Month: December 2012

Copyright, Book Illustrations, and the Internet

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In the public domain.

I collect vintage images–illustrations, as it were. Have for over 40 years. Paper ephemera, books, sheet music, postcards, Halloween, greeting cards,  bridge tallies, you name it, if it’s illustrated art–I collect it. And on flickr I found a community of others just like me. I began sharing this collection as I continued making vintage illustration jewelry from my collections, and from things I found floating around on the fabulous internet. And, from some things I found on flickr-that was downloadable and in the public domain. What does that mean? I can only speak for the United States, because other countries have different laws, but, anything, anything printed before 1923 is in the public domain. Which means they are not protected or owned by any individual. I checked this over and over again, due to problems that occurred on flickr when I had the audacity to explain that I was going to start a digital download business, and that there was a slim possibility that some images from flickr streams may get into my business–inadvertently. I am nothing, if not stupid enough to be honest about what I am doing. This started a mini firestorm of flickr morality. And supposed legal questions. And here’s the point of this post.

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Elaine Viets–Witty Writer, Broadcaster, Newbie Private Eye–10 Questions

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The latest release-on bookshelves now!

I don’t write reviews on amazon. OK, I wrote maybe three–but I had to be highly motivated and passionate about what I was reviewing to dip into that cesspool of bizarreness. And I was. Elaine Viets, mystery writer, had begun a new series at the time, and I was wildly in love with it. Here is part of what I wrote:

“Helen Hawthorne, once quite successful, is forced to lay low, changing cities and jobs as quickly as she used to change her designer shoes. Her new profession, salesclerk in a chi chi Florida boutique whose green door keeps out lowlife Sears Robuck rejects, forces her to do more than cater to collagen frozen faces. Underneaththe fashionable facade, a nefarious manager has embezzled bucks, and when a murder occurs, Helen must find the perpetrator before her past catches up with her. A six toed cat, a real character of a landlady, and very cheap wine bought by the case, comfort Helen as she works to solve the crime.”
The review was written about the Dead End Job series starring Helen Hawthorne, a woman on the run and forced to take jobs that pay under the table. Elaine would work in the various positions she writes about to make Helen’s experiences as realistic and truthful as possible. And they are. She has written a slew (11) of Dead End Job books since the debut–Shop Until you Drop, including one on my  Best 100 Mysteries of All Time list–Murder Between The Covers.  Apparently one exceptional series is not enough work for Elaine, she created another with a secret shopper, Josie Marcus, her latest, Murder Is a Piece of Cake, just released. (That’s number 8.) I’m clearly biased–I’ve known, admired, and called Ms. Viets a friend for over a decade. But even if I’d never met her, I’d still love her rich characters, witty dialog, and satisfying plots. Here’s the 10 questions and answers.

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Pinning Books

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One of the Christmas books available on a Pinterest board

I suppose this is a good tool for online sellers. After all, even the bookshopblog has a spot where you can ‘pin’ what you see. ABE sent another one of their cool little articles, and I thought I’d be seeing a nice ditty on holiday books, the why, wherefores, etc. No- after I clicked-a Pinterest board popped up filled with sunny sideways and front covers of Christmas titles.When you click on Santa, a page full of  the edition displayed  and the various booksellers who have it for your buying convenience, appears. Why should this bother me? It shouldn’t–and it doesn’t when booksellers are touting their wares. It seems odd, but then so does the entire internet, but I’ve gotten used to it the way an old person gets used to new fangled ideas.

What drives me to distraction, is once an image is ‘pinned’ it is there for eternity. No matter what you may do, say, remove the book from sale, or in my case, make my entire flickr account private–tons and tons of my personal images that I worked on to restore, are pinned and re-pinned and re-pinned for the next millennium, and  there isn’t a darn thing I can do about it. Ask for them to be taken down, you say? Yeah, that’l happen–they could care less about public domain images taken without permission from a public site, even if it isn’t public anymore. Apparently once it is pinned, that generates an entirely new self reliant image–that’s the best way I can describe it, having no understanding of these things. So although a ‘link’ is supplied back to the source–(a tiny lip balm for a monstrous gash)–doesn’t matter if the link no longer works and the image now private–it’s still up on a person’s board. And will be taken and re-pinned again and again.

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John Martin’s Book, The Child’s Magazine

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Typical cover of a John Martin’s Book.

When I go through the piles of vintage children’s magazines I’ve collected over the years, one thing strikes me. Kids don’t read this kind of stuff anymore. They probably don’t read at all, but the historical and classic tilt to the John Martin’s Book, The Child’s Magazine, may be over the heads of most children today. I realize we are supposed to be more educated, technically advanced, better off than back in 1912 when this man began his publishing, but as far as what kids were expected to know, expected to learn, expected to memorize in the past, education has been dumbed down, or in nicer vocabulary, simplified.

Up until I just googled him, I knew very little about the man behind these extraordinary publications. I knew his real name wasn’t John Martin, although I could never imagine such an interesting one as Morgan van Roorbach Shepard. His life reads like an adventure story, or a tale from Dickens. He was born in Brooklyn, and  grew up on a plantation. Right here, the story seems implausible. For some reason, he decided to retain the last name of the either a ‘colony’ of people  named Martin, or bunches of birds–wiki doesn’t explain. Devastated by his mother’s death when he was nine, he was shunted off to boarding schools. According to wikipedia, he was often bullied, but considering the new popularity of that word, I have my doubts as to what that means. I also don’t know what, if anything, suffering in boarding school like most kids who attend, did to form his character. He told a tale of being a revolutionary in some South American country, was fired as a conductor on a San francisco  trolly car for giving free rides to children and specific adults, and began his own greeting card company in a building destroyed by the famous 1906 earthquake, in which he was injured. Supposedly it was during his convalescence he began writing stories and poems for children, which after several years became long illustrated letters to thousands of kids, and in 1912 became the magazine.

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Laughing All The Way To The Remainder Table

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Look on the lighter side? Tardar Sauce would rather not, thank you.

William Zinsser once described the humour section of any given bookshop as the most depressing place in the world to contemplate the state of arts and letters.  When Zinsser wrote that essay in 1966, much of the humour section consisted of anthologies of comic strips, bound editions of comic book story arcs, and ‘ slight parodies based on trends that were long on booger jokes and bathroom humour  and short on actually literary merit.

With the advent of National Lampoon as an outlet for humour writers who had outgrown their incubation space at Harvard and other college-based humour magazines, trade paperbacks featuring cartoons and parodies began to scoot Charlie Brown and Pogo Possum to the edges of the shelves.

The 1970s’ was a time when the elevation as the comic and humourist from a gadfly observing from the edges to an icon and spokesperson made a significant impact on pop culture.  Situation comedies centered around comedians (rather than entertainers who do comedy) began to dominate the network schedules, especially in a culture that had wearied of titillation and violence as prime time mainstays.   The close of the decade saw NBC’s Saturday Night Live , with its Second City alumni-heavy cast peppered with contributions from the BBC’s Monty Python crew  dominate and reshape the genre in television, cinema, and print.

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My Bookstore: A Constant Education

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As a new bookseller, I have to work hard to familiarize myself with subjects that I have heretofore overlooked. I know very little about art books, for instance, and this week, thanks to three Don McCullin bookscustomers, I learned something about photography books. One fellow pulled a book off the shelf and told me it was an important book, and that I had underpriced it. It was a book of photographs by Don McCullin, “Hearts of Darkness,” from the Vietnam War. I didn’t remember pricing or shelving the book, but I gratefully took his recommendation and researched the book. It was easy to see how dramatic and provocative the photos were and, though I did re-price the book, more importantly, I put it on display. The very next day someone asked for the photography books, and I showed him the McCullin book. It wasn’t the book he was looking for, but he was glad to have found it and he bought it straight away. In the meantime, the buyer and I talked about what made the book so worthwhile. He was a photographer, and I benefitted as much from his knowledge as from the first customer who had pointed out the book to me. I know a little about a lot of books in the store, but almost everyone who comes in knows a lot about one genre or one author. Without being too obtrusive, I am trying to take advantage of my customer’s expertise.

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