December 7, 2009
More Things To Do With Books & Giftmas
If you, like me, have been banned from buying any more books for your family this Giftmas don’t worry – there’s still a way for a good bibliophile to push the printed form. This year the bee in my bonnet is all about bookish gift cards!
From The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library's Christmas card offerings.
Libraries are a surprisingly good source of tasteful gifts. Fundraising has always been a major issue for libraries, though few of us seem to take notice outside of the occasional bake or book sale. Almost every library has, tucked in behind the front counter, a selection of items for sale like bags, publications, shirts or bookmarks available year-round.
Gift cards are probably a no-brainer for a good reference collection because so many of their books are beautifully photogenic and summon the aesthetic of Nutcracker Christmasses complete with giant fireplaces, trees trimmed with candles and leather-bound books being read to a clutch of excited children before bedtime.
This one available from the Osborne Collection of Children's Books.
Toronto certainly has no shortage of libraries with behind-the-counter gift shops, but ambitious gift-givers among you might enjoy looking further abroad. The J.P. Morgan Library in New York has a fabulous shop including a reproduction of the first known Christmas card, while the British Library has a huge selection including reproductions from the Lindisfarne Chronicles. Link madness here I come: see also the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, the Bodleian, and the New York Public Library. But you don’t have to take my word for it – walk into your favourite library and just ask the librarian. I guarantee [1] they will have something cute you would never have expected.
[1] No actual guarantee available.
December 1, 2009
Canada Reads 2010 Quickie Thoughts
I won’t be back on this subject for months now, but I have to quickly state my apprehension at this year’s Canada Reads books.
For starters, I own four out of five of them already. Of those, I have read two (Generation X and Fall On Your Knees), gave up on one because I found it very, very dull (Jade Peony) and was anxiously looking forward to reading the fourth (Nikolski). So I suppose that makes this year’s list very inexpensive for me to acquire (here I come, Good To A Fault).
I will give Jade Peony another try I suppose, but the Coupland & Macdonald are headscratchers. I could read Generation X again to refresh my memory, though I don’t remember liking it enough to actually want to. Meanwhile Fall On Your Knees still lives in my mind as the single most painful thing I’ve ever read. I didn’t dislike it; it was quite good. But do I really want to live through that read again? I mean, eek. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I doubt anyone would claim it is a pleasant read.
Interesting, though. Hm. Yes, hm.
November 30, 2009
Book Prizes and Book Recommendations
I can’t overstate how excited I am about tomorrow’s Canada Reads 2010 announcement. I have it on my calendar and plan to stay home from Miss Margaret’s drop-in centre in order to hear it, pen and paper ready to scribble down my order list. While the competition aspect of Canada Reads is definitely good fun, what I love best about it is simply receiving the recommendations. Does that sound strange? I find it very difficult to get reliable literary recommendations. It isn’t that there aren’t enough recommendations flying around out there, it’s that there are generally too many.
The seasons’ Best of 2009 Picks are a case in point as far as I am concerned. Every publication with a book reviewer publishes a “Top X Books of the Year” right around Christmas, and I find these lists utterly useless. 100 best books of the year? How are there even enough books published in a year for 100 of them to carry the title of best? I am not a prolific reader as far as bookish folks go – at best I might read 40 books in a year, more often I read 20-25. I can’t absorb 100 books in a year, or even decide which of them to dip in to. I need a short list. Best book of the year. If you read one book this year, make it this one.
That, of course, is something literary prizes can be good for. The Booker Prize winners for the last few years have been decent reads, but I’ll admit it’s pretty clear to me that the Giller juries and I have very different opinions on what makes a good book. Canada Reads is different. Although they’re limited to Canadian books, the wider sweep of time reaches more nooks and crannies than a conventional annual book prize. Because of the populist focus of the competition, they seem to go out of their way to represent a bit of everything: something small press, something funny, something a little strange, something that was overlooked the first time around, something classic but forgotten. And probably most importantly, they aren’t trying to find the best book under any technical criteria, they just want to pick a book they’d feel safe recommending to just about anyone. Be still my heart, recommendations actually intended for reading pleasure.
I even have this thought that I might bundle up Miss Margaret tomorrow and head down to the CBC building for the little meet-and-greet at noon. I’m sure I’ll have at least one of the chosen books on my shelf already, and it’s always fun to have signatures inscribed. Does anyone else have a similar thought? I started this blog last year after having a great time discussing Canada Reads 2009 all over the bloggosphere – I’d love to do the same this year, and maybe meet some (more) of you.
Glee!
November 6, 2009
Puzzles in Paper
I have been working these last couple of months with a privately-owned book collection of mostly German books, most of which were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but some of which are a good deal older. The book’s current owner doesn’t read German and has no relationship with the books, so identifying and describing the books has been quite a lot of CSI with just a little of Indiana Jones thrown in. At this stage I think I have a good handle on most of the collection, excepting one particular item.
The book is a small black leather bound manuscript stamped “M.G” on the cover, and appears to contain Catholic devotions professionally inscribed in German kurrentschrift (German cursive hand, just close enough to our own handwriting to look familiar but dissimilar enough to defy easy translation) with calligraphic headlines. I don’t know who wrote it, for whom, why, when or where.
The best evidence we have of the book’s origin and provenance is an inscription on the half-title page:
This inscription is more problematic than it might first appear. The first two lines read (in German) “This book belongs to Josephine Krofft” followed by two lines of gobbledygook and a date which appears to be 1729. One might hope that this indicates the person the book was written for, her location and perhaps the date she recieved the book. Would that it were so easy.
The date is our first and formost problem. Many of the books in this collection are from the 18th century, and so we did take this, at first, to be the date of this book’s creation as well. The trouble began when I started to investigate the book more closely and found that the majority of the book is written on a nice weave paper with a clean, clear watermark depicting the monogram “OHL” with a crown or flame atop the “O”.
The watermark is so clean and clear that there can be no question of the paper type. If the paper were lain – the standard paper technology in the early 18th century – you would be able to see, however faintly, chain lines in the paper when held up to a light. Weave paper without chain lines was a technology invented in England around 1757, reaching the Continent even later. If my book reads 1729, it must be back-dated for some reason, as the very paper it is written upon was not invented until 30 years later.
Why back-date a book? The answer probably lies in the rest of the text on that line, which I can’t yet decipher. I have one great fear, and that is that the date is a guess made by a previous – but not original – owner. The second puzzle of that inscription involves a lost page. The hasty inscription has been corrected in two places – once where a word was scratched out and written again, below, and once at the end of the third line where one word has been written over another, previously-written word (unfortunately not very visible in this picture). The corrections were so hasty, in fact, that they have left an ink-smudge on the verso of the flyleaf facing it. In between our inscribed half-title page and this ink-smudged flyleaf is a hanging scrap of paper where once there was another page. So, the inscription was made after another page was removed. What was on this missing page? And if Josephine Krofft was the book’s first owner, why would she inscribe it after it has been altered? I suspect now that she isn’t the first owner at all, and the missing page probably had better, more accurate evidence of provenance. Evidence I will never actually witness.
Nevertheless the book is an intriguing find. I’m telling you this story now because I hope that somewhere out there someone may be able to help me source this book in some way. If you or anyone you know can read the text of that inscription, can help me identify the paper type or has any other information on 18th (?)-century German Catholic prayer-books, please drop me a line! Comment here or email me at charlotte@once-and-future.com. I can provide more photos and information as required.
September 30, 2009
A View From the Front Line
Ah, ebooks. The literary bloggosphere’s favourite subject. One of my favourites too, but today I have a little bit more to offer than hysterical doomsaying: today I would like to report the results of a case-study I have informally conducted over the last month.
Under the general header of “ebooks” we actually have a number of issues. Amazon selling popular hardcovers for $9.99 for their Kindle is a wildly different issue than Google scanning orphaned academic works, or textbooks converting to digital, expiring formats. It is the latter I have had a startling new experience with – the former, and other issues, can wait for another post.
I work in a bookstore, one which specializes in academic texts – that is to say, books on subjects of remote and specialized subjects, hard to find but invaluable to the very small audience. I challenge anybody in Toronto to find a better and more well-stocked selection of the works of Giorio Agamben or Jean Baudrillard. Of Anthony Giddens or Hannah Arendt. We have an African Literature section that, at this writing, exceeds five bookshelves. Our best-selling title of September 2009, so far, is Amartya Sen’s Theory of Justice. You get the idea.
In order to finance our indulgence in this very small, specialized field we also carry course books and, occasionally, text books for the Toronto universities. I am absolutely sympathetic to the plight of the textbook publisher. Textbooks take a lot of time and expertise to publish and then sell only to a limited audience; that audience is absolutely hell-bent against buying the product and do everything they can to buy the books used. Textbooks wind up expensive and publishers feel pressured to release “new” editions as frequently as they can in order to gain market share back from the used market. If anywhere in publishing there is an ideal place for an electronic book, this is it. Students get the books cheaper than they would the printed version, publishers have fewer overhead costs, and the limited licensing allows them to keep the product up to date and salable without the cost and nonsense of printing a whole new edition. And, there’s no textbook to move into the used market and become next year’s competitor.
Well, here is the front line reality.
First, a note on my research methodology.
We have the textbook for a large graduate program – roughly 1200 students. The book comes in two formats: a physical textbook just like we all remember from school, and a “code” which retails for $30 less than the book and which gives the student access to the book in an electronic format for 12 months after the code has been activated. (The physical book also includes the “code” for the e-version bundled with it.)
Every student needs this book in some format or another. The book they used is custom published for them, and we have the exclusive right to sell it. So if the students want the book, short of buying it directly from the publisher, they have to come to us. The book is a new publication this year, so not only are there no used versions available, the students would not have been able to inspect either the physical or the electronic versions before buying. Further, I am one of only three people who ring books through the cash register and I am nearby or present even when I am not physically doing the selling, so I can safely say I have seen the vast majority of those books actually sold.
How did 1200 students choose to purchase their textbook?
After one month we have sold approximately 900 physical books.
We have also sold approximately 8 “codes” for the ebook.
Two of those ebook purchasers later returned to buy the physical book.
Now, it is true that at first – for the first 100 books, let’s say – I was selling the hardcopy book pretty hard. I gave the students the full run down of all the ways that the e-version was lacking. But after it became clear that overwhelmingly they wanted the book in any case, our tactics switched – suddenly we were hard selling the ebook to absolutely no avail. We ran out of the hard copy book at one point and even though we still had hundreds of the ebook codes in stock, nobody wanted them. They all left their names for hard copies.
What can we say about this? Despite the usual caterwalling about the price of the textbook, it wasn’t, apparently, enough to persuade them to use the ebook even though it was $30 cheaper. The students were turned off by the look of the thing, a flimsy envelope of cardboard with a scratch-off number on it. They talked about how they couldn’t read on a screen. How they needed the book with them in class (despite having laptops with, presumably wireless connections). Some didn’t like the fact that after 12 months they would have nothing to show for their purchase, as the license to use would have expired. The two who bought the textbook after trying the ebook both didn’t appreciate that they couldn’t print it out – I guess they thought they could create their own textbook at home.
But first and foremost, they didn’t like the price.
Yes, it was $30 cheaper than the textbook. But it was also still over $50. Hundreds of times I heard the phrase “For that much money, I might as well get the book.” This one blindsided me, I’ll admit. I know students that will drive to downtown Toronto from Aurora to return a book because they found it for $3 cheaper on Amazon. I thought a $30 savings was a no-brainer. So, apparently, did the textbook publisher.
This is going to be a tricky one for the publisher to negotiate, because even an ebook of a textbook isn’t going to get much cheaper. Students have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that the majority of the cost of a textbook isn’t the paper (and how often have I heard “wow, all that for such a small book?” or “But it isn’t even hardcover!” as if the book is a bag of almonds bought from the bulk store and priced by weight). A textbook is – or ought to be – a high-end work of scholarship requiring one or more highly educated people to devote several years of their career to write. The book needs to be peer reviewed and fact-checked by equally-qualified people, then marketed and distributed as usual to a very limited audience. In short, you need to pay for the intellectual property, not the paper. Eliminating the paper will yield some savings but will not reduce the book to a $9.99 blowout.
(It bears mentioning that this illusion that an ebook is etherial and costs nothing to produce is perpetuated by Amazon, who keep their ebook prices artificially low for some unknown but no doubt nefarious reason. Novels are also created at great cost of time and effort and should also cost something, regardless of dead tree content.)
So this year, at least, the book held its ground against the rising tide of electrons. Is this representative? Did the textbook publisher mess up in some other way? I am going to be satisfied saying that I no longer consider the battle for the textbook market cut, dried and determined. I suspect the publishers will cry themselves to sleep over this one. We’ll see what they come up with next year. ..
August 26, 2009
Not Dead Yet
Despite weeks of silence, I am still alive, kicking and book-ing. “Rush season” has arrived at my book shop (which deals in a lot of course books for Universities) and only rarely am I allowed to be untethered from the receiving area. I will be free-range again come mid-September.
In the meantime, the Toronto Centre for the Book has just announced their 2009-2010 lecture series. Although they are now the official “lecture series of the graduate Book History and Print Culture Program in collaboration with the undergraduate Book and Media Studies Program”, the series is in no way restricted to students and academics. Attendees of all kinds are welcome. I’ve listed the lectures on the Events Page, but I encourage you to mark them down on your very own calendar.
August 4, 2009
Dumpster Diving at the Kelly Library
One of my favourite book-finding spots in the city is the Kelly Library in St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Every week they stock a table in the cafe with books withdrawn from their stacks, and every week the entire table is replaced with a new batch of books. The books seem to represent particular sections of the library: one week might be American Cinema, the next week the French Revolution. Every book on the table is 50 cents, to be deposited into a little wooden box.
Visiting the Kelly Cafe is one of my weekly rituals. I don’t often find something to buy, but when I do it is usually something totally unique and impossible to have found any other way. I exercise uncommon discretion – I bike there and can’t cart a huge batch of books home, and anyway I want to leave some pickings for others.
I have lately been studying the ins and outs of German typography – blackletter fonts, Fraktur and the like – and by coincidence, last week’s theme at the Kelly Cafe seemed to be early-to-mid nineteenth century devotional and theological books in German. My typefaces were in full display here over about a hundred year period. But for whatever reason I didn’t buy any. I hesitated, wondered if I really needed them, hummed about the subject matter.
By the weekend I totally regretted my decision. Honestly, for 50 cents surely I should justify a few books to practice transcribing and identifying the texts! I tried to go back on Saturday only to find them closed, I tried phoning on Monday to find same. This morning I ran down there first thing in the morning to try to intercept my books before they vanished to wherever they go when they are replaced by the next week’s offerings. They had indeed been replaced (luckily, this week’s batch included some nineteenth century German philosophy, so I picked up a few books there).
I asked the librarians what becomes of the books once they are replaced. They are, I was told, recycled. In a meek voice I pushed further… had… the recycling been disposed of? Luckily no, it had not. Could I look through it? Why yes, I was quite welcome!
So a nice librarian took me down into the bowels of the library to root through their massive recycling bins. They were packed full of books – good books, interesting books! – and luckily, included my early ninteenth century German pickings. I scavenged what I could. I joked to the librarian, “I bet this must happen a lot – mad bibliophiles wanting to root through your garbage?” “No,” I was told. “You are the first.”
Alright, honestly. I can’t be the only girl in Toronto willing to sort through a library’s recycling in order to get at a useful (and free) book. But then, nobody took them when they were 50 cents and on offer in the cafe either. What is this?! Are ex-libris books really so maligned? These books are in excellent condition. Many are leather-bound. Some are old, many are out of print, lots are hard to come by any other way. Readers and academics will find treasures there.
I can only conclude that people must just be unaware of this treasure-trove. Hence this post today. Looking for cheap, good, interesting and unexpected books? Might I recommend the Kelly Cafe? You should check it out, weekly even! And buy things when you see them, because otherwise you might need to go dumpster-diving to get at them the following week in a fit of regret.
July 2, 2009
The Scope of a Collection
I really do plan to be brief, this time. But some administration first: I won’t be holding a book collecting contest this month because I am out of town, nowhere near books in any kind of quantity. Our cottage is newly built and not yet filled to the rafters with summer books, though a new load comes in every week as my family wakes up to this opportunity to clear out some shelf space. In the meantime I am alone with the trees, rocks, lake, rain… and internet.
Enough about that. I wanted to speak for two seconds about the concept of defining the scope of one’s book collection. When I tell people I collect books they often reply with “me too, I have like two whole bookcases of books”. While this is “collecting” in a sense, it isn’t really what is meant when someone who considers themselves a serious collector says they collect. That, really, is hoarding, or owning. Collecting in a more formal sense means to define the bounds of a particular collection, deciding what is relevant and desirable and what isn’t, and seeking out those particular books. A collection can theoretically be completed some day, whereas “owning books” is something which goes on forever.
So defining the scope of your collection really is the single most important thing you will do. Simply put, this means deciding what is in and what is out. Cost, interest, practicality and availability might all factor. For some excellent advice on where to start and how to proceed with defining a collection, check out The Private Library. In the meantime, here is my current predicament.
I collect Alexandre Dumas (pere). The boundaries of my collection are intentionally foggy (I do like to surprises) but roughly speaking, I want to collect all of his oeuvre, one copy in French and one copy in English. I also love adaptations – his works repackaged and possibly reinterpreted for a specific audience. The Count of Monte Cristo as a graphic novel, say, or The Three Musketeers as a play. I do not collect “sequels” by third parties, or totally derived works (although I once found a website dedicated to someone’s collection who only collected sequels, unauthorized versions, derivations, etc. I wish I could find it now!).
Sometimes I make exceptions to the rule because it tickles my fancy to do so. I will buy any “and zombies” mashups that anyone chooses to do of Mr. Dumas’s works (a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). I refuse utterly to touch any of Disney’s many Musketeers interpretations – I am still offended that they call their little footsoldiers “Mouseketeers”. But what about this one?
Sometimes something is just ridiculous enough that I don’t know if I can resist. I mean, this baby even comes with a DVD. And the idea of Barbie as a character in a Dumas novel is so totally preposterous that I feel I might need it just to… I don’t know, counterbalance or juxtapose something. Somehow I doubt Barbie and her friends are carousing and scrapping, disciplining their servants and getting imprisoned. I wonder how Barbie feels about falling in love with fair Constance, then forgetting about her at the first flash of Milady’s milk-white bosom and ultimately sleeping with Kitty, the maid, in order to ferret out Milady’s nefarious plot. I wonder!
Anyway, the moral of the story is, be disciplined but be creative. Sometimes the best collected materials are those ones you never thought you’d acquire. A hundred years from now when your collection is enshrined in a university somewhere (*coff*) you never know what some enterprising young grad student will do with the material. Personally, I see a thesis paper in here somewhere. Think outside the box!
June 22, 2009
Interpreting “Archive”
I try pretty hard not to pooh-pooh the New Media, to keep an open mind about The Fate Of The Book and Literacy These Days as all of bookdom gnaws at their fingernails and tears at their hair over changes to print culture. But sometimes a news story comes up that really sets my nerves on edge.
The Library and Archives Canada has put a moratorium on buying paper documents and books for its collection. They cite the cost of buying printed materials, as well as some notion that digital materials might somehow be a more “efficient” expenditure of funds. Annoyingly, though this isn’t what I want to talk about, this freeze on spending includes the buying of antiquarian books.
What troubles me about this move is that I question the value of an “archive” which is entirely digital. I understand buying digital books for personal use – they are a cheaper and easier way to enjoy a casual reading experience, the kind where you don’t think back to the book after you’re done with it. I understand, even, keeping digital texts for a research library or institutional library – they are easy to search, can be used by multiple users simultaneously and are pretty accessible.
But I don’t grasp how archiving a text digitally serves the aim of an archive. From Library and Archives’ own website, “Library and Archives Canada collects and preserves Canada’s documentary heritage…” (emphasis mine). From Wikipedia, “In general, archives consist of records which have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation…” Other archives will state the same mandate. You will see words like “heritage”, “preservation”, “primary sources” and “unique” pop up regularly. Making records accessible is great, but is really the purview of the library: the task of an archive is to keep those records safe over a long period of time. It is a form of cultural protection.
The protection of records is an ongoing archival problem. Books deteriorate, are stolen, burnt or damaged. Languages change and are sometimes lost. Technologies upgrade and sometimes leave behind old, incompatable records. Nevertheless archivists do what they can to repair, copy and upgrade their charges in order to see that they survive to greet the next generation. We have come to a point where we take digital storage processes for granted, as if all of civilization has been building up to this technology one logical step after another. But it seems to me that instead it is one of the more precarious archival tools we’ve ever known.
To read a digital book, you need a program that can decode it. You need hardware that can read it. You need a device to run that program, and some means of displaying the results. You need a power source to fuel all of the above and then you need to start the sticky business of dealing with the text. Digital media is like taking a book, locking it in ten kinds of lock-boxes with different locks, disguising the whole thing as a rock and then burying it. You and I might, today, know where to find that rock, we can tell that it isn’t a rock, but rather a piece of technology, and then we have the complicated tools required to unlock all the boxes. But will we in a hundred years? Five hundred years? Two thousand years?
We have become very confident that our society today is the pinnacle of all former societies and, somehow, proof against all the pitfalls of other precariously balanced societies. We think we’re fail-proof. Information abundance has certainly perpetuated that belief; we think that if our political, social and communicative networks start to fail, that’s okay, because we’ve got so much junk around us to remind us who we are.
But this really is an illusion. Technologically sound and literate societies have come before us and have gone, and from their ruins we’ve managed to pick out bits and pieces of cultural ephemera and from that, we’ve painted pictures of who they were. Rock paintings, scrolls, disks, books give us evidence. We’ve preserved some of their wisdom and learning this way. Now can you imagine if, at the sacking of Alexandria, rather than being able to run off with what scrolls they could salvage, the librarians were stuck facing a server bank? What would they take? What would they save?
Now archiving isn’t just a safeguard against societal collapse and apocalypse, obviously. But it is concerned with permanence. The day of a blackout, or an electrical surge, a fire or an alien magnet or sun flare, is that digital technology available? Can it even be said to exist anymore? And what if future politicos cut the budget of the Archives, and render them incapable of the technology upgrades they need to continue accessing the technology? Is that it, the end? Nothing even to sell off in an auction?
Information integrity has been recently protected with redundance. Big companies have server space all over the world, spreading themselves out geographically in order to minimize loss due to environmental disaster or political upheaval (say). So, perhaps, Library and Archives intends to keep their archive (archives?) in multiple places in order to ensure that our cultural heritage isn’t nuked when a server reaches the end of its life. After all, this is one of the big benefits of digital technology: its quick and easy multiplication.
But then, what is the archive? The “original” document? Do they own it, or simply display it? Is the “copy” on Server Paris the same as the copy on Server Ottawa? Are all the copies safe from change? Who retains the record of what the document “should” look like, in case of deterioration, information loss, virus or vandalism? Where is the authority of the archive?
This barely scratches the tip of my anxiety iceberg, let me tell you. And how will this even save them money – are people suddenly giving etexts away for free? Did I miss the information liberation?
Nothing about “buying” a digital “copy” in order to preserve it sounds like a good idea to me. In fact, it’s a lot like buying nothing at all. Like this bridge here I have to sell you. I tell you if you wanted the real thing, it would cost you. But I can sell you a virtual one, cheap!