Playing with layout again.

As you were.

Know what these are? I found them tucked into a couple of books that were part of a larger archive I’ve been cataloging. Go ahead, click on them. I’ll wait.

Back? Any guesses?

They’re stamped, postmarked and mailed envelopes from Paul Bowles.

Only problem? They’re empty.

And no sign of the letters they once contained anywhere. I’ve looked three times.

*sigh*

For seventy years, Paul Elder’s bookstores were a fixture in downtown San Francisco. There was not a single bookstore but a series of six, plus short-lived forays to New York City and Santa Barbara. The early shops were the most memorable, small momuments to the Arts & Crafts aesthetic. They were known as much for their ambience and array of art objects as for the books themselves.

Seems if this bit of ephemera is any indication those last two sentences are certainly true.

That’s Larry McMurty’s simple advice to booksellers from this profile. He continues:

Junk is a major problem, it tends to creep in. The taste of the bookseller is important. We sell only our kind of books, a general humanities selection, all in very good condition.”

I apologize in advance for this tasteless spoof from Cracked. More or less NSFW.

Hostage-taker demands:

$100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow’s Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.

From Time.

In a box of books I bought the other week, I found one of the strangest little items I’ve encountered in quite a while. It’s a promotional booklet used by Johnson & Johnson to advertise their 1953 marketing program for drug stores and pharmacists.

And the flier stars…monkeys, apes, and other primates.

?!

As pharmacists.

!?!?

With “funny” captions.

Only, more often than not, the captions are just creepy. Or strange. Or unintelligible. It’s almost Dada-esque in its sheer weirdness.

To appreciate in all its glory, I’ve created a Flickr set of the complete book for your enjoyment. I especially recommend page eight.

Don’t know if he’ll grow up to be a druggist, but I’ll bet he’ll take some…

Not really book related, but just great and hilarious pieces of writing…

Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits:

Q: You’ve always enjoyed the connection between fashion and history…talk to us about that.
A: Ok let’s take the two piece bathing suit, produced in 1947 by a French fashion designer. The sight of the first woman in the minimal two piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.

Also, Foo Fighters’ friggin’ brilliant 2008 Concert Rider:

Also, here are some cool things to do with meat and meat examples.
Fried turkey, fried chicken, fried anything, really.
Sausages, veggie sausages. Big ass kielbasas that make men self conscious. Any sort of tubed meat. Maybe a night of “Fair Foods.”
Cornish game hens.
Meat - in loaf form. Turkey meatloaf.
Bacon. I call it “god’s currency.” Hell, if it could be breathed, I would.
Bacon in any form is great. No as an entree, just in general.

…Which is itself a revision of this almost-as-funny earlier incarnation, which in turn was inspired by the legendary Iggy Pop.

Carry on.

I’ve never seen a bookplate that so prominently included a portrait of the owner before. The good (hirsute) doctor even stamped the title page of the book: “Private Library / O.V. Lawson M.D. / Seattle, Wash.” Guess he REALLY wanted people to know it was HIS book.

Found in THE NEW CENTURY READS BY GRADES: Book 3 (Rand McNally, 1901).

Beautiful, unusual, and compelling book images: another blog that long-ago should have hit the blogroll. Now remedied.

…But I certainly didn’t expect it to shorten my life.

Well, he is:

John might look like a man possessed when he is watching football but, in reality, he is yet another Portsmouth curiosity. It is rather bewildering to find him going about his day job - he is an antiquarian book dealer in the pretty market town of Petersfield.

“People look at me and think I must be some madman off a building site, but books are my life,” he whispers as we meet in the family bookshop.

His late father was a well-known book dealer, his brother is the Queen’s paper conservator at Windsor Castle and John has written a book himself.

First, if you’re going to be in or around the Monterey area before June 1st, our spring sale is going on. 20% off almost everything in the shop (sorry, in-store sales only).

And in other news, fellow bookseller Michael Lieberman of Wessel and Lieberman has invited me to be a regular contributor on his blog, Book Patrol. So now you’ll find me there and here.

Today’s Globe and Mail has an even-handed review of the new Sony reader, discovering much to praise, but still finding the technology wanting:

Advancements in book technology include binding, glue and typography, an artistic/technical undertaking that computer manufacturers are just beginning to glimpse. Page and type sizes have subtleties most makers of digital counterparts have yet to imagine. Everything in a book, from its type and layout to the thickness of its pages, has been carefully orchestrated to deliver the optimal reading experience for its intended audience.

When “a large advance induces a good writer to extend a successful series beyond its natural span.”

From: 7 Reasons Why Scifi Book Series Outstay Their Welcomes.

[via]

Friends, god-help-me, but I give you LOL Manuscripts!

Alberto Manguel on his library:

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.

A bit steep, but they’ll ship to the US.

Edwards Books of Springfield, MA was at the center of one of my favorite bookselling memoirs: Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore about her time working in the shop after battling breast cancer.

Sadly, the shop is closing.

I’ve spent the past two days going through over 300 boxes of books that were part of an estate. I estimate I looked at over 7500 books. Now, here’s a question. How many books/boxes did I go home with? Take a minute. I’ll wait.

Ready? Have your number?

Answer: Five boxes. About 150 or so books. Less than 2% of what I saw.

I’m often asked over the phone, “What books do you buy?” I’d like to answer “Very few.”

Sad truth most people don’t understand: The majority of books are worthless, or nearly so. Too damaged, too dated, too common, too many online, too little demand.

I know dealers who might have taken more than I did (and several who would have taken even less), but the larger truth remains: Books are a dime a dozen (and often not even that much).