This Ain’t the Rosedale Library to re-emerge

Despite the stifling heat and humidity, Book Madam Julie Wilson and Invisible Publishing’s Nic Boshart hosted an al fresco reading outside the troubled This Ain’t the Rosedale Library bookstore last night. Originally slated as a stop on Jeff Miller’s summer tour for Ghost Pine: All Stories True (Invisible Publishing), the reading became a celebration of the bookstore instead.

Besides Miller, who hails from Montreal, the readers included Joey Comeau and Liz Worth, both of Toronto, and Dave Roche of Kansas City. Listeners crowded around the concrete patio, sitting on benches and cross-legged on the ground. After the readings, each reader recounted how indie bookstores have affected their writing, and Charlie Huisken gave a This-Ain’t state-of-the-union: It’s “business as unusual.” Once he and his son and partner Jesse have extricated themselves from their current situation, he said, they can work on getting This Ain’t up and running again. He gave no details, but said the business will probably look quite different than it used to.

Daily book biz round-up: Neil Gaiman’s Spawn; library books with mayo; and more

News bites:

• Publishers call new Amazon “Levels of Service” plan “extortion”
• Harlequin signs deal with Russian publisher
• Little, Brown launches new imprint: Mulholland Drive
• In hopes of landing lucrative legal settlement, Neil Gaiman admits to creating terrible Spawn characters
• Woman arrested for spreading mayonnaise, corn syrup, other substances on library books

Librarians blog about awful books

Time magazine has a fun article about two librarians from the Detroit area who have started a blog called Awful Library Books, where they list some of the outdated, irrelevant, or abysmal titles they’ve come across (they also solicit submissions from the general public). Titles range from the laughably insensitive (Creative Recreation for the Mentally Retarded) to the merely anachronistic (Computer Tutor: Atari).

One of Quillblog’s favourites is Elisabeth Bing’s 1975 pregnancy guide, Moving Through Pregnancy. The picture accompanying the post is a spread from the book, featuring an image of an enormously pregnant woman vacuuming alongside the following text:

With all due respect for the liberation of women, someone has to clean the house and do all kinds of boring chores. Actually those jobs don’t take too long, and this photo shows Judith with the vacuum cleaner. Look at her closely and see the excellent posture she maintains as she walks around the room, pushing the machine on the carpet. Her shoulders are relaxed, her head is high, and in doing this rather boring but occasionally necessary job, she is aware of watching her posture and supporting her baby well with her abdominal muscles.

Surely husbands everywhere will be thanking Bing for reminding their wives to keep their backs straight when vacuuming during their final trimester. Who could possibly object to that?

“Sully” gets library pardon

Remember Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the U.S. Airways pilot who became a media hero for shepherding all of his passengers to safety after his plane crash-landed in the Hudson River? Well, it looks like he wasn’t able to save everything that needed saving. According to The L.A. Times, he left behind – please contain your outrage – a library book.

Borrowed through a local Danville branch library, the book — reportedly on professional ethics — belonged to CSU Fresno. Realizing that the book was now swimming with the fishes, Sullenberger asked if the fees could be waived.

The library, sensibly, said why yes, they could do that for him.

Which means the next time you have late fees at the library, if you’ve got a good reason — a really, really, good reason, like successfully ditching an engineless plane in a near-freezing river and saving more than 150 lives –  they might be forgiven.

Penguins ruffle readers’ feathers

Challenging the longstanding myth that everybody loves those cute creatures known as penguins, the American Library Association reports that a children’s book featuring penguins has topped the list of library books the public objects to the most – for the second year running.

The 2005 picture book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, And Tango Makes Three, is about a family of penguins… with two fathers. At least it’s in illustrious company – other titles on the ALA’s list of challenged books include Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass.

From the Associated Press:

The ALA defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

[...]

Overall, the number of reported library challenges dropped from 546 in 2006 to 420 last year, well below the mid-1990s, when complaints topped 750. For every challenge listed, about four to five go unreported, the library association estimates.

“The atmosphere is a little better than it used to be,” [Judith] Krug [director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom] says. “I think some of the pressure has been taken off of books by the Internet, because so much is happening on the Internet.”

According to the ALA, at least 65 challenges last year led to a book being pulled.

Update: ban-tastic library revokes heinous policy

Earlier this week, In Other Media linked to the story of an Indiana library’s new restrictions on homeless shelter residents’ lending privileges and their cutting shelter children off from borrowing entirely.

The Post-Tribune reports today that a packed house at the Porter County Public Library board of directors’ monthly meeting yesterday saw “the directors unanimously agreed to nix the policy in order to reach an amicable agreement with the county’s shelter directors.”

While they admitted that their decision to limit borrowing privileges to the folks at homeless shelters was “premature,” they didn’t go so far as to say that they pulled the policy because, hey, telling children — homeless children — that they can’t take out library books looks pretty damn bad.

At least library assistant director James Cline had the decency to admit that “library officials probably should have received input from shelter directors prior to implementing the policy.” You think? But he apologized, at least, and Spring Valley Shelter executive director Tom Isakson was rather gracious about the whole thing, saying, “I’m not surprised that in the end those serving Porter County wanted to work collaboratively.”

But the most touching part of the whole thing? The tale of the Knoblock children, who “spent much of the morning and afternoon Wednesday … collecting books and videotapes from neighbors to donate to [the shelter]. Eleven-year-old Taylor led the charge, taking his [siblings] and a wagon with him,” according to the article. “‘I read in the paper that the public library wouldn’t let kids from the homeless shelter check out books anymore,’ Taylor said. ‘I didn’t like that idea, so I started to collect books for Spring Valley to have their own library.’”

Related links:
Check out the Post-Tribune story here

Shelter kids denied access to library books: for shame!

In a scandal broadcast far and wide by book-blogs Bookslut and Bookninja, children from homeless shelters in Indiana’s Porter County are having their library cards taken away and their lending priviliges revoked, according to the Post-Tribune.

Porter County has placed new restrictions on library access for people living in shelters, citing homeless people’s shoddy return record. The article says, “In a letter dated May 11, the library informed Porter County shelters their residents will face restrictions after the library claims it lost more than $4,000 worth of books and audio-visual materials in the last four to five years because of temporary shelter residents who failed to return the items.”

Their new policy will only allow adults to get temporary library cards and sign out three items at a time, while children and teens are not allowed to get a library card at all.

Spring Valley Shelter director Tom Isakson says, “Our clients need the library more than the average citizen. We’re serving low-income people, and they can’t go to a book store and purchase books as freely as many residents of Porter County do.”

Related links:
Read the full story here

Authors Guild sues Google for copyright infringement

Representing more than 8,000 writers from across the United States, the Authors Guild is suing Google for “massive copyright infringement,” claiming damages and “demanding the search engine stop uploading the contents of library books,” James Sturcke of the Guardian reported yesterday.

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said the Authors Guild president, Nick Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Google’s product management vice-president, Susan Wojcicki, says authors will be the ones losing out in the end. She claims the project will encourage the sales of books by making out-of-print, obscure, and lightly marketed titles accessible to millions of potential buyers, while preventing piracy with safeguards that include disabled copy and print functions. Says Wojcicki: “At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Guardian
Click here for a press release from the Authors Guild
Click here to access Google Print