What horseshit. The film would in fact have been more persuasive had it presented a more balanced overview of our troubled food supply system. The distressing, and to my mind accurate, message that monopolies are putting profit before human and animal health and well being, is potent and distrubing, and would have been much better served without the emotional overkill, the taint of exaggeration; the helping of ham-fisted propaganda. (and okay, enough with the hackneyed food metaphors).

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Allen Lane conceived of Penguin Books as series of cheap reprints of good books in a new format, distributed through unconventional sales channels. These ideas were heavily influenced by The Albatross Continental Library series issued in Germany from 1932. Dubliners was #1. Albatross was the brainchild of John Holroyd Reece, a British publisher working on the continent.

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So, I noticed yesterday that Quill and Brush are having a sale, 50% off some pretty desirable titles. Checking to make sure the books really were ‘on sale’, I came across the same book – Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Signed – listed with Second Story Books. The only difference in description being this : ‘Comstock Collection Q&B.’

A quick search of which yielded this:

"If you follow book news you may have caught a snippet of this story. In July 2007, noted book collector Rolland L. Comstock was murdered in his home in Springfield MO that housed over 50,000 books. Nicholas Basbanes wrote about Comstock in the Madness Redux section of Patience and Fortitude….The Comstock family had to deal not only with the shock of Rolland’s untimely passing, but also with the shock of 50,000 books. They contacted the only bookman they knew: Nicholas Basbanes. Turns out Basbanes is a good friend of Allan Stypeck, owner of Second Story Books. Stypeck and Allen Ahearn of Quill and Brush are dealing with all book matters for the Comstock estate. From what I understand no stone is unturned and even film and book rights have been tied up. No surprise really. Stypeck runs a huge operation in Maryland and DC that covers every aspect of bookselling, including a radio show. Ahearn is a giant in the book game. He and his wife Patricia wrote a price guide that was a book-collecting bible before the internet took over pricing for the majority of modern first titles. About 1500 books, I suppose the crème of the Comstock collection, found their way into a catalog under the direction of Quill and Brush. Certain favorites of Comstock, like Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Banville and Edna O’Brien, were offered by Quill and Brush before the catalog was assembled. Tens of thousands of books went to Comstock’s alma mater, Drury College. That left 25,000 titles, and they are now housed at Second Story Books’ warehouse at 12160 Parklawn Drive in Rockville"

Call me macabre, but wouldn’t owning a ‘Comstock Collection’ item, hold a certain ghoulish cache, at least for some?

But wait, the plot thickens: Comstock died of gun shot wounds. He made it to the kitchen where he fell to his death, a signed First of  Lord of the Flies apparently lying on the floor beside his body.

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Copyright activist, speaker, teacher (how about ‘speacher’…or ‘spreacher’), columnist, science fiction novelist, short story writer, co-editor of  Boing Boing,  and the very manifestation of articulate dynamism, Cory Doctorow was in town recently to promote his novel Little Brother (free download here), a fast paced, current-day 1984-like polemic calling for teens to subvert security measures, especially those used by governments that claim to "defend my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.”

As Austin Grossman puts it in the New York Times:

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy…Little Brother argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

I’m clearly not nerdy enough… incarcerated I am in fact by technological illiteracy…incapacitated too…neither machine I used to record my conversation with Cory worked for the full duration of our encounter…they did however capture enough, thankfully, to provide his engaging take on the future of the book, the seeds of its destruction…and mention of a guy with a lemon up his nose. Please listen here:

(For discussion of copyright, please watch this space over the coming days for my interview with the acknowledged giant in the field, Bill Patry).

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