Riba Rambles:
MORE Musings of a Mental Magpie

So, this past weekend was the ALA Midwinter Meeting. I talked my company into paying for membership to the exhibit hall, ostensibly so I could see the kinds of things our competitors were up to. I'll confess, I primarily wanted it just to browse around, and had the company not paid for it, I would've bought it myself, just for browsing purposes (indeed, we did pay for an exhibit hall pass for Ian to accompany me).

At any rate, let me first describe the exhibit halls. Those of you who were at Worldcon: picture the space used for the dealers' room and the nearby space used for exhibits. All of that space was occupied by ALA vendors, plus the equivalent amount of space upstairs. Four times the dealer space of Worldcon.

Now, to be fair, ALA vendors often required much more floorspace than Worldcon vendors. For example, there were a lot of furniture companies with seating and shelves, or tech companies with demo workstations and seating areas for presentations.

But on the whole, most of the floorspace was given over to books, and oh how I enjoyed browsing...

I made it through all the aisles on Saturday afternoon, seeing everything but my competitors' displays. I went back (alone) on Sunday for that, which I supplemented with more time looking at books. On Monday, many of the book dealers were offering huge discounts (and even giveaways) on the floorstock (it made sense -- you want to display as wide a range of products for browsers to see, but don't necessarily want to ship it all home) and I was somewhat tempted to go back on Monday for good deals. But, (a) three days seemed excessive, (b) I had already said I'd be in the office Monday morning, and (c) Ian was planning to go anyway for a medieval combat manual he saw on Saturday that would be $10 on Monday. More on that in a bit.

As I walked through the aisles, I jotted down titles that looked interesting -- ones I might want to go out and find (at the library or bookstore) to read sometime in the future. And now I find myself struggling for how to list them: by publisher (which was generally how they were displayed) or by release date (for those in the future) or what... Well, I'll start with:

Best schwag: a ceramic Jane Austen bobblehead by Greenwood press to promote their All things Austen

Most unusual vendor reps: One booth had everybody wearing black with bowlers. I saw somebody in pseudo-medieval garb, passing out canvas bags. But the winner goes to the booth with an Elvis impersonator, singing Elvis songs modified to have library themes.

Most impressive book seen @ ALA Midwinter: a facsimile of the Domesday book. Wow. Apparently, it sells for around £12,000, so you may want to save up. I felt awed just to see it and touch it.

Scariest book seen @ ALA Midwinter: LSAT for Dummies -- there are enough stupid lawyers; do we really need to encourage them!? I just checked online, and as far as I can tell, nobody's published an MCAT for Dummies, so they have some standards, at least.

As at Worldcon, one of the first publishers to really catch my eye was McFarland Press. Among their titles on display:

• Booze and the private eye : alcohol in the hard-boiled novel
• The library book cart precision drill team manual
• The Trojan War : literature and legends from the Bronze Age to the present

  Compares how the story is portrayed in various works, chronologically from Homer: including Virgil, Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida, all the way to recent works like MZB's feminist Firebrand. Unfortunately, the book was published before this year's blockbuster epic turkey, because I'd love to see what the author would say about it.

• Storytelling in the pulps, comics, and radio : how technology changed popular fiction in America

  Joe: I saw this and thought of you. In fact, you may want to take a look at the rest of McFarland's catalog; they publish a lot of books on the pulps and radio serials, and (here & at Worldcon) they had a prominent sign: "tell us your book proposal"

And the more I wandered, the more I found:

• Youth information-seeking behavior : theories, models, and issues
• When Congress makes a joke : congressional humor then and now
• A funny thing happened on the way to the White House : foolhardiness, folly, and fraud in presidential elections, from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush
• Strange angel : the otherworldly life of rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons
• Please bury me in the library -- a gorgeous-looking children's picture book
• Shlemiel Crooks

  This forthcoming children's story was in a display of storytelling books. And honestly, I read about one page of it silently and wanted somebody should be reading it aloud to me. Clearly effective.

• Touch magic : fantasy, faerie & folklore in the literature of childhood by JAne Yolen
• The Cambridge world history of food
• The Cambridge Old English reader
• A profane wit : the life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (he's the author of the first known printed pornography I described last month.)
• Founding myths : stories that hide our patriotic past
• The Polar bear waltz and other moments of epic silliness : classic photographs from Outside's Magazine's "Parting Shot"
• Hip hop hares and other moments of epic silliness : more classic photographs from Outside magazine's "Parting Shot"

  The above two are collections of nature photos, and just too funny!

• Hachiko waits
• A Book About Design : Complicated Doesn't Make It Good -- not out yet, but really impressive. It's officially a kids' book, but I think most people could learn a thing or two from it.
• Five quarts : a personal and natural history of blood
• Delivered from distraction : getting the most out of life with attention deficit disorder
• Black Ships Before Troy : The Story Of The Iliad

  A children's book with gorgeous artwork

• Murder In Shakespeare's England
• Turning the tables : restaurants from the inside out

  The publisher had several proof copies in their booth. If I had realized that the release date was over six months away, I might've asked about getting a copy.

• Doing Our Own Thing : The Degradation Of Language And Music And Why We Should, Like, Care
• Science fiction television : a history

Whoever arranged the exhibit hall put all the comics dealers in the same corner. Nicely done. Lots of manga, Diamond distributors, DC comics...

• Terry Moore of Strangers in paradise was onhand, handing out a sourcebook with bios and timelines. I've been following the series since the first miniseries was released as a GN, and it's gotten so intricate that it's hard to explain. They're reissuing the series in a new set of trade-paperbacks: manga-sized, but Cerebus-phonebook thick (if that makes sense).
• Also got to meet Bill Barnes -- half the team behind the library comic strip Unshelved. I already had a copy of the first collection, and Ian just knew that I had to own the second collection, which I bought and got signed. I finished reading it Saturday night, and when I went back on Sunday, I told him that I thought the slogan in this strip belonged on merchandise. And, I guess I have good taste, because they had been talking about it, but so far vetoed it as too long.
  Then more potentially paying customers came over and I left him to try to make sales from them. Every subsequent time I came past the booth, he had a crowd, which I suppose is good for him, but I wished we had a chance to chat. See, in the back of What would Dewey do?, Bill Barnes mentions his favorite book is Fredric Brown's What mad universe -- and I just don't meet too many other Fredric Brown fans.

Other nifty finds:

• Remember the classic kids' book There's a nightmare in my closet? Mercer Mayer has a new book coming soon: There are monsters everywhere, which looks equally precious. [Hey! did you know Mercer Mayer illustrated the Great Brain books!? Neither did I until I started looking up the ISBNs for this comment.]
• Puffin Graphics is launching a new series of GNs (manga-sized) that are effectively another attempt at Classics Illustrated. I saw a galley excerpt of Macbeth by Tony Leonard Tamai and Arthur Byron Cover: Shakespeare's language with space opera artwork. I wish it well.
• Far too rich for my blood, but Greenwood Press has a six-volume Encyclopedia of Daily Life. I've seen and read other books in their Daily Life series (such as Daily life in Elizabethan England), but those too were a bit pricy for purchase. And apparently they now produce Daily Life Online. When I have a little more time, maybe I'll try their 30-day free trial...
• In a similar vein for younger readers, I thought Compass Point Books had some nifty series, including Changing Times: four books about Shakespearean England, and Blue Earth -- Exploring History Through Simple Recipes, both of which I thought were clever ways of making history come alive.
• This should thrill some of you (if you're still reading this far): Newmarket Press, which publishes movie scripts in nice illustrated formats, has two volumes of the complete Freaks & Geeks and West Wing Script Books, covering seasons 1 through 4.

What else...

• The ALA and Nextbook had flyers promoting a reading & discussion series on Jewish literature, titled Let's talk about it! I'll confess, the specific books didn't interest me terribly, but I liked the sound of the themes, which included: "Your heart's desire: sex and love in Jewish literature" and "Demons, golems, and dybbuks: monsters of the Jewish imagination." But I think my group of friends could come up with more interesting titles than they did.
• Just discovered that the BPL has been holding a monthly lecture series on John Adams and his books & papers (which are held by the BPL) since October. I've already missed half the lectures <frown>, but at least I found out in time for the next one, which really pushes my buttons:

  "Adams in Opposition: In the Margins of His Books"
  Though it is no longer common for readers to leave personal notes in the margins of books, we are singularly blessed that John Adams did just that.  Heather Jackson will address the idiosyncratic and often argumentative and oppositional nature of Adams' marginal notes in the context of common eighteenth-century practices. Book historian Heather Jackson is a Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the editor or coeditor of several volumes of Coleridge's works, including four volumes of marginalia, and the author of Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books and forthcoming Romantic Readers.
  Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 6 p.m. in the Rabb Lecture Hall. (617-859-2386).

• Attended a fascinating lecture by Andy Smith, of Oxford University Press' Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America. I wish I could afford the book; the website has a few nifty tidbits and excerpts.

  Did you know that Mexican beans and rice was originated in a California Mexican restaurant that catered to Chinese workers? In early America, cider was far more popular than beer -- beer only became prevalent through German immigration.

• I noticed a series of mathematics textbooks titled Life of Fred written by Stanley F. Schmidt. Is this the SF writer, or a different author with a similar name?
• My other major purchase was a nifty little gizmo called a Bookflip; but anything I write on it will get buried, so I think I'll save that for a subsequent post.

At any rate, those are only the books I saw but didn't purchase. Then there comes the books that I did get:

• Somebody was handing out free copies of an English Qur'an. It claims to be a "simplified translation" to suit "reading and comprehension of 6-16 year old individuals." Better than nothing, which is what we had before. It's going on our comparative religion bookcase.
• Advance reading copies of several YA books, listed in order of release date:
  • Boy proof
  • The Slash -- no, I don't think it has anything to do with fanfic
  • The Printer's devil
• I got an autographed copy of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink -- boy, he didn't look anything like what I imagined.
• I got an autographed proof of A Perfect red : empire, espionage, and the quest for the color of desire. I had it signed to Ian, since red is his color. The author has gorgeous handwriting (and used an appropriately red pen), but somehow I suspect that her signature will degrade as she attends more and more signings...
• This morning, Ian picked up (and got signed for me) Outwitting history : the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books

And I'm not even going to go through and list all the books Ian picked up, though I will mention Stevermer & Wrede's Grand Tour (which probably means I should reread the original Sorcery and Cecelia), a version of Twelfth Night adapted by Bruce Coville, and Hans Talhoffer's 15th Century manual of Medieval Combat, which was what drove him to come back on Monday in the first place.

And that's probably about all I have to say, except for writing about the bookflip, which I will make a separate post. I did do some snooping around our competitors' booths, but that's not really suitable subject for blogging.

Anybody still with me?

Well, at the very least, I now have a list of books to read if I should ever get bored...

Now what to read next...