With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not. We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia. Just so you know now, all you bookstore fiends: neither the Strand nor Powell’s is on this list. They’re both great bookstores, of course, but not particularly pretty (at least in our minds), and thus disqualified. Click through to see our picks for the most beautiful bookstores in the world, and as always, if we’ve left off your favorite, be sure to add to the collection in the comments!

A gorgeous converted Dominican church gives the power of reading its due diligence. Selexyz Bookstore, Maastricht, Holland

Christopher James of Porridge Papers in Lincoln, Nebraska is the Cupid of the Typosphere. Since 2008, he has been hosting Love on the Run, a free pre-Valentine’s Day event merging vintage typewriters, love notes and special delivery services. Anyone can stop by his shop and type out a love note on an old working typewriter, onto some nice Mohawk Ultra Fuschia paper and have it sent to a designated Valentine by special delivery. Each note gets rolled up to fit inside a little bottle, and then packaged inside a letterpressed bag made with handmade wildflower seed (for Spring planting), and delivered in time for the Valentine’s holiday. With four years of Cupid expertise, James would now like to assist businesses in other cities to adopt this Free Love campaign. Stop in at his Kickstarter site to watch a short video and learn how you can help spread the love in your neighborhood in the future. My only question to him is, “Do you have any Pink-Out on hand in case of typos?”

In March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records.

No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published, sold, bought and read: e-books and e-readers. Working in secret, behind an unmarked door in a former bread bakery, they rushed to build a device that might capture the imagination of readers and maybe even save the book industry.

They had six months to do it.

Running this sprint was, of all companies, Barnes & Noble, the giant that helped put so many independent booksellers out of business and that now finds itself locked in the fight of its life. What its engineers dreamed up was the Nook, a relative e-reader latecomer that has nonetheless become the great e-hope of Barnes & Noble and, in fact, of many in the book business.

Several iterations later, the Nook and, by extension, Barnes & Noble, at times seem the only things standing between traditional book publishers and oblivion.

Inside the great publishing houses — grand names like Macmillan, Penguin and Random House — there is a sense of unease about the long-term fate of Barnes & Noble, the last major bookstore chain standing. First, the megastores squeezed out the small players. (Think of Tom Hanks’s Fox & Sons Books to Meg Ryan’s Shop Around the Corner in the 1998 comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”.) Then the chains themselves were gobbled up or driven under, as consumers turned to the Web. B. Dalton Bookseller and Crown Books are long gone. Borders collapsed last year.

No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point? Such fears came to the fore in early January, when the company projected that it would lose even more money this year than Wall Street had expected. Its share price promptly tumbled 17 percent that day.

Lurking behind all of this is Amazon.com, the dominant force in books online and the company that sets teeth on edge in publishing. From their perches in Midtown Manhattan, many publishing executives, editors and publicists view Amazon as the enemy — an adversary that, if unchecked, could threaten their industry and their livelihoods.

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Read the rest of the article at New York Times

I am nearly halfway finished digitizing the issues of grOnk magazine that Nelson Ball gave me. In this installment: the fourth series which includes work (from 1968 through 1971) by David UU, Hart Broudy, David Aylward, Joseph di Donato, Andrew Suknaski, and Earle Birney. Once again, given the unique materiality of all these pieces of varying sizes, shapes, colours and textures, I urge you to look at the originals wherever possible.

The first issue of the fourth series, David UU‘s (or David W. Harris) MOTION/PICTURES, was published in March 1969 in an edition of 300 copies. At this point, UU was a co-editor of grOnk along with Nichol and bill bissett. MOTION/PICTURES, sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper stapled together, is wrapped in a red card-stock cover featuring collage work by UU. Most curious for me is the copyright page which lists other books by UU, including poems published by Ganglia Press in 1966 which were “destroyed at authors request” and a collection AMERICANCROSS which was “suppressed by american authorities” in 1966.

The second issue features four gorgeous typewriter concrete poems – titled “C POEMS” – on cream coloured card stock by Hart Broudy. It’s not clear what year this was published. All poems (with the exception of the cover-art on the outside of the envelope which seems to have been made with letraset) have been constructed with the letter ‘c’, occasionally ‘l’ and a few punctuation marks.

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Read the rest of the post at loriemerson.net

I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I’m no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I’ve rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.

But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn’t aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that let’s you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I’m near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I’m not, I fire up the MP3s.

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.

There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

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Read the rest of the article at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type

from CBC News/Arts & Entertainment

Sales have soared for erotic literature with the advent of e-readers such as Kobo and Kindle, with one company in British Columbia reaping the benefits.

Tina Haveman, who’s based in Squamish, B.C., north of Vancouver, owns a busy digital erotic publishing company and she says there are a lot of “closet readers” who would never admit to liking that kind of literature.

“Customers are starting to discover them and finding that they can read certain books that they do not want other people to see and in privacy,” Haveman, who runs eXtasy books, told CBC Radio.

The e-publisher notes that sales took off in early 2010 and doubled last year. She expects them to triple in 2012 with a majority of downloaders being female. Xtasy has more than 1,000 titles in its “store” including ones such as the paranormal Dragon’s Pearl, the hybrid fantasy/Victorian Lady Mechatronic and the Steampunk Pirates and the Western-tinged Dead Man’s Diamond.

“Women read a lot more than men. It’s always been that way.”

But within that group, interests are wide: from inspirational romance to stories involving werewolves to gay romance – each selling for between $3 and $4 online.

Nathan Maharaj, Kobo’s merchandising director, called eXtasy a Canadian success story.

“It’s reduced barriers to entry for publishers as well as for customers looking to get into it.”

Susan Knabe, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, says amateur erotic writing is thriving online and now it’s becoming more accessible.

“You can actually, in some ways, enjoy the fact that you’re doing something a little bit naughty in public,” Knabe said. “You could be reading your e-reader on public transit.”

According to Maharaj, sexy books are regularly cracking bestseller lists: “At any given moment in the list of the top 100 most popular titles on Kobo in any given territory there’s always some work of erotica in there.”

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Lost & Found: An Evening of Storytelling

Last night the Gallery Connexion held its first storytelling event. The theme for the night was “lost & found”. The six storytellers for the evening included Erin Keating, Amanda Jardine, Andrew Sisk, Eric Hill and myself. The capacity crowd enjoyed what will hopefully be the first of many storytelling/spoken word events at the gallery. Big thanks to Eric Hill for setting it all up.

For my story, I chose one that I posted here last fall in written form. I call the story, “I’m the opposite of all those things”. This is my performance from last night’s event. Enjoy.

In July my wife and I took the kids to Paris for two weeks. Amid the other activities-the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa-I brought them to see Shakespeare and Company, and showed them the room looking out at Notre Dame where I slept for four nights in 1993. As it was then, the store was packed in July with earnest young people, many of them clearly aspiring to a literary expat kind of life. I chuckled, but only because I once was one of them.

“I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life,” said George Whitman, who opened the store in 1951 and later named it after the landmark of Hemingway’s era. When I arrived in 1993, George generously equated being a journalist with being a “writer,” meaning I could sleep upstairs unburdened of the normal requirement to shelve books or work the cash.

George was also intrigued to learn I was living in Prague, where I worked at an English-language newspaper called Prognosis. He asked a favour: an English-language bookstore was opening soon in Prague, the first in the city, and he handed me a stack of paperback classics to take back, to “seed” the new store.

The Globe Bookstore and Café went on to become an expat hub not unlike George’s store in Paris. We Prague expats rolled our eyes at the facile comparisons between our scene and Hemingway’s in the twenties, but I still smile at my small role linking literary, expat Paris to literary, expat Prague.

Then in November, during a trip to New York City, I met up in Brooklyn with some former colleagues from the newspaper in Prague. During a two-hour lunch we reminisced and came to a bittersweet consensus that such an adventure would not be possible today. It had existed for a unique moment, when post-Communist society was opening up so quickly that anyone could go to Prague and do just about anything.

That freedom came infused with the aura of Václav Havel, the playwright whose ideals had helped throw off a totalitarian regime and elevated him to the presidency of his country. Like George Whitman, Havel was also a magnet for young people; we were captivated by his writings on “living in truth.”

In his landmark 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel had spoken of a hypothetical greengrocer who, after years of putting signs in his store window supporting the Communist regime, decides simply to stop-to dissent.

“In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance,” Havel wrote.

“He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. . . . Therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”

Though serious and resolute, Havel also saw the absurd humour of life under Soviet domination: in his autobiographical play “Audience,” a playwright-dissident, condemned by the regime to work in a brewery, is summoned by the foreman, a not-very-literate fellow who has been asked by the local party boss to file weekly reports on the agitator.

The foreman asks the dissident if he’d mind terribly helping write the reports on himself; when the dissident demurs, saying it would violate his principles, we glimpse the foreman’s tortured soul: “You bloody intellectuals,” he complains. “Fine gentlemen, spouting fine words. You can afford to, because you always come out on top, you’re interesting. . . . What about me? Nobody gives me a hand, nobody is scared of me, nobody writes about me, nobody gives a blind bit of notice what I do.”

It is this generosity, this humanity, this understanding, that brought Czechs into the streets in the tens of thousands to mourn Havel’s death.

Between the deaths of George Whitman and Václav Havel came that of Christopher Hitchens, the British-turned-American journalist and essayist. In his devotion to literature and to truth, there were elements of Whitman and of Havel in him. He, too, was a beacon to young people, generous with his time when dealing with students, interns and admirers.

Like Havel, Hitchens rejected a fixed ideology or dogma. “I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian-on the left and on the right,” he once said. “The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy-the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”

Havel, too, confounded attempts to label him: having brought down a Communist regime, he was soon lamenting the worst excesses of capitalist, consumerist culture in his country. And like Hitchens, he has often been compared to George Orwell.

The confluence of literature and politics always brings one back to Orwell. At Shakespeare and Company in July, I bought a copy of the new edition of Orwell’s essays, All Art is Propaganda, which includes “The Prevention of Literature,” a warning that writers must avoid sacrificing their freedom to this political cause or that. “A bought mind is a spoiled mind,” Orwell wrote-perhaps the most succinct explanation for why Havel never joined a political party during his years as Czech president.

I am just a reporter, author and storyteller in a small province in Canada, a journalist devoted to covering seemingly prosaic concerns distant from the epic struggles, or literary hot spots, that marked the careers of Whitman, Hitchens and Havel. But lazy thinking and equivocation are universal, as is the need for clear thinking and clear writing.

In this year of nostalgia, the deaths of these three literary heroes reminds me of the importance of living in truth. They remind me, too, that these ideas and ideals must not be the domain of nostalgia, but of daily life.

by Jeffery Donaldson

from The New Quarterly: Canadian Writers & Writing, Issue 117, Winter 2011

As I get older, I find it harder to spend time with friends. And I love my friends. My friends are the warmest and most generous people I know. That’s why I can’t spend much time with them. The stress is too much. The feeling of having to pull myself together, be collected, unscattered, equal to their kindnesses, ready for the nice things they will say and do. Please, don’t let me blurt out something awful. Tourettes and a dash of Aspergers make for a perfect storm in polite company: excess mental energy and an anxiety about every worst thing that can happen, combined with being utterly unintuitive about social decorum. And the obsession! I once spent an entire lunch with a colleague worrying that I was going to spit my mouthful of salad into his face. He’s talking about marking stipends and I’m looking at him picturing the romaine lettuce on his forehead, a speck of red onion on his chin.

What if all that junk in your head came out? You don’t have to have “mental issues” to know that there are rules in conversation, things that can be said and things that should remain hidden or reserved. I always seem to have Edgar’s caveat at the end of King Lear in my head: “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say,” that next-to-impossible ideal that is supposed to keep tragedy at bay. The idea that people can be natural in company is a mystery to me. I don’t know what natural is (does anyone?). So I make it up, stand on the alert, watch, listen, pick up cues from others, and double-think every least gesture and nuance. I’m a Henry James conversation on crack. Intuition for me was an aggressively learned skill: “learned intuition,” the first and last oxymoron for people on the autism spectrum. It helps to explain why there is for me something very eerie and unreal about polite conversation. I feel like a ghost: insubstantial enough to be not noticed, but bound to frighten people when I am. It is embarrassing and very stressful to be around so many real people. I’m thinking, being real is such an unfair advantage. I’m thinking, I could reach out and my hand would pass through you. Ghosts don’t make genuine connections.

Now writing is another matter. Writing puts the mediacy back in immediacy. It lowers the urgency-rheostat and cools down the over-heated neurons. In writing, you take a step back, gather time and space to yourself. You can think and decide, reflect, have second thoughts. Best of all, you can play! You can be whimsical and daring, flirt with limits, meet friends half way, challenge them, tease them, welcome them at their word. You can be hospitable. All in your own good time.

Now I’m not getting all mushy here about genuine feelings in writing. I haven’t forgotten Oscar Wilde’s “give a man a mask and he will tell the truth.” Wilde was spot-on, of course, about writing and masks; writing is nothing if not an epitome of exercised social control, about making yourself up and putting yourself out there in the terms that best suit you. W.H. Auden said that you can walk into people’s living rooms and know in an instant whether you want to see them again. Something of that is true in writing as well. We size people up. In writing you have the same sorts of tensions that you have in conversation: the give and take, the underlying messages, the judgements and anxieties. It all goes on, and sometimes in ways that are much more biting and cruel than one would ever tolerate in conversation.

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Read the rest of the article at Poetry Daily