September 2014

In more than 30 years with Chicago’s Newberry Library, James W. Wells gained a wide reputation as an authority on the history of printing, typography and calligraphy.

“He was one of the most important rare book specialists in the U.S. from the late 1950s through the 1970s,” said Paul Gehl, the George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books with the Newberry. Gehl said Mr. Wells was known as a real bookman — the term for such a specialist used by those in the field.

“He was in so many ways the epitome of the old-fashioned bookman,” said Alice Schreyer, interim director of the University of Chicago Library. “He had an inexhaustible knowledge and a remarkable memory for every book that ever passed through his hands.”

A bookman looks at the physical characteristics of books, which Schreyer said can include “former ownership, bindings, typefaces — things that distinguish them as physical artifacts as well as conveyors of information. He was just a fount of knowledge.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-james-wells-obituary-met-20140911-story.html

Young Americans are more likely to have read a book in the past year than their older counterparts, a new study finds.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/09/11/347620935/book-news-millennials-reading-more-than-older-americans-study-finds

When book critic Maureen Corrigan first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school, she was unimpressed.

“Not a lot happens in Gatsby,” Corrigan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “It’s not a plot-driven novel and I also thought, ‘Eh, it’s another novel about rich people.’ And I grew up in a blue-collar community.”

She also couldn’t relate, she says, because it doesn’t feature any likeable female characters.

“In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Fitzgerald thought it didn’t sell well in 1925,” Corrigan says, “because there are no likeable female characters and women drive the fiction market.”

But today Corrigan considers The Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel — and it’s the novel she loves more than any other. She’s written a new book about it called So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

Full piece:
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/08/346346588/how-gatsby-went-from-a-moldering-flop-to-a-great-american-novel

In this lively & provocative collection of essays, veteran media critic Ron Powers, recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize & an Emmy Award, takes a searing look at a pivotal decade in TV history. He playfully presents some serious thoughts on TV, arguing that TV is a subject of utmost importance, perhaps the unifying & inevitable subject of our time. The essays by Powers contain significant insights into what TV did for us &, most especially, to us in the 1980s. He shows how America has reached a stage where the distinction between entertainment, news, & education — between TV & the real world — has nearly vanished.

This book was written in 1990. I think it is especially interesting to look at books again because now time has passed and you can see where things have actually headed and that can be contrasted to the discussion in the book.

The Beast, the Eunuch and the Glass-eyed Child: Television in the 80’s

Stand-up Librarian Meredith Myers shares influences from the late, great Joan Rivers that aren’t so obvious.

Full piece:
http://cltampa.com/artbreaker/archives/2014/09/04/joan-rivers-honorary-librarian#.VAklcvldVP8

Excerpt: But there is a big challenge related to this paradigm that the industry hasn’t really tackled yet. The “unit of appreciation” for many books is the author. And the “unit of appreciation” is also the “unit of marketing” and therein lies the problem. Because the industry hasn’t figured out how to bring publishers and authors together around how to maximize the value of the author brand.

Marketing requires investment. For an author, that means a web site that delivers a checklist of functionality and appropriate social media presences, as well as what any competent publisher would do to make the individual book titles discoverable.

But authors inherently do not want publishers to “control” their personal brand, particularly when so many of them have more than one publisher or self-published material in addition to what they’ve sold rights to. And publishers don’t want to invest in marketing that sells books they don’t get revenue from or to build up an author name that could be in some other house’s catalog a year or two from now.

Full piece:

Librarianship: A Philosophical Investigation
“One of the first things you learn as a professional librarian is that very few people have any idea what you do. In fact, enough people who actually want to become librarians are sufficiently in the dark about the nature of the profession that many Information and Library Science graduate programs explicitly require their prospective applicants to state in their applications what interests them about the field other than loving books.”
http://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/librarianship-philosophical-investigation/

Headline of a piece on NPR – Librarians Are A Luxury Chicago Public Schools Can’t Afford

Excerpt: Two years ago, the Chicago Public Schools budgeted for 454 librarians. Last year, the budget called for 313 librarians, and now that number is down to 254.

With educators facing tough financial choices, having a full-time librarian is becoming something of a luxury in Chicago’s more than 600 public schools.

It’s not that there’s a shortage of librarians in Chicago, and it’s not mass layoffs — it’s that the librarians are being reassigned.

“The people are there, they’re just not staffing the library, they’re staffing another classroom,” says Megan Cusick, a librarian at Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative School. She says all across the district, certified librarians are being reassigned to English classrooms, world languages or to particular grade levels in elementary schools.

Full piece