Bookaholic

Just added a “small press” page last night (till one in the morning), but woke up realizing it just created an itch that needs to be scratched. So much of my life was invested in that six years, so many people doing the same — and I haven’t even begun to touch the five shelves of small press items (one for each decade). And I’m wake-dreaming of bios and links for all those semi-collectible folks and presses, realizing as I come fully awake how much time it would take to put those online or on the page.

For me, it was perhaps the happiest time I spent, realizing more of my potential than anything had before, and perhaps since. Not a profitable few years, but full of promise, and of promises kept. And somewhere in the middle of that creative ferment I had also plunged into radio, which would absorb another good chunk of my life. Much of the radio material I have already posted. You can find a lot of it in theNineteenth Century portion of my website. I even tried to coordinate the mp3 with rolling scripts, but will have to learn enough html5 or php to really make it work.

I’m realizing, while posting for sale all the books that I helped to create (as typesetter/text designer), that once they’re gone, they’re gone from my life. The Web has caught me, though I struggle to carry along a bit of the baggage of my life. I hope that it is of use to someone somewhere.

So, we’re working to trim the edges off, and get more done in less time (Hmm, didn’t I try to escape from that through most of my life?).

A few sites key everything bookish to the ISBN number, and, yes, that works to bring up boilerplate copy, the correct edition, yadda yadda. On competitive sites, that does not provide any uniqueness except price. And, by the way, how do those sellers on Amazon survive selling at $0.99? Even with a shipping allowance, you’d have to be essentially a shipping operation with tons of the same stuff to make that work. Which we’re not. We = me and my very part-time employee, whom I prize for the forthrightness to argue with me.

The other problem I have with hanging everything on the ISBN is that a lot of my books, the ones I gravitate toward, are pre-ISBN. Before the Sixties, sometimes before 1900. They require a bit more time spent on description, but, to my mind, usually offer much more of interest.

When I started posting listings, I wrote a paragraph and took a scan. Now, with the books-only or books-primarily sites, a spreadsheet works better. And I can see the future post-spreadsheet, it will be DATABASE. And XML. New things to learn how to operate, though I am fortunate to have a resourceful and responsive web host, Bluehost (cheap too) — in case you’re looking for a better one than the one you have. Depends on whether you are ready to delve “under the hood” with coding and other mysterious things like .htaccess, MySQL, Apache, PHP, and such.

So, my experience seems to be that streamlining isn’t itself streamlined but involves a good deal of effort and time to “make it so,” as Jean-Luc Picard used to say so glibly.

I actually was stumped over the behavior of a new folder, sought help from a forum and finally had to resort to the webhost to resolve it, which they did within hours. I still don’t quite know what happened and why, but it’s not happening anymore, so I’ll leave it at that for now, and plow ahead.

I’ve invested in two new shelves, had to stabilize another but was finally able to open the last of the boxes of Black Sparrow books, which I had designed and typeset years ago. They just fit on all the new shelving, and almost immediately, I scored a 50-volume set of Harvard Classics, the deluxe edition from 1909. So the quest for shelf space goes on…

I’m moving my attention toward book sites (more competition), but leaving about 700 titles on eBid, eCrater, and Bonanzle — good sites, but not focused on books. The new sites (for us) are Alibris and Biblio.com. Alibris does a pretty good job of promotion, Biblio is a consortium of used book dealers. Both require a lot more specification as to publisher, date, signed, ISBN, yadda yadda, so I have also shifted from my “masterlist” of descriptive paragraphs to a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. That should work well to move to XML.
And that brings up a question in my mind that one of your readers might have an opinion about: I progressed from HTML to XHTML some years ago, and this year have begun using PHP to slim down my coding (still a long way to go learning what PHP can do). But the next wave I can see crashing toward my shore is HTML5. Is that a better choice than XML, which seems suited for working with spreadsheets and databases. Databases will be in my future, certainly, for other projects, when I get back to publishing “enhanced ebooks” (lots of ideas for that, not enough time). So, for the geeks amongst us, which way the future?
My other recent news is the hire of a part-time person to do what I do, sorting, cataloging, describing. But also someone with imagination for marketing, which has always been a personal weakness of mine. It’s been years since I had employees (woops, contract labor!) and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the back-and-forth of ideas and news and fresh perspectives. It has energized me to get things done before she arrives the next time, so that’s a help too.
We’re discussing how to use eBay, which is the elephant in the Internet. I tried it a few years ago with a dynamite gift book that went nowhere during the Xmas season, and it wasn’t during a recession. So there’s another “teachable moment.”
I will make an effort on Fridays to post a new blog every week, in part to keep myself abreast of what I’ve been doing. I hope this documentation is of use to readers. I’m always happy to read your comments and suggestions.

Looking up from the rock I was propped up against, I focused on a branch, several branches bobbing in the light wind. Then, not sure how my mind clicked a connection as I was pondering my own life’s direction, I felt as if I were a branch, bending to time and circumstance. But as I had been trying to write a business plan to organize my many activities, I followed the branches back to the trunk, the roots — and all the things I’d done, whether for others or for my own amusement, all seemed related — to me (duh). I was the tree.

A tree, as a metaphor, suddenly seemed more appropriate than business owner or entrepreneur. I wasn’t really after money or solving problems. I was going in several directions, creating, producing, dropping seeds in people’s minds (well, that’s how I imagine it). And I know, you can see it in any woods, that every tree has wounds and unique shapes, some branches flourish and others stagnate. To me this was making sense of my life in a new way.

Many, no, most of my activities have not produced fruit or flourished, but for a tree, that’s not the point. A tree does what a tree does; a bird sings because birds sing. Humans, we have such a variety of things we do, and we do them because we can. Our lives are shaped by outside forces working for or against inner strengths — that’s how I see it.

This past week, I encountered a teacher in Second Life who is creating a whole world based on the Pardoner’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A medievalist, she is recreating the environment in which the story might make sense. Of course to us moderns, a “pardoner” is a rather obscure profession: it’s the person who sells indulgences so that people may save themselves from going to Hell (later on, Luther had a problem with that). Chaucer’s trick is to have the Pardoner admit up front that he himself commits all the sins that he is pardoning others for, and then he gives the pitch anyway — the ultimate hypocrisy.

I have to admit that when I was in college I passed my Chaucer course by nodding and smiling, without ever entertaining the notion of craft. But it brought me back to a principle I may have mentioned before: Who is saying What to Whom — and Why? For the medievalist, the point was to get students back into the 14th century, reading, perhaps even reciting, the Chaucerian words with the same appreciation she had for them.

As an editor, my goal would be entirely different for the same material. Chaucer had his specific audience in mind, and, like an investigative reporter, he apparently set out to expose a system that others accepted without questioning. However, my audience, as I see it, are the students and teachers of today in a different country with a much changed language. To my mind, the old language is a barrier, even the subject matter of theology is dusty. Is there a pertinent comparable situation in our modern society? Yes, it crops up in the news all the time: Reker, the anti-homosexual ranter, caught with a “rentboy.” Jim Bakker, evangelist, caught in disgraceful affairs. Politicians paying lip service while accepting tons of money for their next campaign.

The medievalist and I tussled the argument about “modernization” back and forth, but it really wasn’t an argument. She was a different tree offering raw fruit, and I would be creating processed materials. In the end, I’d be happy to see a forest grow up from both of our efforts.

How to Become an Original Writer in Three Days, by Ludwig Börne, started me off on a lifelong quest. Writer I began, publisher I call myself today — still seeking those flashes of against-the-grain brilliance and highlighting them, in the hope that a spark of inspiration may ignite a personal flame in a reader, listener, observer.

Originality can’t be taught. It emerges, I believe, in a unique conjunction of person and world, often arising out of a sense of confusion that the conventional truths do not answer.

Pursuing the path of originality requires to to have more confidence in oneself than in others, which may be construed as egotism, arrogance, waywardness, lawlessness, madness, eccentricity. Success on one’s own terms does not guarantee public acceptance now or ever. It does, however, set a direction for self-fulfillment that cannot be satisfied by any amount of learning, imitation, or outward success. One becomes oneself — “self-actualization” in Maslow’s terms.

Is it “genius” that I’m talking about? In the sense that it is genuine, sui generis. Can anyone do it? Everyone is unique; whether that uniqueness is more important than “fitting in” or not is, I believe, the deciding factor.

Having spent my life (not that much more to spend) on books, I now feel called to re-answer the question What is a book? My best answer before had been “a well-formed idea,” one that might take a whole book to express.

Some books, in the fiction realm, take you to places that the real world can’t — violence, betrayal, heroism, derring-do, confrontations, escapes. Textbooks lead you into expertise, at least partway. Topical books get you thinking, or enraged, or informed, or show you how to… and each in its own way allows you to grow or expand your horizons.

The ideal book — is there such a thing? — engages you, well, let me say that an ideal book engages me. Like a conversation where I end up doing a lot of listening, sometimes with a little outburst of But what if? before the book gently answers in the following pages.

And now we enter a pageless era, or rather, like McLuhan taught us years before, we see the new technology in the frame of the old, as, for example the “horseless carriage” which became the automobile (also an inapt description: auto/self mobile/moving). So, not the “pageless book,” then what should we call it? I’ve seen “vook” or “voox” for video books, not to my liking.

What is the essence of a book? Not the paper and the ink printed on it. If you think about reading, it’s really quite an unusual skill. We’ve adapted our keen hunting eyes to focus word-by-word and line-by-line while simultaneously shutting out almost all other sensory input. It’s like being in a trance; we hear the silent words on the page as they pull us along a story line. The words are crafted to immerse us in an environment that is not the one we’re actually sitting in, filled with characters who are not present but whose actions we anticipate with anxiousness. Experiments have been done with subjects watching people eating, and they feel full or overfull from that vicarous experience. Likewise, we are present in the fictive imagination, which resembles a world we might inhabit (usually). We care about the heroes and despise the villains, we feel the anguish or lust or ambition of the protagonist. Is it history or fantasy, or does it matter?

My beat has been the classics, or, rather, the enduring documents on which our society is built. I won’t say they are timeless, as that is a large claim; each had its initial impact in a cultural crisis which seems resolved today, perhaps because they did change the course of history.

When I went into the study of literature, I assumed that the great writers were representative of their times. In fact, that is wrong. Each one stood out against the common current of their times, an oddball, a freak, an outrageous figure sometimes reviled. They weren’t the norm, they were the exception. Today we accept the common wisdom that the French Impressionists remade stuffy old paintings into a living vibrant art. Ha! Only in hindsight blinded by the blur of rewritten history.

Back to books. What is communicated from one (often dead) person by means of words alone that is so important that we can’t let go of it? This person saw more deeply, or felt more deeply, or lived more honestly that we could have imagined, and was able to share that insight, that complex of emotion, that counterintuitive truth.

It has been a puzzle to me why we have such big brains. We live in a society where intelligence is hardly required to drive a car or get a job or get married and raise a family. One could go through life following orders or accepting what everybody else thinks, and be just fine. So what happens to all that extra horsepower in our skulls? We build industries out of games, movies, publishing, sports, entertainment that is not “productive” in and of itself, that is, there is no end result, no product, no service to make things better, except for personal satisfaction.

The phrase “fictive imagination” caught my attention this year. I’ve been cogitating about it, and I find that it may be the way to describe what we do with our extra brain cells (besides gossip; three-quarters of human face-to-face communication, I’ve read, is gossip).

This human skill of pretending takes some practice, and a bit of growing up so you no longer look behind the TV set to see what happens to those little people when the set is turned off. We get so good at it that we can see things that aren’t there just by reading about them. Even when we know that those characters and scenes don’t exist! That’s what the fictive imagination can do. We learn to think beyond our current reality, and sometimes use that to create a new reality, as entrepreneurs do, or when you change jobs, or travel across country with scarcely a thought.

So, I haven’t settled on the “ideal book,” but I think there’s a clue in there worth contemplating. Ebooks, OK, it’s easy enough to put text in anything. Kindle and iPad bring some possibilities to the table. What is a book? still obsesses me. Will I recognize it when it comes differently? Will readers?

When I started publishing in the mid-1970s, the issue of the sexism of the third person singular pronoun came up. With new authors, we would just advise them of our concern. But when our Mudborn Press broke up (she kept the name, I went with Bandanna Books for my FBN), and I became interested in publishing classic texts, I soon confronted the sexism issue directly.

Obviously, the older authors had no idea that there might be a concern about using “he” or “man” as applying equally to women as to men, and there are historic reasons for that. Until the 18th and 19th centuries, girls were not traditionally sent to school, so why bother with he-and-she when the only readers were male?

In Plato’s Athens, women were not part of the political process; his writings were on major themes of honor, justice, and such, so we moderns assume that he included all persons in his ideas. But when he writes The Republic, it’s clear that he didn’t. We tend to gloss over that, so that today we read his philosophy as universally applicable. Is it? That’s a question for an editor to be worth asking.

When I launched Bandanna Books, my very first book published was a version of the I Ching. Simple, straightforward, right? But the model in almost every entry was the Prince or the noble man, the good man. Again, were women explicitly to be excluded? In a number of instances, women’s roles are mentioned separately from those of men. Nowhere is there an instance of a woman held up as a model. Does that negate the ideas in the I Ching about right living and judgment? Again, we like to read it as if these were universal truths or guides. How should the text read then, if English has a gender split in the third person singular?

I gave it a lot of thought, tried and rejected several ideas before coming up with what I call “humanist pronouns.” I noticed that we already had a set of non-sexist-tagged third person pronouns, interrogative pronouns: “who,” “whose,” “whom.” These are ordinarily used when we don’t know the person or gender and are asking. But what if we started using, with the same pronunciation, “hu,” “hus,” and “hum”? The spelling is similar to what one would expect, the sound is familiar, and even the sense is close to what one expects to hear. “Someone is knocking. See hu’s at the the door.” “A customer left a package. I picked up hus package and put it away.”

This, I believe, works better than using the plural in place of the singular, or he/she, hir, s/he, him and her, or other constructions that I’ve seen.

Some authors are careful in their writing, so that little or no
“gender editing” is required. This is generally true of Shakespeare, Poe, and others. Yet a few books, starting with the I Ching, require major surgery.

What has been the response? I did a little survey, and got something like 8 positive, 2 negative responses from teachers who used the books in their classes. It hasn’t caught on with anyone else, as far as I know. College textbooks go out of their way to keep their texts from being sexist, sometimes going to extremes of rearranging sentences to avoid using any pronoun at all.

Will I continue using the humanist pronouns? That depends on the text at hand, the audience, the acceptance. It’s my best effort at regularizing English.

Actually, the concern has spread to other languages, most of which have explicit masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns, adjectives, sometimes even neuter pronouns. Their solutions, the ones I’ve seen, tend to tack on the second gender with a slash to the ends of words.

Why do I care? Why is this issue important to me? Because I have changed genders myself, and I am forced to ask other people to change their pronouns for me. Now, if we had a non-sexist third person pronoun, that would not be required.

I live in the United States, where equality is part of the law of the land, even when our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” The universal “he” has not disappeared; I don’t know if it ever will. I would like to see another option continue to be available.

Just with too much time on my hands, I uploaded a radio series I did in the 1980s on the Beecher family (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher and others). So, if you’re interested, the audio and the scripts are at Beechers, along with some other projects I’ve done relating to the 19th Century (Poe, Whitman, etc.).

I like old things, that’s my only excuse. Not that I would have liked to live in those days, that would be hard to imagine. Maybe because life seemed so difficult then that I admire the people who managed to accomplish so much.

I’ve spent perhaps thirty years focusing on the college market for publishing (after a career as partner in a poetry press. Rationally, I chose it as an easy market (to which I had sold a title by accident), with texts required in humanities classes, year after year.

But, just in the past few days, I’ve experienced the resurgence of a guilty feeling dating from my two years in the Peace Corps as a teacher. I hadn’t been trained as a teacher specifically, but I was eager to “help save the world” in whatever way I was needed.

The system, carried over from the British style of education, decreed that at the end of Standard Eight, students across the nation would take an exam, and only one-quarter of them would pass and go on for further education. Maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough, or understand the great pressure this put on abandoning regular classes so as to “game the system” by studying previous year exams, cramming, improving test-taking skills. Our performance was below average when the expectation had been that our presence would have increased the school’s chances. As I recall, seven of the 45 students passed. And perhaps the greatest injustice was that the head monitor, who had been head monitor even when he was in the Seventh Standard, did not pass. I was not invited to stay for the final quarter of schooling, though my roommate did stay.

I now believe that my intense focus on the transition from high school to college, which was also personally difficult for me, was compounded by my failure as a teacher. What would I teach myself, or students like myself, in order to succeed in education? What should I have known, or done, in Tanzania to help shape the lives of the students in my classes?

I’ve been content to step back from the classroom, and instead help supply the teachers with materials for that paradigm. Teach the teachers, teach myself. Does that work better? I can’t say. It does begin to explain to myself why I do these things, repetitively, over and over again. Perhaps that is my neurosis, or rut. Perhaps it is the meaning of my life.

With a thousand (yipes) titles online, I look around for ways to be more effective. Did the survey of other sites where books are sold, dug a little more into it, and then I started to see a pattern.

Looking from the “other side of the mirror,” as the buyer sees it, my list is not really as scattered as it seems to me. But it does fall into, or I can characterize it as, three age groups (all of which I feel, depending on my mood in the morning). One is college and soon after, interested in everything actual, starting with college textbooks (a market by itself. The next group, getting into the thirties and forties, people are building families, parenting, getting concerned about health and diet, self-improvement, sports, getting ahead in business, and such. After that, older folks settle in for more philosophy, history, collecting, politics, the investing side of business.

How do the sites stack up? Plugging in a few keywords or names, I created a very subjective list to suit my list. I rejected some (for the time being) for having TOO MANY of the kinds of titles I want to sell, and others for having TOO FEW to be considered; and some were TOO NEW to tell what their audience would be like.

So, on a trial basis, I will add two new ones for each age grouping: Craigslist and ePier for the younger set; Buyitsellit and Atomic Mall for the middle group; and Alsoshop and Biblio (with ePier thrown in) for the older set.

Is this an accurate analysis? Who knows, but it’s a starting place.

By now, I’ve noticed another matter; I’m not really happy with some of my early acquisitions, particularly romance and mystery novels. I had picked some favorites, but they haven’t moved. And there are outdated or small items I’d like to shed. One site that I know of, Bonanzle, offers “freebies” — in my case, buy anything and get another book for free. I’m weeding out paperbacks and anything that’s set at $5 or less — is it really worth my time plus the shipping cost to sell a $5 book?

I just went through my basic list and came up with about 150 titles to mark as freebies on Bonanzle. It would also help my home situation, as the books are climbing up the walls, not enough bookshelves (though a side effect has been to actually go through my other junk and move it — paint cans, electronics, and all the cardboard and shipping supplies. So many tapes — does anyone listen to tapes anymore? And what about all those reels of tape from my days when I had a radio program, and produced a serial, or worked with two others in experimental radio “humor.” I don’t even own a tape deck that can handle reels anymore. Choice: trash them and never look back, or spend time converting to mp3s? Hmm. I’ll sleep on that one. Might be able to sell the 28-part serial, or at least put it online. So, I was doing podcasts before the iPod.

Haven’t sold ANY books this week. What can I do to change that? Lower prices? I see that plenty of people stop by to take a look. Reduce the shipping to media mail; did that tonight, that will cut the costs.

And with my new snobbishness about purchasing, I’m running out of good sources. I’ve pilfered the thrift shops. Ah, but tomorrow morning is Garage Saling! Last week was a bust, but there’s always that next one, just a little further away that maybe has great stuff – that I can afford.

And then there’s my publishing. I have eleven titles I could be making into ebooks. Just want to get it right. Hardly making any progress in the fat PHP book I bought, but I need that for a good working website. Also XML, but I think that’s not such a big step from XHTML.