Day Three, Salt 2

Today was interesting. There was really rather good traffic and a lot of good questions and interest. I had several very good conversations...one with three young people was particularly interesting...I love new/emerging collectors. I had a several reasonably good sales...which is very nice...though I would still like at least one really good one. Hope spring eternal.

Interestingly, one of my sales was to a gentleman who called me yesterday having seen an item listed online and asking about it. I told him I was at a fair and that the item was with me...and asked him were he was...only to have him say that he was in Baltimore. I left him a ticket at Will Call, he came and purchased the item...now, does it get sourced to the internet or the book fair?

A reasonably large group of us (11) all trekked out to Salt yet again. I know there are many other good places here in town...but we had promised some friends to go there with them and...well...it is just really good . We were much better controlled tonight. Suzanne and I split orders of Duck Fat Fries and the Trio of Gazpacho...even more impressively, we split a wonderful filet (with smoked corn and wilted green polenta, onion ring, tomato relish, horseradish and bacon creme fraiche) and a honeydew melon and goat cheese salad with a fresh mint and Macadamia nut vinaigrette. We finished dinner by splitting their "sunday"...with fried wontons (stuffed with chocolate and banana, carmel ice cream, marachino cherry whipped cream and homemade carmel sauce. Needless to say, it was exceptional. The food and the company was wonderful.

Now in hotel room...not working on the presentation I need to do tomorrow .

3am, long day, good day, great evening... SALT 1

Today was good...fairly strong traffic...many good conversations...several strong leads and follow-up opportunities and the like. Tonight was outstanding. John Wronoski of Lame Duck Books fame came to town and invited us to join us him (and two others) for dinner at SALT. As he had picked the restaurant on my suggestion (see, eg, this), I could not very well say no ("please, don't throw me into the brier patch").

We arrived at about 845 or so. The five of us sat down, reviewed the menu, could not make rational choice, so we ordered nearly everything. I was just going to list what I had...but as we shared basically every item...I thought I should just list it all:

appetizers

House Salad
Fresh mixed greens, marinated tomatoes, kalamata olives, red wine vinaigrette, shaved Parmesan Reggiano

Fried Oyster Salad
Arugula, bacon croutons, tomatoes, buttermilk dressing

Eastern Shore Corn Salad
Spicy crab and avocado ball, sweet onion vinaigrette

Trio of Gazpacho [x 2]
Amish tomato, watermelon chili and mango jicama

Gulf Shrimp Ceviche
Orange, lime, cilantro, cusco corn, red onion, aji amarillo

Foie Gras & Kobe Beef Slider
With truffle aioli and red onion marmalade

Duck Fat French Fries
With a trio of aioli

entrees

Seared Day Boat Scallops
Spicy crab topping, summer succotash of corn, peas and peppers

Coriander and Pepper Crusted Tuna
Served over seaweed salad with spicy tuna pot stickers and ginger soy glace

Grilled Petite Lamb Chops
Warm Moroccan chicpea salad, orange, onions, fresh herbs

Atlantic Wahoo Loin
Marinated in sweet chili-soy, quinoa salad, mango,chimichurri

Duck Confit Ravioli
Truffled forest mushroom broth, green onions, Parmesan Reggiano

Yes, that is right...5 people ordered 7 appitizers...and then 5 entrees...and dessert: A) a trio of ice creams (three small cones of home made ice cream (Mocha, Carmel and something I no longer remember)); their iteration of a banana sunday (bananas fried in cannoli rolls, peach ice cream, home-made camel sauce) and a lemon and wild blueberry creme brule.

It was exceptional...the standouts were probably the mango jicama gazpacho and my crusted tuna was absolutely wonderful. We ate too much, drank just about the correct amount and failed in fighting John over the bill and I am going to have to figure out a way to thank him for the wonderful meal...and for what followed. We retired to the home of John's friend, a Baltimoron (his term) and a collector on a level few could believe. I have been in a lot of homes of a lot of book lovers...many of whom own [too] many books. The bar has been completely reset. Quite literally, every room is lined with books...several floor to ceiling...several more than one layer deep. The library has 15 foot(ish) ceilings, shelves lining all the walls (13 shelves)...most stacked *three* deep. Wonderful things. Serious things. Frivolous things. It was truly unbelievable.

If possible, better than the books was sitting (for hours) in the library...drinking single malt/port/aquavit/etc...and talking with our host (or just listening to his stories). I have not had an evening this enjoyable in a very long time...and I will never forget it.

The power of the Pirate Tie...

For the first time in over four years, I wore a non-biblio tie. Two of
the books I sold today were Pyle's Book of Pirates and an 1814 edition
of Johnson's History of Pirates...why, clearly it was the skull and
cross bones tie...

Day one over...urgh...

It was a long day...busy...lots of traffic and interest. We shall see how much translates to closed sales. I was interviewed today for next years promo spots...hope my twitching was under control . Picked up some *really* good Thai food at My Thai and watched Obamarama with friends (B&B Books and Prints Charming). Fun was had by all.

View down the Maine aisle...

J. Arsenault is a booth away (from Arrowsic, ME). He is sitting in front of A.E. Runge Rugs (Yarmouth, ME). We boys from Maine need to start
thinking about shipping together.

View down the main aisle...

Show is open...throngs surge...

Mainely rugs...

My wife would point out that I failed to look at The Checklist...I
would say I simply forgot our rug. Luckily, one of our Portland area
friends and nationally renowned rug dealers A.E. (Tad) Runge is right
across the aisle. He donated this rug to the cause...I hope I can sell
it for him...[link to follow]

Done...finally.

It only took 10 hours...but it does look pretty good. They are installing the carpet tonight. Show starts at noon tomorrow...detailed post tomorrow eve as I'll have my computer to do updates.

Getting there...

5-6 hours into the process...

One case done...

Advantage of arriving early (cont)

Right next door to Kelmscott Books is Royal Books. Kevin and co. Is
deep in modern lit. and the like. As it happens, he has just picked up
about 45 boxes of really nice photography monographs. Kevin told me I
was the first from away to paw through them...I managed to limit
myself to the three piles seen below. I hope I sell enough to free up
room *g*.

The advantage of getting into town early

Our first stop in Baltimore was at Kelmscott Books (links to
follow...too much of a pain via phone). Great books, nice humans, and
a very friendly cat. Picked up a couple books on books, including a
nice Bruce Rogers I've been looking for for a while now...and then:

Nearly packed

We should be off on time...shocking.

Preparing for the Baltimore show and a TV invite...

Well, I finished my presentation for the seminar on Sunday at the Baltimore Show. It should be relatively interesting and I had some fun with what Keynote can do. I have printed new slips for the various fall shows and finally managed to get them all cut and corner-clipped. Now I just have to pack the boxes...and the van. The plan is to hit the road on Monday. Hope springs eternal.

It appears I will again be interviewed on Balt. TV early Friday morning. I did this last year and it was quite fun...though far too early in the morning. I know what I will be bringing with me and it should be a fun little segment.

Now I just have to manage to figure out how to find some time to sleep between now and then...urgh.

Dagon assisting with slip cutting

I had all my book descriptions reprinted and am in the process of
cutting/trimming them. Dagon has been assisting as shown here.

As if bogus signatures aren't a big enough problem already...

The Guardian has published a short article on a currently unnamed publishing house that is actively seeking 14 people able and willing to forge the signatures of a soon to be published book. For this service, they will be paid $25 per 200 books signed. According to the ad, the project will run for two, eight hour days...based on those numbers, this could mean as many as 53,000 or so "signed" books. I guess it undermines the ebay fraudsters...

It used to be that you could at least count on publisher's signed copies to be legit...oh well.

Book-Art, the iPhone and a new page in the art form...

I have just been exploring the arguably the first "innovative" book form I've seen...at least from a tech standpoint. Prior to the publication of "Shadows Never Sleep", books on devices (pdas, kindle, iphone, etc) were simply text on a page. Basically, it was simply a story text put into one digital form or another.

Shadows Never Sleep is different. "Reading" the story involves using the "zoom" function of the iPhone and moving moving the page beneath the screen. It is an interesting way to move through a tale and certainly engages you in the process. I hope others take the concept further. Yet another good reason to have an iPhone.

New applicant for OBC

We were caught off guard when this very cute, very young (6 WM old)
kitten arrived to apply for the open position of Book Cat. He is a
most interesting auburn color.

Clematis running amok

This wall of green sprung forth from one little slip and will soon be
covered in wee white flowers.

Moving print blocks at Beijing opening ceremony...

If you missed the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics, track down a video and watch it...it was arguably one of the best produced and executed "live events" I've ever seen.

For we bookish folks, there was a stunning section with 2008 "wood block" cubes, tipping a hat to China's invention of movable type. What these blocks did must be seen to be believed. Suffice it to say that I assumed through most of it that it was a pneumatically driven computer program...only to find at the end that each block had a human in it...standing and dropping according to the choreography.

I saw an interview today with Zhang Yimou (Chinese director and producer of 2008 Opening Ceremony) in which he said, of the Movable Type section that those men (and women?) spent the last FOUR MONTHS practicing what we saw last night at least EIGHT HOURS a day (significantly more in the last weeks). He stated that never once were they able to do it flawlessly...until last night. I will post a video of this section as soon as I can find one. Amazing.

George Orwell Blogging From Beyond the Grave

The Orwell Trust (together with Political Quarterly and the Media Standards Trust) has begun posting daily entries from George Orwell's diaries exactly 70 years after he wrote them. Thus, the first entry was August 9th, 1938 ("Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive..."). The entries are annotated and tagged. It is quite brilliant.

NPR has a nice bit about it and the geeks are pleased, too.

From the site's announcement post:

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

Pretty much the best political cartoon I've seen in a bit...

It's Offical...we will be in SF in February.

Applications went out today for the 2009 ABAA San Fransisco Book Fair. I have already returned mine and am, officially, the third one to be received. WooHoo! We loved doing the SF fair last year and they share the same venue (though this one is, apparently, twice as big or so). I think my parents may head out with us, which will be very fun. Then again, being able to spend a week in SF in mid-February (not a great time in Maine) is quite a treat by itself.

On a related note, I have become convinced that having Acrobat Professional is entirely justified by its ability to take any .pdf document and automatically create an editable form from it...and then digitally sign it. The days of typewriters are pretty much gone (we do not have one in the house...so you really can only hand-write forms like this (a sad proposition when one's handwriting looks like mine does...). I just love being able to fill in these contracts, "sign" then and email them off. Slick. Slick. Slick.

Paris Hilton enters the Presidential race...

Wow. Genuinely funny. As most of you probably know, McCain & Co. chose to paint Obamarama as a faux celebrity by painting him as another Paris Hilton (ignoring, of course, her father and grandfather's rather extensive support of the RNC). Paris has responded. I am not a fan, but must say my opinion has gone up a lot... Not bookish...but too good to miss.

Spit or Swallow: A Manifesto (continued)

All right, I took a few better images and thought I would post them now. Any ideas re the artist would be appreciated. I know she owned the "bourbongirl.com" domain, though it is no longer live and there is no whois data available.

I *love* the "Special! x-large bonsai"...

Enjoy the art...it goes to shows with me, so stop by and you can poke through them all...

[N.B. Clicking (or rightclicking, optimally) will get you larger images in another tab/window.]

[Updated - Succeeded in testing how often Mother is reading the blog *evil grin*. Use of "alright" or "alot" absolutely guarantees a response...]

Spit or Swallow: A Manifesto

Does anyone recognize this work? It was done in 2001--artist unknown.

This is one of the 45 dry-point etchings w/ holographic captions. They are brilliantly executed & very funny. Others include, "I will not feed martini olives to babies." & "I will not refute dysjunctive
syllogism."I am rather desperate to find the artist.

I'll likely post more soon...though not off the iPhone. [edited to improve image quality]

Churchill in Boston

Testing blog-from-phone. This is, apparently, WC leaving COV in Boston.

Belated boat update...

The boys and I (and their Granddaddy) spent several hours on the boats early this summer. We will repaint them in the fall, but first we oiled the inside of both with great care.

The larger is a 14 foot Whitehall (named after the street in NY where they were first made and famed for their speed in the harbor (the first boat to meet a merchant ship coming in got dibs on the best cargo, speed was important)). She has beautiful 9 foot oars and she just flys (all the more so when there are two oarmen). This whitehall was retrofitted to take a small sail.

The other is a wee pram. A dear friend asked a local boatbuilder to make him the smallest boat possible that could safely hold three adults and gear. This 6 foot pram was the result. He has moved away for a bit and left it on indefinite loan, to be cared for and used vigorously by Thing 1 and Thing 2. Thing 2 is learning to row this summer...additional photos are likely to follow.

And now for an even geekier moment...

Warcarting is unlikely to be popular anywhere but MIT (or, perhaps, CalTech). It is nice to see that hardware hacking is alive and well... Do not miss the pictures/captions toward the bottom.

Can an iPhone 3G be cooler....

Absolutely...when it digs into old auction records on the fly. My old cell finally died the ignominious death it has been crawling toward and has been replaced with this lovely bit of plastic, metal and glass. As I promised KKL, one of the first things I did was log onto American Book Prices Current and set it as one of my favorites. Altogether too much fun.

Very cool criminal broadside....

Five people, four men and a woman, were executed at Newgate in the mid-1600s (well, many more than that...but here we are only interested in those described in this broadside). One of them was a man of some importance, the entire back sheet was given to his story and contrition (he insured and then burned his offices). The other four were convicted together of the same crime.

The three men and one woman apparently worked together to "make a coin appear to be silver" That is, they counterfeited a single coin. For this crime, the three men were sentenced to hang and the woman, for the same crime, was sentence to be burned at the stake.

The broadside is a lovely piece...but it is the woodcuts that make it wonderful. There are only two, the publisher chose not to illustrate the single hanging. The three men take up about half the front page, the woman at the stake is about 1/3 the third page. Apparently the crowd begged for mercy as she cried out on the stake...

Summer power reading...

As I mentioned earlier, Thing One blew by the 10 book goal this summer and was rewarded with a $10 savings account (hypothetically, matched by various others). However, it was not just any ten books he knocked down. Starting a day or so after mid-June, T1 started the Harry Potter series and finished the last one yesterday.

He was very funny about it. He decided he wanted to read the Bloomsbury special editions to start with...largely because he liked the bound in bookmarks. At book four, he had to choose the trade Bloomsbury or Scholastic edition and opted for the Brit on the grounds that he liked the British expressions, etc. The last three he had to switch to the Scholastics, but found that they did less substitution of "gits" and the like.

His best exclamation came at the end of Book 6 when, at about 9:30 at night or so (he was allowed to read late some nights), "DUMBLEDORE IS DEAD?!?!?" Book 7 added several, "Dobby is dead?!?", "Lupin is dead?!?", "Fred is dead?!?...What is wrong with this book?!?" Other than characters he liked dying, he loved the series and wants to reread it starting now. I have suggested he let it sink in and read it again in a year or so.

I just have to say that I am very proud that my 10 year-old read 4224 pages in just this series...not counting his other reading this summer (two other short sets and several stand-alone books). I could not be more proud.

Getting paid to read...

My older son just opened a savings account at TD Banknorth. He did it with the $10 that the the bank gave him for reading 10 books this summer. Sadly, though the program started in June, the nice young account manager told us that he was the first customer she had worked with as part of the program. That said, they are expecting a surge in the coming weeks...the program ends at the end of September. I know my younger is on Number Seven of his ten.

To learn more about the program, see this. I think it is great that the TD Banknorth is willing to support this program. For my boys, it is definitely just a bonus, as they would read regardless...but anything that encourages kids to read is a good thing.

Arguably the biggest thing in the used/rare book biz in years...

Amazon has agreed to purchase ABE. It will, apparently continue to run as a quasi-standalone entity. It will be very interesting to see how Amazon leverages this acquisition and whether/how it will increase traffic "into" the used/rare book market.