Boz Books, Hay-on-Wye, United Kingdom.

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“All good writing is swimming underwater  and holding your breath.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Richard Taylor will offer the Summer Fiction Workshop, English 2903A, Tuesday evenings, 6-9 p.m. from May 10 – August 9. This half credit course will appeal to anyone interested in writing post card fiction, short stories, novels, and creative non fiction like blogs, personal essays, humour, travel and memoir writing. Much of the time will be devoted to fun, stimulating writing exercises, learning how to balance inspiration and discipline, finding a personal voice, choosing a subject and developing a sense of structure. There will also be group critiques of works-in-progress and creative acts of revision and self editing. As usual, the workshop will consist of beginners, and more advanced writers of all genres. On warm evenings some class time will be on the banks of the Rideau River.

For more information, please check www.taylorswave.ca or e-mail Rick at taylorswave@sympatico.ca

Rick has published a collection of short stories, a novel, many feature magazine articles and an Australian travel memoir, House Inside the Waves: Domesticity, Art and the Surfing Life. For 20 years he has taught about 100 writing workshops in Ottawa, Hong Kong, Australia and Tuscany. Since 1995, when he was Carleton writer-in-residence he has taught the Fiction Workshop, and for 5 years he taught writing at Algonquin College. This summer he will offer his Sixth Annual Write by the Lake summer writers’ retreat in Val-des-Monts Quebec near a waterfall at his beautiful lake house, Monet Bay. While surfing and swimming around the world, he is working on an unusual book about swimming with writers, Water and Desire.

 “All memory is fiction.” Spalding Gray

“All life, once lived, is fiction.” Norman Levine

“Any story told twice is fiction.” Grace Paley

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We recently asked Mark Samuels Lasner to provide us with a list of his Top Ten Literary Destinations in the United States. Here it is:

Morgan Library & Museum, New York New York
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge
Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
The Huntington Library, San Marino
Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington
Oak Knoll Bookstore, New Castle
Library of Congress, Washington
Princeton University Library, Princeton
My own collection, (naturally), Morris Library. Univ.of Delaware, Newark

Collector, bibliographer, and typographer Mark Samuels Lasner is Senior  Research Fellow at the University of Delaware Library. He is the author of The Bookplates of Aubrey Beardsley (Rivendale Press, 2008), A Bibliography of Enoch Soames (Rivendale Press, 1999), The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (Eighteen Nineties Society, 1998), A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (Thomas G. Boss Fine Books, 1995), and numerous other titles.

The Mark Samuels Lasner Collection is associated with the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware Library.

First a word of thanks to those of you who have read and responded to this blog over the past 3-4 years, your positive involvement has made the experience of writing it a very rewarding one.

As some of you may know, about a year ago I purchased a small publishing firm called the Book Hunter Press. From 1993-2004 it produced a series of guide books which together listed all of the used/antiquarian bookstores in North America. During the past year I, along with several others, have been busy updating the BHP list and adding many new literary destinations. In order to ‘consolidate’ efforts I have decided to house, at least for now, Nota Bene Books on the new www.literarytourist.com website. Focus will remain the same, but new post categories will be added to reflect the nature of the new site, and the interests of those who love visiting used bookstores and participating in literary activities and events .

Once again, I’d like to thank those of you who’ve followed Nota Bene, and to invite you all to participate in my new venture, either through membership, or by reviewing a few of your favourite bookstores (please search here), or both.

Roderick Cave with George lll at the British Library

The Golden Cockerel Press is one of most important, productive English private presses in the history of fine printing. In 2002 Oak Knoll Press and the British Library co-published the first extensive study of the Golden Cockerel. Written by Roderick Cave, the book is based on interviews and the Press’ widely-scattered archives.  Responsible in large part for a revival in wood-engraving, Golden Cockerel Press books published between 1920-1960 contain the work of  brilliant practitioners such as Robert Gibbings (who owned the Press throughout much of the 20s), Eric Gill, David Jones, Agnes Miller Parker, Eric Ravilious, and John Buckland-Wright.  The Press’ literary achievement was also significant; it published original manuscripts by writers such as H.E. Bates, A.E. Coppard and T.E. Lawrence.

I met with Roderick Cave recently at the British Library to discuss the works and history of The Golden Cockerel Press. As with all episodes in our Publisher History Series, questions are asked primarily from the perspective of a book collector. Please listen here:

This interview is part of our  Book Publisher Series which focuses on the histories of important British, American and Canadian publishing houses, and how best to go about collecting their works.

Copyright © 2010 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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Here is the first in a series of posts/essays by prominent writers and book lovers about their favourite used bookstores:

Visiting the Karaghiozis Emporium

David Solway

I don’t make a habit of visiting used or rare bookshops, not being a collector and content to rely on Amazon for my reading needs—banausic as this may sound. I’m far more interested in content than in the cultural patina of the bibelot. And then I must admit to a callow streak of impatience in my nature. Browsing stacks and shelves of books has approximately the same effect on me as visiting a museum: exhaustion, and a profound yearning to go somewhere for coffee.

Notwithstanding, I have enjoyed the occasional experience—rarer than the books I might be examining—of patronizing an out-of-the-way bibliotheca from time to time, the most memorable of which occurred a few years back when I wandered in, quite by chance, to the Karaghiozis Emporium in the warrens of the Plaka in Athens. This was a decrepit little hovel named after the celebrated puppet-theater character—uneducated, unemployed, given to risqué jokes and sharp social satire—who has delighted Greek audiences for generations. The place struck me as a kind of bookend to the Karaghiozis Museum in the posh Athenian suburb of Maroussi (of Henry Miller fame), thus bracketing the vast social disparities in Greek society while at the same time accentuating its cultural and historical unity.

The Karaghiozis Emporium, despite its exalted name, was nothing more than a hole in the wall, a gap in a stone façade fringed by a pelmet of aluminum shutters. It was not so much a used bookstore or a rare bookstore as a rarely used bookstore. The only occupant when I entered the premises was the affentiko (proprietor), a grizzled dwarf who seemed a dead ringer for the rogue puppet himself. He was seated on a rather high tripod, sipping a turkiko (Greek coffee) which he poured from a battered briki and scanning a much crumpled newspaper, which turned out to be the popular leftwing rag Eleftherotypia, favoured by trade unionists, diehard communists and prospective terrorists. He scarcely troubled to notice me as I cast a skeptical eye over the mouldering copies of socialist tracts, translations of various French anarchists, a prominently displayed Franz Fanon and, of course, the obligatory pile of Communist Manifestos and Das Kapitals, all looking distinctly worse for the machinations of that ruthless free market enterprise, Time. There was also a saucer of milk and the scattered heads of maridhes (smelt) on the dirt floor laid out for the feral cats that would slink in for a brief repast—an oddity I appreciated. The affentiko obviously had a soft spot for the proletarians among the scavenging classes.

As he had not bothered to acknowledge me and as I could see nothing of interest among his wares, I was about to leave when I noticed, at the top of a corded bundle by the cave-like entrance, a cat-eared copy of Yannis Ritsos’ Epitaphios, the poet’s 1936 threnody for a worker assassinated during the Salonika general strike. This was indeed a rare find. Receiving permission to untie the parcel—permission consisted of an abrupt lowering of the head, the Greek gesture for assent—I discovered the 1967 edition of Dinos Christianopoulos’ Poiimata (Poems) and a loose-sheet copy, collected between cardboard panels, of Eleni Vasileiou’s Appolonia, which I’d vaguely heard of but had never come across.

I couldn’t believe my luck and immediately began the process of negotiation. For unlike bookseller and author David Mason’s Rules # 9 and #29 in his charming pamphlet The Protocols of Used Bookstores—“Do not ask for a discount” and “It is not nice to lecture the proprietor on how and why you know that the price of his book is ludicrous”—bargaining is expected and pro forma in a traditional Levantine or Greek marketplace, which the Karaghiozis Emporium manifestly was. Now the affentiko deigned to address me and pointed to a tiny stool at the edge of the cluttered table where I could make myself uncomfortable. And so the haggling began, amid the howls of cats, the incessant hammering from the adjacent metal shop and the whorls of black smoke wafting in from the passing trikiklos (3-wheeled motorized carts).

My interlocutor’s socialist sympathies were no impediment to his shrewd and sinuous bargaining methods, claiming the rarity of the books—“they are like triremes that fly over the trees at sunset,” he said, quoting one of Ritsos’ better lines from “The Dead House,” which impressed me greatly. (Another used bookseller I had dealt with in Montreal quoted only prices.) He mentioned the strenuous and costly hunt to locate these coveted tomes in the scriptorium of a monastery on Mount Athos—a most unlikely repository for a cache of leftist volumes—and his unwillingness to part with them except to someone he judged worthy of so precious and exquisite an intellectual treasure. Feeling that he was attempting to compensate for his short stature by a tall price, I feigned a certain weary indifference, assuring him I was mainly interested in the books as a sentimental token of my visit to the Plaka.

Moreover, I affected to have little leisure, letting it be known that I intended to stop by the shoe shop across the alleyway for a pair of sandals before rushing to Pireaus to catch the ship back to the island where I was spending the summer. This was, I soon realized, too clumsy and transparent a ploy to be effective but I partially recovered lost ground by matching his Ritsos quote with one from Seferis’ signature poem, “In the Manner of G.S.”: “Ships whistle now as night falls on Pireaus,” which earned me an involuntary grunt of approval and perhaps a more acceptable price. Meanwhile, I glanced frequently and conspicuously at my watch. He sipped his turkiko and grumbled beneath his breath, peering closely at the books as if he were about to cut diamonds. It didn’t look like we were making much progress. Then came his crowning maneuver. He slipped from his perch behind the table and made as if to replace the books in the corner where I had found them. My face fell, rather too visibly, I’m afraid. That was his cue.

Suddenly appearing to change his mind, he smiled benignly, as if taking pity on the poor foreigner who had belatedly understood the spiritual value of the antiquarian gift he was about to forfeit, and stated his final price, the best he could do considering his daily expenses, the stray cats he had to feed, the exorbitant rent for this spilaion (cave), and the three daughters he had to build prika (dowry) houses for. My daughters, he said, quoting Ritsos again, are “at the windows, hidden behind their dreams.” Despite the poetry and my growing respect for the man, which tended to make me an easy mark, the tab still seemed a trifle steep. But it was also a question of the bookseller’s dignity, not only of my pocketbook, and so we arrived at a satisfactory price, a little higher than I’d budgeted for, a little lower than he’d initially demanded. Karaghiozis scored his triumph and everyone was happy. The bookseller got his adjusted price, I luxuriated in my trove, the cats had their maridhes and the daughters, no doubt, could look forward to their prika.

But, of course, since the shoe shop was in full view directly across the way and I couldn’t honourably renege on my weak transactional strategy, it also cost me a pair of sandals.

David Solway is a distinguished Canadian poet, essayist and literary critic. His book of poetry Reaching for Clear, won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry awarded by the Quebec Writers’ Federation. An earlier volume, Franklin’s Passage was awarded Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. He has published several books on education theory and literary criticism with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and McGill-Queen’s University Press. His latest volume of literary criticism is Director’s Cut. A political study, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, was a Canadian bestseller. From 2001 to 2008, he served as Associate Editor with Books in Canada and is currently a contributing editor with Arts & Opinion and The Métropolitain.

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