According to Hibernaculum, Bookcourt on Court Street in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn is currently offering a 3-for-1 deal on NYRB Classics. But this is all really just an excuse to post this gorgeous photograph of the books the site's author purchased. Oh, for a little of that golden light in our white box of an office!
Bookcourt's site also has a bunch of photographs of the construction of its welcome expansion.
This story, courtesy of Megan at Bookdwarf, comes as a welcome respite from the sad news of the last couple of weeks. If the American Booksellers' Association has a good citizenship award, Harvard Bookstore could be a shoe-in.
After a Harvard grad student's Amazon package containing two books about Peruvian anthropology were stolen out of his lobby, he went around to some local shops that buy back students' textbooks. Just a few hours later, the bookthief strolled into the shop, looking to unload the loot and the kindly booksellers offered a low price. As the grad student said,
"They basically paid the ransom on the books and turned them back over to me. So, it was very kind of them."
A nice display of Classics at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, CA. This photo was sent in by our California bookstore rep. But we'd love to see any photos of Classics in the wild: at a bookstore, arranged on your bookshelf, propping up an uneven table, anything.
We also hear that February was NYRB Classics month at one of our favorite LA bookstores (especially now that Dutton's is soon to close), Booksoup. Alas, we have no pix of the actual display. But there is a link to their new-ish blog. So far it has mostly best-seller lists, but most recently the "new blog mistress" Julia posted something of substance on all the hair-tearing over the latest fictional-memoir debacle. She proposes that we all calm down:
[I]sn't the very nature of memoir that it is of the fickle mistress known as memory? How do we know what happened, what has been exaggerated, what is misremembered as something bigger or different than what actually happened? The truth is, we don't.
Lastly, here is a photograph of the café/tiny bookshop at RedCat in downtown LA. Found by chance, it features a nice little shelf of Classics.
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There's no need to heap more praise on Shakespeare and Company, probably one of the most famous bookstores in the world—and certainly one of the most photogenic (see the Shakespeare & Co. pool on flickr). Instead we'll just say merci to them for being such great supporters of the series. The store's March newsletter features four NYRB Classics:
The bookstore also holds a literary festival, called festivalandco every June. This year the theme is "Real Lives: Exploring Memoir and Biography."
Did anybody else catch TMC's showing (and Martha Stewart's selection) of the 1935 film version of The Enchanted April? It was true to the book and much better than expected, at least it was until the over-long scene in which the wacky Italian villa staff fly into a tizzy over an Englishman's desire to have a hot bath. Says the Englishman indignantly: "I am convinced that a bath in Italy is somewhere between a public function and an eruption of Vesuvius!"
The Written Nerd has won a special small-business grant from The Brooklyn Public Library and may soon be opening a small bookstore, possibly in one of the underserved but literate neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, or Prospect Heights.
The Wall St. Journal pays attention to the high-profile bookstore-rescue trend in a piece called "Who's Buying the Bookstore." Mentioned is Classics-friendly shop The Community Bookstore.
The most recent Longitude Bookstore newsletter reminds us to note the passing of George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels. Closer to home, Fraser wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Vladimir Sorokin's novel Day of the Oprichnik has been parodied as Day of the Honours Student by a Putin Satirist popularly known as Mr. Parker. Unfortunately, all further information is in Russian, and so unreadable to us here. [via]
The Guardian rounds up the best bookstores in the world, including one in the Netherlands converted from an unused cathedral that it calls a candidate for "most beautiful bookstore of all time."
Our last.fm Classics group membership drive has netted three new members so far. Welcome to you all.
Writer Brock Clarke was shocked to discover that books by Muriel Spark haven't exactly been flying off the shelves of his local used book shop:
I was immediately and totally filled with rage, and demanded the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every one of his cretinous customers who hadn’t had the good fucking sense and taste to buy anything by Spark over the last twenty years.
“I don’t know the names, addresses, and phone of numbers of my cretinous customers,” the used bookstore owner said.
“The hell you don’t,” I said.
Meanwhile, Shelf Awareness this morning points us to an AP article:
Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show....
"Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases," the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.
It's good to know that the judiciary has its priorities in place: first is the right to conduct business and trailing somewhere behind: the right to privacy.
As it turns out, the government prosecutors were trying to discover who had bought books from a tax-evading bookseller operating through Amazon.com, not what those customers were buying. Still, we do buy a lot of used books from Amazon here, I shudder to think what would happen if that information got into the wrong hands!
The staff there has excellent taste, as evidenced by their several recommendations of us.
Here is Kathy on Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking:
Gently reassuring to the inexperienced cook, but merciless to the pretentious, she is vigorous in her disgust at canned peas, “the habit of flambéing everything from prawns to figs,” and unscrupulous butchers. David communicates a deep trust in the good sense of the ordinary cook in her own kitchen.
Will on Charles Duff's A Handbook on Hanging:
...this classic satire makes folly of the standard death penalty propaganda. With tongue-in-cheek, Duff proposes that we give the hangman, the electricutioner, and the decapitator their due. No, he argues, they are not barbarous thugs who need hide behind ritual and hoods, but instead they are truly great artists forced to practice an imperfect science in a totalitarian political climate.
and there's more, including a plug for The Dud Avocado—or so our sources tell us, we don't yet see it on-line.
Annie Bloom's is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
Novelist and Berlin-transplant Helen DeWitt writes about an English-language bookshop in Berlin that
operates partly as a bookshop, partly along the lines of a video rental store: if you buy a book you can bring it back and they will give you what you paid for it, minus €1.50. . . . While Alan went through the books Tim said the good thing about the system was that it meant they always had good books in stock: in other 2nd hand shops all the good books go as soon as they come in, and then sit on a shelf in someone's room. I said yes, these were books I did not expect to read again, or not any time soon, so I would rather they were available to other people; when I lived in South America we were dependent on the supply of cast-off paperbacks that people had happened to bring with them and leave behind, and though there were more English-language books in Berlin it was still better to have them in circulation.
Sounds like an excellent idea. Wonder if such things exist in other cities with large ex-pat populations. The store has its own—quirky, silly, fun—blog, too.
From www.stmarksbookshop.com
It's not news that the Astor Place branch of Barnes and Noble in downtown Manhattan is closing in December, that announcement was made some time ago (for those pining for some B&N, all you have to do is trot up to Union Square, making a stop at the Strand, of course). The real news, as reported at the NY Times City Room Blog, is that the nearby St. Mark's Bookshop is about to celebrate thirty years in business. St. Mark's is modern, airy, its tables and shelves always full of smart, offbeat selections. Browsing there gives you the feeling that you're engaged in the cultural life of the city. And, it has the best remainders table around.
Glancing at their current best-seller list, I see that Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines is burning up the charts. Thanks St. Mark's!
If you're in the LA area tonight, I highly recommend you stop by Book Soup in West Hollywood. Elaine Dundy, of Dud Avocado fame, will be appearing there in conversation with film critic Kevin Thomas. Ms. Dundy is at her best in conversation, and she's sure to be entertaining in person—you might even get to hear some high-class celebrity gossip!
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