Books & Mags

Live Nude Texts!

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by Jas Faulkner 

When I was in college, there was a girl on my floor whose mother managed a Waldenbooks in her hometown.  Whenever the mom visited, bearing a cache of food and supplies for her daughter, she would also bring  two or three boxes of paperbacks that had been stripped of their front covers for everyone to dig through.

Being a thoughtful sort of person who understood what it was like to love books and have every bit of one’s disposable income go towards ugly, overproduced and underedited required texts; she made it as easy as possible for people to find books they would love.  Every box was packed one layer thick with the spines facing up so there were no surprises.  Sometimes the spines of the books were reinforced with clear packing tape.  I figure it was busy work for slow times in an already neat as a pin store.

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Life With Books: Abbreviated

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by Jas Faulkner 

This is probably a bad thing to admit, but I participate in a forum that follows a reality show about the Duggar Family and yet I rarely if ever watch the actual show.  When I do, I see that about eighty percent of the commentary is pretty accurate, but there are moments when I watch and what I see doesn’t seem as bad as it has been made out to be .

On a recent episode, one of the Duggars, a son who is now grown and married and has his own household, showed the documentary crew his eldest child’s library.  It was a shelf that contained seven or eight books.  I have seen criticism about the paltry space and selection in this little girl’s collection.  There were two things I kept in mind as I watched this:  1. The child in question is two or three years old. 2. Neither of these young parents grew up in homes where there was an emphasis on education beyond learning the basics required to take care of a family.  Sad to say, that might be the case with the next generation of Duggars, but I hope it isn’t.  

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Talking To The Dead

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Lily Dale town entrance at night. A 10 buck fee to enter is required.
Some of the religious leaders in stone at Camp Chesterfield, IN

Bored with 24 hour news, politics, and Perry Mason re-runs, I tripped over the laughably named The Learning Channel, and fell into an episode of Long Island Medium. I had seen snippets of the show before, but hadn’t concentrated all that hard at what was transpiring. Apparently a woman who has a typical Longk I-link accent and brassy personality, speaks to dead people. And this is a reality TV show because. . .? Mediumship and Spiritualism seems to have been having a major rebirth, pardon the pun, the last 15 years or so. 9/11, 2 wars, and economic depression  are the perfect ingredients for those who claim to have entrance into the afterlife. The grief stricken, frightened, confused, seek answers and some find themselves making an appointment with a psychic, medium, spiritualist with the idea that they have them.

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Deco Delights–A Look At Book and Ephemera Illustration

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My favorite book cover artwork was rendered during what is loosely called the Art Deco period. That term is being used extravagantly these days, to incorporate years far beyond the 1930s which I always thought of as the cut off. Stylistically, Art Deco has been stretched like a rubber band–eventually it will snap, and nothing and everything in illustration will be labeled ‘Deco.’ I’m guilty of identifying much of my particular likes within vintage illustration as ‘Deco’–I can’t describe the style, but I know it when I see it–sort of like, I don’t know great art, but I know what I like, ha. The book cover art I especially am drawn to has bold lines and colors, a Clarice Cliff look, but on paper, not ceramics. I thought I’d share some of my favorite book covers, illustrations, and paper ephemera from this period.

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What’s Happening to Teen Literature?

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Has anyone else noticed the incredible push toward publishing books geared toward 12+? A number of major fiction authors have crossed over into teen writing (e.g. John Grisham, James Patterson). Does anyone know why this is happening?
I can only assume that the big bucks earned from the likes of Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games is having an affect. I wonder if teens are actually reading more, or do they latch onto the “book of the year” and then quit reading until the next smash hit comes out? Are more teen books being written in the hopes that teenagers will cross over from Twilight and read other similar authors like PC Cast, Richelle Mead, etc? Or is there a genuine desire, on behalf of the publishers, to see teens reading more?
From the perspective of our stores, whatever the publishers are doing right now… it’s working. We sell a lot of teen books. Until recently, we had a hard time keeping a good selection of used teen books in stock. Once more and more authors starting pointing their writing pen toward young adults, our selection grew… and so did our young readers. We were able to entice them with a wider array, allowing us to make more suggestions, hence making more sales.

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Satan Claus Is Coming To Town

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by Jas Faulkner

“He’s out.”

“He’s early this year.  Is there a reason for this?”  I could hear Sam joggle the phone as she rang up a customer and told them to have a good day.  A second later she was back.

“We got the guidelines from the not-the-city council  You know how Tab is about that.”

Bear with me and you, too, will know how Tab is about that.  But first, a little bit of history.  Ten years ago, a radio station decided to buy a three-storey building on the town square that was at one point  a storefront with apartments on the two upper floors.   They then proceeded to wreck the building, turning it into “haunted house” that was sufficiently detailed in its grue that they required a media professional to deal with the inquiries and it developed a fan following.  

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Composition For Four Hands–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Composition  for Four Hands—Hilda Lawrence–1947-OOP

“They wheeled her chair to the big bay window in her bedroom. She’d been fed and bathed. She’d had what they called her forty winks.  They said it was such a beautiful afternoon and wasn’t she lucky to have such a nice window? Then they left her.”

This is the ominous beginning to a story that builds in suspense. Unusual, that it’s not told in the first person, considering the main character is completely paralyzed. I would have probably gone with Nora Manson telling the story from her personal point of view, of her terror in the unknown and the fact that she was being targeted by someone in her own home, someone wanted to kill her.

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The Battle of the Royal Biographies

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This is a guest post from Will Noble

Queen vs. Empress

One of them is a living queen; the other is a dead empress. But which has the better biography? We
take a look at critical response to Elizabeth the Queen and Catherine the Great to decide which is the
royal write-up you should take home this fall.

Royal is in at the moment. What, with the wedding of Will and Kate last year, Elizabeth II’s Diamond
Jubilee in June – not to mention the bizarre wedding of the 85 year-old Duchess of Alba last October
– everyone wants a bite of the bling. Two of the latest titles to capitalize on this are Sally Bedell
Smith’s Elizabeth the Queen (a portrait of England’s current monarch that hopes to shed new light
on her), and Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great, an historical account of the 18th century Russian
empress who was notorious for her many lovers.

They may both have enjoyed long reigns (Elizabeth’s is still going of course), but if critic ratings
are anything to go by, it’s the Russian’s which is by far the more fascinating. Elizabeth the Queen
earns just 57%, compared to the 79% of Massie’s biography, with Bloomberg comically stating
that “…prose comes at you like a spray of saliva, its reverence bordering on rapture…” and My
SanAntonio fully deriding the bio as belonging “…in the same category of sleazy tabloid journalism
that prowls for opportunity to make quick, easy bucks.”

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