Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers

Eat the City, Robin Shulman

2012-05-16T16:20:00.000-04:00

Where there's people, there's food production.

Unsolicited galleys are my favorite. I am really going to miss them in the future when we'll have to jack into the net to hack a spreadsheet asking if - wait, never mind! This just plain showed up one day and I decided to take it for the train ride home.

Basically a food history of the city, each chapter addresses a particular edible (honey, vegetables, meat, wine) and the stories of those profiled become interwoven with New York City's food traditions and accompanying industry. The alcohol chapters cover Prohibition, while the vegetables chapter discusses gentrification and fish takes on our historical obsession with polluting water sources. Plus, there's lots of process dropped so you gather facts on say, the chemical reactions controlled for in wine-making or what time of day is best to plant and it all comes together to make you want to start a garden on your fire escape.

Of course, the food history of a city is a lens through which to view its sociopolitical history as well. After all, the full title of the book is Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York. And it's true! Shulman interviews new and old alike to demonstrate how the current locavore movement is as old as the city itself. Her writing casts a bit of spell over you, in that it suddenly feels like you are surrounded by food, wherever you are. In every home, a winery in the basement and an apiary on the roof. Highly recommended.

Eat the City is on sale July 10, 2012.

2012-05-14T12:07:00.000-04:00

Thank you, MetaFilter. I love a good oral history project and this is a great one: the personal stories of women entering the workforce during World War II.

On the perks of shelving

2012-05-10T15:10:00.001-04:00

They consist mostly of keeping yourself company by list-making. But six carts in, this was a big deal. I totally remember this edition from the shelves of my local library. And that's it really.

Still, it makes me happy that they are back to this cover. Sorry, plant! Sorry, yellow sneakers!

May The Force Be With You

2012-05-07T11:55:00.001-04:00

978-88-6613-088-8

Do you use planners? Because this really, really makes me wish I did.

May the Force be with you 365 days a year. These and other Moleskine beauties are now in stock at Shakespeare & Co.

Pages: 144 pages (72 leaves)
Size: 3.5 x 5.5 inches (9 x 14 cm)
Cover Style: Hard Cover
Paper Color: Off White

Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato

2012-05-02T16:56:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning.

He could not possibly pause long enough to breathe normally. Job that day would never be forgotten: the day when Job would first give its holy communion of freedom. One-on-two-one-on-two-bend-scoop-swing-spread-tap-clip—and bend on for one-on-two—and now Job was no longer a bewildering corridor which one visited by chance and did not realize. Job was establishing itself in gray of stony joint and red of clayey brick, in smell of men's gray bones and wet red flesh.

Job was becoming a familiar being through aches and hours, plumb and level. Job was a new sense which brought excitement of men and steel and stone. Job was a game, a race, a play in which all were muscular actors serious from whistle to whistle, and he was one of them. It was pay-day, and in a few hours pay-check would sign short-short armistice. It was war for living, and Paul was a soldier. It was not as in marbles where he played for fun, it was men's siege against a hunger that traveled swiftly, against an enemy inherited.

Dinner Party Dictum

2012-04-25T17:44:00.000-04:00

John Dos Passos

"When I arrived Ernest was already there, and Martha Gellhorn, looking handsome in her well-tailored pants and good boots. I took along two cans of sardines and two cans of pâté, and Ernest said he was glad I had brought in canned goods from Paris because John Dos Passos hadn't brought in any food but had eaten everybody else's, and he and Dos Passos had had an ugly fight about that."

An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, Lillian Hellman

World Book Night

2012-04-21T11:09:00.001-04:00

Game on! I am ridiculously excited for Monday.

All The Lovely Bookshops

2012-04-16T17:42:00.004-04:00

Source: suelovesnyc.com via Tattered on Pinterest

Thank you to Tattered Cover for linking to All The Lovely Bookshops, a board on Pinterest that is exactly what it sounds like. Pictures of lovely local bookstores!

Explore the set: add to it, help grow it! I was happy to discover Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers already there. Lots of our neighbors are represented as well (WORD, Greenlight, BookCourt, Three Lives) so it really will help out with the map I know you're all making.

World Book Night

2012-04-11T16:41:00.002-04:00

Spreading the love of reading, person to person.

World Book Night is an annual celebration designed to spread the love of reading and books. This year, it will be celebrated stateside for the very first time. No more staring longingly across the Atlantic, everybody. One million books will be given away by 50,000 passionate readers across the USA on April 23, 2012.

Our stores have volunteered to serve as pickup locations for local givers. And we are hard at work on our special plans for the day. Get ready, New York City!

You can keep current on all WBN news and events by following World Book Night USA on Twitter: @wbnamerica

Miguel de Cervantes

2012-04-04T12:00:00.004-04:00

There is a statue of Cervantes located at the end of a long, narrow courtyard that is part of the sprawling NYU campus. It's tucked away on Fifth Avenue off of Washington Square North. Do you see an open gate? Just keep going. There's a post here that discusses its origins but really, my desire to discuss the statue is simple and doesn't require any context at all.

Look at that! It's so delightful! The statue just whittles itself down to two prancing feet. And the expression on the statue's face gives no indication at all of the quiet dance he is doing. It betrays nothing. Which really, is kind of perfect for Cervantes. Also, all Shakespeare statues, too. I am certain they are out there.

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

2012-03-28T22:05:00.003-04:00

Dedications
An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich.
(Photo credit: Flickr)

Trichinosis

2012-03-23T14:01:00.001-04:00

Source: The Heart (Netter Collection of Medical Illustrations, Volume 5)

Ode to Avocados

2012-03-20T18:05:00.002-04:00

Photograph: Haley Johnson

"Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison."

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Or you could sell those books back.

2012-03-13T13:48:00.001-04:00

The Hairpin isolates the greatest panel in the Sequential Crush post on "Love Was a Lie!"

Always remember.

2012-03-09T11:10:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Bryan Waterman: #networkedny Kristen Highland starting her talk on 19c bookstores by invoking recent history at St Marks.

Bookstore Crush

2012-03-06T12:45:00.000-05:00

"There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on."

It's acceptable to talk about other bookshops I would go to if I could travel everywhere to get anything, right? This is DreamHaven Books & Comics in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I want to go to there. There's this mural, for one. Plus, they still maintain a LiveJournal (just like George R.R. Martin) and this is their given store history:

In 1793, science fiction bookseller Nigel Ketter, facing massive legal action and an unprecedented public outcry (see The London Times for June 15th, 1793), sailed for Boston with several tons of collectible monster magazines and rarer-than-rare Arkham House titles. Upon reaching the New World, he made plans to travel south and set up a small book shop in the Caribbean (trading books for rum). Nigel accidentally confused North for South and ended up the arctic wilderness of Minnesota (see photo). He managed to survive by burning old Fanthorpe paperbacks for heat and by hunting (bashing) ice weasels and snow voles with the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction." He waited. He advertised. He waited some more.

Settlers settled. The city grew.

But alas! No one had anything to read.

Thus (and finally!), in 1977, enterprising descendant Greg Ketter, sensing the needs of the public, opened his first store in Minneapolis.

The DreamHaven Empire had begun.

What a lovely store. Bookstore tourism for life. Okay, let's review: Shakespeare & Co. for when you are in New York and DreamHaven for when you find yourself in Minnesota. Are bookseller exchange programs a thing?

The Devil's Home On Leave, Derek Raymond.

2012-02-28T16:07:00.000-05:00

Derek Raymond

"Thatcher is never named in the Factory books, but her shadow falls over them. With their dogged, lyrical, sometimes sentimental, sometimes appallingly violent manner, they offer a consistent portrait of a world in which people are not respected for their humanity but valued according to their usefulness to those in power."
Death at One's Elbow: Derek Raymond's Factory Novels, Charles Taylor.

First of all, this picture. Take notes, other author photos. This is how you should look. Proper. Like you have the jewels you came for, but a quick drink before leaving, thank you very much. Secondly, The Devil's Home on Leave is the second book in the famous Factory Series and it is grim and great. Plus, what a perfectly timed introduction. I was reading all the Chandler and Hammett I could get my hands on when I decided to detour and read this instead. Good idea, me.

Should I lead with the fact that I am going to continue onto the other four Factory novels Melville House has reissued? Because I am. These are dark, horrible and lovely. All elegant writing about brutality with bursts of hilarious dialogue that allow little light to come to the proceedings. Our unnamed detective's back story as well as the crimes he investigates are rotten and ruthlessly sad. Still, it's not an exercise in hopelessness. Detective Sergeant works Unexplained Deaths for his own reasons, eschewing rank to solve the murders of obscure, forgotten people. The murders of the socially small and unimportant. Our man is a human being, in the most meaningful sense of the word. And he's got both eyes open, staring at the nothing. In this particular book, that's a psychopathic killer with ties to the government.

The excellently turned trick is that the book is almost not about its own murders as much as what they mean. It's about man, his capacity or failure to overcome pain and horror, the prevailing social order and all attendant corruption. It takes the procedural and does a correct thing with it: makes it count.

Hogarth Press

2012-02-24T12:20:00.002-05:00

"Though the Hogarth press evolved into a publishing house for Bloomsbury writers, Leonard also initially purchased the press as a form of therapy for Virginia - printing would be a “manual occupation [that] would take her mind completely off her work” (Woolf, Leonard 233). As envisioned by Leonard, the mechanical and physical nature of letterpress printing would liberate her imaginative mind. However, the printing press became, instead of mental therapy, a form of “aesthetic therapy” for Virginia - it contributed to and changed her work, rather than allowing her to escape writing.^[4] Moreover, it bridged the gap between language and reality; language no longer simply conveyed the fictional world, but was composed of real objects to be physically lifted and moved. Indeed, after Virginia became acquainted with type composition, the physical placement and modification of words, required by letterpress printing, is reflected in her writing. Printing forced her to reevaluate her word choice, punctuation use, and how she built a sentence. Indeed, printing at the Hogarth Press marks the beginning of a new direction in Woolf’s writing, one that playfully experimented with form and composition."

Source: Hogarth Press by Jessica Svendsen, The Modernism Lab at Yale University.

Quick Links

2012-02-23T15:03:00.001-05:00

Publisher Barney Rosset died on Tuesday. He was 89.

Order of the Stick Raised $1.25M on Kickstarter. Permission to feel good about the world we live in granted.

The internet is on fire about how J.K. Rowling is writing a "book for adults" like they totally didn't read the Harry Potter series. The deal was struck with Little, Brown and will probably change books forever.

Dalkey Archive Press

2012-02-20T11:52:00.000-05:00

'The press has also republished a book called “Fire the Bastards!” to coincide with the Gaddis reissue. It’s a unique text. Originally published in 1962 under the name Jack Green, the book is essentially a seventy-nine-page harangue against the critics whom he saw as having utterly failed to recognize the greatness of “The Recognitions.”'

Source:
"Fire the Bastards!": The Great Defender of William Gaddis (The Book Bench)

Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

2012-02-17T15:29:00.000-05:00

Source: Charts and Diagrams Drawn by Famous Authors

199

2012-02-15T09:00:00.001-05:00

keyword searches that led people to shakeandco.com (via Google Analytics)

What's even more terrifying is that I can't replicate the result. Somebody hide us from the internet.

The Locusts Have No King, Dawn Powell

2012-02-14T13:50:00.001-05:00

"She was always mistaking his retreat from life as loneliness that must be assuaged, or else she was chiding him for not liking people. She was wrong, he felt. People amused him, and safe in her arms he did not fear them. He wanted to be a spectator, that was all, not actor; if possible he wanted a glass wall between him and other human beings and he was happy when Lyle joined him in the observation post, unhappy when she was on the other side of the glass. It made him uncomfortable when the actors addressed him, as if Myrna Loy should suddenly reach out of a moving picture to shake his hand."

Dickens World

2012-02-11T08:00:00.057-05:00

Did you know about Dickens World? If not, allow Sam Anderson's excellent piece in the New York Times to be your introduction. Take, for example, his passage on the Great Expectations boat ride:

"Halfway up a dark tunnel, the chemical smell-pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the absurdity of this commodified experience — all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone else’s voice, for most of the ride. At some point the boat swiveled and shot backward down a ramp, splashing us and soaking our winter coats, and an automated camera took our picture. It caught us looking like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, my friend resigned and unhappy — comedy and tragedy side by side, “in as regular alternation,” as Dickens put it in “Oliver Twist,” “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Afterward, in the gift shop, I bought a copy of the picture, as well as a 59-page version of “Great Expectations” published by a company called Snapshot Classics. “In the time it takes to read the original,” promised the book’s cover, which was designed to look soiled and creased, “you can read this Snapshot Classic up to 20 times and know the story and characters off by heart.”"

The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut , The New York Times.

Let Mencken Choose Your Major:

2012-02-09T12:20:00.002-05:00

H.L. Mencken

Classical Studies
"No rational man can go through the endless volumes of the Loeb library without concluding that the Romans were an essentially dull and practical people, without much more fancy in them than a Congressman or cow doctor. They had their high virtues, of course, but a lush and charming imagination was certainly not one. They were not poets, but policeman and lawyers."

"Classical Learning" from the New York American, January 1936.

Education
"The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child. Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable from and superior to the thing taught. Its mastery is a special business, a sort of transcendental high jumping."

"The Educational Process" from Education, Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 238-65.

Religious Studies
"No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune-telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest."

"Immune" from the American Mercury, March 1930, p. 289.

All selections taken from A Mencken Chrestomathy.