MemeMachineGo!

A few months ago, I saw Paperback Dreams, a documentary on the declining bookstore business, focusing on Cody's in Berkeley and Kepler's in Palo Alto.

The movie covers the rise and fall of Cody's Union Square store in San Francisco, and the closing of the flagship Cody's store on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. The store that once had gas masks in the back room, when it served as a medic station during the People's Park riots. The store that was bombed for continuing to sell Rushdie's The Satanic Verses after the fatwa.

If I recall correctly (at this remove, it's iffy), when the movie leaves off, there was still one Cody's standing, on 4th St. in Berkeley. But I knew how the story ended.

In 1991, I was going to grad school at USC in LA. During a break between the spring and summer sessions, I spent a week in San Francisco and Berkeley. I met Jym in person for the first time; we'd known each other online. I stayed at the San Francisco youth hostel.

And I fell in love with Berkeley. Mostly, with its bookstores. In one block, Telegraph had Cody's, Moe's, Shambalha, Shakespeare & Co. Around the corner was another used bookstore, Cartesian Books. Not to mention dozens of others throughout town. I had a printout of the rec.arts.books East Bay bookstore list in my pocket, and I wasn't afraid to use it.

Cody's was a damn good new bookstore. It didn't displace Wordsworth in Cambridge as my favorite new general bookstore, but damn good. Moe's was the best used bookstore I'd ever seen (this was years before I made the pilgrimage to Powell's.) Shambhala was the best esoteric philosophy bookstore I'd ever seen. (The Aleister Crowley was in a locked, glass-fronted case. Was it somehow such dangerous knowledge that it needed to be kept under lock and key? I asked the clerk why. "Because it gets stolen if it's not," he said.) Comic Relief was the best comics store I'd ever seen. It had not one, but two, outstanding sf bookstores, Dark Carnival and Other Change of Hobbit.

Despite that I'd hurt my shoulder immediately before the trip, and was carrying all my things in an army knapsack, I bought a stupid number of books. And I knew I'd be back for good someday.

That took five years. And in the dozen years since, I've watched bookstore after bookstore fold. Gaia. Shambhala. The huge Barnes & Noble downtown.

And Cody's on 4th St.

But, then, a new Cody's rose all phoenix-like on Shattuck in downtown Berkeley! Comic Relief had moved to Shattuck, just a couple of storefronts down from Other Change. A huge Half Price books had opened just down from that. And now Cody's was a block away from that, and just a couple of blocks up from Pegasus downtown. Shattuck could be the sort of book row destination that Telegraph had been!

Out of the blue, that Cody's, the last Cody's, closed. Cartesian is gone, too -- I'm not even sure when that happened. Black Oak books just closed. It keeps getting grimmer.

Time was, I kept a written list of books I was looking for. Some of them I could have ordered; most of them were out of print. Visiting any new town was an occasion for excitement, as I hit as many used bookstores as I could. This one had Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel. That one had a Dick paperback I didn't have (in those days before the Vintage reprints.) Time was, I went to an honest-to-god book finding service to surprise Jym with Peanuts Revisited, the Peanuts reprint he'd never been able to find.

I wonder what the heck those guys are doing for a living now.

I first heard of a book scout in John Dunning's cop turned antiquarian bookseller mystery, Booked to Die (a pretty good mystery.) What a wonderful, romantic thing -- scouring estate sales, thrift stores, and yard sales, recognizing the hidden treasures of first editions you can buy cheap and sell dear.

Just between Amazon and Half.com, damn near everything is available online. The thrill of the hunt has been replaced by a web search, and deciding whether you really want it enough to order it then and there. The efficiency of the market has driven the middle out -- most common or low-demand things you can get shipped for under $10; it's harder than ever to find a bargain on rare, in demand things. The last couple of times I've sold things to Moe's, they've checked online to make sure they weren't things that weren't moving at 25¢. At library sales, I've seen people scanning barcodes with Scoutpal, taking all the challenge out of it.

A couple of years ago, I sought out James Newman's 4-volume World of Mathematics. Everyone seemed to agree that the one to get was Microsoft Press' edition, whose typesetting improved on the original. I found a used copy listed on-line on the cheap, and ordered.

The seller wrote me a long email a couple of days later, apologizing profusely about how his part-time college student employee had listed it incorrectly, and it was only Vol. 3, not the 4-volume set, and how he was selling books 12 hours a day at $5 a pop trying to support his family, and I could have a discount on my next order, and would I please not leave bad feedback. He'd caught the error before shipping and was offering to refund my money, a situation I consider so clearly no harm, no foul, that I'm distressed by what experiences this bookseller has had that he seemed so fearful in this case.

I order all my new books at Other Change. I buy my new comics from Comic Relief (but ever fewer, as the price range has become $3-4 a comic.) I know I could usually get better prices on-line, but I want my downtown to have bookstores I can browse. I want to do my part to preserve them.

But I usually check if things are dirt-cheap used on-line before I order them new. An increasing amount of my book acquisition time, energy, and money goes to Paperbackswap. So I'm doing my part to kill bookstores, too.

Obviously, I'm nostalgic for the old days, in which there was some thrill to the hunt for books. There are even a couple of books I've been looking for for ages that I've passed up the opportunity to buy because I want there to be something to hunt. One of them is Greg Egan's Axiomatic, which had been hard to find until a recent British reprint filled much of the demand. I see that at the moment I could get the mass-market edition used shipped for $6.50. Too easy. The other one I'm not going to name, because I don't want to do anything to inflate its demand (though I have no illusions about how much influence this blog doesn't have) -- it's an innocuous-looking mass-market paperback from the '90's that often goes for over a hundred dollars. But someday I'll find it languishing in a clearance bin.

Let me make clear: I wouldn't actually trade my pocket full of book and bookstore lists for what we have now. More books are getting to more people who want them. That's a good thing.

But I'm really going to miss bookstores when they're gone.

Common Errors in English Usage

Wordnik is an on-line dictionary I haven't been able to stump. (It's disappointingly easy to stump most free on-line dictionaries. But Wiktionary is also hard to stump.)

Some of my reading of late has been shaped by Jo Walton's reviews on Tor.com; she has frequently picked things I've had on my shelf and meant to get to for a long time. So I finally read Lest Darkness Fall.

For no adequately explained reason, our hero, Martin Padway, an archaeologist in Rome in 1938, finds himself transported to 535. The Roman Empire has fallen, and Italy's ruled by the Ostrogoths. His knowledge of classical Latin and modern Italian allow him to communicate far too easily, and he has equally suspicious ease selling decimal arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping to a money lender, who stakes him in a scheme to distill brandy from wine.

An advantage he has over a moderner is that the change in his pocket is specie, and he's able to convert it to local money.

Spoilers follow:

Pocahontas and I are fans of the Teaching Company courses of Rufus Fears, a classics scholar at the University of Oklahoma. I googled Dr. Fears and found this scathing review on ratemyprofessor.com:

He isn't interested in teaching, he's interested in making you believe what he believes. He's full of himself, rude, and narrow minded. WORST CLASS EVER. The only people who love him are those who agree with him or are too weak-minded to think for themselves.

The class that inspired this review?

Latin.

"OMG! Dude totally wouldn't consider my original thinking on the fifth declension! He was all, like, his way was the right way."

(Yeah, I realize the student's complaint isn't so ridiculous on the face of it given the discussion of Roman culture a Latin class would include. But that's not funny.)

Tuff Writer Tactical Pens.

I would make fun of the sort of person who'd want one of these, except I kind of want one of these.

Christopher Guest -- Nigel from Spinal Tap, director and co-writer of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind -- is an honest-to-gosh hereditary peer of the realm, a UK baron. He is perhaps the only baron ever to have said "lick my love pump" when he knew the camera was on.

As of a few months ago, some of the potential Republican 2012 presidential nominees being discussed were Jindal, Ensign, Sanford, Palin.

I'm wondering if somewhere Newt Gingrich is crossing names off a list and tapping his fingers together, saying "Ex-cellent."

(Gingrich, by the way, is a prolific Amazon reviewer.)

When I heard there was a new Tom Robbins book, B Is for Beer, I rushed to the library website to put a hold on it.

If you're a Tom Robbins completist, you'll want to, too. If not, then not so much. The cover says "A children's book for grown-ups" and "A grown-up book for children," but it's mostly "Tom Robbins' love letter to beer."

The narrative, in places, directly addresses a presumptive audience of a child being read aloud to by a parent or grandparent, a device I found mostly annoying in a book few would consider appropriate for a young child. And it tried too often to wring humor from our six-year-old heroine misunderstanding and mispronouncing new words.

I did, though, enjoy the book's guided tour of the history of beer.

Some time ago, I noted that the Heinlein Archives were a special collection of UC Santa Cruz, and how a holy pilgrimage was in order.

Not that going to Santa Cruz is an especially daunting trip, it turns out I don't need to to see most of the contents. They've been digitized and reasonably priced PDFs are available at heinleinarchives.net. There's his critique of the draft of The Mote in God's Eye, notes toward a writing book, story notes and fragments, snide comments written by Heinlein and Virginia Heinlein in the margins of Alexei and Cory Panshin's review of Time Enough for Love, various proposals, treatments, and scripts for TV and film work, including a proposal for Abbot and Costello Move to the Moon (!) and pretty much everything this side of laundry lists and dry cleaning receipts (OK, maybe those, too -- I haven't looked through everything.)

I also recently learned about The Virginia Edition, a deluxe hardcover complete works of Heinlein that can be yours for the low, low price of $1500. Looks like about half of them are already available; the balance will be shipped as they're ready. Want.

A Google search on 'coprography' demonstrates that a lot of people have it confused with coprophagy.