Acceleration

That big new bio of Monk:

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

was published October 6, 2009. ($30.00 list, Amazon currently shows it for $19.80)

I had it out from the library, played with it a bit, but didn't read much of it.

Today (July 3, 2010) I found it REMAINDERED at my neighborhood Borders.
Not only is it not yet a year old, it's not even 9 months old.

Apparently the lifecycle is still accelerating, for books as well as for everything else.

The point is: I cannot get to and read a new book in nine months. So, why would I EVER pay new-hardcover prices?

Edited to add: Oh, right: it was remaindered for $5.99, but I made them apply the current "33% off" coupon, so, for you, a special price - $4.01.

How did I not know this?

OK, with the death of Kodak processing, I've been dusting off my medium-format gear.
(Kodak mailers were cheap. Local processing is now relatively expensive. So I'm being nudged back to DIY black&white. If I'm to be relegated to doing home darkroom, I suppose it might as well be stuff that I can contact-print....)

So I've been playing with my old Zeiss Ikonta. Which brings to mind Eric Newby's pictures from "The Last Grain Race", taken on his late-'30s Zeiss Super Ikonta.

During my Lost Decade (...those years lost to parenting...), Newby published a coffee-table book of JUST his photos from aboard the Moshulu: Learning the Ropes, 1999. (But, since I missed it when it was new, it's now scarce and expensive. Grrr.)
Somehow I never really noticed that this was a different book from his "A Traveler's Life", also a Newby coffee-table book. So there's that.

But it's Thing Two that's really remarkable:

The Moshulu is not only still afloat, but it's
a floating restaurant in Philadelphia. (!)

Now, I read The Last Grain Race nearly 30 years ago. For most of those thirty years, I've been IN Philadelphia about every other year. I've SEEN the shipping at Penn's Landing. And yet, this factoid never entered my consciousness.

It makes me wonder what OTHER obvious bits of knowledge have so far evaded me.

No surprise here, I guess

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Yeah, I've read a lot - - though, given my famously Low tastes, I hope it's not accurate to characterize me as a "book snob". And, again, given my own imperfect mastery of spelling, I'm not especially offended by others' grammatical mistakes. But, yeah, I guess I'd have to say that "obsessive-compulsive bookworm" is probably a fair cop.

(A shout-out to LJer "ecbatan" for the link.)

Jefferson's Library

About a decade ago, we realized that our books were more numerous than the library that Jefferson sold to replace the LC. Think of that: our late-90s collection - assembled by an ordinary couple in an ordinary suburban house - was numerically as big as the LC used to be, early in the 19th century. That's some sort of index of how rich our society is today.

Over on LibraryThing, they're loading in the catalog of TJ's library, the collection he sold to Congress to rebuild the LC after the British burned it.

"On Jan. 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950."

So that's an average price of $3.69 in 1815.

(As it happens, that was a high point for American prices - prices had jumped by fully a third due to the War of 1812, and, except for the Civil War, prices would generally decline for the rest of the 19th century.)

according to

http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppowerus/result.php

$23,950 in 1815 was worth $323,830.99 in 2006: $49.89 per book
(A further 3% inflation gives us $333,546 in 2007: $51.42 per book.)
So, say, roughly $50 per book, mostly leather-bound hardcovers.

So, Jefferson's collection was sold for more like "Folio Society" prices than like "bookstore" prices.

(Sidebar: Note that relentless inflation is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon - American prices were essentially the same in 1941 as they were in 1815:

According to this calculator:
$13,075.32 in the year 1900 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$15,645.41 in the year 1915 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$24,190.95 in the year 1918 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$23,660.87 in the year 1941 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.)

"There's more to life than books, you know..."

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading?

The conversation moved on before I could recall enough of the following anecdote to cite it (or even find it: but, yay Google) - but at the time I was vaguely reminded of a factoid that I eventually tracked down to Diana Trilling's obit in the New York Times, October 25, 1996 (this is snipped and re-arranged - and I should learn how to do 'block-quote'):

"I graduated from Radcliffe without having read a line of Homer or Dante or Chaucer, without knowing anything of Shakespeare," she said.

Diana Trilling's career as a critic began in 1941, at the age of 36, when she overheard a telephone conversation between her husband and Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The Nation, who had called to ask if he could recommend someone to write the magazine's literary notes column. When her husband hung up, Mrs. Trilling looked at him and offered herself for the position.

She began writing in 1941 and never stopped.

At one point, as a critic for The Nation, Mrs. Trilling read a novel a day for six and a half years, delivering challenging reviews on some of the most important works of the modern era: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Age of Reason" and George Orwell's "1984." {end NYT quote}



Assuming that's literally true: six and a half years @ one per day = 2374 books. (two leap years makes it an even number....)

Now note that Trilling lived to be 95, so ten times that number of books is certainly possible.

How many people here have had periods when they've read a book a day?

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Last week on NPR's Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl (America's Librarian) recommended a fantasy called "Kings of Infinite Space" :

http://www.tppl.org/books/nancypearl/0507.cfm
(Scroll down)

It's about a guy whose life is such a mess that he's forced to take a job as a tech writer for the state government - his circumstances are so dire that he's been reduced to driving a 14--year-old Dodge Colt.

Of course, I heard her review while driving to my tech writing job in state government, at the wheel of my 16-year-old Honda Civic.

Later that week, I ran across the book at the APL sale. So I bought it, and of course I'm reading it.

(Somewhat similarly, the American version of Hornby's "Fever Pitch" portrayed the protagonist as a loser who was deliberately avoiding a serious career that would render him worthy of the heroine: he was a lowly schoolteacher.)

So much for 'ordinary' careers as portrayed in the arts... this, in a country where only a quarter of adults have a college degree.

Well, that went well.

I've been accumulating books since I was a teenager.
(The clerk at Lescron once asked me - "So...do you read all these books you buy?")
Now that I'm finally getting my library accurately cataloged, now is a good time to unload some dupes.


M just put another first edition of Neuromancer up on eBay. I ran across this at Cranbury about 1989; I paid 60 cents for it.



Neuromancer, by William Gibson, first edition July 1984 Item number: 160114330525


Your item sold for US $163.10!

"That, I believe, is some sort of record"

I went to four library sales within 48 hours. ("I've had 18 straight whiskies; I think this is a record.")

Thursday noon: Albany Public Library's weekly sale.

Thursday evening: the "Friends of the Berkshire Atheneum"s preview sale.
(Pittsfield is about 34 miles from my office, but I think that there are fewer traffic lights between points A and B than I encounter on my normal commute home. And - on a glorious May afternooon - there are worse things to be doing than cruising over the Berkshires in the Miata. I came home with a boxful of books on the passenger seat.)

Friday noon: East Greenbush Public Library.
(My lovely wife even joined me there for this one.)

Saturday morning: my traditional volunteer gig, helping with set-up at the Schenectady County sale.

(For about twenty years, I've helped with set-up at the Schenectady sale. Fred Thompson has now drafted me to help him staff the 'Better Records' table, too. But - as a reward - he comp'd me the few items I had picked up off his table. )

I'd say that "I Have No Life", except that I did squeeze in some non-book-related activities during this burst: on Friday night, the whole family went to my daughter's 'Game Fest' night for her softball league (and saw the fireworks); AND I made it to her Saturday afternoon game, too.

The four sales must have cost me nearly 80 bucks out-of-pocket, including my 'Friends of the BA' membership. Even at 'library sale' prices, books add up. ($1 APL, $36.50 BA, $14 EGPL, ~$25 SCPL). But: see my LT list of recent acquisitions... that's a LOT of books.)

However, all of this silly running-about-advancing-behavior scarcely leaves any time for important stuff, like surfing the internet. (Or blogging.)

.

Like crack for OCD

Library Thing.

It took me three weeks to toggle in my SF book catalog. I felt like one of Skinner's pigeons: for a bibliophile, it's like direct electrical stimulation of the brain. "I'll just load in another hundred books."

...and then suddenly it's morning.

Just my SF makes my collection the 15th largest on Library Thing. I really am a Great Big Geek.

#15, out of 60,000 users. 6,000+ books. (I'm too embarrassed to list ALL of my SF: there's a box of ST books I don't want people to know that I own.)

It will be a lot slower to load in my non-genre books, which aren't obsessively cataloged, and so will each need to be handled individually. Then there are Comrade Wife's books...