Friday, April 04, 2008
Cookbooks as Anthropology and the art of cooking
comment on the cookbooks post:
Mainly, though, I don't use cookbooks for meals any more. Everything we eat seems to be variations on about ten themes. Gordon Ramsay always advises his victims on Kitchen Nightmares to simplify, and it's good advice.
Of course cookbooks are not only, or sometimes hardly at all, for cooking. From the pure book POV I love David, and Claudia Roden. I have a fat tome of classic techniques in Italian cooking by Antonio Bugialli, which is only for thumbing through.
We pretty much stopped cooking from cookbooks when the youngsters were in the house. No time for browsing through cookbooks when you are working and raising, and it's disappointing to spend time prepping something that's downed in ten minutes and appreciated just as much as if you'd made them their favorite meatloaf. We had dishes we knew they liked that we varied in one way or another but yeah, ten themes is probably accurate for our cooking repertoire then too.
I like cookbooks, whether I'm cooking from them or not. I sit and read them and I'm in another world, a world with cuttlefish on the table or an endless number of cabbage recipes, or no eggs-milk-butter. You can tell a lot about how people live by looking at the cookbooks written for them.
A friend once asked, "But really. How many cookbooks do you need?" What can I answer to something like that?
Cookbooks aren't just something for checking out a recipe for mu-shu pork or Char Siu Bao or gingersnaps. No, when I need a recipe, it's usually not a specific cookbook I head for. I pull out five cookbooks and find five recipes and mix them up, or I go to the Web and do something similar with Google.
Cookbooks are for dreaming over, for sitting curled up in a chair with a breeze coming in off the Bay with a pad of sticky notes, marking pages with possibilities for future dishes or snacks or desserts.
Dinner the other night (and last night as leftovers) was a variant on shrimp à la king, made without recipes. Simple, ready?
Olive oil. A small red onion. Garlic.
Bell pepper strips from Trader Joe's, mélange à trois green/yellow/red: frozen. (16oz bag)
Medium-sized shrimp from Trader Joe's: cleaned, cooked, frozen. (16oz? bag)
Butter. Flour. Heavy whipping cream.
Parmesan cheese. Pale dry sherry.
Olive oil in pan. Heat. Add garlic and sliced onion. Cook until browned. Add red-yellow-green pepper strips. Cook some more. Add shrimp and stir until shrimp is hot. Set aside.
Butter in pan. Add flour for roux. Add cream for Béchamel sauce. Toss in shredded Parmesan cheese and sherry and then fiddle with cream and cheese/sherry until you have a nice thick not-too-cheesy sauce. Grind of pepper. Stir sherry sauce into shrimp/pepper medley. Serve with rice.
Total cost ~ $10, if that. From that we had two dinners, or four meals. It was delicious.
Would I have known to toss those things together if I hadn't already made seafood enchiladas =and= chicken with the sherry Parmesan sauce? Would I have tossed the melange à trois peppers with the shrimps if there hadn't been a shrimp à la king in my past? I don't know. I think, like many things, it's easier to cook without recipes, once you have enough time booked using someone's tried and true directions.
Natural cooks do not spring from Zeus' brow.
Oh, how I love cookbooks.
Update: "So, what are you planning for dinner?"
"I dunno. Haven't decided yet. Have any preferences?"
"I'd like meatloaf."
Meatloaf for dinner tonight -- "Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf," to be exact.
posted by Sal Towse at 1:15 PM|
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Mainly, though, I don't use cookbooks for meals any more. Everything we eat seems to be variations on about ten themes. Gordon Ramsay always advises his victims on Kitchen Nightmares to simplify, and it's good advice.
Of course cookbooks are not only, or sometimes hardly at all, for cooking. From the pure book POV I love David, and Claudia Roden. I have a fat tome of classic techniques in Italian cooking by Antonio Bugialli, which is only for thumbing through.
We pretty much stopped cooking from cookbooks when the youngsters were in the house. No time for browsing through cookbooks when you are working and raising, and it's disappointing to spend time prepping something that's downed in ten minutes and appreciated just as much as if you'd made them their favorite meatloaf. We had dishes we knew they liked that we varied in one way or another but yeah, ten themes is probably accurate for our cooking repertoire then too.
I like cookbooks, whether I'm cooking from them or not. I sit and read them and I'm in another world, a world with cuttlefish on the table or an endless number of cabbage recipes, or no eggs-milk-butter. You can tell a lot about how people live by looking at the cookbooks written for them.
A friend once asked, "But really. How many cookbooks do you need?" What can I answer to something like that?
Cookbooks aren't just something for checking out a recipe for mu-shu pork or Char Siu Bao or gingersnaps. No, when I need a recipe, it's usually not a specific cookbook I head for. I pull out five cookbooks and find five recipes and mix them up, or I go to the Web and do something similar with Google.
Cookbooks are for dreaming over, for sitting curled up in a chair with a breeze coming in off the Bay with a pad of sticky notes, marking pages with possibilities for future dishes or snacks or desserts.
Dinner the other night (and last night as leftovers) was a variant on shrimp à la king, made without recipes. Simple, ready?
Olive oil. A small red onion. Garlic.
Bell pepper strips from Trader Joe's, mélange à trois green/yellow/red: frozen. (16oz bag)
Medium-sized shrimp from Trader Joe's: cleaned, cooked, frozen. (16oz? bag)
Butter. Flour. Heavy whipping cream.
Parmesan cheese. Pale dry sherry.
Olive oil in pan. Heat. Add garlic and sliced onion. Cook until browned. Add red-yellow-green pepper strips. Cook some more. Add shrimp and stir until shrimp is hot. Set aside.
Butter in pan. Add flour for roux. Add cream for Béchamel sauce. Toss in shredded Parmesan cheese and sherry and then fiddle with cream and cheese/sherry until you have a nice thick not-too-cheesy sauce. Grind of pepper. Stir sherry sauce into shrimp/pepper medley. Serve with rice.
Total cost ~ $10, if that. From that we had two dinners, or four meals. It was delicious.
Would I have known to toss those things together if I hadn't already made seafood enchiladas =and= chicken with the sherry Parmesan sauce? Would I have tossed the melange à trois peppers with the shrimps if there hadn't been a shrimp à la king in my past? I don't know. I think, like many things, it's easier to cook without recipes, once you have enough time booked using someone's tried and true directions.
Natural cooks do not spring from Zeus' brow.
Oh, how I love cookbooks.
Update: "So, what are you planning for dinner?"
"I dunno. Haven't decided yet. Have any preferences?"
"I'd like meatloaf."
Meatloaf for dinner tonight -- "Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf," to be exact.
posted by Sal Towse at 1:15 PM|
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Thursday, April 03, 2008
The Best Cookbooks
Mark Bitten is asking for help updating his "50 Cookbooks I'd Rather Not Live Without" cookbooks list.
417 comments so far.
I don't know what I'd do if I had to choose my fifty favorite cookbooks. I have bookcases filled with cookbooks elsewhere and maybe a foot-plus of cookbooks above the bar sink here. Are the cookbooks here the ones I'd rather not live without? Are there fifty of them?
On the shelf above the bar sink:
[* means that this blog post accomplished its purpose of making me think about the cookbooks I have here and I'm taking this book elsewhere and freeing up some shelf room ...]
What does that add up to? Thirty-plus. I'll weed through the ones I set aside and take them elsewhere, opening up space for other cookbooks I'd be happier to have close by. For now, here's what the shelves above the bar sink look like.
posted by Sal Towse at 3:46 PM||
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417 comments so far.
I don't know what I'd do if I had to choose my fifty favorite cookbooks. I have bookcases filled with cookbooks elsewhere and maybe a foot-plus of cookbooks above the bar sink here. Are the cookbooks here the ones I'd rather not live without? Are there fifty of them?
On the shelf above the bar sink:
[* means that this blog post accomplished its purpose of making me think about the cookbooks I have here and I'm taking this book elsewhere and freeing up some shelf room ...]
- The Microwave Guide and Cookbook (no author given) *
- Eliason, Harward, Westover - Make-A-Mix Cookery - a classic used constantly while raising my family. I still pull it out to make cream cheese swirls, a coffee roll with cream cheese filling sort of like a cheese Danish, which I make for Easter brunch and other special occasions.
- More Make-A-Mix Cookery ... vol 2. of the classic
- Sunset Chinese Cook Book - this book falls open to the kung pao chicken recipe page, now stained and splattered and no longer attached to the binding it's been used so much
- Sunset Cooking Bold & Fearless: a cook book for men *
- Sunset Cook Book of Favorite Recipes *
- Betty Crocker's Bisquick Cookbook * - used constantly while raising kids. I'd make the biscuit mix from Make-A-Mix Cookery and use the Bisquick recipes from this book
- Shinojima - Authentic Japanese Cuisine for Beginners - picked up on our trip to Japan last year. [or not. When I was going through it, I noticed the price information on the back was in $$$. Picked up where, then?] I need to sit down with it to see if it deserves to be kept in the limited space here. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
- Mabel C. Lai - Chinese Cuisine Made Easy - "Hot & Spicy Soup" (p32) 'nuff said. I always need to check how many golden needles, wooden ears and bamboo shoots the recipe takes. Gee, I haven't made the soup in a long time. Need to get some fresh tofu and check the cupboards for golden needles, wooden ears and bamboo shoots. The "Ginger Broccoli Beef" recipe is exceptional too.
- Ranck, Good - Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: feasting with your slow cooker - another classic.
- Shirley - Wonderful ways to prepare chicken - bought for $1.95 at some Gemco/KMart-like store more years ago than I can remember. (c1979). "Piquant Chicken" (made with honey, lemon juice and ginger) is a favorite. "Chicken Diva" (with a sherry-Parmesan white sauce and broccoli) is another. "Sherry Creamed Chicken." Maybe chicken tonight. Hm.
- Sunset Recipes for Ground Beef - falls open to the splattered page showing "Cottage Cheese Meat Loaf." The recipe not only includes cottage cheese but also uses rolled oats instead of bread cubes. Delish. When the young ones were MUCH younger, I'd cook the meatloaf with carrots, beans and/or peas mixed in as the accompanying vegetable. I tend not to look at the other recipes for meatloaf (24 variations ...) but say, "Almond Studded Curry Loaf" using Major Grey's chutney sounds not half bad. Am I in a rut?
- Killeen - 101 Secrets of Gourmet Chefs: unusual recipes from great California restaurants *
- Goldstein - From Our House to Yours: comfort food to give and share - provenance unknown. I need to sit down with this one. I really liked Joyce Goldstein's cooking at Square One decades back and enjoy her articles in the Chron food section. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
- Duchess of Devonshire - Chatsworth Cookery Book. Signed. Picked this book up when we were back visiting the relatives last fall. Need to sit down with this book too. Should it be taking up space here? [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
- America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - a new classic. I love this stuff.
- Rombauer, Becker - Joy of Cooking. 'nuff said. I love the nitty gritty detail but don't much love the "see White Sauce 111, 341" and "Please read About Doughnuts, 244" sorts of forward and back references in practically every recipe. Still. If you've never quite got the hang of preparing sweetbreads, the Rombauer clan will set you straight. Superb indexing.
- The Best of Bon Appetit (1979) - Ginger Cream Chicken (p69) (madeira, ginger, chopped up candied ginger, cream -- what's not to like?)
- Cooking Light 5 Ingredient 15 Minute Cookbook - Goodwill purchase. I don't know if I've ever cooked from this book. I need to sit down with this book.
- America's Best Lost Recipes - I adore Christopher Kimball and his crew at Cook's Magazine and America's Test Kitchen and all the affiliated incarnations.
- Betty Crocker's Cookbook - the classic. The cookbook I used most after I moved out on my own. Splattered. Marked. Oooh. Here's a piece of folded paper with a recipe for "Rasa Malaysia Portuguese Egg Tarts" Those were exceptionally tasty. BCC is my go-to book when I can't remember how long to cook a roast because it's been so long since we had one.
- The Silver Spoon from Phaidon Press. 1263pp. Can't remember where this one came from either, but like the America's Test Kitchen books, it's just a fun read. Perch: four recipes. Octopus: six recipes Catfish and tench: four recipes. Cuttlefish: six recipes. How can you not like a cookbook with recipes for "Heart Kabobs" and "Cream of Fennel Soup with Smoked Salmon"?
- Eichelbaum - Cooking for Heart & Soul: 100 delicious lowfat recipes from San Francisco's top chefs * a cookbook to benefit the San Francisco Food Bank - this was a prize from a drawing at a Food Bank event. I need to sit down with this one. [Made the cut. Keeping here.]
- Bon Appetit - Too Busy to Cook? Also kept (it seems ... page falls open) for the Ginger Cream Chicken recipe. That is one delicious recipe. I make it these days with boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of chicken breasts, but then I make most of my chicken recipes with thighs instead of breasts. I don't hack up whole chickens like I did back when now that there are only two of us to feed so we have neither chicken breasts nor chicken livers as much as we did then. A large bag of chicken thighs from Costco is in the freezer and we take what we need for whatever we're cooking. Buy a new bag when the current bag is getting near gone.
- seven different editions of the Presto pressure cooker recipe book and a Wards Cooker (pressure cooker) recipe book from 1947 and a Wards Magic Seal Pressure Saucepan recipe book. How many books do I need to look up how long to cook artichokes or beets or pot roast in a pressure cooker? I think I need to re-think this stash.
- Royal Cook Book (from the Royal Baking Powder Co)(1925) - classics like "Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake" "Lady Baltimore Cake" "Royal Sponge Cake" but also a bunch of recipes that don't use baking powder at all. I'm assuming the Royal Baking Powder company wanted a free giveaway that the fickle homemaker would hold on to, that would keep their name front and center even if she didn't =yet= use their baking powder..
- Recipe Finder Index - a critical item back in the days before I could find a recipe for just about anything on the Web. Once the number of cookbooks in the house reached a certain point, there were times when I was all,"Oh, I'd like to make that sausage pie thing with spinach and basil again but which cookbook has the recipe?" The Finder Index is broken into categories (Appetizers & Snacks, Beverages, Desserts -- Pies). Space for recipe name, source & page#, date tried, and notes. I'd forgotten about most of these: "Nanking Liver" from the New Poor Poet Cookbook, "German style Kidneys" from Sunset Cooking with Wine, "Migg's Fish" from the Southern Junior League Cookbook, "Sherried Chicken Livers" from Sumptuous Indulgence on a Shoestring.
- Law - Pacific Light Cooking. Another Goodwill purchase. Need to look at this one.
- Child, Bertholle, Beck - Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A classic. I have no idea why it falls open to the section with onion recipes. Looks like something spilt there once upon a time. Heavily stained page: "Navarin Printanier" [Lamb Stew with Spring Vegetables] I love this cookbook for its sense and its recipes and the way they laid out the pages. Its sequel is over with the other cookbooks,as is Simca's Cuisine and two and a half shelves of books on French cooking: Beck, Child, Pepin, others.
- Dailey - The Best Pressure Cookbook Ever - so why all the Presto recipe books? Oh, look! There's yet another Presto recipe book inside! That settles it. The batch listed earlier is going elsewhere.
- McLaren - Pan-Pacific Cook Book: savory bits from the world's fare (1915) e.g. #63 Tchi - a Russian national soup. "Chop fine half of a small cabbage and a large onion and fry in dripping for a few moments; stir in two tablespoons of flour. Cook for three minutes, then add slowly two quarts of beef stock. Simmer for half an hour, add a few forcemeat or sausage balls and a wineglass of white wine. Simmer twenty minutes more and serve." Fun. His nibs' great great aunt was involved with committee work for the 1915 Fair so we pick up books and whatever we can find about it, if they can be had for a reasonable price. This cookbook was $15.
- The Daily Echo (Halifax) - Good Housekeeping Everyday Cook Book. Very beat up. Of uncertain age. Falling to bits. First six pages gone, which is probably where the date information was. Recipes provided by the Daily Echo, plus handwritten recipes inside in various hands and pasted-in recipes cut from papers or magazines. A look into the past.
- Small-ish book with many pages, separated by alpha dividers. May have been intended as an address book but used instead for recipes. Recipes written in different hands. Provenance? Recipes assigned to letters higgly-piggly. "Pots de creme" recipe under "P" and a different "Pot de Creme" recipe under "D" for "dessert" Also under "D" "Iced Tea" ... "drinks," I suppose. Also in "D" "Daiquiri" with a note, "Edie, Ethel and Emily liked"
- Robertson, Flinders, Godfrey - Laurel's Kitchen. (1976). This book was my second go-to book after Betty Crocker. Vegetarian. The younger ones consider "Chillaquillas" (or ChileeKillees, as we called them) comfort food. Cheap, tasty, good.
- Ayer y Hoy de la Cocina Navarra - with a handy dandy translation of the recipes into English. A goodie gift from the Kingdom of Navarra during a meet the winemakers of Navarre event. I need to check out the recipes. This book probably belongs elsewhere.
and last but not least - Stewart - The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. 1200 recipes. Tasty.
What does that add up to? Thirty-plus. I'll weed through the ones I set aside and take them elsewhere, opening up space for other cookbooks I'd be happier to have close by. For now, here's what the shelves above the bar sink look like.
Labels: books, food, life, photographs
posted by Sal Towse at 3:46 PM|
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Daily Kos: Books for the End of the World As We Know It
Daily Kos: Steering into the skid: Books for the End of the World.
Be sure to read the comments.
posted by Sal Towse at 11:24 PM||
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Be sure to read the comments.
posted by Sal Towse at 11:24 PM|
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Sunday, January 06, 2008
Clare T. Newberry
Over at Grapes 2.0 the Sour One is taking a poll asking what we think is the "Most beautiful children's book".
I've answered, have you?
In my answer I mentioned both Chris Van Allsburg and Clare T (Turlay) Newberry as favorite author/illustrators (although beautiful illustration doesn't seem to be the ultimate intent of the Flemish poll that triggered all this yakyak).
I first encountered Newberry's books when I was a page at the San Jose Public Library back in the early 70s. Shelving books in the Children's Room one day, I came across Newberry's book Smudge and promptly fell in love with her cat/kitten sketches.
Check out what I'm talking about. I love the way she was able to convey the cat-ness of the cats and kittens and the texture of their fur.
posted by Sal Towse at 1:26 PM||
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I've answered, have you?
In my answer I mentioned both Chris Van Allsburg and Clare T (Turlay) Newberry as favorite author/illustrators (although beautiful illustration doesn't seem to be the ultimate intent of the Flemish poll that triggered all this yakyak).
I first encountered Newberry's books when I was a page at the San Jose Public Library back in the early 70s. Shelving books in the Children's Room one day, I came across Newberry's book Smudge and promptly fell in love with her cat/kitten sketches.
Check out what I'm talking about. I love the way she was able to convey the cat-ness of the cats and kittens and the texture of their fur.
posted by Sal Towse at 1:26 PM|
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Rap Sheet's ONE BOOK PROJECT
Better late than never.
Last May, in honor of its one-year anniversary, The Rap Sheet organized The Rap Sheet's ONE BOOK PROJECT.
We invited more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been "most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years."
Interesting list. Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track, nominates THE DOORBELL RANG (1965) by Rex Stout and explains why. J.D. Rhoades, lawyer, blogger, and author of Safe and Sound nominates Katy Munger's MONEY TO BURN [1999]. Linda Fairstein, author of Bad Blood, chose Robert Traver's ANATOMY OF A MURDER.
... and the list goes on.
If you're a crime fiction fan, this list will keep you in reading material for a long, long time.
[via The Rap Sheet]
posted by Sal Towse at 3:18 PM||
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Last May, in honor of its one-year anniversary, The Rap Sheet organized The Rap Sheet's ONE BOOK PROJECT.
We invited more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been "most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years."
Interesting list. Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track, nominates THE DOORBELL RANG (1965) by Rex Stout and explains why. J.D. Rhoades, lawyer, blogger, and author of Safe and Sound nominates Katy Munger's MONEY TO BURN [1999]. Linda Fairstein, author of Bad Blood, chose Robert Traver's ANATOMY OF A MURDER.
... and the list goes on.
If you're a crime fiction fan, this list will keep you in reading material for a long, long time.
[via The Rap Sheet]
Labels: blog, books, mystery, people
posted by Sal Towse at 3:18 PM|
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Monday, November 19, 2007
BLDGBLOG
Check out Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG: Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures.
A plethora of goodies.
Geoff Manaugh has a book (BLDGBLOG) out from Chronicle Books in Spring 2009 and moved to this fair ville in September to become a senior editor at Dwell.
More about Manaugh here.
posted by Sal Towse at 2:01 PM||
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A plethora of goodies.
Geoff Manaugh has a book (BLDGBLOG) out from Chronicle Books in Spring 2009 and moved to this fair ville in September to become a senior editor at Dwell.
More about Manaugh here.
Labels: architecture, blog, books, people, San Francisco
posted by Sal Towse at 2:01 PM|
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
When I'm 64 ...
Talking with an old friend, well, exchanging e-mails and mentioned that I was feeling old.
His nibs and I'd had dinner a week or so ago with a friend who'd turned eighty in August. Eighty-year-old friend is looking good and, really, looks not that much different than he did when I met him thirty-two years ago. He's involved with crafting little technology whizbang solutions for folks at the VA hospital. He's a Maker. He hasn't slowed down much if any at all. He's just pretty darn cool.
I wrote to the e-mail friend, "I'm seven years older than he was when I first met him. Yikes, I'm feeling old."
Then I found this test: Are you a hippy?
which gave these stats on the folks who had taken the test:
54% of test takers are Male, while 46% are Female.
93% of test takers are under the age of forty, while 7% are over forty.
78% of test takers have hair shorter than 6", while 22% have hair that is longer.
7% of test takers were at Woodstock in 1969, while 93% were not.
[That in itself is astounding when you consider only 15% of the test takers were even =alive= in the 1960s. That means that ~50% of the people taking the test who were alive in the 1960s were at Woodstock. Is that even remotely possible?]
54% of test takers prefer John over George at 12% as their favorite Beatle.
15% of test takers were alive in the 1960's, while 85% were not.
21% of test takers are vegetarians, while 79% are not.
11% of test takers have lived in a commune, while 89% have not.
10% of test takers voted for Ronald Reagan, while 90% did not.
[They forgot to ask how many had even had an opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan.]
The questions hit me with pangs of nostalgia: "Do you smell like patchouli?" "Do you own an incense burner?" "Do you have a brownie recipe with ingredients you can't find at the A&P?" "Do you think Bob Dylan has a good voice?"
Do you feel old?
Update> and the doorbell rings. By the time I get there, the doorbell ringer is gone, but there's an Amazon package under the doormat. "Thank you!" I call. "You're welcome," comes the reply from down the path. The package contained a couple books and Kristofferson's latest.
Earlier this month we'd been at the Fillmore for an AIM benefit. I was reminded again how much I like his words and his voice. A few days ago I put an order in and here it was. I put my new purchase into the CD player. First song was the title song, This Old Road.
Yeah, feeling old. And that's okay. Kristofferson, after all, is only ten years younger than our eighty-year-old friend and he's still kickin'.
posted by Sal Towse at 3:41 PM||
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His nibs and I'd had dinner a week or so ago with a friend who'd turned eighty in August. Eighty-year-old friend is looking good and, really, looks not that much different than he did when I met him thirty-two years ago. He's involved with crafting little technology whizbang solutions for folks at the VA hospital. He's a Maker. He hasn't slowed down much if any at all. He's just pretty darn cool.
I wrote to the e-mail friend, "I'm seven years older than he was when I first met him. Yikes, I'm feeling old."
Then I found this test: Are you a hippy?
which gave these stats on the folks who had taken the test:
54% of test takers are Male, while 46% are Female.
93% of test takers are under the age of forty, while 7% are over forty.
78% of test takers have hair shorter than 6", while 22% have hair that is longer.
7% of test takers were at Woodstock in 1969, while 93% were not.
[That in itself is astounding when you consider only 15% of the test takers were even =alive= in the 1960s. That means that ~50% of the people taking the test who were alive in the 1960s were at Woodstock. Is that even remotely possible?]
54% of test takers prefer John over George at 12% as their favorite Beatle.
15% of test takers were alive in the 1960's, while 85% were not.
21% of test takers are vegetarians, while 79% are not.
11% of test takers have lived in a commune, while 89% have not.
10% of test takers voted for Ronald Reagan, while 90% did not.
[They forgot to ask how many had even had an opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan.]
The questions hit me with pangs of nostalgia: "Do you smell like patchouli?" "Do you own an incense burner?" "Do you have a brownie recipe with ingredients you can't find at the A&P?" "Do you think Bob Dylan has a good voice?"
Do you feel old?
Update> and the doorbell rings. By the time I get there, the doorbell ringer is gone, but there's an Amazon package under the doormat. "Thank you!" I call. "You're welcome," comes the reply from down the path. The package contained a couple books and Kristofferson's latest.
Earlier this month we'd been at the Fillmore for an AIM benefit. I was reminded again how much I like his words and his voice. A few days ago I put an order in and here it was. I put my new purchase into the CD player. First song was the title song, This Old Road.
Yeah, feeling old. And that's okay. Kristofferson, after all, is only ten years younger than our eighty-year-old friend and he's still kickin'.
Labels: books, culture, music, timewaster
posted by Sal Towse at 3:41 PM|
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Thursday, October 11, 2007
[BLOG] Sara Zarr: The Stories of a Girl
Word out in today's SFChronicle that Sara Zarr -- whom I met many many moons ago at a WTQ gathering of misc.writers, back when she lived in this fair city, before she moved to Utah -- is a finalist for the National Book Award for The Story of a Girl in the Young People's Literature division.
Yippee! Yahoo! for Sara!!!!!
Sara's Web presence: The Stories of a Girl
Sara is published. Sara is a finalist for a National Book Award.
Sara no longer engages with folks on misc.writing.
Hmmm. Is there a connection?
(A slight one, perhaps. Her success is primarily due to ... Sara is talented, and determined, and focussed and ...)
Yay, hooray for Sara!
posted by Sal Towse at 10:04 AM||
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Yippee! Yahoo! for Sara!!!!!
Sara's Web presence: The Stories of a Girl
Sara is published. Sara is a finalist for a National Book Award.
Sara no longer engages with folks on misc.writing.
Hmmm. Is there a connection?
(A slight one, perhaps. Her success is primarily due to ... Sara is talented, and determined, and focussed and ...)
Yay, hooray for Sara!
Labels: blog, books, URL, writing
posted by Sal Towse at 10:04 AM|
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Monday, September 17, 2007
Intellectual bling
In comments on "Stuff," SourGrapes wrote
TA with all that, but I'd include books too. What are ya keeping them for? In most cases it's not to refer to. They're intellectual bling. It's very very unusual to have a couple thousand books, but that guy forgot to say "in our class of people".
I keep books I want to look at again. And the rest go off to subsequent readers. Books are made to be read, not to be shelved.
Ouch, pal.
There's something about books and not just as intellectual bling. I'm happiest in a nest full of books, all that unrealized and unread or waiting to be reread potential.
Yesterday I was rummaging through my stash of travel books, looking for old books on London for someone who's working on the animation for (don't spew) A CHRISTMAS CAROL, due out in 2009. (Jim Carrey will be voicing Ebenezer Scrooge/Ghost of Christmas Past/Ghost of Christmas Present/Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. I told you not to spew!)
Didn't find any, but found some early 20thc. Baedekers covering London and GB, found some old books covering places we'd been walking in N Wales, got sidetracked by a book on Mount Athos. ... All that roaming around and a very cozy afternoon reading wouldn't have happened if I gave away my stash of books. (I am giving away some of the books, ones I know I'll never need/read/want to see again. But ...)
I just love the potential of masses of books, love libraries. I was absolutely blissed out this trip by the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.
I was || this close to settling in to help them keep track of the 200K books they have stashed away there. (And Good Lord, they should join the 21st century and start scanning that collection. If that room goes up in flames, a world of knowledge will be lost. Maybe Bill Gates would subsidize the project. I'd volunteer. ...)
What a place.
Heaven.
posted by Sal Towse at 4:07 PM||
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TA with all that, but I'd include books too. What are ya keeping them for? In most cases it's not to refer to. They're intellectual bling. It's very very unusual to have a couple thousand books, but that guy forgot to say "in our class of people".
I keep books I want to look at again. And the rest go off to subsequent readers. Books are made to be read, not to be shelved.
Ouch, pal.
There's something about books and not just as intellectual bling. I'm happiest in a nest full of books, all that unrealized and unread or waiting to be reread potential.
Yesterday I was rummaging through my stash of travel books, looking for old books on London for someone who's working on the animation for (don't spew) A CHRISTMAS CAROL, due out in 2009. (Jim Carrey will be voicing Ebenezer Scrooge/Ghost of Christmas Past/Ghost of Christmas Present/Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. I told you not to spew!)
Didn't find any, but found some early 20thc. Baedekers covering London and GB, found some old books covering places we'd been walking in N Wales, got sidetracked by a book on Mount Athos. ... All that roaming around and a very cozy afternoon reading wouldn't have happened if I gave away my stash of books. (I am giving away some of the books, ones I know I'll never need/read/want to see again. But ...)
I just love the potential of masses of books, love libraries. I was absolutely blissed out this trip by the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.
I was || this close to settling in to help them keep track of the 200K books they have stashed away there. (And Good Lord, they should join the 21st century and start scanning that collection. If that room goes up in flames, a world of knowledge will be lost. Maybe Bill Gates would subsidize the project. I'd volunteer. ...)
What a place.
Heaven.
Labels: books, libraries, travel
posted by Sal Towse at 4:07 PM|
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Packed. Can you believe it?
His nibs is relieved that I'm not doing my usual last minute thing.
Everything's packed except the notebooks, pens and reading material. I always pack too many notebooks (well, I need a blank notebook for trip notes, one for note-notes, one for to-do thoughts and lists, one for what-will-I-do-with-myself-when-we-get-home plans).
And I tend to pack too many books 'cause I don't know if I'll be wanting to read mysteries or history or Middlemarch or self-awareness or Dalai Lama or ...
Auntie K shows up tomorrow afternoon and the plan is for his nibs to help her lug all her stuff down here and then for them to meet up with me and we'll swop tools for her boyz (picked up from my dad's workshop yesterday) from my Mini to her car trunk. Following that chore, she gets the grande tour of the book stacks. Then she comes back here and settles in.
A walk down hill to dinner at Firenze By Night (a first for all of us) and then we'll tuck under the covers while visions of sugar plums and all that.
Thursday morning we kiss the cat (if we can drag her out from under the bed), wave bye-bye and head off to the airport in the shuttle.
When we get back, The Book pops up to the top of the priority list.
My clear-the-house sort-the-books organize-the-bookmarks procrastinating projects will be hobbled and put out to pasture.
Onward and upward.
Really.
posted by Sal Towse at 5:23 PM||
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Everything's packed except the notebooks, pens and reading material. I always pack too many notebooks (well, I need a blank notebook for trip notes, one for note-notes, one for to-do thoughts and lists, one for what-will-I-do-with-myself-when-we-get-home plans).
And I tend to pack too many books 'cause I don't know if I'll be wanting to read mysteries or history or Middlemarch or self-awareness or Dalai Lama or ...
Auntie K shows up tomorrow afternoon and the plan is for his nibs to help her lug all her stuff down here and then for them to meet up with me and we'll swop tools for her boyz (picked up from my dad's workshop yesterday) from my Mini to her car trunk. Following that chore, she gets the grande tour of the book stacks. Then she comes back here and settles in.
A walk down hill to dinner at Firenze By Night (a first for all of us) and then we'll tuck under the covers while visions of sugar plums and all that.
Thursday morning we kiss the cat (if we can drag her out from under the bed), wave bye-bye and head off to the airport in the shuttle.
When we get back, The Book pops up to the top of the priority list.
My clear-the-house sort-the-books organize-the-bookmarks procrastinating projects will be hobbled and put out to pasture.
Onward and upward.
Really.
Labels: books, food, life, San Francisco, travel
posted by Sal Towse at 5:23 PM|
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING
Today is the sixteenth anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee posting the first Web pages about his hypertext project that eventually evolved into the World Wide Web.
I mentioned that I'd come across my copy of WEAVING THE WEB yesterday, inscribed "To Sal" by Tim B-L, my hero.
PJ Parks, who used to have a very readable blog but now no longer does, wrote that she has a copy too and talked about ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING, a Victorian factoid book and the motivation for TB-L to name his proto-WWW project ENQUIRE.
Today, while sorting books and packing up boxes, I found a copy -- well, not the Brit version, mine is the American version: INQUIRE WITHIN FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW, or Over Three Thousand Seven Hundred Facts WORTH KNOWING. Particularly intended as a book for Family Reference on Subjects connected with Domestic Economy, and containing the Largest and most Valuable Collection of Useful Information that has ever yet been published. INQUIRERS ARE REFERRED TO THE INDEX. (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, No. 18 Ann Street. 1858 [maybe 1856, the numeral didn't print clearly])
The book has all =sorts= of useful (and quaint and dated and sometimes flat out wrong) stuff.
e.g.
794. YULECAKE -- Take one pound of fresh butter, one pound of sugar, one pound and a half of flour, two pounds of currants, a glass of brandy, one pound of sweetmeats, two ounces of sweet almonds, ten eggs, a quarter of an ounce of allspice and a quarter of an ounce of cinnamon. Melt the butter to a cream, and put in the sugar. Stir it till quite light, adding the allspice and pounded cinnamon; in a quarter of an hour, take the yolks of the eggs, and work them two or three at a time; and the whites of the same must by this time be beaten into a strong snow, quite ready to work in. As the paste must not stand to chill the butter, or it will be heavy, work in the whites gradually, then add the orange-peel, lemon, and citron, cut in fine stripes [sic], and currants which must be mixed in well with the sweet almonds; then add the sifted flour and glass of brandy. Bake this cake in a tin hoop, in a hot oven, for three hours, and put twelve sheets of paper under it to keep it from burning.
795. TO WASH CHINA CRAPE SCARFS, &c. -- ...
2004. Why does a lamp smoke, when the wick is cut unevenly? -- Because the points of the jagged edge (being very easily separated from the wick) load the flame with more carbon that [sic] it can consume; and as the heat of the flame is greatly diminished by these little bits of wicks, it is unable to consume even the usual quantity of smoke. The same applies when the wick is turned up too high.
Some of the stuff in INQUIRE WITHIN is word-for-word what's in ENQUIRE WITHIN. The scarf washing article above, f'rex, is word-for-word except that the title is "To Wash China Crêpe Scarves, &c." in ENQUIRE.
Other bits of information (the one about lamp smoke, f'rex) are not covered by ENQUIRE WITHIN at all.
All-in-all fun stuff. You can see why TB-L called his project ENQUIRE -- there's more than a bit of resemblance to the random collection of stuff on the Web.
How prescient of him.
Project Gutenberg has made a copy of ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING available. Did TB-L even dream sixteen years ago that his nifty little project would some day offer up ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING for anyone with Web access?
Thanks, TB-L!
posted by Sal Towse at 8:41 PM||
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I mentioned that I'd come across my copy of WEAVING THE WEB yesterday, inscribed "To Sal" by Tim B-L, my hero.
PJ Parks, who used to have a very readable blog but now no longer does, wrote that she has a copy too and talked about ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING, a Victorian factoid book and the motivation for TB-L to name his proto-WWW project ENQUIRE.
Today, while sorting books and packing up boxes, I found a copy -- well, not the Brit version, mine is the American version: INQUIRE WITHIN FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW, or Over Three Thousand Seven Hundred Facts WORTH KNOWING. Particularly intended as a book for Family Reference on Subjects connected with Domestic Economy, and containing the Largest and most Valuable Collection of Useful Information that has ever yet been published. INQUIRERS ARE REFERRED TO THE INDEX. (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, No. 18 Ann Street. 1858 [maybe 1856, the numeral didn't print clearly])
The book has all =sorts= of useful (and quaint and dated and sometimes flat out wrong) stuff.
e.g.
794. YULECAKE -- Take one pound of fresh butter, one pound of sugar, one pound and a half of flour, two pounds of currants, a glass of brandy, one pound of sweetmeats, two ounces of sweet almonds, ten eggs, a quarter of an ounce of allspice and a quarter of an ounce of cinnamon. Melt the butter to a cream, and put in the sugar. Stir it till quite light, adding the allspice and pounded cinnamon; in a quarter of an hour, take the yolks of the eggs, and work them two or three at a time; and the whites of the same must by this time be beaten into a strong snow, quite ready to work in. As the paste must not stand to chill the butter, or it will be heavy, work in the whites gradually, then add the orange-peel, lemon, and citron, cut in fine stripes [sic], and currants which must be mixed in well with the sweet almonds; then add the sifted flour and glass of brandy. Bake this cake in a tin hoop, in a hot oven, for three hours, and put twelve sheets of paper under it to keep it from burning.
795. TO WASH CHINA CRAPE SCARFS, &c. -- ...
2004. Why does a lamp smoke, when the wick is cut unevenly? -- Because the points of the jagged edge (being very easily separated from the wick) load the flame with more carbon that [sic] it can consume; and as the heat of the flame is greatly diminished by these little bits of wicks, it is unable to consume even the usual quantity of smoke. The same applies when the wick is turned up too high.
Some of the stuff in INQUIRE WITHIN is word-for-word what's in ENQUIRE WITHIN. The scarf washing article above, f'rex, is word-for-word except that the title is "To Wash China Crêpe Scarves, &c." in ENQUIRE.
Other bits of information (the one about lamp smoke, f'rex) are not covered by ENQUIRE WITHIN at all.
All-in-all fun stuff. You can see why TB-L called his project ENQUIRE -- there's more than a bit of resemblance to the random collection of stuff on the Web.
How prescient of him.
Project Gutenberg has made a copy of ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING available. Did TB-L even dream sixteen years ago that his nifty little project would some day offer up ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING for anyone with Web access?
Thanks, TB-L!
Labels: books, factoid, history
posted by Sal Towse at 8:41 PM|
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Friday, August 03, 2007
Shifty book notes from Thursday
(1) Who wrote
Answer: Marie Annette Beauchamp, cousin to writer Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Fiction.
(2) Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Paul and Virginia. Ltd ed. 800c. 450 GB 350 USA. London. Routledge. 1888. #639.
cracking hinges. foldup box in good shape. worth?
(3) Vicar of Wakefield - Goldsmith. Rackham illustrations. Philadelphia. McKay. Printed in GB by Riverside Press. in box w/ illustration on cover. worth?
(4) War&Peace. Heritage Press. Limited Editions Club. 1938. 2 v. boxed. worth?
(5) signed prints. flowers (3) birds (2) . G. Juniga. (Zuniga?)
Oh, yes. I have a swell and marvelous time sorting books. And again. Tomorrow!
posted by Sal Towse at 1:33 AM||
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- Elizabeth & her German Garden
- The Caravaners
- Christopher and Columbus
Answer: Marie Annette Beauchamp, cousin to writer Katherine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Fiction.
(2) Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Paul and Virginia. Ltd ed. 800c. 450 GB 350 USA. London. Routledge. 1888. #639.
cracking hinges. foldup box in good shape. worth?
(3) Vicar of Wakefield - Goldsmith. Rackham illustrations. Philadelphia. McKay. Printed in GB by Riverside Press. in box w/ illustration on cover. worth?
(4) War&Peace. Heritage Press. Limited Editions Club. 1938. 2 v. boxed. worth?
(5) signed prints. flowers (3) birds (2) . G. Juniga. (Zuniga?)
Oh, yes. I have a swell and marvelous time sorting books. And again. Tomorrow!
posted by Sal Towse at 1:33 AM|
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Friday, July 27, 2007
Book shifting
Book shifting. So here's the problem. The bookcases are, for the most part, filled with the books I intend to stay where they are.
That leaves hundreds of boxes of books to go through on my quest to let go ("Finally!" sez his nibs) of some of the books. You can't see into boxes without opening them. All the boxes of books on a given subject aren't necessarily together.
We already have twenty boxes of books or so packed up for the Coast Community Library. The older younger one will come by with his partner maybe the first weekend in August to see if any of the books in the additional nine boxes of SFF titles intended for CCL are ones they want. Let's call it thirty boxes of books boxed up and ready to shift out. ... and more than ten times that many still here, most unsorted.
I have four main areas where books in boxes (and loose now, due to the sorting) are stashed. I have too many boxes whose contents aren't easily identifiable because I didn't, back when we were packing the boxes up, always remember to label the boxes (as I do now) so that the contents labels are visible from all sides.
I have other boxes that might be labeled but are hidden by other boxes so I can't determine the content. In all I have over thirty boxes that are "unknown." I have another twenty or so that are labeled "nonfic" which need to be sorted through. I have eight that are labeled "misc" which need to be sorted through. I need to get to the "unknown" boxes and see what they might be. And I have the added twist that, due to the vagaries of the move, what is in the boxes is not necessarily as is labeled, if the box is even labeled.
Yesterday I decided that I had to get a grip on what we had, where. I spent some time counting boxes in the four areas and today I created an Excel spreadsheet (and I am so not a believer in spreadsheets) so I can get a handle on which boxes are where and what I can do to shift books around, always remembering that I don't want to end up with too many books in any one place because even though the space was built with a live load req of 40 lbs/sq foot average, you just don't want to push it and, like J Carter Brown, I think it was, have your walls started spreading out because of the load of books on the upper floors.
The purpose of this first pass is to get the nonfic and misc and whatever books rough-sorted into categories so that I can then take each category and sort it more definitively and then take those sub-sorts and figure out what stays, what goes.
So ... my box count yesterday. After feeding the data into Excel I find I have over seventy "subject" sorts of labels for the boxes, and that's even with me throwing physics and biology into a greater superset of science when I was making the book count.
Seventy subjects is about fifty too many. I'm having a problem though with sorting some titles. Are they "essay" or "memoir"? When does "memoir" segue into "autobiography"? Would "Letters" be autobiography or memoir or essay? How about if they're Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son? When do memoirs belong in history?
So I sort and sort and resort. My "reference" boxes had contained all sorts of things. My "facts" boxes had started out as trivia/factoid Uncle John's and Cecil Adams sorts of books but had wound up also including flags of the world and Amos, Amas, Amat. And around and around and around.
The gross decision is that Area 1 will contain fiction, which still needs sorting. Fiction is all that fiction stuff that isn't SFF or MYS. Area 2 will contain history & biography & autobiography & memoirs? essays? Area 3 will have SCI-related for now and JUV. Area 4 (the largest area and where I've been sorting) will get liberal arts (except history and biography) and all the stuff that needs sorting.
My kludgey spreadsheet tells me how many of what are where so I can wrap my head around how many non-fiction things are in the fiction area (24 boxes! that's not bad) and how many fiction things are elsewhere (2 ... okay).
The sheet also tells me that I have about 400 boxes of books, which (take out the thirty destined for CCL or the older younger one) means (hurray!) over half of the books moved in are either on shelves or headed out the door soon.
When I was making my notes, I didn't note how many of those 400+ boxes have already been through the primary sort, but there have been loads. Heck, I probably missed some boxes anyway, but close enough is close enough.
A light's glimmering at the end of the tunnel.
One thing, no, two things, I found day before yesterday were two identical copies of Kipfer's THE ORDER OF THINGS, an interesting book but don't ask me why I have two copies. The table of contents may help me with some of the "How do I sort out the science-related books into subcategories that will make it easy for me to see what I have?" sorts of decisions.
Does Feynman go in "essays" or in "physics" or in just what?
How do I make sure when I'm sorting through for dups that I have all the Feynmans in one place?
Odd, isn't it, that I haven't been buying many books at used bookstores or thrift shops lately?
posted by Sal Towse at 11:17 AM||
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That leaves hundreds of boxes of books to go through on my quest to let go ("Finally!" sez his nibs) of some of the books. You can't see into boxes without opening them. All the boxes of books on a given subject aren't necessarily together.
We already have twenty boxes of books or so packed up for the Coast Community Library. The older younger one will come by with his partner maybe the first weekend in August to see if any of the books in the additional nine boxes of SFF titles intended for CCL are ones they want. Let's call it thirty boxes of books boxed up and ready to shift out. ... and more than ten times that many still here, most unsorted.
I have four main areas where books in boxes (and loose now, due to the sorting) are stashed. I have too many boxes whose contents aren't easily identifiable because I didn't, back when we were packing the boxes up, always remember to label the boxes (as I do now) so that the contents labels are visible from all sides.
I have other boxes that might be labeled but are hidden by other boxes so I can't determine the content. In all I have over thirty boxes that are "unknown." I have another twenty or so that are labeled "nonfic" which need to be sorted through. I have eight that are labeled "misc" which need to be sorted through. I need to get to the "unknown" boxes and see what they might be. And I have the added twist that, due to the vagaries of the move, what is in the boxes is not necessarily as is labeled, if the box is even labeled.
Yesterday I decided that I had to get a grip on what we had, where. I spent some time counting boxes in the four areas and today I created an Excel spreadsheet (and I am so not a believer in spreadsheets) so I can get a handle on which boxes are where and what I can do to shift books around, always remembering that I don't want to end up with too many books in any one place because even though the space was built with a live load req of 40 lbs/sq foot average, you just don't want to push it and, like J Carter Brown, I think it was, have your walls started spreading out because of the load of books on the upper floors.
The purpose of this first pass is to get the nonfic and misc and whatever books rough-sorted into categories so that I can then take each category and sort it more definitively and then take those sub-sorts and figure out what stays, what goes.
So ... my box count yesterday. After feeding the data into Excel I find I have over seventy "subject" sorts of labels for the boxes, and that's even with me throwing physics and biology into a greater superset of science when I was making the book count.
Seventy subjects is about fifty too many. I'm having a problem though with sorting some titles. Are they "essay" or "memoir"? When does "memoir" segue into "autobiography"? Would "Letters" be autobiography or memoir or essay? How about if they're Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son? When do memoirs belong in history?
So I sort and sort and resort. My "reference" boxes had contained all sorts of things. My "facts" boxes had started out as trivia/factoid Uncle John's and Cecil Adams sorts of books but had wound up also including flags of the world and Amos, Amas, Amat. And around and around and around.
The gross decision is that Area 1 will contain fiction, which still needs sorting. Fiction is all that fiction stuff that isn't SFF or MYS. Area 2 will contain history & biography & autobiography & memoirs? essays? Area 3 will have SCI-related for now and JUV. Area 4 (the largest area and where I've been sorting) will get liberal arts (except history and biography) and all the stuff that needs sorting.
My kludgey spreadsheet tells me how many of what are where so I can wrap my head around how many non-fiction things are in the fiction area (24 boxes! that's not bad) and how many fiction things are elsewhere (2 ... okay).
The sheet also tells me that I have about 400 boxes of books, which (take out the thirty destined for CCL or the older younger one) means (hurray!) over half of the books moved in are either on shelves or headed out the door soon.
When I was making my notes, I didn't note how many of those 400+ boxes have already been through the primary sort, but there have been loads. Heck, I probably missed some boxes anyway, but close enough is close enough.
A light's glimmering at the end of the tunnel.
One thing, no, two things, I found day before yesterday were two identical copies of Kipfer's THE ORDER OF THINGS, an interesting book but don't ask me why I have two copies. The table of contents may help me with some of the "How do I sort out the science-related books into subcategories that will make it easy for me to see what I have?" sorts of decisions.
Does Feynman go in "essays" or in "physics" or in just what?
How do I make sure when I'm sorting through for dups that I have all the Feynmans in one place?
Odd, isn't it, that I haven't been buying many books at used bookstores or thrift shops lately?
posted by Sal Towse at 11:17 AM|
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Boxloads of books
I'm tired.
There are boxloads of books to go through.
Still.
So, what's taking so long, Sal?
Let's recap.
We moved ~ 800 boxes of books up here. I have no clue how many are left to sort through. We moved a bunch of shelves as well, but most of those shelves are full so the sorting is taking a long while, while I move boxes from this end of the space to that.
The cookbooks are out of boxes (for the most part) and against the wall in the eastmost room. The travel books (pure travel and travelogue) are in two banks of bookcases perpendicular to the cookbook bank.
The SFF books take up three banks of book shelves to the west of the two banks of travel books (and, yes, perpendicular to the cookbook bank).
There are no more shelves in this room, which is the room where I've been sorting books out of boxes and into other boxes since last week or so when I finished sorting the SFF books. (The SFF books wound up with four boxes of books with no space on the shelves and another five boxes of SFF short stories that didn't fit on the shelves.)
The hall between the eastmost room and the westmost room has stacks of book boxes, mostly boxes marked HIST or PHYSICS or SCI plus boxes with several Harvard Classics sets. Oh, and my SUNSET Magazine going back to forever, and a box of Christmas craft/recipe magazines and books, and ...
I have all the crime fiction (six+ bookcases) on shelves in the westmost room along with a couple shelves of writing books. That room also has a bunch of art (pictures, posters, paintings) and music (78s, LPs, tape, CDs and the occasional 45RPM) that need sorting through eventually (not now) and another twenty-five boxes or so of a motley collection of books, which will be sorted in the current go through.
The alcove outside the westmost room has the SUNSET magazines mentioned up there plus a bookcase full of assorted Tightwad Gazettes and how-to-make-it and FIX YOUR PLUMBING sorts of books that need sorting. Oh, and there's probably 25 boxes labeled HIST and S/W DEV and TECH and what-not.
The hall leading out from the alcove outside the westmost room to the door on that level has a few bookshelves that I may use for sorting the books in that area. Mostly the area has boxes of adult fiction books and (currently) seventeen+ boxes of books destined for the library and nine boxes of SFF books waiting for the older younger one to poke through plus some NF and some MISCNF and ... oh, it goes on and on.
My pal came through today to pick up some cookbooks I'd offered. She took a few. Offered me some of hers that she was getting rid of.
The books she didn't take were reboxed for the library.
I found a box or two of duplicates and things I didn't want/need today. I brought home a list of titles to check in alibris.com and abebooks.com to make sure I don't accidentally give away a first edition of Sue Grafton's KEZIAH DANE.
What did I find? Well, here are some examples.
I found TWO sets of the 2vol. THE PIMA BAJO OF CENTRAL SONORA, MEXICO. by Pennington. 1980. Univ of Utah
I found a selection of slim pamphlets with dust covers by David Starr Jordan and printed roundabouts 1912 by Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin in San Francisco. Titles:
KNOWING REAL MEN
THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION
THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY
Google /"David Starr Jordan"/ if you don't know who he is.
I found a slim, HB, blue jacket with gilt SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOK. 1891. Munn & Co, Office of the Scientific American.
I found MASTERING MAGIC CARDS by George H. Baxter and Larry W. Smith. Wordware Publ. 1995.
And I found everything in between and to both sides.
My method is thus: rather than go through just once and decide toss/save, I'm going through once, sorting out the dups and things I know I really have no need of and repacking the boxes, relabeling, if necessary. (Thanks be for masking tape. Rip off the old, on with the new.)
I relabel boxes which had been NF or MISC or VERY MISC as FIC REF FACT phil/psych/soc HIST SCI or whatever and sort the books into them with a gross sort of sort.
The next pass will be another pass for duplicates and "do I want to keep this?" and an opportunity to sort the general (SCI, f'rex) boxes into a finer sort so that I can wrap my head around what I have instead of just thinking, I think I saw that title or one like that about five boxes ago. I'll have a chance to pull everything out of the FUN & GAMES boxes, f'rex, and see just how many copies of 150 WAYS TO PLAY SOLITAIRE I have. (I found three today.)
Then there'll be a third level sort ... then ...
Come 2009, I may have things under control.
Update: The library all the boxes of books are intended for is the Coast Community Library in Point Arena, which serves the northern Mendocino coast communities.
An old friend is heavily involved with book hugger issues up there and showed us around the library when we were up visiting him in Gualala last May. What a neat library. Great community support. What a story that library and its Friends group have.
When the library was moving from their dinky digs into the old Mercantile building (which the Friends raised money to buy and restore), over a hundred locals lined up along Highway One through town for a "book worm" bucket brigade and moved the books across Highway One and down the road a piece to the new digs, hand to hand until the books were all moved and settled on their shelves in the restored building.
How many places have that kind of community support for the library?
We told Don that he can come down here to get books and if they all don't fit in his van (and they won't, it's now apparent), we'll take books up and the library can take what they want of the books and sell the rest to make money for the library. That offer to Don last May is what precipitated all this sorting activity. That and the fact that books in boxes do you no good when you're looking for your copy of Watts' THE WAY OF ZEN and all you know is that it's here somewhere in one of these boxes ...
posted by Sal Towse at 10:55 PM||
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There are boxloads of books to go through.
Still.
So, what's taking so long, Sal?
Let's recap.
We moved ~ 800 boxes of books up here. I have no clue how many are left to sort through. We moved a bunch of shelves as well, but most of those shelves are full so the sorting is taking a long while, while I move boxes from this end of the space to that.
The cookbooks are out of boxes (for the most part) and against the wall in the eastmost room. The travel books (pure travel and travelogue) are in two banks of bookcases perpendicular to the cookbook bank.
The SFF books take up three banks of book shelves to the west of the two banks of travel books (and, yes, perpendicular to the cookbook bank).
There are no more shelves in this room, which is the room where I've been sorting books out of boxes and into other boxes since last week or so when I finished sorting the SFF books. (The SFF books wound up with four boxes of books with no space on the shelves and another five boxes of SFF short stories that didn't fit on the shelves.)
The hall between the eastmost room and the westmost room has stacks of book boxes, mostly boxes marked HIST or PHYSICS or SCI plus boxes with several Harvard Classics sets. Oh, and my SUNSET Magazine going back to forever, and a box of Christmas craft/recipe magazines and books, and ...
I have all the crime fiction (six+ bookcases) on shelves in the westmost room along with a couple shelves of writing books. That room also has a bunch of art (pictures, posters, paintings) and music (78s, LPs, tape, CDs and the occasional 45RPM) that need sorting through eventually (not now) and another twenty-five boxes or so of a motley collection of books, which will be sorted in the current go through.
The alcove outside the westmost room has the SUNSET magazines mentioned up there plus a bookcase full of assorted Tightwad Gazettes and how-to-make-it and FIX YOUR PLUMBING sorts of books that need sorting. Oh, and there's probably 25 boxes labeled HIST and S/W DEV and TECH and what-not.
The hall leading out from the alcove outside the westmost room to the door on that level has a few bookshelves that I may use for sorting the books in that area. Mostly the area has boxes of adult fiction books and (currently) seventeen+ boxes of books destined for the library and nine boxes of SFF books waiting for the older younger one to poke through plus some NF and some MISCNF and ... oh, it goes on and on.
My pal came through today to pick up some cookbooks I'd offered. She took a few. Offered me some of hers that she was getting rid of.
The books she didn't take were reboxed for the library.
I found a box or two of duplicates and things I didn't want/need today. I brought home a list of titles to check in alibris.com and abebooks.com to make sure I don't accidentally give away a first edition of Sue Grafton's KEZIAH DANE.
What did I find? Well, here are some examples.
I found TWO sets of the 2vol. THE PIMA BAJO OF CENTRAL SONORA, MEXICO. by Pennington. 1980. Univ of Utah
I found a selection of slim pamphlets with dust covers by David Starr Jordan and printed roundabouts 1912 by Whitaker & Ray-Wiggin in San Francisco. Titles:
KNOWING REAL MEN
THE PRACTICAL EDUCATION
THE SCHOLAR IN THE COMMUNITY
Google /"David Starr Jordan"/ if you don't know who he is.
I found a slim, HB, blue jacket with gilt SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN REFERENCE BOOK. 1891. Munn & Co, Office of the Scientific American.
I found MASTERING MAGIC CARDS by George H. Baxter and Larry W. Smith. Wordware Publ. 1995.
And I found everything in between and to both sides.
My method is thus: rather than go through just once and decide toss/save, I'm going through once, sorting out the dups and things I know I really have no need of and repacking the boxes, relabeling, if necessary. (Thanks be for masking tape. Rip off the old, on with the new.)
I relabel boxes which had been NF or MISC or VERY MISC as FIC REF FACT phil/psych/soc HIST SCI or whatever and sort the books into them with a gross sort of sort.
The next pass will be another pass for duplicates and "do I want to keep this?" and an opportunity to sort the general (SCI, f'rex) boxes into a finer sort so that I can wrap my head around what I have instead of just thinking, I think I saw that title or one like that about five boxes ago. I'll have a chance to pull everything out of the FUN & GAMES boxes, f'rex, and see just how many copies of 150 WAYS TO PLAY SOLITAIRE I have. (I found three today.)
Then there'll be a third level sort ... then ...
Come 2009, I may have things under control.
Update: The library all the boxes of books are intended for is the Coast Community Library in Point Arena, which serves the northern Mendocino coast communities.
An old friend is heavily involved with book hugger issues up there and showed us around the library when we were up visiting him in Gualala last May. What a neat library. Great community support. What a story that library and its Friends group have.
When the library was moving from their dinky digs into the old Mercantile building (which the Friends raised money to buy and restore), over a hundred locals lined up along Highway One through town for a "book worm" bucket brigade and moved the books across Highway One and down the road a piece to the new digs, hand to hand until the books were all moved and settled on their shelves in the restored building.
How many places have that kind of community support for the library?
We told Don that he can come down here to get books and if they all don't fit in his van (and they won't, it's now apparent), we'll take books up and the library can take what they want of the books and sell the rest to make money for the library. That offer to Don last May is what precipitated all this sorting activity. That and the fact that books in boxes do you no good when you're looking for your copy of Watts' THE WAY OF ZEN and all you know is that it's here somewhere in one of these boxes ...
Labels: books, libraries, life
posted by Sal Towse at 10:55 PM|
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Saturday, July 21, 2007
Harry Potter
I did not spend midnight at a bookstore.
I spent the hours before midnight wending my way home from the lobster feed at the Bankers Club and chatting with our 2-unit-condo partner-in-crime at our front doorstep until the new parents next door asked us to pipe down.
Today, when we were at Costco buying greens and tequila and Bisquick and whatever, I considered buying the latest HP but because I'm not all caught up with the first six, I decided it wasn't critical to buy a first-edition (one of 12 million) today.
We got to Costco late -- too late for his nibs to nab a 2 lb. loaf of Acme Bread's sour batard. We'll have to go down to the Ferry Building and pick up a 1 lb. loaf. Seems the bakery at the Ferry Building doesn't do 2 lb. loafs, alas.
We'd left our place in the early afternoon. Spent some time at the preview for Bonham's SOMA auction. Went over to the loft and sorted through books. Headed off to Costco and then home.
One of the guys in an adjacent line was a tough-enough guy there with his one-maybe-two-year-old. He chatted up an even tougher looking guy in another lane, a buddy, who came over and chatted up the young 'un.
What surprised, and pleased me, was that all our tough-enough guy had in his cart were three Harry Potters.
I imagined him telling the kids that he would =not= hang out at Barnes&Noble with them at midnight, but he =would= promise to go to Costco today and buy a copy for each of the reading kids so they wouldn't have to share.
We came home plus white t-shirts for his nibs but sans Harry Potter.
As I'm sorting through the boxes of books, I will set aside the Harry Potters and then spend a few days of serious reading to get me through the series.
Harry Potter. Who he?
posted by Sal Towse at 11:58 PM||
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I spent the hours before midnight wending my way home from the lobster feed at the Bankers Club and chatting with our 2-unit-condo partner-in-crime at our front doorstep until the new parents next door asked us to pipe down.
Today, when we were at Costco buying greens and tequila and Bisquick and whatever, I considered buying the latest HP but because I'm not all caught up with the first six, I decided it wasn't critical to buy a first-edition (one of 12 million) today.
We got to Costco late -- too late for his nibs to nab a 2 lb. loaf of Acme Bread's sour batard. We'll have to go down to the Ferry Building and pick up a 1 lb. loaf. Seems the bakery at the Ferry Building doesn't do 2 lb. loafs, alas.
We'd left our place in the early afternoon. Spent some time at the preview for Bonham's SOMA auction. Went over to the loft and sorted through books. Headed off to Costco and then home.
One of the guys in an adjacent line was a tough-enough guy there with his one-maybe-two-year-old. He chatted up an even tougher looking guy in another lane, a buddy, who came over and chatted up the young 'un.
What surprised, and pleased me, was that all our tough-enough guy had in his cart were three Harry Potters.
I imagined him telling the kids that he would =not= hang out at Barnes&Noble with them at midnight, but he =would= promise to go to Costco today and buy a copy for each of the reading kids so they wouldn't have to share.
We came home plus white t-shirts for his nibs but sans Harry Potter.
As I'm sorting through the boxes of books, I will set aside the Harry Potters and then spend a few days of serious reading to get me through the series.
Harry Potter. Who he?
posted by Sal Towse at 11:58 PM|
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Thursday, July 19, 2007
Book Collecting
A delightful collection of Book Collecting information from a former antiquarian bookseller, DJ McAdam.
Be sure to read DJ McAdam's essay Things Found in Books and check out his literature links.
DJMcAdam's site promises hours of exploration. ...
posted by Sal Towse at 1:54 PM||
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Be sure to read DJ McAdam's essay Things Found in Books and check out his literature links.
DJMcAdam's site promises hours of exploration. ...
Labels: books
posted by Sal Towse at 1:54 PM|
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Interview with Elizabeth George
Interview with Elizabeth George in the June 2007 WRITER Magazine. [Caution: PDF!]
[snippet]
You talk a great deal about the craft of writing. What do you mean?
It's important for beginning writers to learn the craft, the basics, of writing. You can't teach somebody to be a creative artist, to have talent or passion, but you can teach somebody craft. Whether they can apply it in an artistic fashion, well, that's in the hands of the gods. But they can certainly learn what the craft of writing is.
posted by Sal Towse at 6:36 PM||
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[snippet]
You talk a great deal about the craft of writing. What do you mean?
It's important for beginning writers to learn the craft, the basics, of writing. You can't teach somebody to be a creative artist, to have talent or passion, but you can teach somebody craft. Whether they can apply it in an artistic fashion, well, that's in the hands of the gods. But they can certainly learn what the craft of writing is.
Labels: books, people, writing
posted by Sal Towse at 6:36 PM|
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Sunday, July 15, 2007
The physics of phog
We spent four hours or so yesterday perched at a table in front of Rogue Ale at Powell and Union, with a stack full of flyers for the San Francisco Climate Challenge and coupons for inexpensive cf lightbulbs for people who sign up for the Challenge. Most of the people we talked to were ineligible for the Challenge, being new to their digs (you have to have lived where you're living last year in October) or being tourists.
Lots of tourists.
We wound up answering questions from, f'rex, a pair of Englishwomen of a certain age who were looking for the Abercrombie and Fitch store.
"Not here," we said. "Up and over that hill."
"This isn't Union Square?" they asked.
"No, this is Washington Square Park, on Union Street. Union Square is blocks and blocks that way and nowhere near Union Street."
So we wrote out where the A&F store was (at Powell and Market) and his nibs walked them up to the corner of Columbus and pointed out where they could catch the 30 and take a ride through Chinatown ("Oh! Chinatown!") and on to the Westfield Shopping Centre on Market Street.
Another question came from a harried father who asked if we knew where there was decent Italian food that was kid-friendly. We looked at his kids, three boys between the ages of nine and fifteen, and pointed him to North Beach Pizza, a few blocks up Union at the corner of Grant. "Good pizza," we told him, plus there'd be an assortment of Italian food that he might like if he wasn't into pizza.
And so it went. We had nice conversations with a lot of people, including a woman with her camera who was on a fieldtrip to San Francisco with her photography class at West Valley College. She began to explain where WVC was and we told her we used to live less than a mile from the college before we pulled up stakes and moved up to this little 7x7 town.
We also spent time talking with each other, noshing down on one of Rogue's delish Reuben sandwiches and swilling some delish beers, enjoying the fresh air and the passing scene.
I also watched the clouds come and go and come and go again and noticed something interesting.
Watch this!
Exhibit One: a view (shoddy picture, sorry. taken with my cell) looking west from our table perch up Union Street toward Russian Hill. Note the cloud cover scudding toward us -- big huge thick clouds, pouring over the top of Russian Hill.
Exhibit Two: a view (another shoddy picture) looking east from our table up Union Street on the other side, toward Telegraph Hill.
Blue skies, eh?
The clouds would come barreling down off Russian Hill and reach the small flat space between the hills, away from the cool ocean breezes and warm up and d-i-s-a-p-p-e-a-r.
Fascinating to watch.
The microclimates of our fair ville are an endless surprise to visitors and to locals who don't get out much.
Heading down to another microclimate down at Potrero Point to sort through the tale end of the SFF collection, removing duplicates and alphabetizing by author/title. So far I have nine boxes of duplicate SFF titles set aside.
I'm all the way up to "R" with only two bookcases and not enough room to shelve the rest of the collection. Back into boxes for the excess. Question is, should I keep going and stop mid-letter (at "Scheckley," for example) or should I start working back from "Zelazny" and just box up all the R's and S's and T's.
Decisions, decisions.
posted by Sal Towse at 12:30 PM||
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Lots of tourists.
We wound up answering questions from, f'rex, a pair of Englishwomen of a certain age who were looking for the Abercrombie and Fitch store.
"Not here," we said. "Up and over that hill."
"This isn't Union Square?" they asked.
"No, this is Washington Square Park, on Union Street. Union Square is blocks and blocks that way and nowhere near Union Street."
So we wrote out where the A&F store was (at Powell and Market) and his nibs walked them up to the corner of Columbus and pointed out where they could catch the 30 and take a ride through Chinatown ("Oh! Chinatown!") and on to the Westfield Shopping Centre on Market Street.
Another question came from a harried father who asked if we knew where there was decent Italian food that was kid-friendly. We looked at his kids, three boys between the ages of nine and fifteen, and pointed him to North Beach Pizza, a few blocks up Union at the corner of Grant. "Good pizza," we told him, plus there'd be an assortment of Italian food that he might like if he wasn't into pizza.
And so it went. We had nice conversations with a lot of people, including a woman with her camera who was on a fieldtrip to San Francisco with her photography class at West Valley College. She began to explain where WVC was and we told her we used to live less than a mile from the college before we pulled up stakes and moved up to this little 7x7 town.
We also spent time talking with each other, noshing down on one of Rogue's delish Reuben sandwiches and swilling some delish beers, enjoying the fresh air and the passing scene.
I also watched the clouds come and go and come and go again and noticed something interesting.
Watch this!
Exhibit One: a view (shoddy picture, sorry. taken with my cell) looking west from our table perch up Union Street toward Russian Hill. Note the cloud cover scudding toward us -- big huge thick clouds, pouring over the top of Russian Hill.
Exhibit Two: a view (another shoddy picture) looking east from our table up Union Street on the other side, toward Telegraph Hill.
Blue skies, eh?
The clouds would come barreling down off Russian Hill and reach the small flat space between the hills, away from the cool ocean breezes and warm up and d-i-s-a-p-p-e-a-r.
Fascinating to watch.
The microclimates of our fair ville are an endless surprise to visitors and to locals who don't get out much.
Heading down to another microclimate down at Potrero Point to sort through the tale end of the SFF collection, removing duplicates and alphabetizing by author/title. So far I have nine boxes of duplicate SFF titles set aside.
I'm all the way up to "R" with only two bookcases and not enough room to shelve the rest of the collection. Back into boxes for the excess. Question is, should I keep going and stop mid-letter (at "Scheckley," for example) or should I start working back from "Zelazny" and just box up all the R's and S's and T's.
Decisions, decisions.
Labels: books, life, San Francisco
posted by Sal Towse at 12:30 PM|
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Thursday, June 14, 2007
Dashiell Hammett's old studio apartment is up for sale
Dashiell Hammett's old studio apartment is up for sale.
(That would be me that socketsite.com refers to as their "plugged-in reader.")
307 sq ft. *only* $249K
posted by Sal Towse at 4:58 PM||
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(That would be me that socketsite.com refers to as their "plugged-in reader.")
307 sq ft. *only* $249K
Labels: books, real estate, San Francisco, writing
posted by Sal Towse at 4:58 PM|
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Book sorting progress
... of sorts.
Doesn't help to be tied down here because the solar guys were supposed to put the panels back up on the new roof today but never showed. Maybe tomorrow his nibs will work from home and set me free to sort some more ...
Sour Grapes offers in comments re Barchester Towers If I win you can have it. I've got it already.
Thanks. I was just feeling left out because I wanted to enter the contest too! I'm pretty sure I have a copy somewhere -- probably in a box marked "classics" or "misc" or "fiction" or ...
The book sorting goes apace. Well, "at a pace" anyway.
All travel books (except for USA travel) are out of their boxes and shifted over to adjacent bookcases, sorted by continent and country. The BENELUX titles and others of the ilk are a problem. I found multiple copies of some titles, which seems always the case, but not that many multiples. Even with the travel books settled, I get sidetracked thumbing through old travel books about Venice and travel memoirs and ... well, I get sidetracked a lot.
After I shifted and sorted the travel books, I moved the cookbooks that were in the shelves over there over thataway to fill in the empty shelves where the travel books had been (adjacent to the bulk of the cookbooks) so now all the cookbooks are in one bank of shelves instead of scattered around. There are still boxes (six or so) that are boxed up because there's no shelf space plus an additional box with a set of "Grande Diplome" cookbooks that I picked up used somewhere and two boxes that are filled with the Time-Life cookbook series that I picked up used here and there over time. A friend asked if I'd be willing to give her a set of Time-Life cookbooks and I said sure, but she's got to get herself over and pick them up.
Most of the cookbooks still in boxes are "community cookbook" sorts of titles. I've sorted the titles on the shelves into "baking" "country-specific" "barbecue" "old" "San Francisco" "California" sorts of categories.
On the shelves after sorting, I discovered multiple editions of the Household Searchlight Recipe Book: three from different years in the '30s, two from the '40s and a couple from the '50s. (The name changed to the Searchlight Recipe Book in 1942.) Different editions! Keep them all! Well, no. Turns out even though the books have different edition numbers and different publication dates, the contents of the 1st-14th editions are the same, according to this site.
I have multiple editions of Fannie Farmer's cookbook, two copies of Larousse Gastronomique, multiple copies of James Beard books, two copies of Rene Verdon's The White House Chef Cookbook (and tell me, should that be a general USA cookbook or should I put it in "San Francisco" because Verdon ran Le Trianon here for years?) There are, of course, multiple copies of some Sunset cookbooks, multiple copies of other titles. I filled up two boxes worth of duplicates for the library. The weirdest, though, was the duplicate copy of Madame Chang's Long Life Chinese Cookbook. Two copies? How did that ever happen?
The cookbooks are pretty well sorted now, although I may find that I have a French dessert cookbook in with dessert cookbooks and another copy in with French cookbooks. Those will sort out in time.
Next up is to start getting the SFF in order. My SFF books are the most likely to have duplicates because my brother and I had copies of the same books in our collections and those collections combined after he died. The most egregious example of too many copies of a title is a Heinlein title for which I wound up with two paperback copies, two hardbacks and one mass market paperback.
I'll take the empty bookcases that had held cookbooks and setup a rough sort (A-Z by author, 'natch) of the SFF books and winnow out the duplicates. I won't be able to get all of them on the empty shelves I have remaining, but I can at least sort through them in alphabetic shifts. Thanks be that I had the SFF boxed separately from the fiction, and labeled so I could find them in amongst all the piles.
After the pass through the SFF is complete, I'll start sorting through all the boxes labeled MISC and VERY MISC and NFIC and, of course, those boxes that are somehow unlabeled. I'll get the books organized in some sort of fashion so I can easily see that I have two copies of How to Build Your Dream House for Less Than $3500 and get rid of duplicates. (Yes, I know I have two copies, maybe three of that book. I'd bought one for myself, you see, because I'd loved my parents' copy. I gave a copy to my brother because I knew he'd love it. I may have bought a spare at some time too. ...)
I'll rough-sort the misc and pull out the fiction titles and the juv and sort the rest into some broad categories: science, essays/memoirs, biography/autobiography, history, reference, gardening, computers ... I don't know. I need to think out the sort before I get seriously into it or I'll wind up sorting and resorting and ...
I also have all the boxes of books that are already labeled "science" and "physics" and "law" and "reference" and whatever that I needs must go through because there was some higglety-pigglety-ness in the boxing up before the move and who knows what may have been tucked into an almost-full box at the last minute.
Once I can lay out all the PHYSICS or GEOLOGY or SOFTWARE DESIGN books in one place I can get a handle on duplicates and other titles that I don't need to save shelf space for.
Maybe along the way I'll find my copy of Barchester Towers and Vanity Fair and Morrison & Boyd's Organic Chemistry. Why own a book if I can't find it?
Yes, I am being unduly obsessive/compulsive about this (Why do you ask?) but I'm also using the exercise as one enormous procrastination project while I mull over the rewrite on the great American crime novel.
Productive procrastination, I call it. (The dupes and discards will be given to the library to use or sell! It's for the library! Think of the public libraries!)
(And I have visions of my darlings having to sort through all of Mom's old books after I take my dirt nap, looking for those of value. Better that I weed the collection now and save them at least some of the effort.)
posted by Sal Towse at 3:03 PM||
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Doesn't help to be tied down here because the solar guys were supposed to put the panels back up on the new roof today but never showed. Maybe tomorrow his nibs will work from home and set me free to sort some more ...
Sour Grapes offers in comments re Barchester Towers If I win you can have it. I've got it already.
Thanks. I was just feeling left out because I wanted to enter the contest too! I'm pretty sure I have a copy somewhere -- probably in a box marked "classics" or "misc" or "fiction" or ...
The book sorting goes apace. Well, "at a pace" anyway.
All travel books (except for USA travel) are out of their boxes and shifted over to adjacent bookcases, sorted by continent and country. The BENELUX titles and others of the ilk are a problem. I found multiple copies of some titles, which seems always the case, but not that many multiples. Even with the travel books settled, I get sidetracked thumbing through old travel books about Venice and travel memoirs and ... well, I get sidetracked a lot.
After I shifted and sorted the travel books, I moved the cookbooks that were in the shelves over there over thataway to fill in the empty shelves where the travel books had been (adjacent to the bulk of the cookbooks) so now all the cookbooks are in one bank of shelves instead of scattered around. There are still boxes (six or so) that are boxed up because there's no shelf space plus an additional box with a set of "Grande Diplome" cookbooks that I picked up used somewhere and two boxes that are filled with the Time-Life cookbook series that I picked up used here and there over time. A friend asked if I'd be willing to give her a set of Time-Life cookbooks and I said sure, but she's got to get herself over and pick them up.
Most of the cookbooks still in boxes are "community cookbook" sorts of titles. I've sorted the titles on the shelves into "baking" "country-specific" "barbecue" "old" "San Francisco" "California" sorts of categories.
On the shelves after sorting, I discovered multiple editions of the Household Searchlight Recipe Book: three from different years in the '30s, two from the '40s and a couple from the '50s. (The name changed to the Searchlight Recipe Book in 1942.) Different editions! Keep them all! Well, no. Turns out even though the books have different edition numbers and different publication dates, the contents of the 1st-14th editions are the same, according to this site.
I have multiple editions of Fannie Farmer's cookbook, two copies of Larousse Gastronomique, multiple copies of James Beard books, two copies of Rene Verdon's The White House Chef Cookbook (and tell me, should that be a general USA cookbook or should I put it in "San Francisco" because Verdon ran Le Trianon here for years?) There are, of course, multiple copies of some Sunset cookbooks, multiple copies of other titles. I filled up two boxes worth of duplicates for the library. The weirdest, though, was the duplicate copy of Madame Chang's Long Life Chinese Cookbook. Two copies? How did that ever happen?
The cookbooks are pretty well sorted now, although I may find that I have a French dessert cookbook in with dessert cookbooks and another copy in with French cookbooks. Those will sort out in time.
Next up is to start getting the SFF in order. My SFF books are the most likely to have duplicates because my brother and I had copies of the same books in our collections and those collections combined after he died. The most egregious example of too many copies of a title is a Heinlein title for which I wound up with two paperback copies, two hardbacks and one mass market paperback.
I'll take the empty bookcases that had held cookbooks and setup a rough sort (A-Z by author, 'natch) of the SFF books and winnow out the duplicates. I won't be able to get all of them on the empty shelves I have remaining, but I can at least sort through them in alphabetic shifts. Thanks be that I had the SFF boxed separately from the fiction, and labeled so I could find them in amongst all the piles.
After the pass through the SFF is complete, I'll start sorting through all the boxes labeled MISC and VERY MISC and NFIC and, of course, those boxes that are somehow unlabeled. I'll get the books organized in some sort of fashion so I can easily see that I have two copies of How to Build Your Dream House for Less Than $3500 and get rid of duplicates. (Yes, I know I have two copies, maybe three of that book. I'd bought one for myself, you see, because I'd loved my parents' copy. I gave a copy to my brother because I knew he'd love it. I may have bought a spare at some time too. ...)
I'll rough-sort the misc and pull out the fiction titles and the juv and sort the rest into some broad categories: science, essays/memoirs, biography/autobiography, history, reference, gardening, computers ... I don't know. I need to think out the sort before I get seriously into it or I'll wind up sorting and resorting and ...
I also have all the boxes of books that are already labeled "science" and "physics" and "law" and "reference" and whatever that I needs must go through because there was some higglety-pigglety-ness in the boxing up before the move and who knows what may have been tucked into an almost-full box at the last minute.
Once I can lay out all the PHYSICS or GEOLOGY or SOFTWARE DESIGN books in one place I can get a handle on duplicates and other titles that I don't need to save shelf space for.
Maybe along the way I'll find my copy of Barchester Towers and Vanity Fair and Morrison & Boyd's Organic Chemistry. Why own a book if I can't find it?
Yes, I am being unduly obsessive/compulsive about this (Why do you ask?) but I'm also using the exercise as one enormous procrastination project while I mull over the rewrite on the great American crime novel.
Productive procrastination, I call it. (The dupes and discards will be given to the library to use or sell! It's for the library! Think of the public libraries!)
(And I have visions of my darlings having to sort through all of Mom's old books after I take my dirt nap, looking for those of value. Better that I weed the collection now and save them at least some of the effort.)
Labels: books, libraries, life
posted by Sal Towse at 3:03 PM|
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted - Amy E. Boyle Johnston
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted - Amy E. Boyle Johnston, LA Weekly.
[...]
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day's L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
"Useless," Bradbury says. "They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full." He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He's now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled "Bradbury on censorship/television."
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that "Radio has contributed to our 'growing lack of attention.'... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people."
[...]
"I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV," Bradbury says in the censorship/television video clip. The collection of clips includes his explanation of how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in a clip titled (oddly enough) FAHRENHEIT 451.
The Bradbury site also includes a wonderful obit for Marguerite Susan McClure (Maggie) Bradbury, who died in 2003.
posted by Sal Towse at 1:44 PM||
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[...]
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day's L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
"Useless," Bradbury says. "They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full." He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He's now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled "Bradbury on censorship/television."
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that "Radio has contributed to our 'growing lack of attention.'... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people."
[...]
"I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV," Bradbury says in the censorship/television video clip. The collection of clips includes his explanation of how he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in a clip titled (oddly enough) FAHRENHEIT 451.
The Bradbury site also includes a wonderful obit for Marguerite Susan McClure (Maggie) Bradbury, who died in 2003.
Labels: biography, books, history, obit, video
posted by Sal Towse at 1:44 PM|
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