In case anyone out there is keeping track, I just passed 1,000 book titles on my LibraryThing catalog, and I still have several boxes to go. I don’t know whether to be proud at the expanse of my collection, ashamed at the amount of money I’ve spent over the years, or depressed that I’ve read so few of them…
I just spent my lunch hour browsing an intriguing little dive of a book shop called Utah Book and Magazine, better known among the bibliophiles at my place of employment as “the stinky bookstore around the corner.” The place is one of the last remaining examples in these parts of the sort of half-assed, stuffed-to-the-rafters, semi-amateur used-book emporiums that I loved to frequent in my younger days — most of my other college-era haunts have gone out of business or, in the case of Sam Weller’s, have gentrified and cleaned themselves up in order to compete with the big national chain stores. But not Utah Book and Magazine, whose owner isn’t overly fussy about condition and will buy damn near anything. The shelves in this place are 12 feet high, creaking under the weight of everything from vintage pulps to well-thumbed nudie mags to last week’s best sellers, now running at reaminder-table prices. And you can get more than reading material at the stinky bookstore, too: you can buy an ice-cold beverage from a ’60-vintage Pepsi machine or a Big Hunk candy bar from a countertop display. Shove the candy bars to one side and you might find an antique straight razor, a Charlie McCarthy doll, or a dummy hand grenade for sale inside the counter’s display case. The only drawback to the place is, as you may have gathered, the peculiar funk that fills the air. It’s less like the scent of old paper (which I quite like) than the, ahem, strong aroma of some of the neighborhood bums.
In any event, I can’t set foot in that hole without buying something, and today I picked up a novel with such an unlikely (and charmingly ungainly) title that I wanted to share:
Adventures: Being a Stirring Chronicle of Intrigue, Romance, Danger, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Thrilling Triumphs over Fierce Beasts and Fiercer Men in the Mysterious and Exotic Dark Continent, as Recounted by the Daring, Resourceful, Handsome, and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them
Ah, how I would’ve swooned at such a title when I was a boy…
Incidentally, I’ve been adding to my LibraryThing catalog whenever I’ve managed to find the time. I still have several banker’s boxes to go, but with the addition of today’s purchase from the stinky bookstore, I’m up to 919 titles…
There’s an interesting interview over at SF Signal with Alan Beatts, the owner of San Francisco’s Borderlands Books. Borderlands specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but Alan’s got some provocative thoughts about the book industry in general, especially on the future of brick-and-mortar bookstores both independent and otherwise:
For any who may be interested, I’m continuing to add titles to my LibraryThing catalog, a few at a time as I have the opportunity and whenever the damn thing is working. The site frequently seems to be overwhelmed by server requests; I’m guessing the owners were unprepared for a flood of new memberships resulting from a mention on Boing Boing. I’ve got 200 books up there now. At the rate I’m going, I should have the entire Bennion Library up for your perusal by this same time next summer…
In the meantime, I’ve found something rather interesting (and somewhat related), a vast collection of statistics about books and the book industry. Here are some items that grabbed my attention:
Yesterday, I followed a link from Boing Boing to LibraryThing, this groovy online service that lets you catalog your book collection and share it with others. It uses tags like Flickr or MySpace, so other people can easily search your personal library and you can search theirs. Thus, the system doubles as a social network based around similar tastes in reading.
I thought the idea of a non-local catalog sounded like a good one — I’ve got a database of my movie collection on my home PC, but if the house burns down, I lose the record along with the collection — so I set up an account. So did one of my three loyal readers and frequent commenters, the inimitable Cranky Robert. Judging from the sporadic outages and slowdowns the site has been experiencing, so have a lot of other people. It’s one of those full-blown Internet fads, I tell you! Everybody’s doing it… so why aren’t you? Seriously, if you own a lot of books, you ought to go check it out.
(Incidentally, if you go to my catalog, you will notice that I haven’t yet entered very many titles. That’s because, as my profile page notes, I have a huge library that’s scattered all over the house, and, as with everything else I do, it requires time, of which I have precious little these days. Now that I think about it, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. The last thing I need right now is another fracking project…)
So, I may not have done much of my promised blogging about books last week, but I was at least thinking about the subject. Cranky Robert and I exchanged a flurry of e-mails which resulted in mutually recommended reading for both of us, as well as my discovery of the Titanic Book Site, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the world’s most famous sunken ocean liner. And I also walked up the street from my office one day to Sam Weller’s and bought a couple of books. That may not sound terribly noteworthy, but it sort of is, at least to me. You see, I don’t buy many books these days. And that’s quite a change from The Way Things Used to Be.
Hmm. This is interesting. It seems there’s a bit of a kerfuffle brewing among the on-line writing community (i.e., folks involved in or aspiring to professional writing and the publishing industry, and who also have blogs) because a shady literary agent named Barbara Bauer — who is number three on SFWA’s list of the 20 worst agencies — threw a tantrum and got a Website called Absolute Write shut down. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has the details.
I haven’t read Douglas Adams’ brilliant and genuinely funny sci-fi parody novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in years, but I still remember large passages of it — no doubt because my memories have been fortified by hearing them dramatized in various media formats over the years. Still, I can’t say that I remember chunks of any other books I read in high school, and that is probably reason enough for me to pass along the news about this somewhat silly gesture of tribute to Adams, who left us unexpectedly five years ago. I think Doug would’ve appreciated the absurdity of people carrying around towels in his honor…
(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s book, listened to the radio show, or seen the TV series or last year’s rather disappointing movie, you may be wondering about the significance of the towel. Go below the fold for the explanation…)
To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time but haven’t gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you’ve already seen it somewhere.) It’s a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a network of some 53,000 libraries around the world. According to the intro copy, the list — which is updated annually — comprises “the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the ‘purchase vote’ of libraries around the globe.”
As you can probably imagine, the list includes all the usual canonical titles that you think of when you hear the word “classics,” but there are some surprises. One of them appears right in the top 20, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. (Hint: I’m talking about number 15…)