'Speak up before there's nothing left': authors rally for National Libraries Day
A week of events tied to the nationwide celebration on 6 February is drawing support from writers and campaigners, as libraries face closure around the UK.
By Alison Flood
January 28, 2016
The bestselling children’s author Philip Ardagh has called on book lovers to “speak up for libraries before there’s nothing left to shout about”, as writers and campaigners prepare for a week of events celebrating the UK’s libraries in the build-up to National Libraries Day on Saturday 6 February.
The annual nationwide celebration of libraries is the latest move by campaigners to highlight the importance of a public service that is being hit by cuts up and down the country. Ann Cleeves, author of the bestselling Vera and Shetland crime series, has been named National Libraries Day ambassador and has urged people to go out and join their local library next week.
“Libraries matter. If we believe in equality of opportunity we must fight, not just for the buildings but for the range of books inside and the skilled staff who can promote reading in all its forms,” said the novelist. “Not only do libraries encourage us to be more tolerant and better informed, they contribute enormously to the wealth of the nation.”
Cleeves added that she “wouldn’t be a writer without a library, and lots of authors will tell you the same thing”. “They’re magic places,” she said. “And we need them for democracy – there should be equal access to books, information and facts for everybody.”
Grubtown Tales author Philip Ardagh, who will be joining campaigners lobbying parliament on 9 February, called the local library “a port of call for books, local information, human contact, internet access, newspapers and magazines; a safe environment, a quiet environment, help with form-filling, advice, and the countless other little things that all add up to bigger things … Speak up for libraries before there’s nothing left to shout about.”
With more than 100 libraries closing in England, Wales and Scotland last year, local communities will be joined next week by authors and illustrators including Roger McGough and Nick Sharratt to celebrate the ones that remain. More than 400 events are planned for the week leading up to the main events on Saturday.
The celebration was originally called for by the children’s author and campaigner Alan Gibbons, who said on Thursday that the public library service is in the middle of its worst ever crisis, with action “urgently needed to secure its future”.
The event is run by organisations including the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals and the Reading Agency. Cilip is also currently running a campaign, My Library By Right, calling on the government to “fulfil their statutory responsibilities to taxpayers” and keep libraries open. More than 11,000 people have signed its petition, supported by authors including Neil Gaiman and Joanna Trollope, asking the government to “take clear and decisive action in situations where services are being put at risk”.
Authors will also come together on 9 February to join a lobby of parliament led by the Speak Up for Libraries group, calling on government to acknowledge the importance of public libraries. Speakers including Ardagh, Gibbons, crime author Jake Arnott and young adult author Cathy Cassidy will join a public rally at Central Hall, Westminster, with campaigners from around the country then planning to “descend on the Commons to lobby MPs to focus on the root cause of libraries’ grim situation – apathy and ignorance in local and central government”, said organisers.
“These people are fighting hard locally to keep libraries alive. They are desperate to show this is a major issue for the whole nation,” said campaigner Laura Swaffield. “And it’s not too late for others to join us.”
Arnott, author of He Kills Coppers, said that “throughout our history, the library has proved to be the most effective and resilient memory system for our culture and civilisation. The public library creates a collective consciousness. Any attack on it simply adds to a social dementia.”
Cassidy called the closure of libraries “a national scandal”, and called on the public to “stand together against these closures, for the sake of our children and the future of our country”.
Source: The Guardian
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Quartz: The Secret World of Membership Libraries
The secret world of membership libraries
By Grace Dobush
January 29, 2016
Public libraries are a relatively new phenomenon. Before the 1880s, when Andrew Carnegie started funding the more than 1,600 library buildings that bear his name, most libraries in America were subscription-based, with members funding and shaping the collections. As free public libraries sprouted up across the United States, membership libraries mostly died off, but 19 non-profit membership libraries still exist, and are reinventing themselves as cultural centers and the coolest coworking spaces you could dream of.
I’m an itinerant freelance writer and work most of the year in Cincinnati, where I discovered the Mercantile Library a few years ago, when it was hosting a small concert. The majestic space immediately appealed to my aesthetics, but I had no idea of its history. The Mercantile was founded in 1835 as a young merchants’ association library—the collection is generalist, though early on there was a ban on novels that has since been reversed. The original cast iron and walnut newspaper reading desks remain in the building that the association secured with a 10,000-year lease for $1 annually.
In the first 70 years of its existence, the Mercantile Library was the most trafficked in Cincinnati, former director Albert Pyle wrote in the book America’s Membership Libraries. That was before the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County opened its original main branch, a gorgeous structure that has since been demolished, and its 40 additional libraries.
While public libraries remain a vital resource for the community, membership libraries serve a self-selected clientele looking for something more. On quiet days, the Mercantile Library is my private aerie, a literary hideout of mahogany and leather. On busier days it’s a well-appointed office, miles nicer than any I’ve ever worked in, with coworkers who have chosen to be with each other. Coworking spaces in mid-sized Midwestern cities such as Cincinnati cost upwards of $300 a month—which, honestly, is more than half my rent. But membership at the Mercantile Library is $55 a year, and its brethren charge anywhere from $15 to $250 annually.
The first subscription library in North America was Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 with members paying 40 shillings to join and promising 10 shillings per year towards buying new books. “Public libraries made books universally available, but they did not supply the other need for which membership libraries were created, the need for a social forum, where books and the matter they contained could be discussed,” Nicolas Barker wrote in America’s Membership Libraries. These were a distinctly American invention—the first subscription library did not appear in England until 1797. Instead, book collections were owned by religious institutions, schools, universities, and private individuals, and “circulating libraries” charged per book. Franklin’s subscription library ”produced a new class of reader, someone firmly placed between those who could read Franklin’s almanacs, on the one hand, and the well-educated elite on the other,” Richard Wendorf wrote in the same book.
In Cincinnati, the Mercantile Library’s membership peaked around the time of the Civil War at more than 3,000, and dipped to just 500 by the late 20th century. Its board realized it had to reinvent the organization to maintain relevance in a world replete with public libraries. The Mercantile’s lecture series have featured Julia Child, Ray Bradbury, and John Updike, and it hosts small concerts, book groups, and social hours. (I’m a frequent guest on its book discussion podcast.) When I joined the library three years ago, the clientele was overwhelmingly older men in suits coming in at lunchtime to eat their Subway sandwiches. The Mercantile Library’s new director, John Faherty, a reformed reporter poached from the Cincinnati Enquirer, is actively recruiting creative people around the city as members, doling out annual passes like a skinny Santa.
“Over the century, our position in society has changed a little bit,” Faherty says. “We’re as much about being a place that celebrate books and where people talk about books more than it is a place where people check books out.” His little cage of an office is right next to the wrought-iron stacks, with some sliding shelves for oversize volumes that he’s crazy about. The Mercantile’s staff is just five people, but some of its programs draw hundreds of patrons.
In San Francisco, another membership library follows a similar ethos. “We don’t try to compete with the public library,” says Deb Hunt, director of the Mechanics’ Institute Library. “We want to be the cultural center for the bay area.” And what they specialize in is community, as evidenced by the high librarian-patron ratio and the legendary Tuesday night chess marathons.
The Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1854 and has been in its current building since 1910—owning a prime piece of San Francisco real estate definitely helps their budget. Now the library has about 4,600 members, but before the 1906 earthquake it peaked at more than 10,000.
Hunt is quick to point out the difference between private libraries and membership libraries. “A private library is exclusive—you have to be recommended, and the bar is very high,” with initiation fees in the thousands of dollars, she says. Her library costs just $95 a year to join. “We feel it’s very democratic.” In November, the Mechanics’ Institute Library will host the fourth international conference of independent and member libraries, the first held in the United States. And although most membership libraries were created before the 20th century, one more has just sprouted in Washington: Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum opened its doors this month.
The low barrier to entry makes me wonder why membership libraries remain such well-kept secrets, but the Mechanics’ Institute’s demographics are getting younger, as are the Mercantile Library’s. “We kind of appeal to younger people in a way I didn’t anticipate. We are so authentic. And we’re not like purposefully authentic—we’re not ironically or contrived authentic. We’re just authentic. And I think that appeals to people. It appeals to me,” Faherty says. “The world can feel like a contrivance. This place is anything but.”
You can follow Grace on Twitter at @GraceDobushToGo. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
Source: Quartz
By Grace Dobush
January 29, 2016
Public libraries are a relatively new phenomenon. Before the 1880s, when Andrew Carnegie started funding the more than 1,600 library buildings that bear his name, most libraries in America were subscription-based, with members funding and shaping the collections. As free public libraries sprouted up across the United States, membership libraries mostly died off, but 19 non-profit membership libraries still exist, and are reinventing themselves as cultural centers and the coolest coworking spaces you could dream of.
I’m an itinerant freelance writer and work most of the year in Cincinnati, where I discovered the Mercantile Library a few years ago, when it was hosting a small concert. The majestic space immediately appealed to my aesthetics, but I had no idea of its history. The Mercantile was founded in 1835 as a young merchants’ association library—the collection is generalist, though early on there was a ban on novels that has since been reversed. The original cast iron and walnut newspaper reading desks remain in the building that the association secured with a 10,000-year lease for $1 annually.
In the first 70 years of its existence, the Mercantile Library was the most trafficked in Cincinnati, former director Albert Pyle wrote in the book America’s Membership Libraries. That was before the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County opened its original main branch, a gorgeous structure that has since been demolished, and its 40 additional libraries.
While public libraries remain a vital resource for the community, membership libraries serve a self-selected clientele looking for something more. On quiet days, the Mercantile Library is my private aerie, a literary hideout of mahogany and leather. On busier days it’s a well-appointed office, miles nicer than any I’ve ever worked in, with coworkers who have chosen to be with each other. Coworking spaces in mid-sized Midwestern cities such as Cincinnati cost upwards of $300 a month—which, honestly, is more than half my rent. But membership at the Mercantile Library is $55 a year, and its brethren charge anywhere from $15 to $250 annually.
The first subscription library in North America was Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 with members paying 40 shillings to join and promising 10 shillings per year towards buying new books. “Public libraries made books universally available, but they did not supply the other need for which membership libraries were created, the need for a social forum, where books and the matter they contained could be discussed,” Nicolas Barker wrote in America’s Membership Libraries. These were a distinctly American invention—the first subscription library did not appear in England until 1797. Instead, book collections were owned by religious institutions, schools, universities, and private individuals, and “circulating libraries” charged per book. Franklin’s subscription library ”produced a new class of reader, someone firmly placed between those who could read Franklin’s almanacs, on the one hand, and the well-educated elite on the other,” Richard Wendorf wrote in the same book.
In Cincinnati, the Mercantile Library’s membership peaked around the time of the Civil War at more than 3,000, and dipped to just 500 by the late 20th century. Its board realized it had to reinvent the organization to maintain relevance in a world replete with public libraries. The Mercantile’s lecture series have featured Julia Child, Ray Bradbury, and John Updike, and it hosts small concerts, book groups, and social hours. (I’m a frequent guest on its book discussion podcast.) When I joined the library three years ago, the clientele was overwhelmingly older men in suits coming in at lunchtime to eat their Subway sandwiches. The Mercantile Library’s new director, John Faherty, a reformed reporter poached from the Cincinnati Enquirer, is actively recruiting creative people around the city as members, doling out annual passes like a skinny Santa.
“Over the century, our position in society has changed a little bit,” Faherty says. “We’re as much about being a place that celebrate books and where people talk about books more than it is a place where people check books out.” His little cage of an office is right next to the wrought-iron stacks, with some sliding shelves for oversize volumes that he’s crazy about. The Mercantile’s staff is just five people, but some of its programs draw hundreds of patrons.
In San Francisco, another membership library follows a similar ethos. “We don’t try to compete with the public library,” says Deb Hunt, director of the Mechanics’ Institute Library. “We want to be the cultural center for the bay area.” And what they specialize in is community, as evidenced by the high librarian-patron ratio and the legendary Tuesday night chess marathons.
The Mechanics’ Institute was founded in 1854 and has been in its current building since 1910—owning a prime piece of San Francisco real estate definitely helps their budget. Now the library has about 4,600 members, but before the 1906 earthquake it peaked at more than 10,000.
Hunt is quick to point out the difference between private libraries and membership libraries. “A private library is exclusive—you have to be recommended, and the bar is very high,” with initiation fees in the thousands of dollars, she says. Her library costs just $95 a year to join. “We feel it’s very democratic.” In November, the Mechanics’ Institute Library will host the fourth international conference of independent and member libraries, the first held in the United States. And although most membership libraries were created before the 20th century, one more has just sprouted in Washington: Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum opened its doors this month.
The low barrier to entry makes me wonder why membership libraries remain such well-kept secrets, but the Mechanics’ Institute’s demographics are getting younger, as are the Mercantile Library’s. “We kind of appeal to younger people in a way I didn’t anticipate. We are so authentic. And we’re not like purposefully authentic—we’re not ironically or contrived authentic. We’re just authentic. And I think that appeals to people. It appeals to me,” Faherty says. “The world can feel like a contrivance. This place is anything but.”
You can follow Grace on Twitter at @GraceDobushToGo. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
Source: Quartz
Monday, February 1, 2016
The Globe and Mail: Wonder of Thunder Bay: Look Inside a Gallery of Overlooked Books
Wonder of Thunder Bay: Look inside a gallery of overlooked books
A shop specializing in ‘nutbar’ titles is a national treasure waiting to be found – or lost forever
By Mark Medley, The Globe and Mail books editor
January 26, 2016
Before it became “the grotto shrine to the fetish object formerly known as the book,” as it’s often described by its unlikely proprietor, Letters Bookshop was a karate dojo, of all things. The store is located on a desolate strip in a sketchy part of Thunder Bay, across the street from a bakery and the train tracks. From the sidewalk it appears to be abandoned, the kind of shuttered business blighting small towns all over the country; the windows have been boarded up, although an attentive passerby might notice the plywood has been painted with scenes from the prehistoric Lascaux cave walls in France – some of humankind’s earliest stories. There’s little indication that what may be Canada’s most unusual collection of books is housed inside, carefully curated, over the course of five decades, by one of the more unusual personalities the Canadian book trade has ever produced.
What’s most fascinating about Nicky Drumbolis and his one-of-a-kind collection isn’t its value, which he estimates is in the millions, or its size – although it includes roughly 50,000 titles, and fills the building, floor to ceiling – but the focus. He has devoted a great portion of his life and livelihood to work that, as he describes it, “slips through the cracks.” Pamphlets and hand-sewn chapbooks that were produced in minuscule print runs; novels and poetry collections published by the most obscure of presses; the work of authors whose names the world has forgotten, if it ever knew them.
Mr. Drumbolis describes himself, as do many others, as an outsider, and he has devoted himself to the literary equivalents. Walking into his bookstore is to be exposed to an alternate history of publishing, one in which the likes of Blew Ointment Press and Ganglia and grOnk are just as celebrated as McClelland & Stewart or Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“He’s a remarkable person,” says Anne Dondertman, director of the world-renowned Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. “You have to admire someone who’s that single-minded. He’s given up everything to do this.”
His is a collection “that only speaks to people who are interested in the obscure, the oblique, the esoteric,” Mr. Drumbolis says. “There never was and there never will be” another like it – which is why its fate is of interest to so many, from authors to fellow booksellers to librarians, who understand its importance to our collective cultural history.
They also wonder how it can be saved from being dismantled, or, worse, winding up as landfill – considering that Mr. Drumbolis was forced to retreat north in a last-ditch bid to preserve his life’s work, a tactic he now fears has only delayed the inevitable, as there is no white knight in sight.
Besides being a bookseller and de facto literary conservationist, Mr. Drumbolis is a historian, writer, editor, bookbinder, gallerist, typographer, detective and storyteller, who claims he’ll “talk forever if you want to listen.” But he doesn’t get many opportunities these days; since moving here from Toronto, he estimates, no more than 50 people have stepped inside the store he purchased five years ago this month. Letters Bookshop is like a treasure buried just below the surface, either waiting to be found – or lost forever.
‘I’VE NEVER OWNED ANYTHING IN MY LIFE EXCEPT BOOKS’
A little more than a year ago, I ran into Nick Mount, who teaches English at the University of Toronto and is writing a book about Canadian literature in the 1960s. I asked how research was going. He’d just returned from Thunder Bay, he said. Did I know Nicky Drumbolis?
I remembered his small, crowded store in Parkdale, in Toronto’s west end, where the aisles were so tight in places you could barely squeeze by, with boxes upon boxes wedged three and four rows deep. But like many second-hand antiquarian bookstores in the city, it had disappeared, and I figured he was out of the business. Prof. Mount smiled when I said this, and his eyes grew wide. Mr. Drumbolis was still very much in business, he said.
Nine months later, I was in the home of the Sleeping Giant.
Although he doesn’t own a car, and had repeatedly been told I’d gladly take a cab, Mr. Drumbolis is waiting for me at the airport, waving a copy of Crad Kilodney’s Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants over his head like a welcome banner. (Mr. Kilodney, who died in 2014, was best known for selling his self-published books on the streets of Toronto – exactly the sort of author Mr. Drumbolis has championed.)
He is 67 but looks a decade younger, and is wearing a black fleece jacket over a blue T-shirt, baggy black jeans, black sneakers and a black beret with “Euskal Herria” embroidered on one side. (It’s what the Basques call their homeland and he’s Greek.) His goatee is more salt than pepper, and he wears his hair in a ponytail that falls to his shoulders.
On the bus ride downtown, he tells me about his move to Thunder Bay in 2011. He grudgingly returned to his hometown after being priced out of Toronto, an increasingly common fate for booksellers. He searched the province for suitable alternate digs, from Wingham, a few hours outside Toronto, to tiny Red Lake, several hours north of here. “I didn’t care where I lived,” he says. “As long as it had a beer store and a post office, I was cool.”
A friend loaned him $70,000 to cover the cost of the building ($45,000) and the move. It’s the first place he has been able to call his own: “I’ve never owned anything in my life except books.”
A lot of books. It took him a year to box them up for the move. Charlie Huisken, former co-owner of This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, the iconic independent bookstore, recalls coming out one weekend with other members of Toronto’s literary community to help pack up the store and the contents of a dozen-odd storage units Mr. Drumbolis had filled over the years: “There was so much stuff that the trailer was starting to rest on the tires rather than on the suspension.”
Once everything had been shifted 1,400 kilometres to Northwestern Ontario – courtesy of two big trucks, one an 18-wheeler – Mr. Drumbolis needed a year to unpack, and then, once he’d built the shelves, another year to organize the collection. The Parkdale store, at 77 Florence St. (also near the train tracks), had soaring 14-foot ceilings but only about 500 square feet of space; he now has more than 3,000 square feet devoted to books, although even this “is hardly big enough.” There are still boxes on top of almost every bookshelf, and the old dojo change rooms are now devoted to overflow. The building has no basement and rests on stilts; Mr. Drumbolis wasn’t sure it would support everything, so he consulted an engineer and researched how best to distribute the weight. He now figures it will hold. The roof needs replacing, though.
It wasn’t always a dojo; the building dates from the early 20th century, and in past lives has been a general store and a post office. An imposing black safe from the period sits in the front room, near the entrance, as does a glass counter that used to tempt the neighbourhood children with candy but now tempts me with a copy, among the many books on display, of Gregory Corso’s first major collection, Gasoline, which happens to be inscribed to the Beat poet’s friend, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote the introduction and signed it as well.
“Johnny Depp collects Beat stuff, right?” asks Mr. Drumbolis. “If he wants it for seventy-five hundred beans, I’ll fly over and put it in his back pocket for him.”
The shop is, in fact, four connected buildings. The book collection, divided into various categories, takes up the front half, along with a small workroom for repairs, a bathroom and storage space. The back half has been turned into an apartment, with a modest kitchen, bathroom, a personal research library and office, and two bedrooms, one of which is devoted to the books he has written and published under his own imprint, and where he sleeps on an air mattress.
He describes Letters both as a “shrine” and a “museum,” and it’s hard to argue with him; it’s unlike any bookstore I’ve ever visited.
‘A CONTRIBUTIVE BOOKSELLER’
Nicky Drumbolis says his life has been “a novel, not a story.” If that’s the case, the prologue begins just across the street. Outside the store, he points east, to an overgrown lot beyond the rail tracks where a two-storey house once stood – and his father was born. His life, in a way, has come full circle.
The path to becoming “probably the most remarkable bookseller Canada has produced,” as Toronto rare-book dealer David Mason called Mr. Drumbolis in his 2013 memoir, The Pope’s Bookbinder, actually started across town. He was born in Port Arthur (amalgamated with Fort William in 1970 to form Thunder Bay), the oldest of six children. Despite being selected for a city-wide advanced-learning program, he didn’t finish high school, and even though he later managed to enroll at both Lakehead and York, he didn’t finish university, either.
“My education was largely one at rummage sales,” he says. “I’d find a book and go, ‘This looks neat,’ and I’d take it home and read it. And I particularly loved nutbar books.”
His life has been immersed in “nutbar” books – books that struggle to find a readership, that don’t appear on bestseller lists, that are overlooked for awards, that most people have never heard of. He has spent his bookselling career trying to introduce these works to a larger audience, trying to salvage them from the remainder bin that is time, and, if no one is interested at the moment, ensuring at least one copy survives, just in case a future reader stumbles across it, as he did, and finds some kind of joy. “It’s bringing these people back to life,” he says.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Drumbolis was living in Toronto, where he managed a successive string of second-hand bookshops around the city, including Olympia Books, on a seedy strip of Yonge Street, where he was first introduced to the rare and antiquarian trade; and the adult-oriented Reid’s Bookstore, also on Yonge Street, where, after being hired, he “started writing [small-press publishers] around North America,” imploring them to send their newest titles.
Some publishers were perplexed. “I thought it was a strange place to sell this stuff,” recalls Marty Gervais, who had founded the influential Black Moss Press in 1969, and would drive up from Windsor, Ont., with a carload of chapbooks and literary magazines to drop off. “Right beside a vast array of grotesquely large dildos was the poetry I was publishing by the likes of bpNichol and Al Purdy. It made me wonder what his clientele was taking home with them. Living out their sexual fantasies alongside lyrical recitations, maybe?” (According to Mr. Drumbolis, “all that stuff sold. Why? Because these people would come in to buy porno and then they’d always take something to cover it up!”)
The first of his own stores, Acme Book, opened in 1978 in the west-end Toronto apartment he shared with his wife, Susan Fritz, the same year he co-founded a magazine-distribution company. He’d drive down to New York to pick up porn, but also avant-garde literature and underground magazines – he says he was the first to bring Art Spiegelman’s Raw to Canada. Those trips served a dual purpose: “On the way back, I’d stop in every fucking small town and scout rare books.”
In 1982, the first incarnation of Letters opened on the strip of Queen Street West once known as “booksellers’ row,” where up to 20 bookstores operated at any given time. It was the golden age of bookselling in Toronto, although Mr. Drumbolis set himself apart from his colleagues, as he still does.
“There’s two types of booksellers,” he says. “There’s the distributive bookseller – the guy who just sells whatever he can fucking get – and then there’s the contributive bookseller, which is me, who emplaces the kind of book that I think needs to be read.
“As a contributive bookseller, the important thing I felt that a bookstore ought to represent was a depot for the work, a hostel to house people if they needed it – a place to crash or a place to come and hang out – and then a forum, a place where they could exchange ideas.”
Letters was all these things. It was somewhere that writers could hold readings, “basically to give these people a forum where they were at the centre,” he says. It was a gallery, with display cases housing the best in what Mr. Drumbolis terms “the book arts.” It was a publishing house, with him releasing his own work (often using the pseudonym Arthur Cravan, a nod to the Swiss Surrealist poet) and that of other writers he admired under the Letters imprint. It served as a crash pad, not only for writers but for Mr. Drumbolis himself, who slept in a sleeping bag in a back room after his marriage dissolved.
And, perhaps most important, it was a bookstore that was decidedly democratic in how the shelves were stocked – he’d sell almost any book that he deemed worthy. “It wasn’t a cabinet of curiosities, but a collection of literary wonders,” says Mr. Huisken. “It wasn’t just an accumulation, it was a creation.”
There’s a photo of the old store at 452E Queen St. W., a modest three-storey brick building, with the front window full of what looks to be chapbooks and the front door almost entirely papered over with posters. Mr. Drumbolis stands out front, wearing oversized glasses and a multicoloured checkered sweater, his hands jammed in his front pockets, a thin smile on his lips. It dates from 1988, and was taken by Stan Bevington, a friend and the founder of Coach House Books, perhaps the most important publisher to emerge from the Canadian small-press boom of the sixties and seventies.
The following year, rising rents prompted Mr. Drumbolis to move to Florence Street and take a job with Coach House, where he worked as a bookbinder, off and on, for the next two decades. “Everyone,” he says, “saw me as a binder at Coach House, a menial, and didn’t know I still had the store.”
Mr. Gervais recalls visiting the stop late one night, and being shown early Black Moss titles, some of which he’d likely dropped off amid the sex toys and porno mags years before.
“It was so neat, just being in this place, really quiet at night, and there he is, living in and among his own collection. Many of us have a love for our work, but we go home, as well. But his home was where his books were.”
‘I HATE MY EXISTENCE UP HERE’
And yet his new home isn’t such a happy one. Almost no one in Thunder Bay – almost no one in Canada – knows what he is doing.
“I hate my existence up here,” he says. “It’s done a number on my soul and, believe me, I don’t believe in souls.” He’s lonely, bemoans the lack of good coffee shops and the fact he’s so far away from his friends, that he can’t go out any given night to a poetry reading. He’s angry, frankly, that he had to leave in the first place.
“Toronto lost a huge resource,” he says. “I resented the fact that there wasn’t enough space on the postage stamp for just one more little guy. So I’ve got to play out the string up here.”
Living on a modest pension (he has repaid all of the $70,000 loan), he spends his days working on his own books, which range wildly in subject matter from lunar iconography to Shakespeare, and which he uploads online, and researching the titles in his collection. “Every book has a story,” he says, and he’s driven, in part, by finding out what the story is and then sharing it with the world.
Mr. Bevington describes the store as “a retirement home for books,” which is probably the most accurate description I’ve heard. The 50,000 or so volumes it houses don’t include the impressive array of art and publishing ephemera Mr. Drumbolis has accumulated. And for the first time, all his books are out on display, which makes the fact that hardly anyone has seen them that much more depressing.
An extremely rare vintage Dada poster for the first and only public gathering of the Dadaists.
“All of this is my memory,” Mr. Drombolis says. “Every single thing in here has some memorable factor about it, and every piece in here was scavenged from some experience. And that experience is still pregnant in these things. This is all the inside of my head, in a way.”
Walking through the store is an overwhelming experience. Everywhere I look I spot something I’ve never seen before and will probably never see again. I could have picked a single shelf of a single bookcase and spent my entire visit studying its contents. Not that Mr. Drumbolis would have let me do that. As we amble up and down the aisles, he is constantly narrating, constantly picking out items at random and telling their story – how he acquired it, or who published it, or whatever happened to its author – which often leads into another, entirely different story, and another book, and so on, until I can’t remember which book started the conversation in the first place.
He throws around words like “shit kicker” or “heavyweight” to describe books he particularly loves, his voice growing progressively louder and more animated, the longer he talks. He pulls out a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s 1956 debut Let Us Compare Mythologies, part of what is probably the most extensive sampling in existence of Montreal’s legendary Contact Press, which helped to launch Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and others. Now here’s his Franz Kafka collection, and over here Ezra Pound, and Charles Bukowski, and a few remaining titles from his collection of William S. Burroughs, most of which he sold years ago to David Cronenberg around the time the director was adapting the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch.
“Henry James,” he says, tapping a shelf filled with first editions of the American master. “The guy I wanted to read cover to cover before I died. I don’t think I’ll get to it now.”
His words are tinged with melancholy, not just about James, I think, but about the whole store. After spending a lifetime collecting and preserving these books, there’s not enough time in the world to actually enjoy them, let alone sell them. “I’m going to die with more shit than I’m going to fucking sell,” he tells me. When I spot a first edition of Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell’s 1965 book about a man who spent his life working on an oral history of the modern world, I can’t help but draw a line between the Greenwich Village writer and this Thunder Bay bookseller.
At one point he stops, mid-sentence, and looks around, in what seems like awe. “I have so much shit,” he says, as if to himself.
Part of the reason is that he just doesn’t sell many books, at least not any more.
“He’s sold everything he’s ever sold reluctantly,” says Mr. Mason. “Try and buy a book from him. It’s not going to work.”
Prof. Mount gave it a shot, and was rebuffed – but in the end was given one for free. I was sent home with a suitcase filled with books, too, despite the fact I hadn’t asked for any.
For instance, his Queen Street store featured a lending library. He can rattle off titles borrowed years ago and never returned, or titles that came back not in the same condition as when they left. He shows off a first-edition copy of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a short-story collection by William Gass; it’s stained with what looks like tea, returned that way, he says, by literary icon Alice Munro, once a regular customer. “This was a rare book,” he says.
He describes himself as a “cultural mediator” who is “simply a custodian of a shared resource.”
“I don’t see all of this as ‘mine’ or ‘yours.’ I see this as ‘ours.’ This is history,” he says. “I have temporary custody of the book. That’s all. It’s going to be here after I’m dead.”
Or will it?
Mr. Drumbolis: ‘My education was largely one at rummage sales. I’d find a book and go, “This looks neat,” and I’d take it home and read it. And I particularly loved nutbar books.’
‘WHEN I DROP DEAD … IT’S GOING TO GO TO THE SALLY ANN’
I was in Thunder Bay for two days, sleeping overnight at the store and speaking to more than a dozen of Mr. Drumbolis’s friends and acquaintances. In every conversation, the question as to what will happen to these books was just below the surface. Mr. Drumbolis, for his part, refers to the store as his “tomb.” The priority is to ensure the books aren’t buried with him.
“It scares the hell out of me thinking about it, because the word ‘landfill’ keeps coming up,” says Steven Temple, a rare-book dealer based in Welland, Ont.
“It should be preserved somewhere, somehow,” says John W. Curry, an Ottawa avant-garde poet (as jwcurry) and friend whose small-press collection is one of the few to rival that of Mr. Drumbolis. “There is not another repository like that. It should probably just be turned into a museum.”
Mr. Drumbolis: 'I don’t see all of this as "mine" or "yours." I see this as ours. This is history.'
Says Mr. Huisken, “What we have to do is create an institution to take care of that collection. It’s not going to happen on its own.”
Mr. Drumbolis has a daughter, a social worker in Sudbury, but doesn’t want to burden her. Part of the problem, he says, is that “it’s now up in Thunder Bay where, when I drop dead of an aneurysm, it’s going to go to the Sally Ann.
“I held onto this stuff, to the detriment of my health, against all odds, in the hopes of seeing it go somewhere,” he says. “Nobody wants it, at any cost.”
It’s more complicated than that. Ms. Dondertman, of the Fisher library, says part of the problem is the size of the collection. “There aren’t a lot of libraries who can cope with those numbers, no matter what the books are,” she says. “It’s a huge, huge challenge.”
Mr. Mason maintains that it “won’t end up in the dump. There are now enough people in the book trade who know how important what he has is, that that will not be allowed to happen.”
That said, what the shop contains “is less than what he has in his head, which is the part that’s going to disappear, sadly,” says Mr. Bevington. “I don’t think that there’s any way that you can collect the amount of information that he has in his head.”
Poet Cameron Anstee agrees. “It’s not just that he has books no one has, but he knows things about those books that no one else knows. The amount of knowledge that he possesses as a result of his life’s work – it’s not really reproducible.
“Whoever picks up that tradition from him, it’s going to be a huge task,” adds Mr. Anstee, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa writing about postwar bookselling in Canada. “A hugely important task.”
‘WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT THIS PLACE?’
On my second morning in Thunder Bay, while drinking lukewarm coffee at his kitchen table, Mr. Drumbolis asks me a question I’ve been trying to answer ever since: “If I died, what would you say about this place?”
The best answer, I think, is found in 77 Florence, a poem in Phil Hall’s 2011 Governor-General’s Award-winning collection, Killdeer, inspired by the store “where pilgrims arrive in bewilderment.”
This is what Mr. Hall sees when he looks at what Mr. Drumbolis has accomplished:
A shop specializing in ‘nutbar’ titles is a national treasure waiting to be found – or lost forever
By Mark Medley, The Globe and Mail books editor
January 26, 2016
Before it became “the grotto shrine to the fetish object formerly known as the book,” as it’s often described by its unlikely proprietor, Letters Bookshop was a karate dojo, of all things. The store is located on a desolate strip in a sketchy part of Thunder Bay, across the street from a bakery and the train tracks. From the sidewalk it appears to be abandoned, the kind of shuttered business blighting small towns all over the country; the windows have been boarded up, although an attentive passerby might notice the plywood has been painted with scenes from the prehistoric Lascaux cave walls in France – some of humankind’s earliest stories. There’s little indication that what may be Canada’s most unusual collection of books is housed inside, carefully curated, over the course of five decades, by one of the more unusual personalities the Canadian book trade has ever produced.
What’s most fascinating about Nicky Drumbolis and his one-of-a-kind collection isn’t its value, which he estimates is in the millions, or its size – although it includes roughly 50,000 titles, and fills the building, floor to ceiling – but the focus. He has devoted a great portion of his life and livelihood to work that, as he describes it, “slips through the cracks.” Pamphlets and hand-sewn chapbooks that were produced in minuscule print runs; novels and poetry collections published by the most obscure of presses; the work of authors whose names the world has forgotten, if it ever knew them.
Mr. Drumbolis describes himself, as do many others, as an outsider, and he has devoted himself to the literary equivalents. Walking into his bookstore is to be exposed to an alternate history of publishing, one in which the likes of Blew Ointment Press and Ganglia and grOnk are just as celebrated as McClelland & Stewart or Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“He’s a remarkable person,” says Anne Dondertman, director of the world-renowned Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. “You have to admire someone who’s that single-minded. He’s given up everything to do this.”
His is a collection “that only speaks to people who are interested in the obscure, the oblique, the esoteric,” Mr. Drumbolis says. “There never was and there never will be” another like it – which is why its fate is of interest to so many, from authors to fellow booksellers to librarians, who understand its importance to our collective cultural history.
They also wonder how it can be saved from being dismantled, or, worse, winding up as landfill – considering that Mr. Drumbolis was forced to retreat north in a last-ditch bid to preserve his life’s work, a tactic he now fears has only delayed the inevitable, as there is no white knight in sight.
Besides being a bookseller and de facto literary conservationist, Mr. Drumbolis is a historian, writer, editor, bookbinder, gallerist, typographer, detective and storyteller, who claims he’ll “talk forever if you want to listen.” But he doesn’t get many opportunities these days; since moving here from Toronto, he estimates, no more than 50 people have stepped inside the store he purchased five years ago this month. Letters Bookshop is like a treasure buried just below the surface, either waiting to be found – or lost forever.
‘I’VE NEVER OWNED ANYTHING IN MY LIFE EXCEPT BOOKS’
A little more than a year ago, I ran into Nick Mount, who teaches English at the University of Toronto and is writing a book about Canadian literature in the 1960s. I asked how research was going. He’d just returned from Thunder Bay, he said. Did I know Nicky Drumbolis?
I remembered his small, crowded store in Parkdale, in Toronto’s west end, where the aisles were so tight in places you could barely squeeze by, with boxes upon boxes wedged three and four rows deep. But like many second-hand antiquarian bookstores in the city, it had disappeared, and I figured he was out of the business. Prof. Mount smiled when I said this, and his eyes grew wide. Mr. Drumbolis was still very much in business, he said.
Nine months later, I was in the home of the Sleeping Giant.
Although he doesn’t own a car, and had repeatedly been told I’d gladly take a cab, Mr. Drumbolis is waiting for me at the airport, waving a copy of Crad Kilodney’s Sex Slaves of the Astro-Mutants over his head like a welcome banner. (Mr. Kilodney, who died in 2014, was best known for selling his self-published books on the streets of Toronto – exactly the sort of author Mr. Drumbolis has championed.)
He is 67 but looks a decade younger, and is wearing a black fleece jacket over a blue T-shirt, baggy black jeans, black sneakers and a black beret with “Euskal Herria” embroidered on one side. (It’s what the Basques call their homeland and he’s Greek.) His goatee is more salt than pepper, and he wears his hair in a ponytail that falls to his shoulders.
On the bus ride downtown, he tells me about his move to Thunder Bay in 2011. He grudgingly returned to his hometown after being priced out of Toronto, an increasingly common fate for booksellers. He searched the province for suitable alternate digs, from Wingham, a few hours outside Toronto, to tiny Red Lake, several hours north of here. “I didn’t care where I lived,” he says. “As long as it had a beer store and a post office, I was cool.”
A friend loaned him $70,000 to cover the cost of the building ($45,000) and the move. It’s the first place he has been able to call his own: “I’ve never owned anything in my life except books.”
A lot of books. It took him a year to box them up for the move. Charlie Huisken, former co-owner of This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, the iconic independent bookstore, recalls coming out one weekend with other members of Toronto’s literary community to help pack up the store and the contents of a dozen-odd storage units Mr. Drumbolis had filled over the years: “There was so much stuff that the trailer was starting to rest on the tires rather than on the suspension.”
Once everything had been shifted 1,400 kilometres to Northwestern Ontario – courtesy of two big trucks, one an 18-wheeler – Mr. Drumbolis needed a year to unpack, and then, once he’d built the shelves, another year to organize the collection. The Parkdale store, at 77 Florence St. (also near the train tracks), had soaring 14-foot ceilings but only about 500 square feet of space; he now has more than 3,000 square feet devoted to books, although even this “is hardly big enough.” There are still boxes on top of almost every bookshelf, and the old dojo change rooms are now devoted to overflow. The building has no basement and rests on stilts; Mr. Drumbolis wasn’t sure it would support everything, so he consulted an engineer and researched how best to distribute the weight. He now figures it will hold. The roof needs replacing, though.
It wasn’t always a dojo; the building dates from the early 20th century, and in past lives has been a general store and a post office. An imposing black safe from the period sits in the front room, near the entrance, as does a glass counter that used to tempt the neighbourhood children with candy but now tempts me with a copy, among the many books on display, of Gregory Corso’s first major collection, Gasoline, which happens to be inscribed to the Beat poet’s friend, Allen Ginsberg, who wrote the introduction and signed it as well.
“Johnny Depp collects Beat stuff, right?” asks Mr. Drumbolis. “If he wants it for seventy-five hundred beans, I’ll fly over and put it in his back pocket for him.”
The shop is, in fact, four connected buildings. The book collection, divided into various categories, takes up the front half, along with a small workroom for repairs, a bathroom and storage space. The back half has been turned into an apartment, with a modest kitchen, bathroom, a personal research library and office, and two bedrooms, one of which is devoted to the books he has written and published under his own imprint, and where he sleeps on an air mattress.
He describes Letters both as a “shrine” and a “museum,” and it’s hard to argue with him; it’s unlike any bookstore I’ve ever visited.
‘A CONTRIBUTIVE BOOKSELLER’
Nicky Drumbolis says his life has been “a novel, not a story.” If that’s the case, the prologue begins just across the street. Outside the store, he points east, to an overgrown lot beyond the rail tracks where a two-storey house once stood – and his father was born. His life, in a way, has come full circle.
The path to becoming “probably the most remarkable bookseller Canada has produced,” as Toronto rare-book dealer David Mason called Mr. Drumbolis in his 2013 memoir, The Pope’s Bookbinder, actually started across town. He was born in Port Arthur (amalgamated with Fort William in 1970 to form Thunder Bay), the oldest of six children. Despite being selected for a city-wide advanced-learning program, he didn’t finish high school, and even though he later managed to enroll at both Lakehead and York, he didn’t finish university, either.
“My education was largely one at rummage sales,” he says. “I’d find a book and go, ‘This looks neat,’ and I’d take it home and read it. And I particularly loved nutbar books.”
His life has been immersed in “nutbar” books – books that struggle to find a readership, that don’t appear on bestseller lists, that are overlooked for awards, that most people have never heard of. He has spent his bookselling career trying to introduce these works to a larger audience, trying to salvage them from the remainder bin that is time, and, if no one is interested at the moment, ensuring at least one copy survives, just in case a future reader stumbles across it, as he did, and finds some kind of joy. “It’s bringing these people back to life,” he says.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Drumbolis was living in Toronto, where he managed a successive string of second-hand bookshops around the city, including Olympia Books, on a seedy strip of Yonge Street, where he was first introduced to the rare and antiquarian trade; and the adult-oriented Reid’s Bookstore, also on Yonge Street, where, after being hired, he “started writing [small-press publishers] around North America,” imploring them to send their newest titles.
Some publishers were perplexed. “I thought it was a strange place to sell this stuff,” recalls Marty Gervais, who had founded the influential Black Moss Press in 1969, and would drive up from Windsor, Ont., with a carload of chapbooks and literary magazines to drop off. “Right beside a vast array of grotesquely large dildos was the poetry I was publishing by the likes of bpNichol and Al Purdy. It made me wonder what his clientele was taking home with them. Living out their sexual fantasies alongside lyrical recitations, maybe?” (According to Mr. Drumbolis, “all that stuff sold. Why? Because these people would come in to buy porno and then they’d always take something to cover it up!”)
The first of his own stores, Acme Book, opened in 1978 in the west-end Toronto apartment he shared with his wife, Susan Fritz, the same year he co-founded a magazine-distribution company. He’d drive down to New York to pick up porn, but also avant-garde literature and underground magazines – he says he was the first to bring Art Spiegelman’s Raw to Canada. Those trips served a dual purpose: “On the way back, I’d stop in every fucking small town and scout rare books.”
In 1982, the first incarnation of Letters opened on the strip of Queen Street West once known as “booksellers’ row,” where up to 20 bookstores operated at any given time. It was the golden age of bookselling in Toronto, although Mr. Drumbolis set himself apart from his colleagues, as he still does.
“There’s two types of booksellers,” he says. “There’s the distributive bookseller – the guy who just sells whatever he can fucking get – and then there’s the contributive bookseller, which is me, who emplaces the kind of book that I think needs to be read.
“As a contributive bookseller, the important thing I felt that a bookstore ought to represent was a depot for the work, a hostel to house people if they needed it – a place to crash or a place to come and hang out – and then a forum, a place where they could exchange ideas.”
Letters was all these things. It was somewhere that writers could hold readings, “basically to give these people a forum where they were at the centre,” he says. It was a gallery, with display cases housing the best in what Mr. Drumbolis terms “the book arts.” It was a publishing house, with him releasing his own work (often using the pseudonym Arthur Cravan, a nod to the Swiss Surrealist poet) and that of other writers he admired under the Letters imprint. It served as a crash pad, not only for writers but for Mr. Drumbolis himself, who slept in a sleeping bag in a back room after his marriage dissolved.
And, perhaps most important, it was a bookstore that was decidedly democratic in how the shelves were stocked – he’d sell almost any book that he deemed worthy. “It wasn’t a cabinet of curiosities, but a collection of literary wonders,” says Mr. Huisken. “It wasn’t just an accumulation, it was a creation.”
There’s a photo of the old store at 452E Queen St. W., a modest three-storey brick building, with the front window full of what looks to be chapbooks and the front door almost entirely papered over with posters. Mr. Drumbolis stands out front, wearing oversized glasses and a multicoloured checkered sweater, his hands jammed in his front pockets, a thin smile on his lips. It dates from 1988, and was taken by Stan Bevington, a friend and the founder of Coach House Books, perhaps the most important publisher to emerge from the Canadian small-press boom of the sixties and seventies.
The following year, rising rents prompted Mr. Drumbolis to move to Florence Street and take a job with Coach House, where he worked as a bookbinder, off and on, for the next two decades. “Everyone,” he says, “saw me as a binder at Coach House, a menial, and didn’t know I still had the store.”
Mr. Gervais recalls visiting the stop late one night, and being shown early Black Moss titles, some of which he’d likely dropped off amid the sex toys and porno mags years before.
“It was so neat, just being in this place, really quiet at night, and there he is, living in and among his own collection. Many of us have a love for our work, but we go home, as well. But his home was where his books were.”
‘I HATE MY EXISTENCE UP HERE’
And yet his new home isn’t such a happy one. Almost no one in Thunder Bay – almost no one in Canada – knows what he is doing.
“I hate my existence up here,” he says. “It’s done a number on my soul and, believe me, I don’t believe in souls.” He’s lonely, bemoans the lack of good coffee shops and the fact he’s so far away from his friends, that he can’t go out any given night to a poetry reading. He’s angry, frankly, that he had to leave in the first place.
“Toronto lost a huge resource,” he says. “I resented the fact that there wasn’t enough space on the postage stamp for just one more little guy. So I’ve got to play out the string up here.”
Living on a modest pension (he has repaid all of the $70,000 loan), he spends his days working on his own books, which range wildly in subject matter from lunar iconography to Shakespeare, and which he uploads online, and researching the titles in his collection. “Every book has a story,” he says, and he’s driven, in part, by finding out what the story is and then sharing it with the world.
Mr. Bevington describes the store as “a retirement home for books,” which is probably the most accurate description I’ve heard. The 50,000 or so volumes it houses don’t include the impressive array of art and publishing ephemera Mr. Drumbolis has accumulated. And for the first time, all his books are out on display, which makes the fact that hardly anyone has seen them that much more depressing.
An extremely rare vintage Dada poster for the first and only public gathering of the Dadaists.
“All of this is my memory,” Mr. Drombolis says. “Every single thing in here has some memorable factor about it, and every piece in here was scavenged from some experience. And that experience is still pregnant in these things. This is all the inside of my head, in a way.”
Walking through the store is an overwhelming experience. Everywhere I look I spot something I’ve never seen before and will probably never see again. I could have picked a single shelf of a single bookcase and spent my entire visit studying its contents. Not that Mr. Drumbolis would have let me do that. As we amble up and down the aisles, he is constantly narrating, constantly picking out items at random and telling their story – how he acquired it, or who published it, or whatever happened to its author – which often leads into another, entirely different story, and another book, and so on, until I can’t remember which book started the conversation in the first place.
He throws around words like “shit kicker” or “heavyweight” to describe books he particularly loves, his voice growing progressively louder and more animated, the longer he talks. He pulls out a first edition of Leonard Cohen’s 1956 debut Let Us Compare Mythologies, part of what is probably the most extensive sampling in existence of Montreal’s legendary Contact Press, which helped to launch Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster and others. Now here’s his Franz Kafka collection, and over here Ezra Pound, and Charles Bukowski, and a few remaining titles from his collection of William S. Burroughs, most of which he sold years ago to David Cronenberg around the time the director was adapting the Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch.
“Henry James,” he says, tapping a shelf filled with first editions of the American master. “The guy I wanted to read cover to cover before I died. I don’t think I’ll get to it now.”
His words are tinged with melancholy, not just about James, I think, but about the whole store. After spending a lifetime collecting and preserving these books, there’s not enough time in the world to actually enjoy them, let alone sell them. “I’m going to die with more shit than I’m going to fucking sell,” he tells me. When I spot a first edition of Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell’s 1965 book about a man who spent his life working on an oral history of the modern world, I can’t help but draw a line between the Greenwich Village writer and this Thunder Bay bookseller.
At one point he stops, mid-sentence, and looks around, in what seems like awe. “I have so much shit,” he says, as if to himself.
Part of the reason is that he just doesn’t sell many books, at least not any more.
“He’s sold everything he’s ever sold reluctantly,” says Mr. Mason. “Try and buy a book from him. It’s not going to work.”
Prof. Mount gave it a shot, and was rebuffed – but in the end was given one for free. I was sent home with a suitcase filled with books, too, despite the fact I hadn’t asked for any.
For instance, his Queen Street store featured a lending library. He can rattle off titles borrowed years ago and never returned, or titles that came back not in the same condition as when they left. He shows off a first-edition copy of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, a short-story collection by William Gass; it’s stained with what looks like tea, returned that way, he says, by literary icon Alice Munro, once a regular customer. “This was a rare book,” he says.
He describes himself as a “cultural mediator” who is “simply a custodian of a shared resource.”
“I don’t see all of this as ‘mine’ or ‘yours.’ I see this as ‘ours.’ This is history,” he says. “I have temporary custody of the book. That’s all. It’s going to be here after I’m dead.”
Or will it?
Mr. Drumbolis: ‘My education was largely one at rummage sales. I’d find a book and go, “This looks neat,” and I’d take it home and read it. And I particularly loved nutbar books.’
‘WHEN I DROP DEAD … IT’S GOING TO GO TO THE SALLY ANN’
I was in Thunder Bay for two days, sleeping overnight at the store and speaking to more than a dozen of Mr. Drumbolis’s friends and acquaintances. In every conversation, the question as to what will happen to these books was just below the surface. Mr. Drumbolis, for his part, refers to the store as his “tomb.” The priority is to ensure the books aren’t buried with him.
“It scares the hell out of me thinking about it, because the word ‘landfill’ keeps coming up,” says Steven Temple, a rare-book dealer based in Welland, Ont.
“It should be preserved somewhere, somehow,” says John W. Curry, an Ottawa avant-garde poet (as jwcurry) and friend whose small-press collection is one of the few to rival that of Mr. Drumbolis. “There is not another repository like that. It should probably just be turned into a museum.”
Mr. Drumbolis: 'I don’t see all of this as "mine" or "yours." I see this as ours. This is history.'
Says Mr. Huisken, “What we have to do is create an institution to take care of that collection. It’s not going to happen on its own.”
Mr. Drumbolis has a daughter, a social worker in Sudbury, but doesn’t want to burden her. Part of the problem, he says, is that “it’s now up in Thunder Bay where, when I drop dead of an aneurysm, it’s going to go to the Sally Ann.
“I held onto this stuff, to the detriment of my health, against all odds, in the hopes of seeing it go somewhere,” he says. “Nobody wants it, at any cost.”
It’s more complicated than that. Ms. Dondertman, of the Fisher library, says part of the problem is the size of the collection. “There aren’t a lot of libraries who can cope with those numbers, no matter what the books are,” she says. “It’s a huge, huge challenge.”
Mr. Mason maintains that it “won’t end up in the dump. There are now enough people in the book trade who know how important what he has is, that that will not be allowed to happen.”
That said, what the shop contains “is less than what he has in his head, which is the part that’s going to disappear, sadly,” says Mr. Bevington. “I don’t think that there’s any way that you can collect the amount of information that he has in his head.”
Poet Cameron Anstee agrees. “It’s not just that he has books no one has, but he knows things about those books that no one else knows. The amount of knowledge that he possesses as a result of his life’s work – it’s not really reproducible.
“Whoever picks up that tradition from him, it’s going to be a huge task,” adds Mr. Anstee, a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa writing about postwar bookselling in Canada. “A hugely important task.”
‘WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT THIS PLACE?’
On my second morning in Thunder Bay, while drinking lukewarm coffee at his kitchen table, Mr. Drumbolis asks me a question I’ve been trying to answer ever since: “If I died, what would you say about this place?”
The best answer, I think, is found in 77 Florence, a poem in Phil Hall’s 2011 Governor-General’s Award-winning collection, Killdeer, inspired by the store “where pilgrims arrive in bewilderment.”
This is what Mr. Hall sees when he looks at what Mr. Drumbolis has accomplished:
This recent April flames engulfed Baghdad’s National Library/ destroying manuscripts untold centuries oldSource: Globe and Mail
Almost nothing remains of that great library’s tens of thousands of/manuscripts – books – & Iraqi newspapers
In light of such atrocities – Drumbolis’s preservation instinct/ means – to catch the glowing ashes – & save them – so the world-/as-book can be – if not rebuilt – at least remembered – intensely
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Los Angeles Times: Have an overdue book or unpaid fines? L.A. Public Library to offer 2-week amnesty program
By Matt Hamilton | January 21, 2016
Patrons of the Los Angeles Public Library who’ve racked up fines for overdue books will soon get a reprieve.
Starting Feb. 1, the city’s library system will offer a two-week amnesty period.
Overdue, undamaged materials -- including books, DVDs, and tapes -- can be returned to the downtown Central Library or 72 branch libraries. All fines will be forgiven, and patrons will again be allowed to use their library cards.
“We’re encouraging everyone -- children, students and adults -- to return their overdue materials so they can get back to discovering all that the library has to offer, and so others can enjoy these books,” City Librarian John F. Szabo said in a statement.
Outstanding fines will also be pardoned, including overdue fees for previously returned items.
Those with a lost or missing item can also replace it -- with a librarian’s approval -- and the usual fees for replacement will be waived, the library said.
There are some caveats: damaged or unusable items are not eligible for the amnesty program.
And if you already paid for fines previously levied by the library? Sorry, no refunds.
For the original article, please visit the Los Angeles Times. More information can be found on the Los Angeles Public Library website at http://www.lapl.org/missingyou.
Patrons of the Los Angeles Public Library who’ve racked up fines for overdue books will soon get a reprieve.
Starting Feb. 1, the city’s library system will offer a two-week amnesty period.
Overdue, undamaged materials -- including books, DVDs, and tapes -- can be returned to the downtown Central Library or 72 branch libraries. All fines will be forgiven, and patrons will again be allowed to use their library cards.
“We’re encouraging everyone -- children, students and adults -- to return their overdue materials so they can get back to discovering all that the library has to offer, and so others can enjoy these books,” City Librarian John F. Szabo said in a statement.
Outstanding fines will also be pardoned, including overdue fees for previously returned items.
Those with a lost or missing item can also replace it -- with a librarian’s approval -- and the usual fees for replacement will be waived, the library said.
There are some caveats: damaged or unusable items are not eligible for the amnesty program.
And if you already paid for fines previously levied by the library? Sorry, no refunds.
For the original article, please visit the Los Angeles Times. More information can be found on the Los Angeles Public Library website at http://www.lapl.org/missingyou.
The Conversation: Libraries on the front lines of the homelessness crisis in the United States
Libraries are increasingly a sanctuary for people who are homeless or mentally ill. We wondered how libraries function on the front lines of social service provision.
Prevalence of homelessness in the United States
On any given night in 2014, over half a million people in the United States found themselves without a home. While the majority of these people (69%) secured shelter for the night, many shelters do not provide daytime accommodations for their patrons. This leaves many in search of daytime activity and protection from the elements.
Unfortunately, many homeless are also living with debilitating mental illnesses. The intimate relationship between homelessness and mental illness is well-established. Almost all psychiatric conditions are overrepresented in homeless populations.
The transition from inpatient to outpatient psychiatric treatment that began in the 1960s, including the closure of state-run psychiatric hospitals, may contribute to the prevalence of mental illness among the homeless. Today, adjusting for changes in population size, US state mental hospitals house only about 10% the number of patients they once did.
So it is no surprise that libraries are coping with a large number of patrons who are homeless or have mental illnesses. Public libraries are, after all, designed to be welcoming spaces for all.
This can leave libraries struggling with how to serve a population with very diverse needs.
A major metropolitan library
This is an issue we know that librarians at a metropolitan public library we visited are grappling with. We became aware of this issue in speaking informally with librarians who work there. To our surprise, we learned that the library serves a large number of homeless and mentally ill patrons.
The librarians told us about some of these patrons. There is Big Bob, a large man in his 40’s who frequently regales the librarians with accounts of his exploits as a member of special ops forces in the military. There is John, a reclusive man always attired in combat fatigues and heavy-duty army boots who turned out, in the bitterest cold of winter, to be suffering from severe frostbite. And there is Jane, a young woman who, when it emerged that she was temporarily living in her car, turned the tables on the librarians by saying, “Shh,” so no one else would learn of her plight.
Some of these library patrons are homeless. Others have been diagnosed with a mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, or substance dependence. Tragically, many are experiencing both.
They come to the library for all sorts of reasons: to seek warmth and shelter, to use the restroom, to access the internet, to meet friends, and yes, even to read books and newspapers. One librarian estimates that about half of the library’s regular patrons are either mentally ill or homeless.
The library’s long-term employees report that the mentally ill were not always such a prominent component of its clientele. Their presence increased dramatically 20 years ago, with the closure of a local mental hospital.
How librarians can help patrons who are mentally ill or experiencing homelessness
Helping homeless and mentally ill clients is a challenge that libraries all over the country are grappling with, but library science curricula don’t seem to have caught up.
According to one newly minted librarian who received her master’s degree in library science a few years ago, contemporary library education typically includes no coursework in mental illness. It focuses on the techniques and technology of library services, especially meeting the needs of patrons for access to information.
Learning strategies to assist mentally ill and homeless patrons might not be on library curricula, but the American Library Association has long had policies in place emphasizing equal access to library services for the poor, and in 1996 formed the Hunger, Homelessness, and Poverty Task Force.
Across the country, libraries have developed helpful strategies for serving homeless and mentally ill patrons. One, at least for large libraries with sufficient numbers of personnel, is to designate a member of the staff as a specialist in these matters, who serves as a resource person for other employees.
At the metropolitan library we visited, one of the more civically oriented librarians acts as a liaison between various local mental health agencies and homeless shelters. She has cultivated a relationship with a mental health crisis clinician at the county hospital, who has organized workshops to educate the library staff about mental health and substance abuse.
This librarian’s work with homeless and mentally ill library patrons is currently supported by the library’s budget, but much of her progress was driven by her personal commitment. As she looks toward retirement, she worries that these services will fade when she leaves.
However, there are signs that libraries are embracing their role as a safety net. Libraries in San Francisco, Washington DC and Philadelphia are hiring social workers to assist with the needs of homeless and mentally ill patrons. Others in Queens, New York and Denver, Colorado have outreach programs that bring training services to homeless shelters and educate residents about library services. The Denver program even provides the bus fare to visit the library.
The librarians we talked to take their role as surrogate mental health workers in stride, and many regard their mentally ill patrons with a sense of mission.
Said one librarian who has worked at the downtown library for more than 30 years:
The library often serves as a destination for people who have no place to go. They can always come here, to be warm, safe, and entertained. At first, I didn’t know how important the library is to them, but one day before a holiday, a patron came up to me and said, ‘You guys will really be missed tomorrow.’ Some may resent the presence of the mentally ill in the library, but as far as I am concerned, everyone deserves a chance to use it.
To read the full article, please see The Conversation.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Nautil.us: The Deep Space of Digital Reading
Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.
By Paul La Farge | January 7, 2016
In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,
A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”
There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.
The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.
In the age of print, nonlinear reading found its most elaborate support in the “book wheel,” invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588: a “rotary reading desk” which allowed the reader to keep a great number of books at once, and to switch between them by giving the wheel a turn. The book wheel was— unfortunately!—a rarity in European libraries, but when you think about all the kinds of reading that print affords, the experience of starting a text at its beginning and reading all the way to the end, which we now associate with “deep” reading, looks less characteristic of print in general than of the novel in particular: the one kind of book in which, we feel, we might be depriving ourselves of something vital if we skipped or skimmed.
The quality of digital media poses one kind of problem for the reading brain; the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem. But it’s worth noting that readers have faced this problem before, too. Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, and by 1500, some 27,000 titles had been published in Europe, in a total of around 10 million copies. The flood of printed matter created a reading public, and changed the way that people read.
The German historian Rolf Engelsing argues that a “reading revolution” took place at the end of the 18th century: Before that point, the typical European reader had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, maybe a work of devotional literature—and he read them over and over, so that they were deeply impressed on his consciousness. Afterward, Europeans read all kinds of material—novels, periodicals, newspapers—and they read each item only once before racing on to the next. Contemporary critics were doubtless appalled, but on the other hand, from that flood of printed matter, we got the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the American and French revolutions.
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” They tested the hypothesis that our reading habits follow from this perception, and found it to be correct: Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.
If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.
Meanwhile, some writers are taking advantage of the formal possibilities of digital media to tell stories and communicate information in new ways. One of these new forms is what people in the 1990s called “hypertext”: text divided into units called “lexia,” which are connected by links, sometimes in a branching or tree-like structure, sometimes in webs or cats’-cradles or other tangled forms. (Technically, the Web is a hypertext, but the word often refers to single works with an internally linked structure.)
In fact, though, DeStefano and LeFevre’s findings were equivocal. The cognitive load imposed by hypertext doesn’t correspond in a straightforward way to the number of choices presented at a decision point, or to the total number of links in a hypertext. (Indeed, a 1996 study by Michael Wenger and David Payne found that hypertext did not impose a greater cognitive load on readers than linear text, a result that DeStefano and LeFevre note in passing.) In two studies, hypertext seemed to improve comprehension. One involved readers with little prior knowledge of a subject, who were able to use a highly structured hypertext (one whose structure mirrored the organization of its subject matter) to learn more effectively than similar readers of linear text. In the other study, academically gifted readers learned better from unstructured hypertext than from linear text. The author, Amy Shapiro, hypothesized that these readers were obliged to engage more actively with the hypertext, in order to figure out the relation between its parts; this engagement led to increased understanding, the way puzzling over a difficult poem yields more than reading quickly through an easy one.
DeStefano and LeFevre also remark that “[f]ew of the studies that we reviewed considered affective factors such as engagement or enjoyment.” This may seem like a small point, but it’s not. In a 2008 study by the psychologists Tal Yarkoni, Nicole Speer, and Jeffrey Zacks, subjects were given two narratives to read, while their brain activity was monitored by a functional MRI scanner. One narrative was a fairly straightforward account of a day in a boy’s life; the other was the same account with the sentences scrambled. Here’s a bit of the latter:
Comprehension matters, but so does pleasure. In Proust and the Squid, Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, observes that the brain’s limbic system, the seat of our emotions, comes into play as we learn to read fluently; our feelings of pleasure, disgust, horror and excitement guide our attention to the stories we can’t put down. Novelists have known this for a long time, and digital writers know it, too. It’s no coincidence that many of the best early digital narratives took the form of games, in which the reader traverses an imaginary world while solving puzzles, sometimes fiendishly difficult ones. Considered in terms of cognitive load, these texts are head-bangingly difficult; considered in terms of pleasure, they’re hard to beat.
A new generation of digital writers is building on video games, incorporating their interactive features—and cognitive sparks—into novelistic narratives that embrace the capabilities of our screens and tablets. Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro’s 2014 iPad novella, Pry, tells the story of a demolitions expert returned home from the first Gulf War, whose past and present collide, as his vision fails. The story is told in text, photographs, video clips, and audio. It uses an interface that allows you to follow the action and shift between levels of awareness. As you read text on the screen, describing characters and plot, you draw your fingers apart and see a photograph of the protagonist, his eyes opening on the world. Pinch your fingers shut and you visit his troubled unconscious; words and images race by, as if you are inside his memory. Pry is the opposite of a shallow work; its whole play is between the surface and the depths of the human mind. Reading it is exhilarating.
There’s no question when you read (or play) Pry that you’re doing something your brain isn’t quite wired for. The interface creates a feeling of simultaneity, and also of having to make choices in real time, that no book could reproduce. It asks you to use your fingers to do more than just turn the page. It communicates the experience of slipping in and out of a story, in and out of a dream, or nightmare. It uses the affordances of your phone or tablet to do what literature is always trying to do: give you new things to think about, to expand the world behind your eyes. It’s stressful, at first. How are you supposed to know if you’re reading it right? What if you miss something? But if you play (or read) it long enough, you can almost feel your brain begin to adapt.
Most of the Web is not like Pry—not yet, anyway. But the history of reading suggests that what we’re presently experiencing is probably not the end times of human thought. It’s more like an interregnum, or the crouch before a leap. Wolf points out that when it comes to reading, what we get out is largely what we put in. “The reading brain circuit reflects the affordances of what it reads,” she notes: affordances being the built-in opportunities for interaction. The more we skim, the more we’re likely to keep skimming; on the other hand, the more we plunge into a text, the more we’re likely to keep plunging. “We’re in a digital culture,” Wolf says. “It’s not a question of making peace. We have to be discerning, vigilant, developmentally savvy.” And of course we have to be surprised, delighted, puzzled, even disturbed. We have to enjoy ourselves. If we can do that, digital reading will expand the already vast interior space of our humanity.
From: Nautl.us
By Paul La Farge | January 7, 2016
In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,
... the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.
 |
16TH-CENTURY INTERNET: The “book wheel,” invented in 1588, was a
rotating reading desk that allowed readers to flit among texts by giving
the wheel a quick spin. (Source: Wikipedia)
|
There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.
Critics like to say the Internet causes our minds to wander off, but we’ve been wandering off all along.The fear of technology is not new. In the fifth century B.C., Socrates worried that writing would weaken human memory, and stifle judgment. In fact, as Wolf notes in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, the opposite happened: Faced with the written page, the reader’s brain develops new capacities. The visual cortex forms networks of cells that are capable of recognizing letterforms almost instantaneously; increasingly efficient pathways connect these networks to the phonological and semantic areas of the cortex, freeing up other parts of the brain to put the words we read into sentences, stories, views of the world. We may not keep the Iliad in our heads any longer, but we’re exquisitely capable of reflecting on it, comparing it to other stories we know, and forming conclusions about human beings ancient and modern.
The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.
In the age of print, nonlinear reading found its most elaborate support in the “book wheel,” invented by the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588: a “rotary reading desk” which allowed the reader to keep a great number of books at once, and to switch between them by giving the wheel a turn. The book wheel was— unfortunately!—a rarity in European libraries, but when you think about all the kinds of reading that print affords, the experience of starting a text at its beginning and reading all the way to the end, which we now associate with “deep” reading, looks less characteristic of print in general than of the novel in particular: the one kind of book in which, we feel, we might be depriving ourselves of something vital if we skipped or skimmed.
The quality of digital media poses one kind of problem for the reading brain; the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem. But it’s worth noting that readers have faced this problem before, too. Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, and by 1500, some 27,000 titles had been published in Europe, in a total of around 10 million copies. The flood of printed matter created a reading public, and changed the way that people read.
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” They tested the hypothesis that our reading habits follow from this perception, and found it to be correct: Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.
If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.
Meanwhile, some writers are taking advantage of the formal possibilities of digital media to tell stories and communicate information in new ways. One of these new forms is what people in the 1990s called “hypertext”: text divided into units called “lexia,” which are connected by links, sometimes in a branching or tree-like structure, sometimes in webs or cats’-cradles or other tangled forms. (Technically, the Web is a hypertext, but the word often refers to single works with an internally linked structure.)
The digital novel Pry is the opposite of a shallow work; its whole play is between the surface and the depths of the human mind. It is exhilarating.The impact of hypertext on the reading brain has, as you’d expect, received a fair amount of scientific attention. In 2005, the psychologists Diana DeStefano and Jo-Anne LeFevre reviewed 38 studies of hypertext reading; their expectation was that hypertext would be found to impose a greater cognitive load on the reader than linear text, because of the effort involved in scanning a page for links, and deciding which link, if any, to follow. DeStefano and LeFevre further hypothesized that this increased cognitive load would cause readers’ recall and comprehension to suffer. They concluded that this expectation was, generally speaking, correct, and Carr cited it in his 2011 book The Shallows, as evidence that the Internet is making us stupid.
In fact, though, DeStefano and LeFevre’s findings were equivocal. The cognitive load imposed by hypertext doesn’t correspond in a straightforward way to the number of choices presented at a decision point, or to the total number of links in a hypertext. (Indeed, a 1996 study by Michael Wenger and David Payne found that hypertext did not impose a greater cognitive load on readers than linear text, a result that DeStefano and LeFevre note in passing.) In two studies, hypertext seemed to improve comprehension. One involved readers with little prior knowledge of a subject, who were able to use a highly structured hypertext (one whose structure mirrored the organization of its subject matter) to learn more effectively than similar readers of linear text. In the other study, academically gifted readers learned better from unstructured hypertext than from linear text. The author, Amy Shapiro, hypothesized that these readers were obliged to engage more actively with the hypertext, in order to figure out the relation between its parts; this engagement led to increased understanding, the way puzzling over a difficult poem yields more than reading quickly through an easy one.
DeStefano and LeFevre also remark that “[f]ew of the studies that we reviewed considered affective factors such as engagement or enjoyment.” This may seem like a small point, but it’s not. In a 2008 study by the psychologists Tal Yarkoni, Nicole Speer, and Jeffrey Zacks, subjects were given two narratives to read, while their brain activity was monitored by a functional MRI scanner. One narrative was a fairly straightforward account of a day in a boy’s life; the other was the same account with the sentences scrambled. Here’s a bit of the latter:
Mrs. Birch called in a pleasant tone, “Raymond, take a bath and then you can go to bed.” Raymond noticed this immediately and asked curiously, “Am I four feet high?” He stood and went toward them in a slow, jogging run.Based on the fMRI data, Yarkoni, Speer, and Zacks concluded that the scrambled sentences forced the readers to keep remaking their “situation models,” their mental representations of what was happening in the story. Situation models guide reading comprehension and memory; without them, we get lost, which explains, in neuropsychological terms, why the scrambled sentences were harder to remember. And yet, when I read the two experimental texts, I found myself thinking about how much more interesting the scrambled one was, and how much more fun it was to read. Maybe I’m just the kind of person who likes building situation models, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. If there were no pleasure in reading things that don’t make sense, who would read the Surrealists? Who would giggle at bad subtitles, or Mad Libs?
Comprehension matters, but so does pleasure. In Proust and the Squid, Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, observes that the brain’s limbic system, the seat of our emotions, comes into play as we learn to read fluently; our feelings of pleasure, disgust, horror and excitement guide our attention to the stories we can’t put down. Novelists have known this for a long time, and digital writers know it, too. It’s no coincidence that many of the best early digital narratives took the form of games, in which the reader traverses an imaginary world while solving puzzles, sometimes fiendishly difficult ones. Considered in terms of cognitive load, these texts are head-bangingly difficult; considered in terms of pleasure, they’re hard to beat.
 |
SHAPE OF READING TO COME: Reading’s future is
signaled by interactive novels like Pry, which, along
with text, uses video clips to expose its protagonist’s
memories.
|
There’s no question when you read (or play) Pry that you’re doing something your brain isn’t quite wired for. The interface creates a feeling of simultaneity, and also of having to make choices in real time, that no book could reproduce. It asks you to use your fingers to do more than just turn the page. It communicates the experience of slipping in and out of a story, in and out of a dream, or nightmare. It uses the affordances of your phone or tablet to do what literature is always trying to do: give you new things to think about, to expand the world behind your eyes. It’s stressful, at first. How are you supposed to know if you’re reading it right? What if you miss something? But if you play (or read) it long enough, you can almost feel your brain begin to adapt.
Most of the Web is not like Pry—not yet, anyway. But the history of reading suggests that what we’re presently experiencing is probably not the end times of human thought. It’s more like an interregnum, or the crouch before a leap. Wolf points out that when it comes to reading, what we get out is largely what we put in. “The reading brain circuit reflects the affordances of what it reads,” she notes: affordances being the built-in opportunities for interaction. The more we skim, the more we’re likely to keep skimming; on the other hand, the more we plunge into a text, the more we’re likely to keep plunging. “We’re in a digital culture,” Wolf says. “It’s not a question of making peace. We have to be discerning, vigilant, developmentally savvy.” And of course we have to be surprised, delighted, puzzled, even disturbed. We have to enjoy ourselves. If we can do that, digital reading will expand the already vast interior space of our humanity.
From: Nautl.us
Forbes.com: The Bill Gates Bump: How A Billionaire Is Helping To Save The Publishing Industry From Itself
By Grant Feller | January 6, 2016.
My daughter is studying Voltaire’s Candide and hates it. That’s OK, she’s allowed her opinion. But there’s a line in which I think Bill Gates would especially enjoy: ‘Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.’
It seems that Bill’s burgeoning new career as a book reviewer on GatesNotes is under fire from those who believe literary opinions should be the preserve of the so-called experts. Or fools. Bill, on the other hand, is keen to tell the world which books suit his taste.
His highly influential blog (part of his brilliant network of content marketing tools designed to maximise his philosophies) includes a list of some of the 50 or so books he’s enjoyed that year, including The Road To Character by New York Times columnist David Brooks (a bit long and disjointed, I thought, but nevertheless thought-provoking) and The Vital Question by Nick Lane (brilliant on the origins of life and why we are the way we are).
According to those who bow to the superior skills of the literary critics, Bill, by presuming that anyone cares what he reads, likes and thinks, is helping to destroy the books industry which recent figures suggest is worth £10 billion to the UK economy alone and almost £300 billion worldwide.
This week, The Times newspaper printed a rather sneering assessment of Bill’s blog and how ‘struggling authors enjoy the Bill Gates bump’. Because when the world’s wealthiest man blogs about your book (or celebrity-blogs as the newspaper would have it) then the wretched lives of writers on the poverty line will be transformed overnight. Sales success is inevitable.
Some critics are outraged. The highly-respected DJ Taylor is quoted as saying: ‘What does Bill Gates know about books?’ He adds that ordinary people not steeped in literary criticism tarnish the industry: ‘There has been a loss of critical authority. You have to have some kind of language, some kind of protocols to have the conversation about the meaning of books.’
It’s a line that has been forcefully argued by Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who believes that the rise of book bloggers is ‘to the detriment of literature’ because their tastes, knowledge and critical faculties cannot be trusted. Certainly can’t be as trusted as those precious types who sit in their ivory towers surrounded by mini-libraries of books that publishers have sent on to them, gratis. Presumably with companies like Amazon in mind (which accounts for 90 per cent of all book sales in the UK and whose book sales account for around 7 per cent of its $70bn annual revenue), Peter adds: ‘If the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics…then literature will be the lesser for it.’
Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued film criticism or has it made bylined critics less snobby and more attuned to people’s tastes? Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued travel experts who jet around the world on PR-funded freebies, or has it made hotel establishments keener to keep the customer satisfied? Has the mass of unargued opinion destroyed news journalism or made it faster, fresher and sharper?
The most profound societal change that our digital age has created is the democratisation of opinion. Of course it’s always been there but the means of expressing it to a wide audience has always been highly restricted, the preserve of an elite few who enjoy telling us the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. Bill Gates might be good at making money, they would argue, but what does he know about books?
How conceited, arrogant and wrong. Presumably the same goes for book clubs, a phenomenon that conservative estimates believe adds up to 100million in individual sales in the US alone. Those, for instance, run by Oprah Winfrey (whose annual recommendation list causes a 2.5% decline in sales for all other books in the 10 days after they’re announced), Richard and Judy and Mark Zuckerberg, whose new online forum recommends titles that ‘emphasise learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies’. What do they know? Well, for one thing, they tend to know what people like – not ‘should’ like but will like.
In truth, most literary critics are brilliant, intelligent writers with a unique ability to know what books the wider public will devour and loathe. But that doesn’t mean their literary tastes are any better than Bill’s. And at the end of the day, if one of the world’s most famous individuals is able to enthuse a wider public, increase sales of books and spark intellectual debate (whilst making money for those poor souls known as writers), well isn’t that a good thing?
Even Voltaire would have raised a glass of absinthe to that.
Grant Feller is a media consultant and the Director of GF-Media
From: Forbes
My daughter is studying Voltaire’s Candide and hates it. That’s OK, she’s allowed her opinion. But there’s a line in which I think Bill Gates would especially enjoy: ‘Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.’
It seems that Bill’s burgeoning new career as a book reviewer on GatesNotes is under fire from those who believe literary opinions should be the preserve of the so-called experts. Or fools. Bill, on the other hand, is keen to tell the world which books suit his taste.
His highly influential blog (part of his brilliant network of content marketing tools designed to maximise his philosophies) includes a list of some of the 50 or so books he’s enjoyed that year, including The Road To Character by New York Times columnist David Brooks (a bit long and disjointed, I thought, but nevertheless thought-provoking) and The Vital Question by Nick Lane (brilliant on the origins of life and why we are the way we are).
According to those who bow to the superior skills of the literary critics, Bill, by presuming that anyone cares what he reads, likes and thinks, is helping to destroy the books industry which recent figures suggest is worth £10 billion to the UK economy alone and almost £300 billion worldwide.
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| Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, participates in a panel discussion during the Financial Inclusion Forum December 1, 2015 at the Treasury Department in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) |
Some critics are outraged. The highly-respected DJ Taylor is quoted as saying: ‘What does Bill Gates know about books?’ He adds that ordinary people not steeped in literary criticism tarnish the industry: ‘There has been a loss of critical authority. You have to have some kind of language, some kind of protocols to have the conversation about the meaning of books.’
It’s a line that has been forcefully argued by Peter Stothard, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who believes that the rise of book bloggers is ‘to the detriment of literature’ because their tastes, knowledge and critical faculties cannot be trusted. Certainly can’t be as trusted as those precious types who sit in their ivory towers surrounded by mini-libraries of books that publishers have sent on to them, gratis. Presumably with companies like Amazon in mind (which accounts for 90 per cent of all book sales in the UK and whose book sales account for around 7 per cent of its $70bn annual revenue), Peter adds: ‘If the mass of unargued opinion chokes off literary critics…then literature will be the lesser for it.’
Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued film criticism or has it made bylined critics less snobby and more attuned to people’s tastes? Has the mass of unargued opinion devalued travel experts who jet around the world on PR-funded freebies, or has it made hotel establishments keener to keep the customer satisfied? Has the mass of unargued opinion destroyed news journalism or made it faster, fresher and sharper?
The most profound societal change that our digital age has created is the democratisation of opinion. Of course it’s always been there but the means of expressing it to a wide audience has always been highly restricted, the preserve of an elite few who enjoy telling us the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. Bill Gates might be good at making money, they would argue, but what does he know about books?
How conceited, arrogant and wrong. Presumably the same goes for book clubs, a phenomenon that conservative estimates believe adds up to 100million in individual sales in the US alone. Those, for instance, run by Oprah Winfrey (whose annual recommendation list causes a 2.5% decline in sales for all other books in the 10 days after they’re announced), Richard and Judy and Mark Zuckerberg, whose new online forum recommends titles that ‘emphasise learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies’. What do they know? Well, for one thing, they tend to know what people like – not ‘should’ like but will like.
In truth, most literary critics are brilliant, intelligent writers with a unique ability to know what books the wider public will devour and loathe. But that doesn’t mean their literary tastes are any better than Bill’s. And at the end of the day, if one of the world’s most famous individuals is able to enthuse a wider public, increase sales of books and spark intellectual debate (whilst making money for those poor souls known as writers), well isn’t that a good thing?
Even Voltaire would have raised a glass of absinthe to that.
Grant Feller is a media consultant and the Director of GF-Media
From: Forbes
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