Practically every best list has this title on it. There’s a reason why. It’s that good, obviously, but also because it makes the case for the innocence of King Richard III who down through history has been accused of smothering his two royal nephews to death in the Tower of London. Shakespeare wrote a play with him as villain, hunchbacked to boot. But many historians feel poor Richard as been maligned, as did Ms. Tey. Her protagonist, Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective is bored to tears after breaking his leg and laid up in hospital. A friend brings a portrait of King Richard and Alan, on the basis of nothing more than the physiology of the portrait’s subject, decides Richard must be innocent of the crimes he has been accused.
As I sit staring at my screen, it occurred to me how for granted I take the advent of the computer in my life. Up until the late 90s, I didn’t own a computer. I couldn’t type, still can’t, but I fake it. I don’t understand how a computer works, could never write whatever it … Read more
Every book feels like an unopened door. Every page turned is another step that could lead to high adventure or bittersweet romance or tutelage in a Platonic cave of our own making. This is why it is so important to keep reading and also why there are books that we may, for whatever reason, decide to revisit.
All kinds of circumstances can precipitate picking up a book that may no longer serve the function it once did, but still serves as a memorial touchstone. Where were you when you read Old Yeller? What music was playing when you were in the book shop when you first picked up a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or The Colour of Magic? Sometimes you can remember and sometimes it’s a trick of the mind.
You might have picked up the book because you wanted to be seen picking up the book, only too conscious of the music and whoever else happened to be wandering around and might see you with evidence of your intellectual acumen conveniently in hand. Other times, the music fell away, the odd sweet stink of the incense from the
Last week I reflected on the expertise I’ve been extracting from my customers. Lately, though, it’s been my counsel that’s in demand. Christmas is the time when people realize how little they know about their loved ones, at least in so far as in pegging them for a gift. So, naturally, they come to me for sage gift advice. I was asked today to provide for a Californian a recommended book that most embodies the essence of North Carolina. I first assured him that no such book existed, but then got down to making the best of a fool’s errand.
“Living or dead?” I asked.
“What’s the difference?”
“The living ones publish more frequently.”
“I mean, would it matter in choosing the book?”
It makes a great difference. The essential North Carolina book today is nothing like the essential North Carolina book of the 1950s, and farther still from the essential North Carolina book of the 1920s,
Me Talk Pretty One Day by Sedaris
which, for instance, would be “Look Homeward, Angel,” by Thomas Wolfe, or “In Abraham’s Bosom,” by Paul Green. A hundred years ago Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman,” might be the book you would choose to reflect the soul of the state. North Carolina literature today is just as likely to be set in a suburb, as in the dusty, sweltering tobacco fields of the rural old south. North Carolina characters today have gay friends and travel abroad; they buy vegan falafels and drink beer that wasn’t made in a bath tub. I ended up recommending a Lee Smith novel, “Cakewalk,” but I could have chosen David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and I wouldn’t have been wrong.
Later, I was asked by a woman to help find a book for her 15 year-old grandson. I asked the standard question: “What does he like?” (as prescribed in the “Idiot’s Guide to Bookselling,”), but she admitted, forlornly, that she really didn’t know. “He lives so far away, I hardly see him,” she confessed. I knew right away that I had the ideal book. First, before I reveal my choice, I need to assure you that I know perfectly well that it is impossible to guess what book someone you don’t really know will like. It’s hard enough to pick a book for someone you know well. And even if you were able to guess what book might be enjoyed, that’s just half the battle. The most perfectly chosen book won’t do anyone any good if the recipient can’t be induced to start reading it. Do you have any idea how many swell book spines have gone uncracked by apparently enthusiastic birthday boys and girls? A lot. The book not only has to be good; it has to look good and sound good, too. And even then, if the reader isn’t in the right mood, he may give it up after five pages, before the story really starts to hum. It’s not easy to get someone to read what you want them to read! Then again if this sort of help didn’t interest me I would have set up a shop to rent textbooks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Daughter of Time— Josephine Tey–1951–IP
