November 9, 2009
Not Specifically About Books
Last weekend, early in the morning on Saturday, October 31st, the Children’s Storefront burnt down.
The Storefront was a community drop-in centre for children – mostly pre-schoolers – and their caregivers; a comfortable, welcoming and unparalleled space to play, read and create surrounded by friendly, like people. To put it like that makes it sound like an Ontario Early Year’s Centre, some government-funded space in a basement or a school gym for people who can’t afford daycare or a more elaborate for-profit indoor playground. What it was is impossible to describe. It was warm, tight-knit but welcoming to newcomers, flexible, accommodating, beautiful, comfortable, safe and peaceful. The kids were welcome to play with a huge range of high-quality, un-branded, well-selected toys in mini-environments that were built by volunteers and staff while parents and caregivers found comfy places to sit and hang out with free coffee, tea or leftovers from the previous day’s community dinner or brunch. The staff were omnipresent, ready to help you with your child or offer advice or just company.
Miss. Margaret in the playhouse at the Children's Storefront.
For us, the Children’s Storefront was a complete, unqualified life-saver. My husband and I are fairly reclusive people, anxious in social situations and more than a little awkward. Yet we have been gifted with a daughter who is friendly, generous and precociously social. Once we worked up the nerve to walk into the Storefront and introduce ourselves we never looked back – Maggie immediately bonded with the staff and the other parents, and tried at every opportunity to interact with and play with the other children (with great success, considering she is a mere 16 months old). The quiet and comfortable environment put me at ease; this was somewhere that I could set a good example for my daughter and let her learn the social skills that maybe I never quite picked up. It was a community I felt our family was welcomed into, something so essential to people like us who otherwise tend towards isolation.
Saturday, October 31st it burned. Over the course of the following week demolition crews moved in and tore it down. As of this Saturday morning nothing remains but an empty lot and a high fence. My husband and I have been struggling with a sense of loss that neither of us expected; not so much for the space as for the community we’d felt we’d lost. Our week was spent feeling trapped within the walls of our small apartment with a child who was clearly growing bored and impatient with us. We took tentative, shy trips to the park and another community drop-in to break up the tedium. But the spaces, complete as they may have been with toys, climbers and crayons were no substitute for the community. Even Maggie could tell this. She had no interest in swinging alone in a swing or sliding alone down the slide.
We are not the only ones to whom the Storefront meant a great deal – a Facebook group called The Children’s Storefront Needs a New Home has been set up and boasts already over 440 members. As you can see, the support of those community members is being mobilized already to get the Storefront up and running again, a huge task that will take a great deal of volunteer time and, most importantly, money. We are optimistic that the result will be a positive one, and someday we will take Maggie to the new Storefront which, for her, will be the only Storefront she will be able to remember. Twenty years from now that new, yet-unrealized space will be the institution in her fond memories.
If you should feel so inclined, please do visit the Children’s Storefront website and see if you can help us find a new home. You could attend a fundraising event, donate to the toy & book drive or just send money. Or simply join the Facebook group and let your presence lend strength to our efforts. It might not be a glamorous or life-saving charity but it is one which is very dear to our hearts. Strong urban communities are sometimes elusive; and I want desperately to keep this one running for generations to come.
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 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 27, 2009
Visiting from the Land of Books
My maternity vacation is over and I have been back to work at the book room for two weeks now.
I have to confess that I have been cheating on my all-Canadian reading diet. One of the great hazards of working in a book store is of being distracted from the task at hand by any number of new, wonderful and enticing books sitting on the shelf. So while I do have Therese and Paulette sitting on the shelf behind me, 60 pages read, I haven’t been very faithful to it. I keep passing little curiosities, flipping them open and thinking, “well, it is only 150 pages. I can read this before lunch and then go back to something else.”
Most avid readers will tell you that they read four or five books at a time. Me, I try to focus on one. If I don’t apply some discipline then I will play favourites, tending to ignore the harder books I’ve undertaken. But then, a consequence probably of the fact that the harder or more boring books can sometimes take me months to get through, I don’t read as much as some people do. I certainly don’t read as much as I’d like to. In a good year I will read 40-50 books, in recent years (I blame knitting and child-rearing) I’ve barely read more than 20.
Two of the books I have read since being back at work, Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry and The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar & co. feature autodidactic protagonists whose reading habits are described in the same terms as their hedonistic drug habits (well, maybe not McMurtry’s). They binge, they read obsessively, they escape for weeks, months into libraries and stacks. The great writer is the great reader, end of story.
Having modest aspirations to writerhood myself I am therefore critical of my reading habits. Should I read more books? Better books? Am I better served by spending three months slogging through, say, Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (my nemesis) or by reading back to back 6-8 shorter, more varied titles: some poetry maybe, essays, some more sparse novels? I go back and forth. And I cheat. Most ridiculously, I feel guilty about it.
Scattered and undisciplined as book store life makes me, however, it has its benefits. Customers, not unreasonably, always expect me to have read every book in the store. Is this any good? Have you read this? How does it compare to this? If I didn’t engage in little episodes of literary philandering I wouldn’t be able to bluff my way through these little interrogations quite so well. Customers who know me ask me my opinions without hesitation; they really do assume I’ve read it all. This isn’t as good as having read it all but it is flattering. The reading hasn’t reached full gestation and burst forth in a great literary creation yet but I am an awfully good bookseller. Maybe there’s something to be said about my destiny there.
So am I making excuses for dabbling and cheating and reading little bits all over the map? Probably. This is how I maintain my balance after all, but swinging back and forth between a disciplined assertion that good reading should hurt and a freer spirit of impromptu inspiration. In the end I get both done. Is it any wonder that our great writers (and readers) were all crazy or drug-addled? A person’s reading habits are a case-in-point expression of their neuroses. Does anyone read in a careful and measured way? Maybe that’s what casual readers do. Back at the book store torn between reads like a woman with too many lovers it occurs to me that even when I can’t squeeze many books in my reading is anything but casual. What to read entertains as much of my thinking as the read itself. Good lord. But I’m in good company, I’m learning.
As for blogging, by the way, it is and will be a more sporadic activity from here on in. Between work, reading, school, toddlers and living it has to exist between activities. My apologies if you prefer regiments and reliability! But I’m not gone, and continue to welcome your visits.
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 18, 2009
Now That’s Customer Service…
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During CBC’s Canada Reads broadcasts earlier this year I could be found all over the internet championing what I thought was not just the best book on the list, but one of the very best Canadian books I have ever read, The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay. I was totally devastated when it was voted off the program, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that Michel Tremblay is a rather prolific author and I would have a lot more of his work to read.
In particular I was pleased to see that Talonbooks, the publisher, was offering a Canada Reads special – all six books of the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal in one handy package for a mere $75. I went down to my local bookstore (also, my place of work) to order it immediately. That was back in February.
I can’t report on exactly what happened after that, but it seemed that Talonbooks’ distributor, Raincoast, was having trouble locating the exact package deal I wanted. Phone calls were exchanged and databases were consulted, and we were assured my order was in progress. Time passed. More time passed. A lot of time passed.
I got the call, finally, a couple of weeks ago. My books were in! I hurried in to the store for my little darlings (paying $45 for the set – I work as a bookseller strictly for the discounts. I am paid in product, I’m afraid.) I only got around to opening the package today. I think, now, I understand what took so long. The package appears to have been lovingly assembled by hand by some industrious employee. A band cut from a 8 x 11 sheet of printer paper secures the books with some help from a bit of scotch tape. The cellophane wrapping is – I am fairly sure – Saran Wrap, also secured with scotch tape, liberally applied. The six books are pulled from the shelf in various states of shelf wear, some having been there for some time.
But I am thrilled none the less. I suspect that with Fat Woman‘s early exit from the challenge Talon gave up hope of having a great bestseller on their hands and withdrew the special. I’m sure they were surprised to get my order but, as good and honest bookpeople, fulfilled it anyway on a to-order basis. Somehow I like it better this way – I am left with the distinct impression of having been personally served.
May 15, 2009
Always Look Twice: Two More Parables
Yesterday afternoon I got an email titled “FW: Congratulations!” Being 99% sure this was another internet lotto spam, I marked it for deletion. But something stayed my hand and I decided to give it a quick glance first. You know, just in case.
“Did you get my previous email of May 5th?” the email asked. I scanned the attached email. “Congratulations!” it read, “You have won FIRST place in the National Book Collecting Contest!”
After picking myself up off the floor I spent the next ten minutes running up and down the stairs viewing the email on two different computers just to be sure. In the meantime my much more level-headed husband opened a bottle of wine and phoned our families for me to give them the exciting news. This was the first-ever National Book Collecting Contest and the only year I would ever be eligible (next year I will be too old). To say I am thrilled beyond description would still be a gross understatement.
So in celebration of my now-prize-winning collection I thought I’d tell the story of one of my favourite books, the tacky and overlooked Easton Press edition of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père.
Easton Press published in the 1970s a series called “The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written”, reprints of book club editions bound in leather and pressed with gaudy gilt decoration. These are the kinds of books you might want to decorate a film set with, or maybe your show-library. I doubt very much that many people actually read them, and I certainly believe that Easton Press paid somewhere between little and no attention to picking, editing and publishing them. I recently saw another copy of the book at the Toronto Book and Paper Show and considered seriously buying it in order to have it made into a purse.
So why is this my favourite book? Because of the “portrait of the author”:
I don’t know a huge amount about much, but I do happen to know a lot about the author of the Three Musketeers and that ain’t him. In fact, I recognize the chap in that painting. It’s this guy:
Alexandre Dumas fils, the son of the author. Alexandre Dumas père, the author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and hundreds of other gems looks like this:
It’s a forgivable mistake to make. I’m sure the artist went to the library for a reference photo, found young Dumas and went to town, having no idea that there were two Dumases. But what tickles my funny-bone is that for forty years, no one noticed. Not the artist, not the editor, not the publisher, and not a single reader, seller or collector. Why? Because of the nature of the edition: it was never intended to be read by anyone who had a clue. The target audience is people who want to be spoon-fed a library of “classics” that look fancy, without having to know anything about literature themselves. The books are designed to look good on a shelf, not to be read and enjoyed.
I admit it, I have an odd sense of humour. But I love this. I just love it. What effort and expense to create a book for looking at. Without a second care for the contents!
The history of publishing is full of quirky little discoveries like this, though. It’s the whole fun of collecting: finding those things that are special, that tell a story beyond the narrative printed on the page. Thrilled as I am to have won the inaugural contest, I am almost equally thrilled that one has been established. There is a pleasure to be had here that more people – especially of my generation – could partake of. And what excellent incentive!