Bibliomania and the not-so-light side of book hoarding

Last week, the National Post‘s Mark Medley wrote a piece about his ever-expanding book collection and the difficulty he has lightening his load by even a single volume. “I am a book hoarder,” he says. “Help me, please.”

The same day the article was published, CBC Radio’s Metro Morning picked up the story and host Matt Galloway spent the rest of the week discussing the impulse on air, and over Twitter and Facebook. He even brought in Shelagh Rogers to talk about her own book-collecting habits. By the end of the weekend, the term “book hoarder” came up in national media a lot.

The piece caught the eye of one Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding. In her view, the conversation around book hoarding overlooked an important fact: hoarding is more than a mild eccentricity, it’s an illness. (To be fair, Rogers avoided the word “hoarder” throughout her interview with Metro Morning, opting instead to call herself a “book lover.”) Sholl responded to Medley’s article on her blog at Psychology Today.

In her post, “You Are Not a Book Hoarder,” she attempts to set the record straight on bibliomania:

Just because you have a lot of books, that doesn’t mean you’re a bibliomaniac. Can you walk through the room in which your books are stored? Have you depleted any of your life savings on these books? Do you hide when the doorbell rings or not allow a plumber into your home when your sink is clogged?

…

[C]arelessly tossing the label of hoarder around, as the National Post essay does, is disrespectful to hoarders and those affected by the disorder…. [N]o one’s arguing that the term hoarding is off limits. Or that you can’t joke about hoarding, ever…. Maybe the line between harmless humor and disrespectful minimization of a mental illness is similar to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography — you know it when you see it. Or maybe it’s simply keeping in mind that common expression: Language matters.

Harry Potter, Dan Brown dominate U.K. list of best-selling books

The stereotype has it that England is filled with recondite literati ensconced in mahogany-lined libraries reading leather-bound volumes of Romantic poetry and plump Victorian novels. This as compared to the beer-swilling philistines in America, gorging themselves on a diet of Dan Brown and Tom Clancy (if they read at all). Well, newly released data indicates that this conception is flawed. Readers in the U.K., it would seem, have every bit as much devotion to Dan Brown as their counterparts across the Atlantic.

As noted in the Guardian over the weekend, Brown took the number one spot on Neilsen Bookscan’s list of the U.K.’s best-selling books released since the company began collecting data in 1998. According to the service, which tracks 90 per cent of book purchases in the U.K., The Da Vinci Code moved 4,522,025 units between 1998 and 2010, which accounted for a staggering £22,857,837.53 in revenue. Angels and Demons, Brown’s prequel to The Da Vinci Code, took the fourth spot on the list, with 3,096,850 units sold, accounting for sales of £15,537,324.84.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the top 10 is devoted to Harry Potter: all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard are featured, with the first in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, taking the number two spot. The only place in the top 10 not devoted to Brown or Rowling goes to Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight, which clocks in at number nine. In fact, one has to make it to number 13 before a title by an author not among the three already mentioned appears: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.

Perhaps surprisingly, Stieg Larsson does not crop up on the list until number 17, although the three novels in the Swedish author’s Millennium Trilogy came in at numbers one, two, and three respectively on the list of U.K. bestsellers for 2010.

Mr. Brown wants to go to Ottawa

As eye weekly reports, Louis Riel author Chester Brown is looking to get in on the federal election as a Libertarian candidate. He’s currently trying to amass the 100 signatures necessary to get the party’s nomination for the Trinity-Spadina riding, though even if he does, it’s unlikely that incumbent Olivia Chow will be too worried.

As eye‘s Marc Weisblott writes, The Beguiling is soliciting signatures on Brown’s behalf, with this caveat: “Please note: You can nominate Chester and then decide to vote for someone who might actually get elected.”

Weisblott also notes that Brown received a $16,000 Canada Council grant for his next graphic-novel project, “a 200-page chronicle of his experiences paying for sexual services.” Is anyone else worried that the Tories are smelling blood in the water?

Furthermore:

How is a candidate telling voters that the government should keep as much distance as rationally possible going to explain that one?

“I don’t understand why those grants are there,” says Brown. “If you can’t make money off your art then you should get a real job to support yourself.

“I also don’t think that people collecting welfare are doing anything wrong. What I’m taking a stand against are the people who do the distributing.

“And, if I didn’t take it, the money would probably go to someone less deserving than me.”

Let’s not forget that star CanLit author Thomas King – whose next project, I think we can assume, is probably not a 200-page chronicle of his experiences paying for sexual services – is also running in this election. He’s an NDP candidate in Guelph, under the presumably more voter-friendly name of Tom King.

Going once … going twice …

Fans of the late Canadian novelist and ZZ Top lookalike Robertson Davies can now claim a part of the author’s history for themselves. StyleNorth reports that selected pieces of furniture and decorations belonging to the novelist and playwright, who died in 1995, are up for sale. Canadian auction house Ritchies is conducting the sale, which will be held from Sept. 16-18.

Items in the sale include an English walnut stationery box valued between $200 and $300, and a Victorian page turner with a tortoise-shell blade and a handle embossed with the image of St. George, whose shield is monogrammed with the initials RWD.

But perhaps the most desirable item on the block will be Davies’s personal writing desk, an early-20th-century leather-topped, Chippendale-style mahogony desk, valued between $1,000 and $1,500. Superstitious writers who want to bask in the reflected glory of a Canadian literary icon and possibly soak up some residual inspiration may be willing to part with a couple of thou’ for this particular item. Given Davies’ own fascination with ghosts and spirits, perhaps the buyer will wind up with more than just a jazzy piece of furniture.

Does anyone have $1,500 Quillblog could borrow?

GG Unit

John Meier wants to own every English-language first edition book that has ever won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. (You may remember him from a Quillblog post back in November.)

Today, Meier, 51, was profiled in the The Globe and Mail. Marsha Lederman describes the Ikea Billy bookcases where Meier houses his collection on the ground floor of his parent’s house. He uses blackout curtains to protect the books and sometimes even shelves them backwards so as not to expose colours prone to fading, such as the Day-Glo orange on his four copies of Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960).

Meier is currently trying to raise $500, 000 to display his collection at the Cultural Olympiad, which will coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympics. After the Olympics, Meier hopes to take his books on a cross-country tour of Canada. The Canada Council will not fund the project because it “constitutes privileged treatment” of the English-language Governor General winners for fiction.

Read the article here. For more on Meier read this story about the National Book-Collecting Contest published in Q&Q last month.

Bookmarks: McMurtry on book collecting; Rushdie on latest Booker win; “indecent sunbathing”

Some book-related links:

• Larry McMurtry’s new book about book collecting (The New York Times)
• Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children‘s third Booker win (The Guardian)
• Booker judge thinks future winners should be determined by public (Sydney Morning Herald)
• Christian Science Monitor looks at Google Book Search (The Christian Science Monitor)
• U.K. publishing professional arrested in Dubai for nude sunbathing (The Daily Telegraph)
• U.K. publishing professional fears being made example of (The Daily Telegraph)
• U.K. publishing professional “wasn’t wild enough” for ex-boyfriend (The Daily Telegraph)

James Bond, museum piece

From CBC.ca:

Like Trekkies or Beatles fanatics, James Bond buffs are proud of the factoid retention that comes with their obsessive fandom. Thus, when the Fleming Collection – an art museum originally endowed by Robert Fleming, financier grandfather of Bond creator Ian Fleming – announced the launch of an exhibit celebrating the cover art of James Bond novels, the calls started pouring in.

“We’ve had to deal with the fans every step of the way,” says Selina Skipwith, curator of Bond Bound. “The responses to the literature on our website were like” — and here she affects a drippy tone to mimic a Bond fan — “‘You say Fleming was 43 when he wrote Casino Royale, but in fact he turned 44 before he handed the manuscript to the publisher, Jonathan Cape.’”

Luckily, as keeper of the Fleming Collection, Skipwith is armed with more Bond minutiae than most aficionados. In preparation for the exhibit, which opened April 22, she returned to the Fleming oeuvre, rereading dozens of novels and comparing cover artwork from dozens of countries. Skipwith is the ultimate Bond girl – at least until late June, when the exhibit closes and, in all probability, London will be Bonded out.

Only in the U.K. would the curator of a major exhibit openly mock that exhibit’s target audience.

Attack of the robo-authors

Philip M. Parker is the (computer-aided) author of more than 200,000 books. And, thanks to the wonders of print-on-demand, he has yet to lose money on a single one. His work represents the tip of a very long tail.

From the New York Times:

Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

All we need now is a machine that reads for us, and we’ll finally be free of the oppressive shackles of literate culture.

Q&Q wants to hear from you

Over the last few months, Q&Q has been collecting data for our upcoming industry salary survey, which will appear in our June issue. We’ve got a lot of facts and figures, but we’d also like to hear some more personal stories, which is where you, dear reader, come in.

If you work for a publisher, distributor, or wholesaler, and you’re willing to discuss the pros and cons of your job (relating to the work, the pay, the hours, the office conditions, or anything at all, really), please give our staff writer, Scott MacDonald, a call at 416-364-3333, ex. 3111.

Please note that we won’t print any names or identifying details without specific permission.

I see dead people(‘s libraries)

Library Thing, a social networking website for booklovers, is offering, for your browsing pleasure, the libraries of such luminaries as James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Adam Smith, mostly compiled from collections held by museums and estates.

Some libraries provide few surprises: for instance, Ernest Hemingway had about a million books on hunting, bullfighting, and the first World War. But on the other hand, there’s something very touching about picturing Tupac Shakur settling down with a nice cup of tea and The Diary of Anaïs Nin.