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Tabletop Letterpress


I spent my Sunday last the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, Maryland taking a class on how to use to tabletop letterpress.

The machinery used in this session was about the size suited to print stationery, business cards, or the like. While it would be possible to print your own, modern day Thomas Paine cri-de-coeur, I wouldn’t suggest it.

Nonetheless, it was very enjoyable. I even enjoyed to slow process of setting the little metal type in place, row after row of them (actually, just five rows – but it was still quite laborious).

Of course, I lack any real artistic talent, besides (arguably) literary. What that means is that the visual arts potential of the letterpress is wasted on me. I can appreciate it, but I lack to eye to reproduce it myself.

For me, the pleasure of the letterpress is in it being another expression of personal anachronism – like my manual typewriter and fountain pen.

That said, I may go back and try again, though it would take an awfully long time to do an essay or a longer poem in one of them.

 

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Another Story About An Independent Bookstore Thriving Even As Borders Falls


This one is from Charlotte, North Carolina.

But let’s lose sight of the big picture. The number of independent bookstores has dropped dramatically over the last decade and we shouldn’t confuse the much fewer remaining bookstores as victory nor the stories about a new indie bookstore cropping up here and there as signs that things are going to go back to what they were twenty years ago.

Also, for many people in poorer and more rural areas, Borders was the only bookstore around – the only place to find anything besides the handful of best selling schlock the local Wal-Mart deigns to display next to camping stoves and candy bars.

I have family living in rural Arkansas and there is no independent bookstore nearby, nor any bookstore, in truth.

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Inkwood Books Survives, Thrives


Tampa’s own Inkwood Books gets some well deserved love from the local, ABC News affiliate.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XLVII


This one has Pound’s knowledge of classical literature in full bloom – including a reference to Tiresias.

I mention him/her (Tiresias spent seven years as a woman, according to Greek mythology, in addition to being the seer who identified the truth behind the prophecy that so baffled Oedipus) because Tiresias was prominent in Eliot’s The Wasteland. Pound was heavily involved in the editing and revising of that poem and one wonders if Pound had anything to with his insertion into the poem – or whether Eliot’s inspirational use of that classical figure inspired Pound to include him.

However, compared to Tiresias, more of the poem is devoted to references to Odysseus, though the overall feel is more pastoral than epic. In fact, the overall feel reminds me more of Virgil’s Georgics than Homer. The style is very much in keeping with nineteenth and early twentieth century translations of classical literature.

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Tara Kainer’s ‘When I Think On Your Lives’


Rather than reprint the whole thing over here, I will just link to it – a review I wrote for Literatured.com.

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Too Much Emphasis on Bookstores?


This article seems to suggest that Borders failed because it focused too much on its bookstores. Which is a sad kind of business truth, if it is indeed any kind of truth.

Fortunately, many independent bookstores are succeeding precisely by focusing on themselves and their ability to offer something of value within their physical space.

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Independent Alternatives to the Soon to Be Defunct Borders


Check out this list of indie bookstores nearest soon to be vanished Borders locations by state.

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Bookstores: ‘A Space For Cultural Dilettantism’


That said, the aspect of Borders’ implosion that troubles me is that there will be 399 fewer places to take part in the communal act of book buying, which is a completely separate activity from reading (see: regular bookstore lurkers who never purchase a thing). As corporate as it has become, Borders began as an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1979. Tom and Louis Borders bought out the aging Wahr’s store at 316 South State, and they hired a local rare books restorer to stock it lovingly with unique reading material. The restorer kept a binding workshop upstairs. It expanded into the impersonal, sprawling latte experience that we know today, but Borders started small, and it grew out of a love for the shared browsing experience.

Bookstores are very special places, even the behemoths. They provide a space for cultural dilettantism. You can get lost in them for hours, perusing covers and picking up obscure titles. They are dedicated to discovery and are curated by some of the most dedicated retail employees around (even to get hired at a large corporate chain, one is still required to exhibit a sharp passion for reading).

 

I love that phrase, ‘cultural dilettantism.’ Yes, I am a cultural dilettante (is that the same as a ‘cultural omnivore?’) and yes, I treasure spaces that welcome the practice of cultural dilettantism. Even Borders was capable of providing that space. Often when accompanying my better half on shopping expeditions, I would take refuge in a chain bookstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble or in a Starbucks. I also actively browse the shelves of my neighborhood used bookstore just to experience the sensation of being surrounded by so many examples of the written store of our civilization’s knowledge or will make an expedition to one of my favorite independent bookstores without a particular book in mind, but just with intention of finding a new book of poetry or a poetry ‘zine or some heretofore unknown to me book of history or philosophy. I will sit in a comfortable coffeehouse just to spend an hour reading from a book and taking some notes away from the distractions of home and television.

I am a cultural dilettante and I must mourn whenever a space for me to practice my particular form of mediation and contemplation (or perhaps mediation between the world and my understanding of it) disappears.

 

 

 

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Do We Need Bookstores, Or, The Value Of A Clean, Well Lighted Place


So what is the value of a clean, well-lit place? It is people. “It’s something that you can’t scientifically determine,” Smith said. “There is a core human need to be with people in a place that is stimulating and exciting.” Back to the proto-Internet: booksellers. “They are remarkable people,” Smith added. “People like the exchange with them, they have a passion and it rubs off. … It’s really a very simple formula: [A bookstore is a] welcoming place, with interesting stuff and welcoming people.”

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‘A Dance with Dragons’


I’m not actually here to post a review of the latest book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice heptalogy. I’m still reading it (though I will acknowledge that, yes, it is better than its immediate predecessor).

The publisher noted that sales of physical copies were outstripping those of digital editions. Overall, digital sales are less than 10% of the market, but often on big new bestsellers, the digital versions, which are cheaper and don’t sell out, do better in the first few days.

Not so here.

And it’s a big damn book. Big, heavy, and expensive.

Books of almost cultish value – and I include the Harry Potter series about which I have some ambivalence – seem to demand a physical presence for the diehards who make up the buyers during those first days. An object of totemic presence is required.

Will that be enough to save the physical book?