Gotta spend more hours at the library...

I've been meaning to post this very-very-book-related advertisement for a few weeks now-

Good Grading is Important-

No, no, no. Not that kind of grading...

Book-grading terms are always controversial and usually good for a few hundred bickering emails whenever the topic comes up on an email list. Over the years I've come up with a system of my own, which I now humbly offer to the honorable book-buying public as well as my fellow bookselling scum-

AS NEW: Literally "new". Since most books, once read or even handled, no longer qualify for the term NEW, the use of the qualifier "AS" has led to some controversy, with opponents pointing out that a book is either in new condition or it isn't. Proponents and opponents like to bicker about this point, and can usually only be distracted from it by the sound of someone dropping the phrase "VERY FINE" into the conversation.

FINE: A controversial term for a grade which may or may not exist, denoting a book that has slight wear that disqualifies it from the grade AS NEW, which also may or may not exist. Opponents contend that any book that has been handled cannot qualify for a grade above "NEAR FINE". Proponents generally counter this argument by asking Opponents how many angels they think can dance on the head of a pin.

VERY FINE: A grade between FINE and AS NEW. If the grade "FINE" has been controversial over the years, it has nothing on the long, confused and violent history that has attended the use of the grade VERY FINE. The Bern Convention of 1826 officially allowed the term and defined it as any book showing no signs of wear except for an allowance of 2.5 creases not to exceed .0005 mm. in depth, or bumps on the corners not to exceed 5 microns. Smudges were specifically disallowed, but this was amended by the Paris Treaty of 1887, which allowed for up to 3 smudges with a square area not exceeding 21 mm. The controversy over this point led to the Expulsion of English Booksellers from the Continent in 1889. Although English booksellers were re admitted after the Compromise of 1895, under which smudges up to 37 square mm would be allowed, the bad feelings left in the wake of this controversy are believed by many historians to have been one of the indirect causes of the First World War. Used today by many booksellers on Ebay. Not to be confused with "Very Fined (tm)", which usually means the book has fruit juice stains.

NEAR FINE: Either the top grade even a new book, just out of the box from the publisher, can have, or a grade denoting some general wear. The fact that these two conditions are not at all the same cuts no ice with the NearFiners(tm). Take your pick about which side you are on and hope whoever you are discussing this with agrees with you, or else you are likely to end up with a book stuffed up your nose.

GOOD: Not good. An archaic term mostly used nowadays by bored brick & mortar booksellers who amuse themselves by explaining to befuddled walk-in customers that the term "Good" technically means "Not Good", leaving the befuddled customers to wonder what planet booksellers come from.

FAIR: Poor. Getting the hang of it by now?

POOR: Don't even think about buying it. It not only is probably lacking its covers, some pages and all the illustrated plates, but may well leave you with a nasty rash...


OTHER GRADES-

ELSE FINE: A grade used to describe the most minute portion of a book which has been left undamaged. As in: "Ex-library with stamps, embossures, and orange-day-glo spine numbers; covers warped; hinges reinforced with duct tape; 3 plates with crayon scrawls, slight mold odor; pages 47-52 with newspaper recipes glued over text; else fine.

EX-LIBRARY: See "ELSE FINE".

MINT: Another controversial term, used by some booksellers as a synonym for AS NEW. A 1978 research study by Tulane University discovered that the term is mostly used by booksellers who collected coins as children. The study further found that the booksellers who object to it most vociferously collected stamps as children, thus basically boiling the controversy down to the old "stamps" vs. "coins" argument that most of us had with friends at the age of 8 and had left behind by the age of 10.

Stupid Database Tricks -a DUH! Moment

Someone was going on to me recently about how wonderful it must be to be a bookseller- a world of Paradise and roses, or so I am given to understand. Well, sure it is, but there are a few thorns in the garden as well. I was just reminded of another one this morning while strolling through the databases-

There's a certain "bookseller" (term used really, really loosely) on one of the major databases who has gotten hold of a whole bunch of 100-year old Century Magazines and other periodicals and offers xeroxed articles from them. That in itself is a fine service, and quite valuable for anyone who needs a specific article. Nothing wrong with it at all.

The problem begins with their pricing structure- for $19.00 they will send you the article you want, usually 2-6 photocopied pages. In the description the "bookseller" states that "This reference is for personal use only. It may not be reproduced for commercial use. By ordering this reference you are agreeing to these terms".

Huh?

It gets better. Further down the listings you will find exactly the same article, from the same vendor, offered for $44.00, with the note- "this reference is authorized for commercial use. It may be reproduced in books, magazines, television, or in any manner desired".

Well thank you, God! The only problem is that it's a photocopy of out-of-copyright material. No new content has been added, not even new covers. Nobody can claim copyright on 100-year old, out-of-copyright text, not even somebody who photocopies it.

Duh.

There are some choice words to describe blowing smoke out your ass this way, in an attempt to scare people into paying twice what they otherwise would have paid. I'm feeling fairly charitable this morning, so I'll simply stick to "stupid".

What's in an inscription?

We've got a nice Ann Beattie first edition up on Ebay at the moment with a great inscription-

In the past few years there is a certain school of bookselling on Ebay and elswhere which claims that books which are simply signed with the author's name are more valuable than books with good inscriptions.

Well... maybe.

And perhaps there really were WMD's in Iraq.

All I will say is that the entire history of bookselling, as well as common sense, both indicate that the reverse is true. Of course a nicely inscribed book is worth more than a simple signed copy. People want a story, something interesting, something to catch hold of their imagination -simple signatures are boring. The moral of the story is that there is always somebody around selling something, but just because they claim something to be true does not mean it is, especially if all common sense indicates it is not.

Remember- be careful out there.

You can see our auction by clicking the "Ebay Auctions" link in the right-hand column.

How to Have Fun in a Bookstore...

[From the archives; adapted from a piece about offices, so office dwellers should feel free to feel free to adapt it to their needs]


HOW TO KEEP A HEALTHY LEVEL OF INSANITY IN YOUR BOOKSTORE

Pretend to page yourself over the intercom when the store is full of customers. (Don't disguise your voice.) This is even more effective if your store is small and does not have a real intercom and you use one of those home karioke machines.

Find out where the owner shops and buy exactly the same outfits. Always wear them one day after the owner does. (This is especially effective if the owner is a different gender than you are.)

Make up nicknames on the spur of the moment for all your customers and refer to them only by these names (but never the same one twice). "The Nautical books are over there, Sparky." "No I'm sorry we don't have any new Gardening books, Chachi."

Send email to your entire customer mailing list telling them what you're doing. For example "If anyone needs me on Wednesday, I'll be in the bathroom."

"Hi-lite" your shoes. Tell people that you haven't lost your shoes since you did this.

At lunchtime sit in the big overstuffed chair in the middle of the shop and soak your fingers in "Palmolive."

Put mosquito netting up all around the counter.

Arrive for work late, say you're sorry, but you didn't have time for breakfast, and you're going to be nibbling while you stock shelves. Over the next hour consume 5 entire raw potatoes.

Insist that your co-workers refer to you as Zena, Goddess of Fire. This is especially effective if you are a man.

Every time someone asks you for a book, ask them if they want fries with it.

Send email to yourself engaging yourself in an intelligent debate about a hot book-related controversy. Forward the mail to a book email list and ask other listers to settle the disagreement.

Replace the "free coffee" pot with a full beer cooler.

Encourage your customers to join you in a little synchronized chair dancing.

Put your garbage can on the front counter. Label it "New York Times Best Sellers".

Determine how many cups of coffee is "too many."

Develop an unnatural fear of bookends.

Decorate the front counter with pictures of Cindy Brady and Danny Partridge. Tell everyone that they're your children (works especially well for anyone under 40).

For a relaxing break, get away from it all with a mask and snorkel in the store's tropical fish tank. If no one notices, take out your snorkel and see how many fish you can catch in your mouth.

Announce that there is free pizza, free donuts etc... at the front counter and when people come over, see an empty plate and complain, lean back, pat your stomach, and say, "Oh you've got to be faster than that."

Put decaf in the store coffeemaker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.

I Dream of Genie-

[from the Archives]

This newlywed couple is on their honeymoon. They've spent the first couple of days in the hotel room, so they decide to go outside and play a game of golf for the first time in their lives.

On the first tee the husband slices the ball so hard to the right that it goes crashing through the plateglass window of an antiques/bookstore across the street from the golf course.

The couple immediately run over to the shop to apologize, but when they get there they don't see anyone....just broken glass everywhere.

Then the young wife screams when she notices a man with a goatee laying on the floor. The man is in a daze. The couple drop to their knees and begin apologizing. The goateed man raises a finger to his lips and tells the couple that they have done him a great favor.

The goateed man then explains that he is a genie and has been trapped in an antique vase for 211 years. By virtue of the errant golf ball, the vase was shattered, and he was finally freed.

The newlyweds are relieved, but still slightly baffled by the turn of events.

The genie then stands, dusts himself off, and then says with a big smile, "Now I would like to repay you for your act of kindness. I'll grant you two wishes. What would you like? Anything.... Just name it!"

The husband speaks up first. "One billion dollars."

The genie smile and says, "Your wish is my command. I'll have the money deposited into your joint account within 15 days."

The young wife hugs her husband with delight and says to the genie, "For our second wish, I'd like you to make us PAR golfers on any golfcourse in the world."

The genie says, "After this day, playing par golf will be as natural for you as breathing."

The newlyweds are giddy with delight. The young wife turns to the genie and says, "You've been so kind to us, is there ANYTHING we can do for you?"

The genie lowers his head, smiles a slightly embarrassed smile, and says: "Well, I have been locked in a bottle for 211 years, without the warmth of a woman's touch. I would very much like to make love with you. I would understand if you didn't want to, but I am GIVING you one billion dollars...."

The husband and wife are shocked, but they they figure what the hell....it is a BILLION dollars.

The young bride goes upstairs with the genie. While the genie and his wife are upstairs, the husband sits down and begins to read one of the old first edition books in the store. As he reads he can hear the squeaking of the antique boxsprings coming from one of the beds upstairs.

After a couple of hours of strenuous lovemaking, the genie looks down at the young bride and asks her how old she is. "22," she says demurely.

"And how old is your husband?" asks the genie.

"He's 32," she answers.

"32? And he still believes in genies?" asks the bookdealer with a smile.

Diet Time-

[stolen from Tuco on the Beekslayers list]

I was buying a large bag of Purina at Wal-Mart and was in line to check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog?

On impulse, I told her that no, and that I was starting The Purina Diet again, although I probably shouldn't because I'd ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story.

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me.

I told her no; I'd been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

Bon Apetit!

Yes, that's Julia Child and her kitchen in corn! This year's "Mike's Corn Maze" at Warner Farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts, features Julia Child, "The French Chef", a graduate of nearby Smith College. Mike has a complete website devoted to this year's maze, past mazes, and other interesting stuff. The designers have even added some "additions" this year to keep things interesting, including a potato bazooka and tomato trebuchet (a sort of catapult). The maze opens this coming weekend, and stays open through October. FB and I will be mosying over and will have a full report...

Nerdilicious...

This truck driver hauling a tractor-trailer load of computers stops for a beer. As he approaches the bar he sees a big sign on the door saying:

"NERDS NOT ALLOWED -- ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!"

He goes in and sits down. The bartender comes over to him, sniffs, says he smells kind of nerdy, asks him what he does for a living. The truck driver says he drives a truck, and the smell is just from the computers he is hauling. The bartender says OK, truck drivers are not nerds, and serves him a beer.

As he is sipping his beer, a skinny guy walks in with tape around his glasses, a pocket protector with twelve kinds of pens and pencils, and a belt at least a foot too long. The bartender, without saying a word, pulls out a shotgun and blows the guy away.

The truck driver asks him why he did that. The bartender said not to worry, the nerds are overpopulating the Silicon Valley, and are in season now. You don't even need a license, he said.

So the truck driver finishes his beer, gets back in his truck, and heads back onto the freeway. Suddenly he veers to avoid an accident, and the load shifts. The back door breaks open and computers spill out all over the freeway. He jumps out and sees a crowd already forming, grabbing up the computers. They are all engineers, accountants and programmers wearing the nerdiest clothes he has ever seen. He can't let them steal his whole load. So remembering what happened in the bar, he pulls out his gun and starts blasting away, felling several of them instantly.

A highway patrol officer comes zooming up and jumps out of the car screaming at him to stop.

The truck driver said, "What's wrong? I thought nerds were in season."

"Well, sure," said the patrolman, "But you can't bait 'em."

Thistle Talk

We had the world's tallest thistle growing behind the garage this summer. We never measured it, but Amy is about 5'3"...

(this isn't really a garage, but more like a stable with a loft over it that goes up almost two stories, and, as you can see, the thistle got to the base of the roof line).

X-Treme Croquet

Tomorrow (weather permitting) we hold the First Annual Foggygates X-Treme Croquet Bar-B-Q, and are expecting somewhere between 5 and 30 people... It was forecast to be a good day today, so we planned to mow the lawn this afternoon, but it rained all day instead, and may shower in the morning, which means the croquet may be a bit more X-treme than usual.

WTF???

On the one hand, one is tempted to find this story slightly humorous in the same way that all those "Darwin Award" stories are- a "what the fuck were they thinking???" moment. On the other hand, it's an instructive moment for those who think that the Jewish people are just hyper-sensitive these days. Obviously some folks have forgotten about the Holocaust, or perhaps they just don't think that killing 6 million Jews is that big a deal... If the guy had named his place "Osama Bin Laden's Place" and featured big color blow-ups of the Trade Center on fire not only would this have made more newspapers, you can bet the Marines would be on his doorstep tomorrow morning...

Fuhrer furor: India's Hitler eatery to change name

BOMBAY, India -- The owner of a restaurant named after Adolf Hitler said Thursday he will change its name.

Puneet Sablok said he would remove Hitler's name and the Nazi swastika from billboards and the menu. He had said the restaurant's name -- ''Hitler's Cross'' -- and symbols were only meant to attract attention.

Sablok made the decision after meeting with members of Bombay's small Jewish community.

''Once they told me how upset they were with the name, I decided to change it,'' he said. ''I don't want to do business by hurting people.''

Sablok said he had not yet decided on a new name.

Hitler's Cross opened five days ago and serves pizza, salad and pastries in Navi Mumbai, a suburb of Bombay.

From Wildlife Activist to Terror Suspect in 1 Day-

I debated whether to put this here or on 'State of Denial', and eventually decided that the acts of reading, writing and speaking are closely allied enough to include it here.

There are a variety of stories about this on the internet, but this one, from the Sierra Club website, includes an update where the Army Corps of Engineers is caught lying about sending Mr. Bensman's name to the FBI as a possible terror suspect, even when the Corps knew very well that the information they were forwarding was false...

The Army Corps Admits it Lied

Alton, Illinois -- Jim Bensman, the Sierra Club activist who was being "investigated" by the FBI as a terrorist because he stood up at a public hearing being held by the Army Corps of Engineers and suggested that the Corps should pursue its idea of removing some dams to improve fish habitat, has now discovered that the Corps lied when it denied having turned him into the FBI as a suspect. In a response to The Alton Telegraph the Corps now says:

"On July 26, the Telegraph had an article on the day following the public meeting; we sent that article to our district staff. We had some employees who pointed out that the article attributed certain statements to Mr. Bensman. Our security officer's determination, based on U.S. Army regulations concerning possible threats to public facilities, was that the article should be forwarded to the appropriate federal agency, the FBI, for their consideration to determine whether there was a threat or not."

This item appears only a day after the Army Corps denied to the New York Times that it had asked the FBI to investigate Jim. Now the Army Corps admits that it sent the FBI a newspaper story which incorrectly said that Jim Bensman had suggested "blowing up dams" when this suggestion was actually the Army's own idea -- Jim simply said it was worth looking into. The Corps had prepared the PowerPoint presentation that had the picture of dams being blown up. They were aware that it was their idea, not Jim's; therefore, they knew that the article they sent the FBI was wrong. And the Corps further admits that it did not send the FBI the transcript of the hearing which would have clearly shown the FBI that Jim did not even make the statement which allegedly warranted turning his name over to the Bureau in the first place.

It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to set up one of their critics for an FBI investigation using a bogus charge based on a newspaper article the Corps knew was false. They withheld from the Bureau information in their possession which they knew exonerated Jim. They may well have assumed that eventually the FBI would learn the truth and drop the investigation, as the Bureau in fact did -- but in the meantime they were harassing Jim, and, one suspects, hoping to intimidate him.

"Denigrating Turkishness" ???

A Turkish novelist is being prosecuted for having a fictional character state that one of his ancestors was an Armeian victim of Turkish genocide. The New York Times reports that Elif Shafak, "a Turkish novelist who has spent much of her life in Europe and the United States...fills her books with characters who defy all orthodoxy, and in her journalism she lives by the same code, mixing feminism and nuanced political analysis with a deep interest in Ottoman culture."

She's now in trouble, as are many other Turkish writers for, among other things, "denigrating Turkishness". It's all part of a backlash against an attempt to liberalize Turkey and get it into the European Union. The Times article is interesting, if troubling, reading.

"State of Denial" (see the sidebar) is back, and this morning features a semi-book related story, about the Department of Education dropping Evolutionary Biology from its list of approved studies.

Dog Days

What I've been doing lately is going through my "Humor" email box of material I've been saving for about 8 years. I figure these days we all need a laugh or two.

What dog is best at changing light bulbs?

Golden Retriever- "The sun is shining, the day is young, we've got our whole lives ahead of us, and you're inside worrying about a stupid burned-out light bulb?"

Border Collie- "Just one. And I'll replace any wiring that's not up to code."

Dachshund- "I can't reach the stupid lamp!"

Toy Poodle- "I'll just blow in the Border Collie's ear and he'll do it. By the time he finishes rewiring the house, my nails will be dry."

Rottweiler- "Go ahead! Make me!"

Shi-tzu- "Puh-leeze, dahling. Let the servants..."

Lab- "Oh, me, me!!! Pleeeeeeze let me change the light bulb!" Can I? Can I? Huh? Huh? Can I?"

Malamute- "Let the Border Collie do it. You can feed me while he's busy."

Cocker Spaniel- "Why change it? I can still pee on the carpet in the dark."

Doberman Pinscher- "While it's dark, I'm going to sleep on the couch."

Mastiff- "Mastiffs are NOT afraid of the dark."

Hound Dog- "ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ"

Chihuahua- "Yo Quero Taco Bulb."

Greyhound- "It isn't moving. Who cares?"

Australian Shepherd- "Put all the light bulbs in a little circle..."

Old English Sheep Dog- "Light bulb? Light bulb? That thing I just ate was a light bulb?"