February 4, 2003
Lifting the Lid on a Treasure Chest
By STEPHEN KINZER


AUSTIN, Tex. — During a rehearsal for "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Barrymore Theater in New York more than half a century ago Marlon Brando dropped his address book.

"I beg you return this," he had written inside the cover. "I lost eight others already and if I lose this, I'll just drop dead."

The finder, however, did not return it. Today it is part of a collection of literary and cultural treasures here at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, part of the University of Texas.

Scholars know the Ransom Center as one of the world's pre-eminent research libraries, but until now the public has caught only fleeting glimpses into its rich chambers. That will change in April when the center opens its first galleries.

"The lid is coming off," said Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar who is the center's director. "We got tired of people telling us we're the best-kept secret in Texas."

With this unveiling a fascinating archive of modern life and literature is coming into view 45 years after it was founded. Though its holdings are appraised at more than $1 billion, much of its true value may lie in its ability to inspire the imagination.

The Ransom Center's labyrinthine stacks hide five million photographs, one million rare books, 60,000 works of art and a vast show-business archive. The collection includes touchstones of the modern age ranging from the first book printed in English — a history of Troy dated 1473 — to the sunglasses that Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard."

There are also handwritten manuscripts by Lord Byron, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac, a haunting self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, the beaded moccasins that D. H. Lawrence used when he lived in New Mexico, and heavily corrected musical scores by Ravel and Debussy.

For years the Ransom Center has been housed in an ugly, forbidding hulk of a building on the university campus. It has no display space of its own and has been forced to show what it could at other museums.

In a $14.5 million renovation, workers are now turning the building's entire ground floor into the showplace this collection has never had. The facade will be dominated by large glass panels, each bearing the etched image of a document or author from the collection.

Two items will be on permanent display: a Gutenberg Bible, one of five in the United States, and the world's first photograph, which was printed on a pewter plate by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826. Mr. Staley called them the "vestal virgins" of this collection because they mark the beginning of two shattering cultural revolutions.

The collection's core is its 19th- and 20th-century American, British and French literature. It is a mother lode of modernism, as well as a repository for the first drafts, letters, manuscripts, libraries, scribblings and ephemera of more than 500 contemporary writers. For a while there were also some very old socks, found among the papers of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"They're in the very top tier in the United States, which means they're top-tier internationally as well," said Barbara Shailor, director of the Houghton Library at Yale. "They don't specialize the way the Morgan Library or the Getty Museum do. They're strong overall. They excel in so many ways."

The opening show in the new gallery will be a selection of the center's most attention-grabbing pieces. That could include Edgar Allan Poe's hand-corrected copy of "The Gold-Bug" or a photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading "Ulysses."

The photographer who made that picture, Eve Arnold, has told researchers that "Ulysses" was not a prop, and that Monroe indeed read parts of it. Here she appears to be reading the end, perhaps passages in which Molly Bloom recalls her lifelong search for "real beauty and poetry" and her dread of "that awful deepdown torrent."

Curators at the Ransom Center say they observe rigorous standards of quality when considering which contemporary writers to collect. Among those they have recently added to their list are Jonathan Franzen, John Guare and Nick Hornby.

This selectivity has not confined curators within any discernible boundaries of style, theme or subject matter. The variety of their tastes, along with the depth of their pockets, is evident in the names written on the sides of blue and beige storage boxes that line the archive's corridors.

In the M corridor, for example, each name evokes a complex of emotions, a whole private world: Ross MacDonald, Terrence McNally, Bernard Malamud, John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters, Peter Matthiessen, Somerset Maugham, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Miller, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Christopher Morley. These boxes hold much of what humanity will ever know about their lives.

"There's nowhere like it in the U.S.A., and its only rival for 20th-century material in Britain is the British Library," said Ferdinand Mount, a former editor of The Times Literary Supplement of London who spoke at the Ransom Center recently. "I'm trying to wake up some zest from the British Library. They have the money but they're not as proactive. The Texas people are very quick."

Mr. Mount said the Ransom Center's purchases are "mostly to the delight of writers, who get to empty their attics and fill their bank accounts." Some other Britons, however, have grumbled about the number of British writers whose archives are now in Texas.

A London newspaper, The Independent, has watched what it calls "the great trans-Atlantic manuscript race" with dismay. It warned in one article that "in a generation's time, British scholars wishing to research the lives of our leading contemporary writers will be forced to travel to Texas." In another article it lamented that whenever a desirable archive appears on the market, "American institutions like the University of Texas can just call up an oil-rich benefactor and ask him to put a check in the post."

But The Independent did grudgingly admit that American curators "are not necessarily the villains of the story." It said they have succeeded because "they have simply been taking 20th-century literary and theatrical archives more seriously for longer than British institutions."

The founder of the Texas library, Harry Huntt Ransom, was a dominant figure at the University of Texas for several decades before his death in 1976. During the 1950's he set out to create what he called "a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state in the Union that started out as an independent nation."

Rather than compete for antique works with well-established libraries in Eastern cities and Europe, Ransom decided to focus on the contemporary age. Armed with multimillion-dollar budgets provided by the state and a few private donors, he and his successors plunged into the literary market with abandon. They bought entire collections as well as individual archives.

Ransom also broke with collecting orthodoxy by buying not just books and manuscripts but anything at all that belonged to the writers, cultural figures and others who interested him. This impulse brought in baubles like Anne Sexton's typewriter and Carson McCullers's cigarette lighter.

Although the Ransom Center no longer has the money to suck up every piece of literary memorabilia that appears at auction, as it once seemed to, it is steadily expanding its collection. Last year it bought the archives of Julian Barnes and Russell Banks, and was given a large French library that includes letters and manuscripts by Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, André Gide and Henry Miller.

The center also fervently embraces mass culture. Its largest acquisition of recent years was the archive of the film producer David O. Selznick, which filled several tractor trailers. It contains hundreds of thousands of photos and documents, plus artifacts ranging from storyboards for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" based on designs by Salvador Dali to screen tests by Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind."

Mr. Staley, the center's director, is part scholar, part librarian and part treasure hunter. He was describing Joyce's literary habits to a visitor one recent morning when a prominent Texas art dealer telephoned. A moment after he picked up the receiver, his face lit up in jubilation.

"A home run!" he cried into the phone. "You don't mean it. Fabulous! That's what tenacity brings."

After hanging up, Mr. Staley begged indulgence to say no more, since "it still might not come off." He is reportedly pursuing a collection of portraits of British writers. A couple of days later he was scheduled to visit the New York studio of the photographer Richard Avedon.

"Acquisition never stops," he said. "The difference is that now we're finally going to be able to show off our collection in a real museum setting. We're going to give people that thrill that comes from the aura of the original."

C-SPAN host wants to get to know writers

By Sylvia A. Smith
The Journal Gazette

WASHINGTON - He asked what S&M sex is. He asked who Abraham Lincoln was. He asked Jimmy Carter to analyze his role as a father. He asks why authors dedicate their books to the people they did; where they write; what their parents think of the book.
When Brian Lamb sits down with an author for an hour on C-SPAN's "Booknotes," as he has weekly since 1989, the conversation has one point:

To teach someone something. On the best of days, that someone is Lamb.

"This is not a show done for intellectuals," the Hoosier native said. "A lot of people thought it was in the beginning. They started to hear me ask some very basic questions, and they'd say: 'Oh, my goodness, why is he asking those stupid questions?' "

So: Why is he asking those questions?

"I want to know the answer."

There's no way to tell how many people tune in to "Booknotes" at 8 p.m. Sundays, because C-SPAN, unlike commercial television, doesn't compile ratings. But Lamb has a sense that his questions strike a chord with viewers.

"People say to me: 'These are the same questions I want to ask.' It's because they're so basic," he said. "In this crazy television business, people think they have to ask the intellectual, erudite question that's going to make them look so bright. I don't care whether people think I'm bright or not. I really don't. I just don't care. I don't know how to describe it. I just don't care."

Thus, the questions that give viewers a peek inside the book and inside the author's psyche.

"He gets to the core of things in the simplest, least contrived sort of way," said Morton Kondrake, whose book about his wife, "Saving Milly: Love, Politics and Parkinson's Disease," was the subject of a June 2001 Booknotes.

Caryle Murphy, a Washington Post reporter whose book on Islam was featured Nov. 2, said Lamb's interviewing technique appears chaotic, "but it lends a surprise factor that a lot of people find interesting. ... You just wish there were more interviewers like him."

But there aren't. Lamb stands out among author interviewer on two counts. He reads the book, and he asks short questions that allow the author to talk - often at length. On one typical show last month, in fact, the "Booknotes" guest spoke 8,026 words. Lamb uttered 1,251.

"One of the things about interviewers in television is they abhor a vacuum," Lamb said. "Commercial television doesn't allow them to have a pause. Interviewers are almost trained putting words in people's mouths. They ask closed questions. They say to the guest: You think that George Bush is a great president, don't you? Well, we have just the opposite approach: What kind of president do you think George Bush is?

"That person can take that anywhere they want to. You're not prejudicing their answer. You're not forcing them to say, 'No, I don't think he's a great president.' It flows. They're not used to that."

Lamb readily acknowledges that C-SPAN's Joe Friday approach doesn't appeal to everyone. But its fans are diehards.

Fort Wayne real estate executive Albert Zacher watches "Booknotes" every Sunday night. If he's not going to be home, he tapes it.

Zacher's enthusiasm started years before he was offered a slot on "Booknotes," making him a rarity in the book world. Of the nearly 110,000 non-fiction books published this year, only 50 will be discussed on "Booknotes." Zacher's status is even more unusual because his book, a 329-pager on two-term presidents, was self-published, so he didn't have a public relations machine hawking it.

But when then-President Clinton referred to the book as one he was reading right after his own re-election in 1996, C-SPAN was on the phone to invite Zacher to talk about "Trial and Triumph: Presidential Power in the Second Term."

"There's nothing to compare to it," Zacher said of his hour-long interview. "It's the premier opportunity for an author."

In addition to the program being an oasis for authors who want to talk about themselves and their books - rather than robotically repeating sound bites - it's an almost guaranteed income booster.

Zacher's book sold out after his "Booknotes" appearance. So did "Carnegie," a biography by Peter Krass that was aired Nov. 24.

"There was a huge spike in sales," Krass said, noting that before his "Booknotes" interview, "Carnegie" was ranked about 2,000th on Amazon.com, where rankings are based on sales. After the program, he said, "it skyrocketed to 300."

Connie Doebele, senior executive producer of "Booknotes," said books on a president's nightstand often end up on the show because "people like to know what a president is reading."

Lamb makes the final decisions about which authors will be invited. "After all, he has to read the book," Doebele said.

It starts with the list of books that will be published in coming months - hundreds of biographies, historical accounts and books on public policy issues. Distributed by Publishers Weekly, a book industry publication, it's "Booknotes' " soup stock, but plenty of other ingredients make up the stew ladled out to viewers each week.

Lamb and the rest of the "Booknotes" team read book reviews, visit bookstores, listen to what their friends say, note the prize-nominated books, flip through the books that arrive in the mail. And of course, Doebele said, there's the lobbying from publishing houses and authors' press agents.

The culling process has some rules - only non-fiction, no self-help, no repeat authors, what's in the news.

"I don't read any books in advance," Lamb said. "We choose the books without reading them. I go to bookstores all the time. I read reviews all the time. It's just a way of life. I'm constantly looking for things I've never read and don't know anything about.

"For instance," he said of John McWhorter, whose interview will air Feb. 23, "we didn't do his big book ('Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in the Black America') back in 2000. I don't remember why. But he's a player now, and let's find out what he thinks. This book ('Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority') allows us to do that."

As for topics, "You've seen the threads: civil rights, Vietnam, Lincoln, the Revolutionary War, Civil War, a bunch on World War II. Wars make good books. I have changed some over the years. I don't do as many public policy books as I used to because you can't get your teeth into them. I often don't do sitting politicians because (their books are) nothing more than campaign vehicles to get on television shows," he said.

The interview with McWhorter fits a "Booknotes" niche in two ways: The book explores race issues, one of the key themes of "Booknotes" books, and the conversation probed past McWhorter's theories and into his personal background.

Lamb deliberately picks books about race issues "because we don't deal with it very well in this society. It's a great, low-key way to deal with it. People who are interested in it can listen to somebody complete a thought without being shouted at. ... This is a chance to talk about it. Then if you don't like it, fine, throw something at the TV. But at least you get to hear the completed sentence."

Lamb's on-camera demeanor has a just-the-facts-ma'am quality. It has nothing of the uber-empathy of, say, a Barbara Walters. But it's also void of the skepticism or judgment commonplace in a Mike Wallace interview.

"I'm a journalist, so I love it when we learn new things," he said. "But if you don't put people in a confrontational situation, they become themselves. They're not afraid to talk about themselves. I'm not trying to lower their barriers, I'm just trying to get to the person without being emotional about it. I don't want them to cry. We're not trying to get them to cry here. We're just trying to get them to tell us about their lives and why they do what they do."

They do.

The interview room is not unlike a confessional. It's a small space - about 12 feet square - that holds two chairs, a small table and some cameras that are manipulated from the control booth. The walls are wrapped in black velvet, and no one else is there except Lamb and his guest.

When he asks questions about an author's family, which have become a staple in the Lamb interview, the writers invariably drop whatever scripted comments they have (many acknowledge cramming before a Lamb interview). Their voices change. They become people instead of experts on some esoterica.

Sometimes - as it did with McWhorter - "you hit a note with them and bingo - there's the emotion of the moment," Lamb said. With McWhorter, whose parents had a stormy relationship and whose mother has been restricted by an aneurysm, "I had no idea what his family situation was. I had no idea what I was getting till it was over. I wasn't trying to get him there. I just instinctively asked him about his father."

When that happens, Lamb said, "you get an understanding about the person, and you then can decide whether you want to go buy their book. And if you want to buy their book, you have a dimension that you don't get from (other sources).

"This is one of my pet peeves of book publishers: They give you six lines in the book about the author. It drives me nuts. What in the world is that all about? Here you have somebody that's worked 15 years on their book, and you're getting six lines of their background. And then they tell you stupid things like they've written for The Washington Post, the New Republic, The New York Times and they've appeared on NPR and CBS morning news and the "Today" show. I don't care about any of that. Tell me where they were born, how many kids they have, are they married, where do they live, where'd they go to school."

As intriguing as the interview was, McWhorter will never be asked to repeat "Booknotes." Nor will Zacker, Murphy, Kondracke or the 700 other authors who have appeared on the program over the years.

There's an ironclad one-time-only rule.

"I stole the idea from Broadcasting magazine, of all things, the one-time rule," Lamb said. "Broadcasting magazine has a thing called the Fifth Estater. It's a profile they do on a person in the broadcasting business, and you only get one in your life. I always thought that was smart because there are lots of folk out there. Television is the worst at concentrating on only a thousand people out of 288 million, and that's all you see on a yearly basis. ... I wanted to build in a system that made sure we were constantly going to new faces. Isn't it just fabulous that after 14 years, there have been 705 people, all different people?"


Sylvia Smith is Washington editor for The Journal Gazette.

Bush wants to close book on library flap
By John Kennedy
Sentinel Staff Writer

February 2, 2003

Not long before it was revealed that Gov. Jeb Bush planned to close the Florida State Library, lay off the entire staff and move the collection to Florida State University, the governor issued a proclamation declaring February as Florida Library Appreciation Month.

Bush, who has said promotion of reading is a top priority of his second term, wants to shut down the state's main library and move almost 1 million books and historical items, including 16th-century maps, early documents on Walt Disney World and some of the oldest photos of Florida.

The budget-cutting move has drawn fire, and even FSU said it doesn't have space or money to house the items.

Parts of FSU's own collection are in warehouses, and the university wouldn't get any more money or staff to deal with the new collections.

Told last week that the flap doesn't seem to be going away, Bush answered, "So, stop writing about it."

The governor's proclamation praised the importance of libraries and said the month is "to encourage recognition of all of our Florida libraries that provide outstanding service to our communities."

Good thing he didn't proclaim "Florida Library Year."

Copyright © 2003, Orlando Sentinel

A kind of whimsy
By TOM VALEO
St. Petersburg Times, published February 02, 2003

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kinky Friedman had no idea what kind of cover he wanted for his latest mystery, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch. He definitely did not want his name to be too big.

"Usually when you see an author's name in huge letters, you know it's probably a mediocre book," he says. "I mean, Danielle Steel's name takes up half the cover."

He also did not want his new mystery to look like a mystery, and he didn't want the cover to depict some meaningless detail from one scene. "If the girlfriend is wearing red boots in one scene, they'll put red boots on the cover and nobody knows what the hell it means."

So what did he want?

"I don't know what I like," Friedman says. "Some people can look at something and instantly say it sucks, but I can't."

So when New York freelance designer Brad Foltz got the assignment to create a cover for Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, he didn't get a lot of guidance from the author, and he knew the cover would be difficult. "There's a quirkiness to Kinky's writing that's tough to portray," says Foltz, who struggled with this problem when he created the cover for Friedman's earlier novel, The Mile High Club (which featured the author's name in huge letters, by the way).

Foltz flirted with a couple of obvious ideas. In Ranch, the "Kinkster" - a hip, irreverent private eye - works on three cases which he catalogs as "Moe," "Curly" and "Larry," so Foltz considered an image of the Three Stooges. "But we would have had to go to a lot of trouble to get the rights to an image," he says, "and the cover would have made it look like a Three Stooges book."

One of the cases involves a three-legged cat, so Foltz created a few sketches using that idea, but he discarded them all.

Finally he resorted to every designer's best friend - a stock photo agency. In bygone days Foltz would have called the agency, given them a few key words - "cat," perhaps, and "ranch." Then he would have waited for the agency to send a messenger to his apartment with some photographs pulled from its archives. Now that images have been digitized and placed on the Web, Foltz can roam the archives himself, free-associating key words as he explores. In this case, his searching led him to an image he never would have thought to request - a little boy in a cowboy suit, shooting his gun at the camera and grinning like a crazed demon. The image, while it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, seemed to embody the "Kinky-ness" he wanted, so Foltz downloaded it, manipulated the color, tinkered with the background and added a little cat to the boy's hat - a sly reference to the cat in the plot. On the back cover he added a picture of a toy cat.

Friedman loved it.

"The guy really hit it out of the park," he says. "There's something about that kid [on the cover] that is really grotesque. It's a mesmerizing little picture."

Friedman wasn't the only one who liked the cover a lot. The editors of Pages magazine named the cover the best of the year. "It's hard to top a chaps-wearing, gun-toting, mask-sporting baby in a cowboy hat," the editors commented. "It's just an excellent image that conveys the kind of whimsical, in-your-face, politically incorrect humor of the book," says Pages editor John Hogan. "We didn't conduct a big official vote, but it was unanimous."

- Tom Valeo is a writer who lives in Chicago. His e-mail address is tvaleo@aol.com.

© Copyright 2001 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.

White House Postpones Poetry Symposium
Thu Jan 30,11:02 PM ET

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - Two former U.S. poet laureates criticized the White House on Thursday for postponing a literary symposium it believed would be politicized. Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove characterized the decision as an example of the Bush administration's hostility to dissenting or creative voices.

The Feb. 12 symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" was to have featured the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The postponement was announced Wednesday and no future date has been set for the event, to be held by first lady Laura Bush.

"I think there was a general feeling that the current administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse," Kunitz, the 2000-2001 poet laureate, said Thursday.

In a statement, Dove, who served as poet laureate from 1993 to '95, said the postponement confirmed her suspicion that "this White House does not wish to open its doors to an `American voice' that does not echo the administration's misguided policies."

In announcing Wednesday that the symposium had been postponed, Noelia Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the first lady, said: "While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum."

Mrs. Bush, a former librarian who has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues, has held a series of White House events to salute America's authors. The gatherings are usually lively affairs with discussions of literature and its effect on society.

Hughes and Whitman themselves were frequent social commentators. Whitman once complained that the presidency and other offices were "bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes." Hughes' political writings and left-wing sympathies led to FBI (news - web sites) surveillance and harassment from Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Kunitz, Dove and others had refused to attend the symposium and a nationwide protest was soon organized.

Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, e-mailed friends asking for poems or statements opposing military action against Iraq.

"Make Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon," the e-mail reads.

He had expected about 50 responses; he's gotten about 2,000, including contributions from W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose poem, "Coda," includes the lines "And America turns the attack on the World Trade Center-Into the beginning of the Third World War."

Hamill will post all the submissions on a Web site that began running Thursday.

White House invitations have inspired protests before. In 1965, poet Robert Lowell refused to attend a White House arts festival, citing opposition to the Vietnam War.

Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate, said Wednesday she had accepted her invitation to the poetry symposium because she felt her "presence would promote peace."

"I had commissioned a fabric artist for a silk scarf with peace signs painted on it," she said. "I thought just by going there and shaking Mrs. Bush's hand and being available for the photo ops, my scarf would make a statement."
___

On the Net:


http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/

FYI -
Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement

This Web site was established to provide information about a proposed Settlement of lawsuits brought by Attorneys General of 43 states, Commonwealths and Territories, and by counsel for the Plaintiff Settlement Class entitled In re: Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation.

The lawsuits, which are currently pending in the United States District Court for the District of Maine, relate to the retail pricing of prerecorded music compact discs, cassettes or vinyl albums (collectively known as prerecorded Music Products).

You may be a member of the Settlement Group and your rights against Defendants may be affected if you are a person or entity that purchased these prerecorded Music Products from a retail store during the period of January 1, 1995 through December 22, 2000.

Russians To Sue 'Potter' Over Alleged Putin Resemblance
Law Firm Claims Dobby Character Looks Like Russian Leader

January 28, 2003

It's Potter versus Putin in the latest identity crisis to rock the Muggle world.

Some Russians are charging that a character from the latest Harry Potter movie was created in the likeness of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The character in question is "Dobby the House Elf."

Some say there is a slight resemblance to the Russian president when comparing their noses.

One Russian law firm was so offended, it's preparing to sue the special effects team that created Dobby, Baltimore's WBAL-TV reported.

There is no response from Warner Brothers or President Putin.

Still driving customers up the wall after 100 years: Foyles, the bookshop that time forgot
By John Walsh
23 January 2003

It's in the Guinness Book of Records as the bookshop with the most titles in stock and the longest lines of shelving (30 miles). It boasts the most starrily famous clientele, alive or dead, of any bookshop in history (Eva Peron, the Argentinian first lady, finding herself temporarily short of cash one day, paid for her books with a crocodile-skin vanity case). The guest speakers at its Literary Lunches read like a guide to 20th century literature. It is also, by general consent, one of the most infuriatingly, perversely eccentric retail operations in the history of commerce. Foyles, the most famous bookshop in the world, is 100 years old this year.

It was actually on 14 July, 1903 that two brothers, William, 17, and Gilbert Foyle, 18, sold their first wholesale book. But months earlier, they had started in business by flogging some unwanted textbooks from their parents' kitchen table. They advertised in educational journals, and were startled by the response. Their first year of trading made a princely £10.

In 1906 they bought the shop at 113-119 Charing Cross Road and were away. William Foyle became a bookselling legend, "the Barnum of Books". He employed his 17-year-old daughter Christina in 1928. She later ran his empire for 40 years – and nearly ran it into the ground.

For decades, Foyles has been a shopper's nightmare, with miles and miles of haphazardly arranged titles, non-English-speaking student staff, and a payment system apparently designed by a Victorian lunatic. "It was a byword for dreadful bookselling," said Nicholas Clee, editor of The Bookseller. "They never answered the phone, the assistants never knew anything, and were hired and fired in six months. You could never find any book you wanted."

Would-be buyers had to queue twice. "There weren't any tills or cash registers," remembers The Independent's Christina Patterson, who worked there (and was fired after five weeks) in the mid-80s, "You sat in a little wooden box, and people would have to bring you dockets hand-written by the assistants. I dreaded being asked for help. I couldn't confidently have said which floor I was on."

The trouble was Christina Foyle, who hated any signs of modernity. She refused to allow computers or electronic tills, and spent no money on refurbishments. Her attitude to staff was autocratic: once she fired 40 women for "talking too loudly".

Since she died in 1999, leaving £60m (most of which went to charity, and none to her family), the shop has been run by two of Christina's nephews, Christopher (whom she made a director on her deathbed) and Bill Samuels (whom she cordially loathed). Between them they pulled the shop into at least the 20th century.

Some things don't change, however. You can still spend hours browsing the miles of shelves and marvelling at how everything is in the wrong place. Under "Fiction" you can find Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson, Baudelaire's Prose Poems and the plays of Beaumarchais, and that's just the Bs. Other famous works of conspicuous non-fiction include Rousseau's Confessions, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help and the Greek historian Polybius's Rise of the Roman Empire. With a perversity that borders on the criminal, Proust's 3,000-page A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is filed under "Short Stories". But there's a certain delight in finding out-of-print books, some dating back to the mid-70s, that have been in Foyles' stock for 30 years.

"There's a lot of goodwill in the trade towards Foyle and Samuels, as there would be towards any independent operators, in a world of chain stores" says Nicholas Clee. "They make no attempt to hide their opinion of the shop's past. They want to get things right from now on. After years of incompetence, Foyles still has a very good name."

Mystery visitor returns to Poe's grave
By FOSTER KLUG
Associated Press

BALTIMORE -- With his face hidden beneath a dark hood, a man crept into a bitterly cold downtown graveyard before dawn on Sunday and raised a solitary birthday toast to Edgar Allan Poe.

Continuing a 54-year tradition, the man, whose identity remains unknown, put his hand on Poe's tombstone, bowed, placed three red roses and a half-empty bottle of Martel cognac on the grave and then silently slipped back into the shadows.

A huge pale-white moon glowed over the city, yet the man still eluded dozens of people who waited in their cars or huddled together on the sidewalk outside the cemetery.

"To me, it's magic," said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, who spent the night tucked inside a former Presbyterian church nearby with a small group of Poe enthusiasts he invited to watch the ritual. "It would be very easy to step out from our hiding place and expose him, but no one wants to ruin this mystery."

No one, not even Jerome, who has watched the cemetery every Jan. 19 since 1976, knows the identity of the so-called "Poe Toaster." The visit was first documented in 1949, a century after Poe's death. For decades, Jerome says, it was the same frail figure.

Then, in 1993, the original visitor left a cryptic note saying, "The torch will be passed." Another note left later told Jerome that the first man in black, who apparently died in 1998, had passed the tradition on to his sons -- Jerome thinks there are either two or three. Such notes are the only communication anyone has had with the visitor.

A combination of respect, the visitor's cunning and the chill of Baltimore on a January night have kept the curious from uncovering the secret.

"It's just this incredible rush of adrenaline when you see that he's made it again," said Anita Gruss, an athletic director at a high school in Centreville who has seen 12 toasts. "Even after all these years, it's a thrill."

Poe, who is best known for poems and horror stories such as The Raven and The Telltale Heart, died in Baltimore at the age of 40 after collapsing, delirious, in a tavern. The circumstances of his death remain unclear: some researchers have blamed a fever, while others point to the late stages of alcoholism or to rabies.

The visitor's three roses are thought to honour Poe, his mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and his wife Virginia, all of whom are buried in the graveyard. The significance of the cognac is a mystery.

"That he has kept this secret for over 50 years is just so fascinating to me," said Joe Sainclair, a high-school English teacher from Mountaintop, Pa., who was seeing the toast for the first time Sunday. "For a fan of Poe, for a fan of mystery, it just doesn't get any better than this."

Two Worlds And In Between

Jonathan Kiefer discusses the delicate art of translation with Michael Emmerich, English translator of Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto

Here's what it means to be a literary translator: If you haven't heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven't heard of Michael Emmerich. If you have heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven't heard of Michael Emmerich. The former is a hip, ethereal, superstar Japanese fiction stylist; the latter is her English translator. If Banana becomes as big in Britain and the United States as she is in Japan, it will be because of Emmerich, but unless he too renames himself for a piece of fruit, who will give a damn?

"A nice thing about being a translator is that you don't have to worry about that stuff too much," Emmerich says. "You don't have to worry about being a really public figure. You can just do what you love." It's hard to know whether his Zen attitude comes from a longstanding affinity for Japanese culture or from having no illusions, but in either case it serves him well.

Make no mistake: as translators go, Emmerich is a hot shot. He didn't seriously study Japanese until he got to college, but by graduation he had translated one of Japan's most revered writers to great acclaim. That's impressive for an English major.

"It didn't make sense to take East Asian studies," Emmerich recalls. "I'd have to study economics, and that didn't interest me at all." In 1997, while still a Princeton undergraduate, Emmerich read several stories by Japan's first Nobel laureate for literature, Yasunari Kawabata, and decided to make a senior thesis of translating them. His advisor, Joyce Carol Oates, was enthusiastic and supportive; so were the various literary magazines which soon published some of the stories, and Counterpoint Press, which published all of them, as the collection First Snow on Fuji, in 1999.

"The reviews were terrific, and a couple said very kind things about the translation itself, which is unusual," Emmerich says. "So after that I started getting requests from publishers. One such request was Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep, which was published in 2000."

Last August, Grove released his translation of the newest Banana book, Goodbye Tsugumi, a wistful but transformative tale of the burdened relationship between a young woman and her cousin, an invalid "who had been going through her rebellious teens ever since she was born." In a deceptively compact volume, the book furthers Yoshimoto's human insights, and her radiant, searching style.

"I don't think she really has the right image in the U.S. yet," Emmerich says. "I don't think she has the right image in Japan either. She's a pretty experimental, sophisticated writer. She's writing carefully, and creating her public image carefully. I've been trying to make it clear how smart she is."

Still only in his mid-twenties, Emmerich is now about as on the map as a translator can hope to be. He is therefore entitled to make sweeping romantic pronouncements about his craft:

"A good translation is one that translates meaning, not words. Meaning is alive, words are dead."

"When you read a scene it could take five minutes. To translate it could take eight hours. Reading gives you an intense emotion. Translating gives you that same emotion for eight hours. It's ten times, a hundred times, more intense than reading!"

"Translating is always going to be much more than you hoped."

"The translator is of course always blamed for everything."

Such assurance is almost mandatory for Emmerich's highly detailed and fundamentally speculative work. When reading something that really excites him—whether it's the lucid cleanliness of Kawabata or the moody dreams of Yoshimoto or something else—Emmerich can't resist starting to translate immediately. He has also been known to exhaust himself in pursuit of a single correct cadence.

He seems undaunted by the responsibility of cultural ambassadorship, and concedes that translation is a kind of hyper-nuanced literary criticism. "Ultimately translators have to rely on their own instincts," he says. "We try to create feelings and scenes in one language that approximate as closely as possible the feelings and scenes we live as we read the book we are translating….Rhythm is very important. The rhythms of language. Getting things to connect."

Emmerich has what he can only describe as a "tendency to try and sneak into the spaces between words." His dark, inky voice shimmers whenever he inserts a Japanese word or notion into an English sentence. Yet, he says, "I've never felt translating literature from Japanese is automatic. The words are so far apart. The texture of the language is so different…it's some hazy realm that's bordered by the two languages. When I was growing up I had no idea that that space between languages existed." He grew up on Long Island, and can not account for what drew him to such a notably foreign language in the first place.

"My parents were travelling," he says. "When she was pregnant, they went to Japan. There's probably no other answer that means anything. For some reason Japan has always interested me most." Emmerich confesses that he has, in fact, wanted to be a translator for nearly as long as he can remember. When they were children, he and his sister Karen once planned to learn seven languages so they could speak a different one on each day of the week. It didn't happen, but probably came a lot closer than similar plans in other families. Karen is also a translator now, currently living and working in Greece.

Last summer, Michael left for China, "from whence he'll come back, no doubt, with another language under his belt," his sister observed at the time. He stayed with a non-English-speaking family and studied Mandarin. Such monkish immersion is no doubt elemental to his success, and to his comfortable obscurity.

The people who have heard of him, including his family and many admiring colleagues, will occasionally ask Emmerich if he'd like to try a novel of his own. But translation beckons. "You get excited as if you were writing your own stuff," he explains. "You are writing your own stuff. I have no interest in that. This is what I do."

Publishing's latest gimmick
Matt Seaton
Tuesday January 21, 2003
The Guardian

The things publishers will do to get their books noticed, part 44. The latest wheeze, from Fourth Estate, is to dispatch David Flusfeder's new novel, The Gift, to literary editors and reviewers with a cover-wrapped slip bearing the legend "Signed first edition". This type of inducement is not without precedent: in 2001, the same publisher printed a limited number of proof copies of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, followed by a large quantity of signed review copies. More recently, Donna Tartt added her autograph to the 500 proofs of The Little Friend sent out by Bloomsbury. The implication is that you, esteemed reviewer, are getting something valuable. In the case of The Gift, you are being given, well, a gift.

Of course, publishers are always coming up with such scams. Literary editors not only receive 400-500 "first editions" (ie review copies) of books every week, but some come with all manner of goodies - sweets, helium balloons, T-shirts. Even the sober academic press, Routledge, sent out Raimond Gaita's new book about our relationship with animals, The Philosopher's Dog, with a cuddly toy mastiff.

But the "signed first edition" of the Flusfeder novel is different: there's no add-on gimmick here, just the planting of the idea that this is a serious novel that's going to be talked about, bought and reprinted ... and, eventually, be worth something (provided you have a signed first edition). After all, signed first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone go for upwards of £20,000; a mint copy of Fever Pitch will fetch £750; even a first edition of Trainspotting is worth £300. So can a publisher create an instant collectable like this?

"Absolutely," says Robin Harvie, Flusfeder's publicist. But isn't that the same as a bribe? "Of course it is." Oh, right. "This is David's break-out novel," Harvie goes on. "All the lit eds have picked it up, so it's worked."

So how many of these signed first editions are there? "We've done a first run of 4,000. It took him about a month to do - but he's recovered now."

I call Simon Finch Rare Books, who deal in first editions, for a quote. It says £12.99 on the flap, I say, but what will they give me?

"Probably a bit less. But it wouldn't be something we would buy: 4,000 is an awful lot," says Natalie Galustian. "Unless he becomes some kind of through-the-roof phenomenon, I wouldn't hold my breath."

What does the author think of these shenanigans? "I find the whole thing a bit baffling," confesses Flusfeder. "I went through some minor psychosis at the time." To prevent himself going completely mad, he says, he occasionally doodled as well as signed. So if you get one of the three or four copies that contain a caricature of the author, hang on to it. You never know, it might be worth something.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

January 20, 2003
Some Best-Seller Old Reliables Have String of Unreliable Sales
By BILL GOLDSTEIN

Some of America's most popular authors are finding that being big isn't what it used to be.

Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark and Sue Grafton, usually among the most bankable of best-selling writers, sold far fewer copies of their books than expected this past year. The disappointing sales numbers, possibly the result of too many books from the same authors or the book-buying public's changing tastes, contributed to a dismal holiday season for book retailers, particularly chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Not all star authors suffered drop-offs in their sales numbers: Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Nora Roberts and Janet Evanovich continued their predictable and profitable ways. But the decline of such stalwarts as Mr. Clancy and Ms. Clark could presage a trend that would play havoc with publishers' bottom lines, and even the advances handed out to big-name authors.

The commercial necessity of publishing a lucrative roster of brand-name novelists, who can be counted on to write a book a year, was underscored last week by the ouster of Ann Godoff as president of the Random House Trade Group and the merger of the imprint with Ballantine Books.

The trade group had more adult hardcover best sellers in 2002, including books by Tom Brokaw, Anna Quindlen and Maya Angelou, than any other Random House division. But its recent lists have lacked the prolific best-selling novelists that are vital to the book divisions of large media conglomerates like Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, AOL Time Warner and Viacom, which owns Simon & Schuster. Random House no longer has a James Michener or Robert Ludlum to pour cash into its coffers consistently and help smooth out the inevitable peaks and valleys of publishing new authors.

Ballantine, primarily a paperback imprint, publishes crime novelists like Jonathan Kellerman and Richard North Patterson in hardcover.

"Brand-name authors still dominate the best-seller lists. They are still the bread and butter of the industry," said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chief executive of the AOL Time Warner Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson. But a change is afoot, he said. "There is no longer a quintessential best seller. The market is diluted to some extent by the incredible number of brand-name authors out at the same time."

And some retailers and publishing industry executives blame publishers for giving readers too much of the same thing by individual authors. Mr. King released two horror books in 2002, and Ms. Clark, the suspense novelist, published three.

While sales of Mr. King's first book of 2002, "Everything's Eventual," a story collection, nearly matched those of his 2001 novel, "Dreamcatcher," his second book, the novel "From a Buick 8," fell short. "From a Buick 8" has sold 367,000 copies, about a 20 percent decline, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which gathers sales data from outlets that represent about 70 percent of total sales.

Ms. Clark's June 2002 novel, "Mount Vernon Love Story," has sold 108,000 copies, far fewer than the 427,000 copies that sold after her "Daddy's Little Girl" went on the shelves in April, according to Nielsen Bookscan. (Her other book in 2002, a memoir, sold about 60,000 copies.)

Executives at the companies that publish Mr. Clancy, Mr. King, Ms. Grafton and Ms. Clark acknowledge their weaker sales in 2002, but contend that the sales drops are the consequence of a weak retail economy that has hit booksellers especially hard. During the nine-week holiday season ending Jan. 4, sales at Barnes & Noble stores open at least a year were down 3 percent from the previous year. And Borders's fourth-quarter comparable-store sales at its superstores were down 2.5 percent, while sales at Waldenbooks were off 6.3 percent.

Susan Petersen Kennedy, the president of the Penguin Group (USA), confirmed that Mr. Clancy's "Red Rabbit," a spy thriller published under its Putnam imprint, had not sold as well as expected. But, she said, it still reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list. "Tom's audience is still out there," she said. "If blue jeans are down for a month, does that mean Americans aren't going to keep buying blue jeans?"

"It's been a year of different buying patterns," Ms. Kennedy said. "They're not the patterns we predicted." She pointed to the Penguin Group's success with new books by Jan Karon, Maeve Binchy, Nora Roberts and Patricia Cornwell.

Some retailers speculate that younger readers are turning elsewhere for commercial fiction. "We're all old enough to know these writers who've been writing a long time," said Daniel Goldin, a trade buyer at Harry Schwartz Booksellers in Milwaukee. "When I first started in publishing, people like Arthur Hailey were still selling. And then they stopped."

One retailing executive insisted that the downturn was not because of the economy. "Too many authors are cranking out at least a book a year," the executive said. "Readers can't keep up. It's the bottom-line pressure to be on schedule, to deliver at least a book a year. You have 10 percent of people saying, I can wait for the paperback or wait until I hear more about it. And then they may not buy."

But the definition of overproduction is relative. Hardcover sales for James Patterson are up, though he published three novels, including collaborations, in 2002. Warner expects to sell more than a million hardcover copies of his latest thriller, "Four Blind Mice," released in November, an 8 to 10 percent increase over his previous book's sales, according to Mr. Kirshbaum. Warner will sell more than seven million copies of Mr. Patterson's books in hardcover and paperback this year, up from about two million copies five years ago.

"There's no question we're seeing a softness at retail, which is impacting sales on the brand-name authors," said Jack Romanos, president and chief operating officer of Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ms. Clark and, under its Scribner imprint, Mr. King. "But we won't really know how well these books have done until they're published in paperback a year from now. We won't make up the hardcover dollars, but ultimately readers will come to them."

While sales have slipped for Mr. Clancy and Mr. King, the authors are not in danger of going the way of Irving Wallace and Arthur Hailey just yet. Sales of their earlier books in paperback have remained remarkably consistent, even as their latest hardcover sales dip. Mr. King's "Carrie," for example, his first novel, originally published in 1974, sold about 23,000 copies in both 2001 and 2002, according to Nielsen Bookscan.

Paperback sales for previous titles by Ms. Clark and Ms. Grafton have stayed similarly consistent. "As each of these authors has a new novel, they may dilute" their own hardcover sales, Mr. Kirshbaum said. "But when you take all their books together, they may actually be growing." Ms. Grafton, he said, may be selling less of her latest mystery, "Q is for Quarry," in hardcover, "but she's still selling A through P."

Nonetheless, the steep sales decline could have a long-term impact on future author advances. "I am more nervous about paying large sums," Ms. Kennedy said, because "a sense of solid trending" is more difficult to achieve today than several years ago.

Mr. Kirshbaum said: "Publishers will be more careful when courting major authors. There will be some tempering of advances going forward. There are limits to what can be sold, and if agents realize there has to be some reality in terms of advances, that would be valuable. It's a nice thought."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

The Dialect Survey uses a series of questions, including rhyming word pairs and vocabulary words, to explore words and sounds in the English language. There are no right or wrong answers; by answering each question with what you really say and not what you think is "right", you can help contribute to an accurate picture of how English is used in your community.

The test is designed for speakers of North American English, but speakers of all varieties of English are welcome to take the test.

The dialect survey is an expansion of an initiative begun by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. Dr. Vaux prepared an earlier version of this survey for his Dialects of English class at Harvard in 1999. The survey has since been revised and expanded for a larger, lay audience.

Dialect Survey

BookMania! a rousing success story
By Christine Selvaggi staff writer
The Stuart News
January 19, 2003

Book enthusiasts, a group of authors with growing notoriety, and a bit of marketing helped make the ninth annual BookMania! a success beyond expectations, according to organizers.

The book festival commenced Friday at the Blake Library in Stuart with a much-anticipated lecture by crime fiction author Elmore Leonard. It ends today at 7 p.m. with a performance of "The Tender Nights of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

"Each year, the caliber of writers gets higher and higher," said Judi Snyder, library community relations coordinator. "We're thinking about space for next year."

Snyder said a book festival's biggest draw is the lecturing authors, which this year included Leonard and Edna Buchanan, a suspense novelist and Pulitzer prize-winning crime reporter.

"This is a small community, and it's amazing they can put on this presentation," Boca Raton resident Stacy Alesi said. "It's very impressive."

As Alesi waited in line for Buchanan to autograph her newest title, "The Ice Maiden," the Miami Herald reporter chatted about the "victory garden" she planted after Sept. 11 and her guess on the whereabouts of missing child Rilya Wilson.

"The audience here was very responsive because we're all Floridians," Buchanan said.

Buchanan's book, along with others, sold steadily throughout the fair, with one title unexpectedly selling out.

"We're doing a considerable amount better than last year," said Dale Kostakos, community relations manager with Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

Snyder attributed the numbers to increased marketing, which included mailing 3,000 BookMania! fliers weeks in advance to hype the event.

"We doubled the size of the brochure and it was massive campaigning," she said.

Snyder added that brainstorming already has begun for next year's festival. She thinks it will surpass the success that the little library in Stuart found this weekend.

"We want to accommodate the people," she said.

- christine.selvaggi@scripps.com

I loved this...in response to a thread on a listserv regarding pet peeves in books, Mark Terry posted this eloquent, intelligent response. I wish I'd wrote it:

Subject: My anti-peeves

Anti-peeves? Oh well. Just...here's what I like in books.

Books that tell good stories. Books with male main characters. Books with female main characters. Books with male and female main characters. Interesting characters. interesting voices. Humor. Good dialogue. Books I can get lost in. Books that make me want to keep reading. Books with cliffhanger chapter endings that make me excited to turn the page. Books that I'm so excited by their existence that I go to the bookstore as soon as possible and buy them even if I don't get around to reading them for a while. Books told in the first person and the third person. Multiple point of view books. Drama. Sadness. Happiness. Violence. Did I say violence? Let me repeat that. I don't want violence in my life, but I really do want it in my reading. Go figure. Violence. Death. Murder. Madness. Love. Sex. Romance. Sex and romance. Romance and sex. Love. Anger. Hostility. Sweetness. Books that take me to exotic places like Panama and the Congo and Greenland and Texas and Miami. Books that take place in my backyard. Did I say violence and death? Murder and mayhem? Death, destruction. The end of the world. Birth. Rebirth. Did I say sex? Let me say it again. Sex. Blue collar and white collar and pink collar and no collar. Straight people and gay people and angry people and happy people. I want to be presented an organized version of life which is entertaining and thought-provoking, but recognizably like life with all its messiness. I want, desperately, to be entertained. I want books that suck me in and won't let me go, that I think about when I'm not reading them and that I can't wait to get back to, that I'm sorry when they're over, about people who I would like to have in my life...and I guess, in a way, I do. And if I can't get that from a book, well, then I might not finish it.

Best,
Mark Terry
The author of Catfish Guru
Two Theo MacGreggor Mysteries
Medical Writer: www.mark-terry.com/clips
Mystery author: www.mark-terry.com

Thank you, Mark, for sharing.