More Interesting Articles

These were some very interesting articles from listservs I follow.

Salon: #WeNeedDiverseBooks goes viral

Lee and Low Books: Where Can I Find Great Diverse Children's Books?

New York Public Library: Celebrating Diverse Children's Books: These Stories Dazzle and Reflect

NPR - New Initiative Aims to Encourage Diversity in Kids' Publishing

Teen Librarian Toolbox: Dear Media: Let Me Help You Write That Article on YA Literature

Anne Ursu: On 'The John Green Effect,' Contemporary Realism, and Form as a Political Act

Zetta Elliott, The Huffington Post: It's Not Me, It's You: Letting Go of the Status Quo

There is also a great list of Native authors and illustrators by Debbie Reese at American Indians in Children's Literature, and this is the link to her WeNeedDiverseBooks post.

Diversity and Multicultural Books

School Library Journal has a really great variety of articles in this month's journal, many focusing on diversity. You can check out some of the features on the web:

Landing page for May 2014: The Diversity Issue

Article: We Need Diverse Books...But Are We Willing to Discuss Them With Our Kids?

Feature: An Expanded Cultural Diversity Booklist: SLJ Readers Respond

There are a great number of multicultural books featured throughout the journal. One example is Don’t Say a Word, Mamá, featured in an article focusing on summer reading for K-3.

Along the same lines, Booklist just had a great webinar titled "Reaching All Readers: New Multicultural Books for Children and Teens." If you visit their webinar archive, the webinar should be available next week. There were great handouts and a list of books from each publisher was also provided. A great resource!

I'd like to take a few moments to include some book covers of some of my favorite multicultural books. I've previously mentioned The Tequila Worm by Viola Canales, but these are just three of my favorites as well. Give them a try if you can!

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin

Cat Girl's Day Off, Kimberly Pauley

Who Am I Without Him? A Collection of Stories about Girls and the Boys in their Lives, Sharon G. Flake

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Passes Away at 87

It was reported today that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author, has passed away at age 87.

CNN: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning author, dies at 87

NPR: Writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Who Gave Voice To Latin America, Dies

Mexican Katniss

Diversity in Young Adult Literature: "Where is the African-American Harry Potter or the Mexican Katniss?" 

An interesting article featured on CNN.

Black Beauty

Recently a little girl came in looking for classics to read. She had a paper from her school shaped like a shield/crest, and it was divided into sections, with each section having the title of a book and its author. Titles included Treasure Island and Mary Poppins, The Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows. When we were looking for one of the titles, we passed by the S author last names. She reached up and touched Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, and I said, "That's my favorite," and she replied, with a sigh, "I know." She understood.

I love Black Beauty, and I hold it very close to my heart. It is one of the first books I ever read, the first book I read completely in English, and the first book that ever made my heart ache. It is also one of the greatest reasons why I love animals and think there should be stricter punishments for animal abuse. This was the version I had, a paperback Landoll Classic, which I am trying to purchase again:

It came with this matching Robinson Crusoe:

I can't tell you how happy I felt to hear that she loved this book so much. That was a great moment, and she was such an awesome kid. 

The January/February 2014 issue of The Horn Book Magazine has a really wonderful article titled "What Makes a Good Horse Book?" by Anita L. Burkam. It's such a wonderful article, I highly recommend it. There are so many great titles, and it is so neat to have learned that Ms. Burkam was a former riding instructor! 

Author Gary Soto: Why I've Stopped Writing Children's Literature

A beautiful and heartbreaking article featured on The Huffington Post discusses why Gary Soto has moved away from children's literature.

Some of the passages that reverberate with me the most:

"Instead, mother explains tenderly their move by saying that the family wants another kind of life for themselves, a yard for instance. Migration makes sense for them, just as migration from Mexico to Chicago, Houston, New York City and my hometown of Fresno also makes sense for others. Life is not stagnant."

"Marisol returns to my book "A Simple Plan." She opens it again, reads another poem, and sees enough there to take it to the front counter. The young woman takes my book home, me the lost father who brought her to life.
I have stopped writing children's literature. At my age, the genre is too dangerous."

Harry Potter Kids Club

Rowling Webcast Will Promote New Potter Kids Club

Associated Press, Tue, July 31, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) — J.K. Rowling's next book is for adults, but she will be on hand this fall to help promote a new club for kids, the Harry Potter Reading Club.

Scholastic Inc. announced Tuesday that Rowling will participate in a live webcast at noon, Oct. 11 from her hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, taking live questions from her young fans for the first time since 2007, when the last Potter book came out. The discussion will take place on www.scholastic.com/hpreadingclub , the website for an online Potter club launched Tuesday by Scholastic.

Designed for schools and libraries and parents, the new club will include discussion guides, a glossary, interactive features and information on community events. Rowling will contribute original commentary. She has a novel for grown-ups out in September, "The Casual Vacancy."

[Source]

I really love this! It would be my dream to have this at the library where I work!

Another Loss for Literature

Science Fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury, 91, has died
June 6, 2012   8:01am

Ray Bradbury, an iconic science fiction author who helped bring the genre into the mainstream, has died, his family confirms. He was 91.

Bradbury was the recipient of many awards, including a National Medal of Arts, a special citation from the Pulitzer board, a medal for distinguished contribution to American letters from the National Book Foundation, and an Emmy. He is a member of the SF Hall of Fame, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a crater on the moon was named for one of his works and an asteroid is named in his honor.
Bradbury served as an affable emissary for science fiction. His futuristic ideas were much sought after: he consulted with both Disney and NASA.

Bradbury wrote his classic "Fahrenheit 451" at a pay-as-you-go typewriter in the basement of UCLA's library. In the book's futuristic world, reading is banned and books are burned. First published in 1953, it has sold more than 10 million copies, been published in 33 languages in 38 countries, and has never gone out of print.

Other notable works by Bradbury are "The Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes." In his career, he wrote more than 30 books, hundreds of short stories, plus poetry, plays and books for children. He is credited as a writer on dozens of movie and television projects and worked with John Huston on the screenplay of the 1956 film version of "Moby Dick."

Bradbury was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill. He moved to Southern California, where his efforts to become a writer took hold. According to legend, he gave a copy of "The Martian Chronicles" to Christopher Isherwood, and his career was underway.

[Source]

If there is one Ray Bradbury story you can read this week, please read A Sound of Thunder. I really recommend this book.



Maurice Sendak



'Where Wild Things Are' author Maurice Sendak dies
Associated Press - Tue, May 8, 2012

DANBURY, Conn. (AP) — Maurice Sendak, the children's book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes-dark side of childhood in books like "Where the Wild Things Are" and "In the Night Kitchen," died early Tuesday. He was 83.

Longtime friend and caretaker Lynn Caponera said she was with him when Sendak died at a hospital in Danbury, Conn. She said he had a stroke on Friday.

"Where the Wild Things Are" earned Sendak a prestigious Caldecott Medal for the best children's book of 1964 and became a hit movie in 2009. President Bill Clinton awarded Sendak a National Medal of the Arts in 1996 for his vast portfolio of work.

Sendak didn't limit his career to a safe and successful formula of conventional children's books, though it was the pictures he did for wholesome works such as Ruth Krauss' "A Hole Is To Dig" and Else Holmelund Minarik's "Little Bear" that launched his career.

"Where the Wild Things Are," about a boy named Max who goes on a journey — sometimes a rampage — through his own imagination after he is sent to bed without supper, was quite controversial when it was published, and his quirky and borderline scary illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker" did not have the sugar coating featured in other versions.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas, including the Czech opera "Brundibar," which he also put on paper with collaborator Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner in 2003.

He designed the Pacific Northwest Ballet's "Nutcracker" production that later became a movie shown on television, and he served as producer of various animated TV series based on his illustrations, including "Seven Little Monsters," ''George and Martha" and "Little Bear."

But despite his varied resume, Sendak accepted — and embraced — the label "kiddie-book author."

"I write books as an old man, but in this country you have to be categorized, and I guess a little boy swimming in the nude in a bowl of milk (as in 'In the Night Kitchen') can't be called an adult book," he told The Associated Press in 2003.

"So I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think."

During that 2003 interview, Sendak also felt as if he were part of a dying breed of illustrators who approached their work as craftsmen. "I feel like a dinosaur. There are a few of us left. (We) worked so hard in the '50s and '60s but some have died and computers pushed others out."

Sendak, who did his work in a studio at the Ridgefield, Conn., home he moved into in the early 1960s, never embraced high-tech toys. He did, however, have a collection of Mickey Mouse and other Walt Disney toys displayed throughout the house.

When director Spike Jonez made the movie version of "Where the Wild Things Are," Sendak said he urged the director to remember his view that childhood isn't all sweetness and light. And he was happy with the result.

"In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy" Sendak told the AP in 2009. "There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger. And I did not want to reduce Max to the trite image of the good little boy that you find in too many books."

Sendak's own life was clouded by the shadow of the Holocaust. He had said that the events of World War II were the root of his raw and honest artistic style.

Born in 1928 and raised in Brooklyn, Sendak said he remembered the tears shed by his Jewish-Polish immigrant parents as they'd get news of atrocities and the deaths of relatives and friends. "My childhood was about thinking about the kids over there (in Europe). My burden is living for those who didn't," he told the AP.

Sendak, his sister Natalie, and late brother Jack, were the last of the family on his father's side since his other relatives didn't move to the United States before the war. The only family member Sendak really knew on his mother's side was his grandmother.

Sendak didn't go to college and worked a string of odd jobs until he went to work at the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window dresser in 1948. But it was his childhood dream to be an illustrator and his break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for "Wonderful Farm" by Marcel Ayme.

By 1957 he was writing his own books.

Sendak received the international Hans Christian Andersen medal for illustration in 1970. In 1983 he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association.

But it was "Brundibar," a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother that Sendak completed when he was 75, that he was most proud of. "This is the closest thing to a perfect child I've ever had."

Sendak stayed away from the book-signing bandwagon that many other authors use for publicity; he said he couldn't stand the thought of parents dragging children to wait on line for hours to see a little old man in thick glasses.

"Kids don't know about best sellers," he said. "They go for what they enjoy. They aren't star chasers and they don't suck up. It's why I like them."

[Source]

Obsolete

Federal Libraries, Archives Shutting Down in Canada

"Transport Canada's library is now closed, too, with seven workers informed Monday their jobs are obsolete. They will now spend months packing up and told CBC News much of the collection will soon be in the trash."

[Source]

This is all I can think about:

Little Free Libraries

Little library goes by the book

Posted: May 05, 2012, 8:23 am

By Jen Cullen
The Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN

RED WING — The library in front of Robert and Sandy Miller’s home is open 24/7.

No library card is needed to enjoy the modest book collection at 1876 Woodland Drive. There’s no complicated Dewey Decimal system or electronic book catalog to navigate.

You simply open the little library’s door and take a book or leave a book.

That’s the idea behind Little Free Libraries, a project started in Hudson, Wis., by two men dedicated to promoting literacy and reading by building free book exchanges worldwide.

The simple idea has spread rapidly since the first Little Free Library made its debut. Robert and Sandy Miller’s library — a miniature white house with a red door stacked with 20 to 30 books — is No. 660 of an estimated 1,600 libraries around the world.

A sign on each Little Free Library provides simple instructions: "Take a Book, Leave a Book," though it's not a requirement to do both.

“If you can just get someone to read a book, they will realize what’s in books and they read more,” Robert said. “The more they read, the more they learn.”

Sandy agrees.

Sandy never read books — until she met her husband. Now they both look forward to what their Little Free Library can do for their community.

“You have the world at your fingertips when you read,” she said.

Robert built his Little Free Library a few months ago after seeing a magazine article. An avid woodworker, he figured the project was a perfect way to keep him occupied in his shop.

He and his wife mounted his creation in the front yard, unsure what to expect.

Then the parade of curious people began.

Robert said at least one person stops by each day to either drop off or pick up a book. Most days the library has two or three visitors.

“It has been really neat,” Robert said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

The Millers stocked their library with books they had around the house. Sandy went to the Salvation Army to round out the collection with children’s books.

The stock in their Little Free Library has become quite diverse during the past few months, with everything from a mystery novel written 80 years ago, to cook books, to sewing instructional guides.

Rick Brooks, Little Free Library co-founder, said he started the project not only to promote literacy, but to foster a sense of community and pride in the neighborhoods where the libraries are built.

“People really identify with giving and sharing with what they think is valuable,” he said. “The builders of these libraries don’t see it as they own it. They see it as it belongs to the neighborhood.”

That might explain why so few reports of vandalism are reported. Brooks said residents take watch over the libraries, ensuring they aren’t damaged. When they are, neighbors repair the libraries quickly.

Brooks said approximately 70 percent to 80 percent of the people who have Little Free Libraries build their own.

Libraries can also be ordered online or donated to those who are financially or physically unable to build their own.

“We did hope it would get this big. It’s been fun,” Brooks said. “In our fondest dreams, this is exactly what we hoped would happen.”

To learn more about how to build a Little Free Library or to locate a library in your area, visit the Little Free Library website.

[Source]

President Obama Reading Where the Wild Things Are



Jan Berenstain Passes Away

Berenstain Bears Co-creator Jan Berenstain Dies

By Associated Press | Parenting – 3 hours ago

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Jan Berenstain, who with her husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88.

Berenstain suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness, her son Mike Berenstain said.

The gentle tales of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear and Sister Bear were inspired by the Berenstain children, and later their grandchildren. The stories address children's common concerns and aim to offer guidance on subjects like dentist visits, peer pressure, a new sibling or summer camp.

The first Berenstain Bears book, "The Big Honey Hunt," was published in 1962. Over the years, more than 300 titles have been released in 23 languages - most recently in Arabic and Icelandic - and have become a rite of passage for generations of young readers.

"They say jokes don't travel well, but family humor does," said Jan Berenstain told The Associated Press in 2011. "Family values is what we're all about."

Stan and Jan Berenstain, both Philadelphia natives, were 18 when they met on their first day at art school in 1941.

They married in 1946, after Stan Berenstain returned home from serving as a medical illustrator at a stateside Army hospital during World War II. During that time, Jan Berenstain worked as a draftsman for the Army Corps of Engineers and as a riveter building Navy seaplanes.

Before their family of bear books was born, the young couple had already built a successful career in periodicals. A cartoon series they produced called "All in the Family" ran in McCall's and Good Housekeeping magazines for 35 years, and their art appeared in magazines including Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.

Stan and Jan Berenstain created hundreds of books until Stan Berenstain's death in 2005 at the age of 82.

Mike Berenstain is an illustrator who collaborated on the books with his mother in recent years. His elder brother, writer Leo Berenstain, is involved with the business end of the family franchise.

The books in recent years have tackled modern subjects such as online safety and childhood obesity, and the bears (or their human helpers) answer children's emails and letters, but the goal is to tell enduring, universal stories. Perennial favorites cover challenges of getting kids to doing chores, defuse fears of the first day of school and teach values of kindness and generosity.

"It's wonderful to do something you love for so many years," Jan Berenstain told the AP in 2011. "Not everyone has that."

About 260 million copies of Berenstain Bears books have been held in the hands of children and their parents since the earliest books were published with the help of Theodor Geisel, a children's books editor at Random House better known as Dr. Seuss.

Mike Berenstain said his mother worked daily at her home studio in an idyllic part of Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, which served as inspiration for the books' setting. He said he will continue writing and illustrating future Berenstain books.

"Every day she was very productive," he said. "She was working on two books and had been doing illustrations until the day before she passed away."

Jan Berenstain is survived by her two sons and four grandchildren.

___

Online:

http://www.berenstainbears.com/

[Source]

CIA's 'ninja librarians' track revolts through Twitter and Facebook

McLEAN, Va. (AP) — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the "ninja librarians" are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group's effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency's Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center's operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center's work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, says the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in an interview.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Its predecessor organization had its staff heavily cut in the 1990s — something the CIA's management has vowed to keep from happening again, with new budget reductions looming across the national security spectrum.

The center's several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of subjects, including Chinese Internet access and the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most analysts are based in Virginia, they also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to their subjects.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another almost every day. The material is often used to answer questions Obama poses to his inner circle of intelligence advisers when they give him the morning rundown of threats and trouble spots.

"The OSC's focus is overseas, collecting against foreign intelligence issues," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. "Looking at social media outlets overseas is just a small part of what this skilled organization does," she said. "There is no effort to collect on Americans."

The most successful open source analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

An analyst with a master's degree in library science and multiple languages, especially one who grew up speaking another language, makes "a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that kept Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Officials in Pakistan protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

When President Obama gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too. Tweets from speakers of Arabic and Turkic contended that Obama favored Israel, while Hebrew tweets denounced the speech as pro-Arab.

In the following days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in such areas as Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The AP agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

Naquin says the next generation of social media will probably be closed-loop, subscriber-only cellphone networks, like the ones the Taliban uses to send messages among hundreds of followers at a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those networks can be penetrated only by technical eavesdropping by branches of U.S. intelligence, such as the National Security Agency — but Naquin predicts his covert colleagues will find a way to adapt, as the enemy does.

[Source] | Associated Press | By KIMBERLY DOZIER - AP Intelligence Writer

Borders Succumbs to Digital Era in Books

By MIKE SPECTOR and JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Borders Group Inc.'s imminent demise marks the first major casualty of the digital era in buying and reading books. But the store closings also will mean fewer opportunities for shoppers to wander the book aisles, a loss that will affect publishers as well as competitors and authors.

The bookseller is expected to ask a bankruptcy judge Thursday to approve plans to start liquidating as soon as Friday. By the end of September, the remaining 399 stores of the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain will be shut down for good.

The closures will make Barnes & Noble the only national bookstore chain in the U.S., leaving some Americans to drive long distances to find the largest collections of new bestsellers or wile away the hours among the stacks. Publishers, meantime, are losing one of their biggest customers as they struggle with declining demand for physical books.

Borders filed for bankruptcy protection in February and continued to bleed cash as it raced, unsuccessfully, to find a buyer.

Its failure will hasten the dramatic changes under way in how consumers buy and read books. Tom and Louis Borders started the company 40 years ago in Ann Arbor, Mich. by stocking rich assortments of books that rivals couldn't match. Now, many consumers prefer having books delivered to their doorsteps or downloading them to electronic devices by touching a screen.

Amazon.com Inc., the nation's dominant online bookseller by sales, is driving those changes that felled Borders. Apple Inc. and Google Inc., too, have started selling books.

Underscoring Borders's inability to adapt, the company handed its Internet operations to Amazon about a decade ago and didn't relaunch its own website until 2008. Then, too late, it relied on a Canadian company for an electronic-book reader.

Publishers, already grappling with seismic shifts in their business, including the demand for e-books, now are trying to gauge how many fewer books they should print, both in terms of physical copies and the number of new titles.

"There will be fewer titles on display," said the head of one large publishing house. "We're going to have to make a lot of different assumptions."

Writers, too, have lost a place to promote their works through talks and signings. The author Kristina Laferne Roberts, who uses the pseudonym Zane and also operates Stebor Books, a publishing joint venture with CBS Corp.'s Atria Books, said Borders was particularly open to African-American writers. "Many of my own signings were at Borders, as were signings of a lot of my authors," she said. "We're going to have to find alternative ways to market books."

Borders's failure disappointed many. "I felt we were on the right track," said George Jones, who served as Borders's chief executive from mid-2006 to January 2009. Mr. Jones said he inherited about $750 million in debt, and that financial markets had turned south when he tried to refinance.

After Borders unsuccessfully put itself up for sale in March 2008, his hopes of creating a proprietary e-reader to match Amazon's Kindle fizzled. "I would have loved to have had the money to develop something like Barnes & Noble's Nook, but our company was up for sale, and nobody would partner with us."

Barnes & Noble, weighing a buyout offer from Liberty Media Corp., also faces challenges but could attract Borders's customers. "It's not unrealistic to think that they'll capture $600 million to $1.1 billion in sales," said Edward Latessa, portfolio manager for Aria Partner, a Boston-based investment firm that owns a large stake in Barnes & Noble.

At Borders's flagship store in Ann Arbor this week, customers expressed dismay at the chain's closing but weren't surprised. Joel Zaretsky, a 73-year-old painter from Woodstock, N.Y., was curled up in the store's front window, wearing a tie-dyed shirt, cargo shorts and sandals. His glasses perched on the end of his nose, which was buried in a magazine devoted to Photoshop.

Mr. Zaretsky said he had been coming to the store s every summer for the city's art festival. "I don't like it," he said of the chain's fate. "This is a case of Internet outsourcing," he added, before admitting that he, too, bought books online.

Yuching Lin, a 20-year-old college junior, said she sees little reason to buy a book in a bookstore when shopping online is more convenient. "It's like an old kitchen in here," she said while chatting with a friend at a table in the store. Barnes & Noble "is classier," she added.

For several weeks, Borders looked like it might survive. Jahm Najafi, a vice chairman of the Phoenix Suns who runs private-equity firm Najafi Cos., had agreed last month to buy it. But Mr. Najafi's agreement didn't preclude him from later liquidating the chain. That didn't fly with creditors, who felt they could get paid more by liquidators. Borders reluctantly consented to a deal with liquidators after discussions with Mr. Najafi collapsed last week amid concerns about support from landlords and publishers.

Over the past weekend, others, including Birmingham, Ala.-based chain Books-A-Million Inc., contacted Borders's financial adviser, Jefferies & Co., about possible bids. A bidding deadline passed Sunday without an offer to save Borders.

"We gave it everything we had, but ultimately we lost," said Borders Group President Mike Edwards.

[Source]

Jane Austen Manuscript sells for $1.6 Million

Secret bidder nabs Jane Austen manuscript for $1.6 million
By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout

An unfinished, handwritten manuscript penned by Jane Austen has just sold for more than three times its expected price at a Sotheby's auction, fetching a whopping $1.6 million from an unknown buyer over the telephone.

Entitled The Watsons, it is the only handwritten Austen manuscript still in private hands. No original manuscripts exist of her six finished works, making The Watsons all the more unique and valuable to Austen fans.

Associate Professor of English at Manhattanville College Juliette Wells tells The Lookout that it's "fascinating" the manuscript sold for so much more money than Sotheby's predicted.

"Anyone can go on the web and look at the facsimiles that just sold for 1.6 million dollars," she adds. "So why would you pay unless you thought owning them would bring you closer to Jane Austen in some way?" (Check out the manuscript online here.)

Austen has a very devoted following, and this book is the "most precious Jane Austen relic that's come up to auction in our lifetime," Wells says. Dozens of fan fiction spin-offs, movie adaptations and even, of course, a zombie-infused take on Pride and Prejudice have sprouted up in Austen's honor, nearly two hundred years after the writer's death.

The marked-up draft affords a rare glimpse into Austen's writing process, Wells adds. The 68-page manuscript is made up of booklets that Austen created herself by folding her writing paper in half.


The Guardian writes that the famous author began the novel in 1804, when she had just had one manuscript rejected and another spiked by a publisher. Some speculate that she never finished The Watsons because its story hit too close to home: the novel's heroine is worried her ill clergyman father will die and leave the family penniless, which happened to Austen in real life only one year later.

Even though she wrote the book during a difficult time, it shows off Austen's trademark wit. The critic Margaret Drabble called it "a tantalizing, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels, had she finished it," according to Reuters.

It's unknown whether the Austen devotee who won the bidding war will make the manuscript publicly available or keep it private.

[Source]

Elegy for Librarians

Elegy for librarians: After all the budget cutting's done, who'll be around to help us ask the sharper questions?





If librarians seem distracted these days, you can't blame them. They're worried that they'll lose jobs. As cities, counties, public schools and universities all grapple with recessionary budget cuts, libraries look like low-hanging fruit. In this iEverything age, the thinking goes, books are musty relics. And without books, who needs librarians?



The truth is that we've never needed them more. Every day in this city, librarians do important jobs not strictly related to library science.



They teach senior citizens to use e-mail and show job seekers how to fill out on-line forms. They help middle-schoolers with math homework and urge high-schoolers not to trust everything they read on Wikipedia. They reserve rooms for community meetings. They set up displays. They arrange reading series. They keep cranky microfiche readers running. They read aloud to toddlers.



But as valuable as all those things are, what we need most right now is for librarians to do their core jobs: to serve as information professionals, a job that's harder now than ever before.



The infoverse has exploded. Data still comes in book form — and also in a bazillion other forms as well: among them, databases, online journals, architectural plans, maps, photos, microprints, CDs, DVDs, podcasts, posters, manuscripts, Tweets, musical scores, scripts, magazines, software and web sites.



Librarians make it possible to navigate wilderness.



They do the brute-force work of organization: bar-coding new acquisitions; putting books back on the right shelves; scanning and digitizing paper holdings; entering items into databases, where a search can reveal them.



Handed a difficult question, a good librarian happily hacks through the data jungle, sorting the good info from the bad, and procuring exactly the answer you wanted.



But great librarians do something even better: They help you ask a sharper question, then find the answer you didn't know you needed.



Maybe printed books will largely disappear in the next decade. But even so, we'll still need libraries - because we'll need librarians.

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Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe!

Last year was the first year that the mystery visitor to Edgar Allan Poe's grave did not visit to leave the traditional gifts. Sadly, today marked the second year that the tradition has not occurred. Nonetheless, it is a good day to celebrate Poe and his writings, many of which have kept me up at night.

Edgar Allan Poe's cognac-carrying admirer fails to materialize again

How appropriate for the creator of the mystery novel.

The shadowy visitor who left roses and a half-full bottle of cognac at Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore grave on the writer's birthday, every year for 60 years, has failed to appear for the second year in a row. And no one knows why.

The tradition began on January 19, 1949, according to the Edgar Allan Poe Society. The last visitation came two years ago, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Poe, the author of such dark classics as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Telltale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the poem "The Raven."

Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and unofficial head of the annual vigil, waited in the dark and cold overnight before declaring it over at 5:45 a.m. Wednesday, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Jerome took as many media calls as he could handle Wednesday morning, then went to bed.

"This is Jeff Jerome. I can't talk to you. I've been up for 25 hours straight, I'm exhausted and I need sleep," his voice mail at the Edgar Allan Poe House says.

Before he went to bed, Jerome told the Sun he's just about done with waiting for Poe's secret admirer.

"I will be here in 2012, but that will be it," he said. "If he's a no-show, I will officially pronounce the tradition dead."

The identity and motivation of the "Poe Toaster" has always been a mystery, as is the reason for the ritual's apparent end.

As crowds for the annual stakeout at Westminster Burying Ground have grown, the Toaster may be finding it harder to go in and out unnoticed. Perhaps the stealthy Poe admirer simply decided it was time to stop.

Or perhaps he died under mysterious circumstances. (Cue scary music.)

"It is a great, kind of unique Baltimore story and tradition. Baltimore is full of those quirky and unique traditions," said Sara Hisamoto, director of public relations for Visit Baltimore.

"It's always sad to see a tradition go away, but knowing Baltimore, we'll come up with some other kind of quirky celebration to take its place."

Toaster or no Toaster, the Poe society will still hold a birthday party this weekend at Westminster Hall.
[Source]

Calif library book returned 74 years overdue

Published: Dec 8, 2010

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - A California woman is proving it's never too late to make things right.

Ninety-five-year-old Hazel Severson of Sacramento says a friend found a book that Severson's late husband had borrowed from an Amador County library in 1936 while sorting through things for a garage sale.

She knew what she had to do: return the book and offer to pay the overdue fee - a whopping $2,701.

Severson told the Sacramento Bee that she and her husband Howard were newlyweds back when he checked out the hardback, "Seaplane Solo," about Sir Francis Chichester's 1930 solo flight across the Tasman Sea.

Luckily for Severson, the library didn't charge her the fee, though it did accept a small donation when she stopped by on Oct. 13.

Librarian Laura Einstadter says it was just happy to get back the book.

___

Information from: The Sacramento Bee, http://www.sacbee.com

© 2010 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
[Source]

A few excerpts on libraries

A few excerpts from an article discussing libraries.

Public libraries are an integral part of a free, educated society
I completely agree.

Some argue that the library is an antiquated institution
Unfortunately, yes. What with so many new forms of technology, it seems that maybe people will be going to libraries to visit them sort of as if they were museums. What can libraries, and librarians, offer that is not already known or available with the click of a button? The problem with this belief is that it does not take into consideration the people who don't know how to find information, who need help finding resources, who don't have access to computers/copy machines/printers, who need help finding good and accurate information that a quick search in a search engine just won't give. And, of course, no matter how large one's house is or how amazing one's computer is, it will never hold all of the books in the world; that's one reason libraries will always be here.