when the game ends, and only then. For while a goal goes up in lights, a permanent record for the goal-scorer and the game, a save is ephemeral, important at the time, occasionally when a game is over, but able to be wiped away, undone, with the next shot.

Many experts, most prominently Grantland.com's Bill Simmons, believe that The Game is the best hockey book ever published. George Plimpton agreed, calling it "a classic." Plimpton himself donned goalie pads for the Boston Bruins in Open Net (1985), another of his Walter Mitty-esque tales, wherein the Ivy League amateur-enthusiast infiltrates the locker-room, bonds with the beer-swilling jocks, and briefly joins the fray.

This wasn't Plimpton's finest effort — Paper Lion and Out of My League top that list — but his conversations with roommate Jim "Seaweed" Pettie and Bruins coach Don "Grapes" Cherry (now a famous, bombastic hockey analyst) are insightful gems. Here, Plimpton riffs on creating a design for his goalie mask: "I drew them clumsily on telephone pads. Some were quirky — a chipmunk's face with small, apple cheeks, perky and with a prominent pair of long teeth showing in the middle of a sunny smile, bright blue eyes sparkling above; some were meant to puzzle, such as one I designed that was decorated with a large question mark; others were graphic — a mask that read simply enough in red letters, NO!; yet another was a psychedelic swirl that was supposed to make anyone who gazed on it slightly dizzy."

Two years later, the late author-musician Paul Quarrington delivered what many consider to be hockey's finest novel: King Leary. Based in part on the life and career of King Clancy, a pint-sized defenseman who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1930s, the aged fictional character lives in a retirement home and spends much of his time reminiscing about former line-mates, lovers, and rivals.

King Leary is a valentine — a maple leaf? — to the pioneering era of professional hockey, and Quarrington evokes some of the arcane wonderment found in the books of fellow Canadian W.P. Kinsella, author of several baseball-themed novels, including Shoeless Joe. In this passage, Leary tries to recall his initial encounter with the sport: "I can't remember lacing on blades for the first time. Likewise with hockey. I've got no idea when I first heard of, saw, or played the game of hockey [...] [T]he truth of the matter is, I never knew that hockey originated. I figured it was just always there, like the moon.”

The same year, journalist Roy MacGregor published The Last Season, a dark novel that traces the rise and demise of tough-guy Felix Batterinski. His "position" is enforcer: he intentionally gets into fights to intimidate opponents, protect his teammates, and provide excitement for the fans. He's a not-too-bright palooka whose fists serve as both weapon and money-maker: "When I touched [my knuckles], they stung with his jaw, just as I knew when he moved this week he would feel me and I would be with him, his better, for weeks to follow. He had my mark on him. I too had swelling and redness but on the knuckles it shone with pride."

One novel from America was published during this era: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League (1980), attributed to one Cleo Birdwell. This oddity features the on- and off-the-ice hijinks of the first woman to play for New York Rangers, a leggy temptress who jumps into bed with many of the book's characters, "my honey blonde hair flying in the breeze, my silver skate blades flashing, my milky blue eyes, my taut ass and firm breasts, the downy white bruises on my milky white thighs."

This satire-gone-awry is long out of print. It's a well-known secret that Don DeLillo is the author (or, at least, co-author) of Amazons, although he refuses to acknowledge it.

¤

Since the mid-1980s, as if to make up for years of virtual silence, a torrent of hockey titles has been published, primarily in Canada, including biographies, histories, memoirs, novels and poetry. An (admittedly) cursory recap of the highlights: Journalist Jack Falla contributed Home Ice and Open Ice, which brought together his soulful essays and columns about the game's indelible pull. Writer-musician Dave Bidini turned himself into a nomad and, in Tropic of Hockey, sought out the game in remote locations, including Dubai, northern China, and Transylvania. Dryden and MacGregor teamed to explicate hockey's meaning in Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada, which introduced themes that were echoed in How Hockey Explains Canada, by former Toronto Maple Leafs forward Paul Henderson and Jim Prime. Memoirs abound, from Theo Fleury's searing Playing With Fire to Herb Carnegie's stoic A Fly in a Pail of Milk to Ken Baker's breezy They Play Hockey in Heaven. Countless writers (including Bidini) re-visited the Canada-U.S.S.R. Summit Series, while journalist Wayne Coffey deftly recounted the 1980 U.S. Olympic team's gold-medal triumph over the Russians (the so-called "Miracle on Ice").

Several works probed hockey's dark side. From the late 1960s through the early 1990s, agent Alan Eagleson was hockey's most powerful figure. He controlled the players' union and was a major force within the international game. Unbeknownst to the players he was supposedly representing, he cut backroom deals that benefited the owners and himself. In Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey, reporter Russ Conway masterfully detailed the alleged crimes and misdemeanors. His sobering takedown ruined Eagleson; not long after its publication, his place in the Hockey Hall of Fame was revoked.

Meanwhile, long before charges of rape and sexual abuse were revealed at Penn State, former NHL player Sheldon Kennedy accused his junior coach of sexually assaulting him for years. That's one of many disturbing incidents related in Laura Robinson's Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada's National Sport, which argues persuasively that the pressure to make it to the NHL fosters a machismo that undermines the sport's moral center. Notes Robinson: "How can the game that defines Canada, that unifies the country in so many ways, that feeds young dreams or merely entertains in the darkest of winter days, also be responsible for the systematic dehumanization of young men and young women?"

In defining hockey as "that combination of ballet and murder," poet Al Purdy juxtaposed the artistry and brutality of the sport. Another poet, Randall Maggs, crafted Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems (2008), a harrowing epic about the troubled life of goalkeeper Terry Sawchuk. His brilliant career spanned 21 years and four Stanley Cup victories, but he also drank too much and suffered from depression. (If he were playing today, he would be examined for concussions.) He died from internal injuries after a "horseplaying" incident with a teammate.

Writes Maggs:

Who starts the brain's conspiracies?
Who knows what it is that waits in the trees?
Crazy.

¤

Sawchuk, it should be noted, played for the Los Angeles Kings during the team's inaugural season (1967-68). Before then, Southern California's contribution to hockey revolved around the city of Paramount, in south L.A., where Frank Zamboni invented and manufactured the ice-resurfacing machines that still bear his name.

The Kings' first owner, media magnate Jack Kent Cooke, was originally from Canada. He also owned the Lakers. He built the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood for his two clubs, figuring that, at the very least, the Kings would sell some tickets on nights when the Lakers were out of town.

Far from hockey's roots, clad in garish purple-and-gold uniforms, the Kings labored in obscurity. Even Felix Batterinski, the fictional enforcer from MacGregor's Last Season, recognized the Kings' sorry status:

Hockey meant nothing to L.A. Not only were the Kings nobodies up against the Lakers and the Dodgers and the Rams, but who could possibly compete for notice with The Fonz and Suzanne Sommers and Charlie's Angels and, more precious yet, the true Hollywood stars. The Los Angeles Kings made as much sense as turning the Queen Mary into a hotel. We were the London bridge in Arizona; the magic mountain in Disneyland was more real than a bunch of half-talented Canadians charging around on ice after a forty-five-cent piece of black rubber in a replica of the Forum in Rome, all for a mere $12.50 a seat. They even sold margaritas and tacos in the tuck shop at the Fabulous Forum. No fat men in runny noses peering knowingly through the steam of their Styrofoam cups; in California there might be foam cups and heat but it began with cleavage and ended with skintight acrylic pants.

L.A.'s image as a hockey Babylon changed in 1988, when then-owner Bruce McNall acquired Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers. The "Great One" was the game's unquestioned best player, in the tradition of Richard, Howe and Bobby Orr. His presence instantaneously legitimized the NHL in Southern California.

Roy Orbison sang the National Anthem at Gretzky's L.A. debut. Ex-pat celebs like John Candy and Michael J. Fox flocked to the Forum. The team traded in their Mardi Gras- colored jerseys for the street-cred cool of black and silver. Gretzky's pull was so strong that he helped bring another NHL team, the Ducks, to Anaheim.

In his terrific book Gretzky's Tears: Hockey, America, and the Day That Changed Everything, journalist Stephen Brunt recounts the circumstances surrounding the historic trade. Losing its treasured natural resource, he writes, devastated Canada: "Sell them our water and our oil and our trees, sell them our fish and our wheat, gradually erase the great unguarded border, gradually break down the real and imagined differences. But sell the greatest hockey player in the world, sell Jesus of Brantford, and it cut to the heart, to the core, to the essence of belief."

Brunt notes that Canada soon got its revenge. Gretzky was unable to win the Stanley Cup with the Kings and eventually left. McNall pleaded guilty to fraud and went to prison. The team was sold, then sold again. Hockey again became irrelevant in L.A., even after the Kings moved into the glitzy downtown Staples Center.

Until last season, that is. After 45 years of futility, the Kings coalesced around an outstanding goalie and went on an improbable playoff run that resulted in their first-ever Stanley Cup. The Kings finally eclipsed the Lakers, the Clippers, the Dodgers and the Angels.

Who knows: perhaps the Kings' victory will inspire a young writer to create the Great American Hockey Novel. At the very least, it may well encourage local kids to take to the ice. As William Faulkner wrote in 1955, after the Rangers-Canadiens game: "We like the adrenalic discharge of vicarious excitement or triumph or success. But we like to do also: the discharge of the personal excitement of the triumph and the fear to be had from actually setting the horse at the stone wall or pointing the overcanvased sloop or finding by actual test if you can line up two sights and one buffalo in time. There must have been little boys in that throng too, frantic with the slow excruciating passage of time, panting for the hour when they would be Richard or Geoffrion or Laprade — the same little Negro boys whom the innocent has seen shadow-boxing in front of a photograph of Joe Louis in his own Mississippi town, the same little Norwegian boys he watched staring up the snowless slope of the Holmenkollen jump one July day in the hills above Oslo."

from: LA Times

Monday, November 19, 2012

New Findings Reaffirm Library Borrowers Are Also Buyers

Survey of 75,000 patrons shows library e-book patrons purchase average of 3.2 books per month


(Cleveland, OH) - November 15, 2012 - An extensive online poll of library e-book readers finds that these patrons purchase an average of 3.2 books (both print and e-books) each month, and a majority would consider purchasing books discovered on a library website. These e-book borrowers also report that their digital content purchases have increased in the past six months. Sponsored by OverDrive with the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), the survey constitutes the largest study of library eBook usage to date, with more than 75,000 people responding.

Confirming earlier studies such as the Pew Internet Project's "Libraries, Patrons, and E-books," the survey found that a significant percentage of library users regularly purchase books they first discover at the library. In fact, 57 percent of those surveyed said that the public library is their primary source of book discovery.

Library e-book borrower: Highlights

· Public library is primary source of book discovery (57%)
· Purchase average of 3.2 books per month (including print and e-books)
· Would consider purchasing books discovered on library website (53%)
· Visit both the physical library and download e-books (53%)
· Digital book purchases have increased in past six months (44%)
· Purchased book (print or e-book) after borrowing that title (35%)


Library e-book borrower: Demographics
· Female (78%)
· Adults aged 40-64 (55%)
· Household income $75,000+ (48%)
· College degree or higher (74%)

"Book discovery and promotion have taken on greater importance for publishers and authors as the shift to digital continues, and this survey confirms the value of public libraries," said David Burleigh, OverDrive director of marketing. "With rising web traffic and enhancements to library websites (see YouTube preview), public libraries are becoming an essential part of the marketing strategy for publishers."

"Library lending encourages people to experiment with new authors, topics and genres—which is good for the entire reading and publishing ecosystem," said Carrie Russell, OITP program director.

The survey also found that dedicated e-book reading devices—including Kindle, Sony Reader and Nook—were the devices most used to read e-books from the library (84 percent). Desktop or laptop PCs (20 percent), smartphones (19 percent) and tablets (18 percent) rounded out the top four types, which reflects the rapidly escalating trend of borrowing on mobile devices recently reported by OverDrive.(In August, mobile devices accounted for 30 percent of checkouts and 34 percent of web traffic at OverDrive-powered library websites. Both statistics are up nearly 100 percent year over year.)

The survey took place between June 13 and July 31, 2012, at thousands of OverDrive-powered public library websites in the United States, with 75,384 respondents completing all or part of the survey. The intent of the survey was to gain insight into the borrowing and buying behaviors of library e-book readers and is not representative of the U.S. population as a whole. To see the full survey data, please visit OverDrive's Digital Library Blog.

With more than two-thirds of U.S. public libraries participating in OverDrive e-book lending, 87 percent of the U.S. population has access to e-books and audiobooks through this service. Worldwide, readers checked out more than 34 million e-books and audiobooks with OverDrive in the first half of 2012—more than double the checkouts in all of 2011. To find a library with OverDrive e-books near you, visit search.overdrive.com.

from: OverDrive

Friday, November 16, 2012

Thomas Hardy and George Eliot fall out of fashion

Works by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and EM Forster have fallen in popularity over the last two decades, according to new research of the literary canon.

by: Jasper Copping

They are the books that have stood the test of time – not to mention the ones we are all supposed to have read.


But an analysis of reading habits has revealed that some of the most celebrated classics of English literature have fallen out of fashion in recent years.

Works by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and EM Forster have seen their popularity plummet over the last two decades, while those by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and George Orwell have fared much better.

The study involves a comparison of lending data from Britain's libraries for 50 classics by British and Irish authors from the literary canon from the early 1990s, a decade ago, and last year.

It shows some clear winners and losers, with all featured works by the first three named authors rising in the list over the period and all of those by other three falling.

Academics say the changes could show readers' growing taste for more upbeat, comic novels with happy endings over more tragic, harrowing works.


Another likely factor behind the popularity of works appears to be whether or not they have featured in a television or film adaptation.

The biggest riser in the chart is Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, which has risen from 49th place in the early nineties, and 44th a decade ago, to reach 16th. The novel, was made into a BBC series five years ago.

All the Dickens and Austen novels featured in the study have also been dramatised at least once during the period: Great Expectations (adapted for the screen in 1998 and 1999), David Copperfield (1999 and 2000), and Oliver Twist (1997, 1999, 2005 and 2007); Pride and Prejudice (1995 and 2005), Sense and Sensibility (1995 and 2008), Northanger Abbey (2007), and Emma (1996).

Notable risers included: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift (40 to 23); Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons (43 to 24); The Woman in White (31 to 18), and The Moonstone (38 to 26), both by Wilkie Collins; The War of the Worlds, by HG Wells (45 to 32); and Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe (41 to 33).

The work to see the biggest fall in popularity is the Jungle Book, which has sunk from third place in the 1990s to 36th. Its author, Rudyard Kipling is now considered unfashionable by many for his views on the Empire.

The new study has been conducted by the Public Lending Right, which monitors data from libraries and collects payments for authors. In the case of the classics' authors, it does not collect any money.

It compiled a list of 50 classics written before 1950 and then analysed the lending data for three years: 1993-94 and 2010-11 – the earliest and latest years for which records are available – and also 2001-02.

In total, the 50 books were lent 641,733 times in the most recent year available, compared with 1,170,303 at the start of the period. This mirrors a general trend in libraries, which have seen loans fall during the period from 552 million to 300 million.

Jim Parker, registrar of the PLR said: "This is the first time we have analysed classics in this way. They are a niche part of library loans but they are still being borrowed.

"We know that television dramatisations do have an impact. Often, they lead people to look out for other books by the same authors. But who knows what else could be behind the changes."

John Bowen, a professor of nineteenth century literature at the University of York, said the success of authors like Dickens and Austen at the expense of others, like Hardy and Eliot, could be down to readers seeking comfort in their greater optimism and happy endings.

"What is rather cheering is that the more optimistic and comic novels, with happy endings – like those by Dickens and Austen – seem to have done better," he said. Hardy and Eliot are much less simply positive or comic in their conclusions. It could be the sense of overcoming difficulty that has appealed."

The top 20
1 (7 in 1993-94) – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 32,812 loans in 2010-11
2 (2) – Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 29,278
3 (1) – The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, 28,414
4 (11) – Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 24,839
5 (4) – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, 23,985
6 (9) – Animal Farm, George Orwell, 22,396
7 (22) – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 21,308
8 (10) – Emma, Jane Austen, 21,066
9 (5) – Dracula, Bram Stoker, 19,046
10 (12) – Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 18,404
11 (16) – Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen, 18,360
12 (6) – Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, 18,310
13 (34) – Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, 17,876
14 (18) – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stephenson, 17,463
15 (35) – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson, 15,591
16 (49) – Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell, 15,337
17 (20) – Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, 14,716
18 (31) – The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, 14,596
19 (8) – Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 13,593
20 (28) – Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, 12,969

from: Telegraph

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Helen Fielding to write new Bridget Jones novel

Bridget Jones's Diary, the book that launched a thousand chick-lit imitators, will be brought back for a third time.

by: Felicity Capon

Bridget Jones and her haphazard love life are making a return to our bookshelves, 17 years after first being published. Helen Fielding’s new work has been acquired by publisher Jonathan Cape and the novel is due to be published in Autumn 2013.


No title has yet been released for the new novel, although it is reported to be set in contemporary London and will explore “a different phase in Bridget’s life”.

Dan Franklin, a publisher at Jonathan Cape, said: "Great comic writers are as rare as hen’s teeth. Helen is one of a very select band who have created a character, Bridget, of whom the very thought makes you smile. Like millions of others, I can’t wait to see what’s happened to her."

The first two Bridget Jones novels, Bridget Jones’s Diary, published in 1996 and The Edge of Reason, published in 1999, were international bestsellers. They have been published in over 40 countries and together have sold over 15 million copies worldwide, with help from two successful film adaptations, released in 2002 and 2004.

Earlier this year Fielding told the Telegraph she would not be attempting any 50 Shades of Grey style sex scenes. “If ever I wrote a sex scene, I would send it to friends for feedback – different passages to different friends – and, honestly, I’d never hear the end of it,” she said. “I would always be hearing little references to it slipped into conversation – how embarrassing – so now I just don’t do it.”

from: Telegraph

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Amazon finds its books aren’t welcome at many bookstores

by: Nora Krug

“Care of Wooden Floors,” by Will Wiles, is the kind of novel you’d expect to see on a “staff picks” shelf at an independent bookstore. A slim but sophisticated farce by a relatively unknown author, the book is full of witty asides and snappy comments about modern life; its wry, endearingly hapless narrator feels like he might have stepped out of a Nick Hornby story.


But many local stores, both independents and chains, are refusing to stock it. They don’t want to promote what they see as a predatory publisher. “Care of Wooden Floors” was issued this month by New Harvest, a new collaboration between Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the arch-nemesis of brick-and-mortar bookstores: Amazon.

Earlier this year the two companies signed a licensing agreement whereby Amazon Publishing acquires, edits, markets and publicizes books that are then distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s sales force, according to Alexandra Woodworth, a publicist for Amazon/New Harvest. The partnership was an effort to woo bookstores into stocking Amazon-published books. But many booksellers are balking.


“We don’t want to do anything that will support their publishing venture,” said Mark LaFramboise, chief buyer for Politics & Prosein Washington. The bookstore is not stocking Wiles’s novel, though it will order the book upon customer request.

“Amazon has not been a very cooperative fellow bookseller in any fashion,” LaFramboise said. “They pretty much want nothing more than our demise.”

Busboys and Poets is not carrying Wiles’s novel, either. “We are certainly not trying to be a satellite showroom for Amazon,” owner Andy Shallal said. “We don’t support Amazon’s ‘Wal-Martization’ of bookstores.” (Busboys’s Web site takes that position even further, saying Amazon “has strong-armed many publishers into reducing the prices of their books and eBooks.”) Busboys will not special-order the book but will direct interested customers to the Amazon site.

It’s not just the independents that are protesting. Barnes & Noble also has decided not to stock New Harvest books in its 689 stores. It will, however, sell them on its Web site and special-order them for customers. “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent,” Jaime Carey, B&N’s chief merchandising officer, said in a statement in January.

Woodworth would not disclose how many copies of “Care of Wooden Floors” were being printed or had sold since its release Oct. 9. “We’re excited about the reaction so far,” she said. Features about the book have been aired on NPR and appeared in the New York Times, where a full-page ad for the book ran in the Book Review earlier this month.

Wiles’s novel was originally published in Britain by Fourth Estate and received generally positive reviews there. Amazon will not provide sales figures for the book, which was ranked 40,588 on its U.S. site as of Tuesday. According to Nielsen BookScan, fewer than 1,000 copies of the book had been sold as of last week. “My Mother Was Nuts,” Penny Marshall’s memoir, which New Harvest published Sept. 18, sold just 7,000 copies in its first month, despite a reported $800,000 advance; Jessica Valenti’s “Why Have Kids?,” released by New Harvest on Sept. 4, has sold 1,000.

Without prominent display in bookstores, “authors are not going to get the kind of exposure they want,” said Becky Anderson, president of the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent booksellers. “If I were an author, I would think twice” about signing on with Amazon.

Then again, if enough bookstores refuse to sell Amazon’s books, they could become just the kind of hard-to-get, underappreciated gems that independent bookstores typically champion.

from: Washington Post

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Boulder libraries to allow permit holders to carry guns

by: Joe Rubino

A rule change that will allow concealed-weapon permit holders to bring their guns into Boulder's public libraries received unanimous approval from the city's library commission Wednesday night.


The Boulder Public Library Commission discussed a new set of rules of conduct last month but heard several questions about rule No. 5, banning weapons inside library facilities.

Assistant City Attorney Sandra Llanes then took another look at the rules, according to commission documents.

Citing the state's concealed weapons statute and a Colorado Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that dictated the University of Colorado could not ban concealed-weapon permit holders from bringing guns on campus, Llanes proposed the rule change approved Wednesday.

"Given that this is state law, a change is in order," Commissioner Anne Sawyer said Wednesday. "We have to conform to state law."

The measure did not draw any public comments at Wednesday's meeting.

The policy formerly read, "No person may bring a weapon into or possess a weapon in any library facility except this rule shall not apply to library security personnel or police officers carrying service weapons."

The updated rule will read, "No person may bring or possess a weapon, except as expressly permitted by state law."

The new policy and other rule changes approved by the commission will not take effect until they are signed by City Manager Jane Brautigam.

from: Daily Camera

Monday, November 12, 2012

The 13 Worst Reviews of Classic Books

A quarter century ago, Pushcart editor Bill Henderson put together Rotten Reviews Redux, a collection of the meanest and most scathing reviews of classic books and the writers who penned them. The vitriol returns in a 2012 edition of the book with a new introduction from Henderson. We sorted through the book to find 13 of our favorites.

by: Bill Henderson

"The final blow-up of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent." -The New Yorker, 1936, on Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
"Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics." -The London Critic, 1855, on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
"That this book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phrases of the feminine will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction." -Chicago Times Herald, 1899, on The Awakening by Kate Chopin

"What has never been alive cannot very well go on living. So this is a book of the season only..." -New York Herald Tribune, 1925, on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read." -James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847, on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

"That a book like this could be written--published here--sold, presumably over the counters, leaves one questioning the ethical and moral standards...there is a place for the exploration of abnormalities that does not lie in the public domain. Any librarian surely will question this for anything but the closed shelves. Any bookseller should be very sure that he knows in advance that he is selling very literate pornography." -Kirkus Reviews, 1958, on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

"Her work is poetry; it must be judged as poetry, and all the weaknesses of poetry are inherent in it." -New York Evening Post, 1927, on To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, Of Mice and Men will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists...Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen." -Time, 1937, on Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

"Its ethics are frankly pagan." -The Independent, 1935, on Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

"A gloomy tale. The author tries to lighten it with humor, but unfortunately her idea of humor is almost exclusively variations on the pratfall...Neither satire nor humor is achieved." -Saturday Review of Literature, 1952, on Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

"Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole." -Henry James, Galaxy, 1872, on Middlemarch by George Eliot

"At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War...Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux..." -Commonweal, 1940, on For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

"Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer." -Le Figaro, 1857, on Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

from: Publisher's Weekly

Friday, November 9, 2012

DC Comics goes digital



DC Comics is expanding the reach of its digital comics by selling its monthly titles through iTunes, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


The decision appears to be the first time a comics publisher has made all its titles — not just graphic novels or collected editions — available for sale on iPads, Kindles and Nooks.

The industry has embraced tablets, with most selling their titles through Comixology and other online storefronts on the same day that print copies are sold in comic shops.

Hank Kanalz, DC Entertainment’s senior vice-president for digital, says it is not leaving Comixology. Instead, DC hopes to capture new readers for its monthly titles who already buy most of their media through their tablets.

from: National Post

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Santa Cruz library board delays suspension policy changes

by: J.M. Brown

SANTA CRUZ -- The library board agreed Monday to push two controversial issues to its Dec. 5 meeting to get legal advice on a patron suspension policy and replacing a citizen board member.

The proposed patron policy changes allow for staff to suspend someone for up to a year after a series of warnings.

Current rules allow only for a 30-day suspension, after which the next step was to seek a temporary restraining order. Staff now would be able to suspend a patron up to six months or a year after a fourth violation of conduct rules, and there are ways to appeal.

The changes also ban using the library for sleeping. Landers said the rule is not meant to punish those who doze off while reading, but rather those who come to sleep for long periods of time. The new rules also empower staff to remove unattended items, such as backpacks.

The rules also clarify provisions for animals -- dogs or miniature horses -- that provide emotional support to patrons. The proposed rules would require staff to ask what kind of service or support the animal provides.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ellen Pirie objected to the rule, saying the question could violate personal privacy by forcing a patron to disclose a disability.

"I agree you need to ask, 'Is this a service animal?' It's the next step that I'm not sure is wise," Pirie said.

Landers said identifying the purpose the animal services reduces the city's liability if the animal injures someone else.

The library also updated the language used on a flier staff can hand to someone who has a strong odor, a piece of paper that on one side urges the person to leave and on the other provides information about free shower and laundry facilities at the Homeless Services Center. The new language tells the person their odor 'is a violation of our rules of conduct," a point Landers said interferes with others' use of the library.

Landers estimates staff hands out a flier once or twice a week at the downtown branch.

Landers said there has been a major improvement in the atmosphere around the branch since the city hired private security guards to patrol the library and City Hall. People have often congregated outside, sleeping, smoking or being loud. There have been problems inside too, including a man staff caught disrobing in the stacks months ago.

Monday, the board also debated the process for replacing citizen Leigh Poitinger, who has represented Santa Cruz. Pirie objected to specifying that a seat be named specifically for the city, saying the library's bylaws only state that the board's three citizen seats be geographically diverse.

The board decided to table the matter to get a ruling from the city attorney about a motion passed in 2005 that some believe required city residency for one of the seats.

from: Mercury News

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Canada and Australia launch women's literary prizes

As the search continues for a Women's fiction prize sponsor, two Commonwealth nations have gone ahead and started their own
by: Alison Flood

As the prize formerly known as the Orange continues its hunt for a headline sponsor, it's interesting to see that Canada and Australia have both just launched women-only literary prizes.


The Stella prize, in Australia, is named after Stella Miles Franklin, the esteemed novelist whose bequest founded the country's most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, which came under memorable attack last year for being a "sausage fest". No female author had made the shortlist for the second time in three years, and just 13 out of the award's 50 winners had been women.

That changed this year when Anna Funder took the prize, but a group of women in the arts have founded the Stella award nonetheless, to "raise the profile of women's writing" with a prize pot of A$50,000 for the best work of fiction or non-fiction by a woman.

In Canada, meanwhile, trade magazine Quill & Quire reports that the Rosalind prize is being set up. It's just for fiction, and it comes about due to the disparity in numbers discovered by the organisation Canadian Women in the Literary Arts: although looking at submissions for the Governor General's Literary Awards, "women and men published books in near equal numbers in 2011 with 513 books published by men and 523 books published by women", far fewer books by women were reviewed in the press (you can see the details here).

"I thought things were fine and equal here in Canada. I didn't realise the disparity until looking at the hard numbers," publisher Janice Zawerbny told Quill & Quire. "It was really disheartening. Why is this happening in this day and age? It became the impetus or the rallying cry, sitting in the auditorium."

The establishment of the Rosalind prize follows the discontinuation, in 2008, of Canada's Marian Engel award for female writers. There's an intriguing piece in the Globe and Mail by Leah McLaren about this.

"In Canada, women writers have been playing with the big boys for some time now," she writes. "This is why, in 2008, when I was on the authors' committee of the Writers' Trust of Canada, we discontinued the Marian Engel award (for a woman writer in mid-career) and created the Engel/Findley award to honour a body of work by any established Canadian writer, male or female. Assessing the literary landscape, the committee decided that a gendered prize was no longer needed – and we were right. It was a wise choice, and one that reflected the progress (if not outright dominance) of female Canadian writers on a level playing-field."

Clearly, not everyone in Canada agrees that there's a level playing-field these days. But as we in the UK discuss whether or not we still need the Women's prize for fiction – Hilary Mantel, after all, is fresh from her second Booker win – it's intriguing to note that other countries are starting their own versions.

from: Guardian

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Starbucks Builds a Library-Themed Pop-Up Store in Tokyo



In Tokyo, the design firm nendo created the Starbucks Espresso Journey pop-up store to help the coffee chain promote its espresso drinks–a coffee shop that looks like a library.

The library shelves featured nine books, each book sharing information about a different espresso drink. Patrons are encouraged to browse this coffee library until they find the drink they would like to order. Here’s more from the designers:

At the counter, visitors can trade the book for an actual espresso drink, but retain the book cover which tells them about the drink they have chosen, to use as a book cover, as they like. The reverse side of the book cover has been punched into a tall or short size tumbler insert, which can be used in a Starbucks Create Your Own Tumbler. The ‘library’ invites visitors to choose an espresso drink as they would a book, and verse themselves in espresso drinks as though quietly entering into a fictional world. Books and coffee are both important parts of everyday life, so we created a link between favorite books and favorite coffees. (Link via Book Patrol)

What do you think of this unusual project?


from: MediaBistro

Monday, November 5, 2012

Secret reading in Sudan

The banning of books by the Sudanese authorities has inspired a new reading culture in Khartoum

by: Reem Abbas


Journalists hold signs protesting about the closure of the Al-Tayyar newspaper in July in Sudan, 'a surveillance state where freedoms and civil liberties and now creativity are shackled'. Photograph: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images
When Fathi al-Daw, a Sudanese journalist and writer, published a book about the state security apparatus and how it has operated over the past few years, the security apparatus quickly confiscated copies from bookstores in Khartoum, turning it into a much sought-after book, with a badly photocopied version selling at $10.


After al-Daw's book, travellers who arrived in Khartoum with books found themselves put through a much more rigorous airport security. Many reported confiscations of books, especially travellers coming from Cairo, where a large number of Sudanese authors are published.

A few weeks ago, a very early work of politics by al-Daw was confiscated from the luggage of a university professor who refused to leave the airport until the confiscated books were returned to him. He organised a sit-in and encouraged his students to join him, which they did. The security apparatus feared that the students would turn the sit-in into a highly organised protest.

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, a well-known Sudanese novelist, caused ructions earlier this month when his books were three days late arriving at Khartoum's book fair. Sakin threatened to begin a hunger strike before the books were brought over from Cairo to the book fair.

His books only lasted a few hours at the book fair before the security officers confiscated all copies saying that they had to read them before they could go into circulation. Then, they said, they would return them.

In total 15 books were confiscated from the book fair, causing many young readers and intellectuals to boycott visiting the book fair.

In a matter of minutes, social media broke the news of these latest confiscations and a whole crowd of youngsters started asking where they could get their hands on the confiscated books as an act of defiance against a surveillance state where freedoms and civil liberties and now creativity are shackled.

Trading secret books is somewhat similar to organising a protest in Sudan. Code words are used, the planning takes places only through trusted sources, and personal security becomes important.

A young woman keeps Sakin's books, which are now officially banned, in boxes in the back of her car. She tells me that the "marijuana" is selling fast.

In Sudan they used to say that Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Khartoum reads, but in recent years, the reading circle has shrunk to politicians and the creative community. Now, with the growth of a politically aware younger generation, the ongoing censorship campaign is endowing books with their long-lost status all over again.

On social media, the blogs of writers have been tweeted, retweeted and shared, and novels written by Sakin and other banned authors have been circulated as pdf files by one of the largest Sudanese online lists.

Meanwhile, it's not too bad that security officers will get the chance to read the banned books. Who knows – they might find their personal stories between those covers which Sakin dedicates to "a class with slaughtered hopes and dreams".

• This article first appeared in Open Democracy's Arab Awakening section

from: Guardian

Friday, November 2, 2012

Will a twit fic lit fest get followers?

Next month, Twitter will host its first online storytelling festival. John Walsh explains how the medium is already shaking up fiction

by: John Walsh

Readers who complain that novels are too bloated and baggy these days will welcome the news of the first Twitter Fiction Festival next month. It won't take place in a field in Hay-on-Wye or the town hall in Cheltenham; it'll occur online, under the hashtag #twitterfiction. And it has so few rules, the organisers are asking contributors to make them up.

"We're looking," say the organisers, "for new, creative, exciting ideas that will push the bounds of how we tell stories on Twitter. Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter… or how you'll create a new one."

Much of Twitter operates as a linkage service, urging a tweeter's followers to read an attached article or view an attached video of a kitten in a catsuit. Many tweets are smart remarks – and Gertrude Stein famously told Ernest Hemingway: "Remarks, Hemingway, aren't literature." Twitterfiction uses the tiny compass of a tweet – 140 characters – as a creative or critical tool. We've seen many examples already.

Twitterature (Penguin, 2009) by Alexandere Aciman and Emmet Rensin, re-told great works of fiction through multiple tweets that cut through the, you know, verbiage to the meat of the plot, whether it's Oedipus Rex ("PARTY IN THEBES! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF") or Anna Karenina ("Alright, twenty rubles says I can toss my bag in the air, run across the tracks and catch it before the train arriv..."). The hilarity soon fades.

A chap with the Twitter handle of @biblesummary offers a condensed version of the Bible, one tweet per chapter, one chapter per day. It's ingenious, because the terse précis suits the Old Testament ("The serpent deceived the woman; she and Adam ate from the tree. The earth became cursed, and God sent Adam and Eve out of the garden.")

On Bloomsday (16 June) last year, a group of Joyce fans chopped the 20th century's greatest novel into tweets, each "representing" eight pages of Ulysses, a doomed and fatuous exercise about which the loquacious author would have expressed contempt.

In last week's Guardian, certain writers including Ian Rankin and Jilly Cooper were asked to write a story in under 140 characters. The results were patchy, more like jokes than bonsai tales (David Lodge's was: "Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.) But they pointed the way to a genuine innovation: using Twitter to tell a story in real time.

The best exponent so far is Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad. In May she tweeted "Black Box" (a series of dispatches from an undercover agent in the future) on the New Yorker's Twitter feed, at one tweet a minute, for an hour, and did the same for 10 nights until the 8,500-word story was finished. It offered a thoroughly conventional experience of reading literature in instalments (see Charles Dickens,) provided you could stand the jerky rhythm; and the Pinteresque, pause-heavy dialogue. You've got until 28 November to set the Twittersphere alight. #goodluck

from: Independent