The idea is to streamline this part of the process, which is primarily my area of work. Mz. does much better at research and personal negotiating, and I handle the spreadsheet info, usually do the Saturday morning garage sales and estate sales (that’s the fun part), and catalog the books and mags (recently picked up a bunch of Playboys — who knew they’d be worth more than newsstand price 20 years later?).

And FBA from Amazon looks like it will be a time-saver and a money-saver as well; we’ll see. Adam Bertram’s recent blog on Amazon cited $8,700 gross for one month, with Amazon fees about $3,600 — but he’s delighted to have so much business. How did he say it, someone’s already done the heavy lifting in figuring out how to sell and ship books, so why try to duplicate that on one’s own website. I haven’t heard back from Amazon yet; it’s not quite as straightforward as I had hoped, but there are a lot of books taking up a lot of room in my small house.

Next steps, when we figure we can afford it: data service (i.e., Internet) on a mobile phone. Perhaps an accounting system (cheaper than MYOB, more reliable than Quickbooks for Mac, more functional than open source Gnucash). Figuring out a better sourcing strategy. Publishing (which is my old career) new content — lots of ideas, not enough time to develop properties.

As August winds down, it’s been a slow month. Back to school might help move some of these older textbooks — or not. And there’s the specter of ebooks as well. I now have the software to do them, but haven’t made the changeover. Tick, tick, tick.

Let me hear from book people — what is your experience, what works, what used to work but not so well any longer?

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.

I accept the words of Fareed Zakaria that our war in Afghanistan is disproportionate. At the very beginning, I believed the attack on the World Trade Center did not call for a war, it called for a police action. Osama bin Laden already won when he provoked military action. An army (well, OK, I’m venting here, not much to do with books today) simply calls up resistance. The more we pour into it, the more turmoil we create, the more reliance on us, when in Afghanistan, the issues are not about us at all.
What do we stand for, and how do we work to bring that about? It’s the paradox of liberty — we need freedoms to make a better society, and we need to recognize the limits and the dangers inherent in that belief.

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…

(Grammar, not history)

How we speak and write is how we think. The prescriptionists of language, known as grammarians, strain to put every utterance, every word, into its own box (this is an Adjective, this is a Verb). In some ways, their rationalist approach does simplify language. By doing so, they fool us into thinking it’s simple.

I start from a different point. Noam Chomsky made the cogent observation that language seems to be an innate ability of humans at a very young age — to hear and speak a language. Chomsky showed a generative pattern that could lead to a full language, notm, however, requiring a universal language or universal grammar. Let’s start from our own early experience.

The English language has shown a remarkable propensity to grow like a weedpatch, ever resistant to neat rows of categorization. Gnarly roots show in the quaint spellings captured during the years that printing took over Europe, spellings that no longer reflect pronunciation in any known area of spoken English. That’s the subject of a different chapter.

Here I intend to explore the “future of English (tenses).” Latin, its associated languages, and others simply modify a verb to create a future tense. English, however, a bastard language, went with the Germanic branch to attach “helping” words to a verb to indicate an event or time not yet occurring (or perhaps never to occur), i.e. the Future.

In other words, English verbs do not have a distinct future form. The stratagem of “helping” or auxiliary words opened the door to a wide variety of futures, depending on your choice of helping words. Here is my list, and you’re welcome to comment to add your own:

I will go (I’ll go) = I have every intention of going

I shall go = I commit myself to going, though I may be grudging in my commitment

I am going to go (I’m gonna go) = I’m stating that I’m planning on going

I would go (I’d go) = I am willing to go, if certain conditions are true

I could go = I have the ability to go but am not necessarily planning on going

I should go = I feel an obligation to go

I ought to go (I oughta go) = I feel obliged to go but am reluctant

I may go = I haven’t decided definitely whether I’m going or not

I might go = I could go if I wanted to

I must go = there’s no way around it, I am going whether I want to or not

I have to go (I hafta go) = I can’t get out of going (also used to describe an urgent bathroom trip)

I’ve got to go (I gotta go) = I can’t stay any longer because of other commitments

I’ve got to get going (I’ve gotta get goin’) = Sorry, I can’t stay. I’m already late

I’m good to go = I’m ready

In other words, we English-speakers have a variety of futures to play with. Or, another way of stating it is, We’re a bit foggy about our future.

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.

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.

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?