Star Books is closing

Avol's owner Ron Czerwien emailed a few weeks ago...

In recent years Madison has lost McDermot's, Bookworks, Big Deal Books, and is about to lose Star Books.

I'd walked by recently and seen a poster in the window reminding customers to place Harry Potter pre-orders. The latest installment's slated for July 21st publication, so that didn't strike me as the last gasp of a business about to advertise a 25%-off storewide clearance sale...

...in marginally more optimistic wanderings...

I recently stopped by Avol's while Bookworks owner Peter Dast was on the premises, and interrupted his late lunch of Fat Squirrel and a messy burger (some sort of sauce-laden sandwich, at least) but he was happy to chat re: the ethics of dealer competition, book digitization a la Bartelby and google, and the impact print-on-demand technologies will have on the long-tail of obscure academic texts. Oh, and recommend some books (19th century travel is a particular passion). I offered a vague prompt--"my sister's going to be working in Indonesia, so..."--and now have two more to add to the reading/moving crates. And some Redmond O'Hanlon to track down.

Dast is usually in the store Thursday afternoons. Stop by to pick his brain. Maybe I'll bring my own beer next time.

finally...

There was a notable omission from that independent bookseller poll in the madison.com forums. Hank Luttrell of 20th Century Books piped up in the comments to point out that he'd helped compile Sustain Dane's list of local independent booksellers, and was wondering why he was left off the poll. My bad.

I'll be pedalling over later this week, and Hank emailed yesterday, with some more precise directions...

if you stop by, be aware that we are on the second floor of 1421 S. Park (just north of Arby's and Midas Muffler, across the street from the Labor Temple). I'm here (unless I'm at the post office) 10:00-5:30 mon-sat., and noon-5:00 on Sunday.

Corresponding about books

Just posted Bookworks owner Peter Dast's response to a surveyish thing I was trying to put together on Post.

Earlier this morning, I sent Peter a follow-up email that commiserated a bit re: the reader poll's failure to gain traction, and ask if it would be ok to post his reply outside of the context of the broad bookseller survey originally envisioned. The lightly edited excerpt below references my own e-book wariness, and responds to Peter's question,

For example--as a writer, don't you feel you want or need a nice hardcover copy of Strunk & White, Webster's Second Unabridged, maybe an OED, and old hardcover editions of your favorite essayists or journalists?"

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As a telecommuting writer/blogger whose first real rent-paying piece was for a website, my personal relationship with books is really one that revolves around decompression, and literally unplugging from the day's work. I often stare at one screen or another for much of the day, and wind down by going to bed with a book--usually short stories and essays. I'm guessing an e-book reader with a backlit screen would feel a little too vocational for comfort. I'd rather continue falling asleep with the lights on and waking up with paper cuts on place-holding fingers--or spine imprints on my face.

You invoked a writerly canon of reference materials, so I figured I'd share mine. I haven't graduated from paperback copies of Chicago and AP style manuals, Strunk and White (and rarely, if ever, consult them). The reference books I value and revisit regularly were given to me by friends [as jokes, i.e. a 1930's vocab-building workbook or revolve around hip-hop. I think the most interesting contemporary explorations of the genre are published by writers with one foot in the "blogosphere" and another planted elsewhere (to name a few career lanes of favorites: academia, big box retail, fast food, lock-smithery, magazine writing--even PR), but there are a few texts with staggering historical sweep that I flip through regularly--Can't Stop Won't Stop, Yes Yes Y'all, Hip Hop America, the Vibe History of Hip Hop. I'm ashamed to say I don't own the two books that best embody hip-hop in written form. Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists and Big Book of Racism ARE the concise and contradictory wit, wordplay, humor and outrage that drew me to hip-hop in the first place, and I need to stop checking them out of the library.

Forthcoming posts will visit the stores that remain, for now.