April 16, 2010
Posted at 5:02 PM in Net Life
Counting this entry, I have managed to turn up on four blogs this week. I've been guest-blogging at Bookslut, which I always get a kick out of. Bookslut ought to be part of your regular lit-net rounds if it's not already.
For the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog, I wrote about "Collector in Chief," a new blog launched by AOTUS, a k a David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. His call for "citizen archivists" to get involved in helping the Archives do its work provoked some interesting reax over at ArchivesNext, a site that's well worth keeping an eye on if you groove on archives. (And who doesn't?) On Wired Campus I also noted the kinda mind-bending news that the Library of Congress will archive every public tweet every sent forth on Twitter since it went live in March 2006. That, too, provoked some fascinating commentary around the Twitterverse and blogosphere and even in the old MSM about the wisdom and risks of the move. When I have time, I'll compile a roundup of the better posts/articles I've seen on the topic.
And--ta da--the Chronicle debuted its blog on scholarly publishing today. Called PageView, it will have posts by yours truly and several other book-loving Chronicle folk, so please swing by and take a look.
Fiction-writing got a little lost in the shuffle this week, but I did get good news on the fiction front. The Smoking Poet will publish some short fiction of mine in its summer issue. I'll post that link when I have it.
Shameless plea: If you don't already follow me on Twitter (@JenHoward), I'd love it if you would. When I have 1K followers, I get to drink beer on the roof with my colleagues, and it's getting to be that season in DC when it is very pleasant to do things like that. So help me out, because beer really does taste better when you drink it on the roof (safely--safety first, always).
April 5, 2010
Posted at 2:33 PM in Lost in the Stacks
On a wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, my 7-year-old daughter reminded me that our local library was having its book sale. So she, her younger brother, and I piled in the car and headed over. After about 20 minutes, the kids settled themselves in a corner with a stack of books more than a foot high. I kept browsing. By the time we were ready to settle up, we had picked out 14 books, which set us back a whopping $9.
None of what we bought was rare: some Magic Treehouse adventures , a few Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, H.A. Rey's The Stars: A New Way to See Them. My daughter turned up a relic from the 1960s: a book on Indian crafts and how to make them, which turned out to be perfect, 40 years later, for her 2nd-grade class's study of Native Americans. The serendipitous joy of finding it was worth every modest penny. The point is that there was readers' gold to be found on all those tables of random paperbacks and obscure hardcovers.
The prize of the day was a 2,000-page Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (unabridged) from the 1950s, which I found for a buck on the "Last Chance" table. The words "Last Chance" brought out the side of me that wants to adopt every dog and cat at the animal shelter every time I visit. Luckily for my household, a massive dictionary is a lot easier to care for than a mastiff or a mongrel. The Webster's has been living on our coffee table, delighting the children and their elders with its heft and erudition. And I got it for a buck. A buck! Time was you'd have shelled out a lot more than that for such a thing. Sure, everybody looks everything up online now, but there's still a lot of joy to be had from browsing a 10-inch-thick guide to the weird wonders of English. So many words one never knew and will never have occasion to use. And those thumbnail sketches have a certain whimsy to them.
Who knows what gems and rarities we will find at the library sales of the next few years? My friend Jim and I traded a few thoughts about this via Twitter. We agreed that it could be a golden age, as the bound book loses some of its luster and libraries shuffle old tomes out to make room for...whatever the libraries of the future consider essential. There will be some good stuff to be snapped up. "For a while, there will be a boom, as everyone offloads their old books," Jim said. "But eventually, will there be cardboard boxes full of cracked and yellowed old Kindles and iPads, for a buck each?" And after that? "A hellish Mad Max existence where gangs of savages burn old copies of Harry Potter to run their cars in the outback," Jim said.
Last chance! Get 'em while they last!
