Good Book of the Day

My bookseller connections

The Librarian — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:50:04 +0000

Heretofor, I’ve been putting the following sets of “buy” links for books I review:

in-print books and e-books: amazon.com and indiebound.org.
out-of-print books: abebooks.com

Amazon.com and Macmillan (whose subsidiaries and imprints represent maybe 20% of US book publishing) have been negotiating rights and pricing on e-books. On Friday, January 30, 2010 Amazon removed all “buy” links on its site for *all* Macmillan materials, e- or paper. The situation is, as they say, “developing”, but as of Feb. 7th most Macmillan books still do not have their Buy links back, though Amazon has said it will.

You can find good coverage of this issue by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, John Scalzi, and others.

I’m not saying that Macmillan is the hero in this fracas. But Amazon.com is clearly not interested, at some level, in selling books — or in keeping my links to them moderately stable. Since abebooks is a subsidiary of Amazon, I’m tarring them with Amazon’s brush.

So, I have decided to switch “buy” links:

in-print books to Powell’s
e-books to Diesel eBooks
out-of-print books to Alibris

I’m removing the indiebound links, frankly, because they weren’t getting enough traffic, and I don’t want to split up the traffic I drive. If anyone has a better idea, especially for OOP books, please let me know.

Snowy in snow

The Librarian — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:26:55 +0000

Snowy Owl in the Zürich Zoo.

Credit: Tambako the Jaguar.

Waiting to fly

The Librarian — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:14:18 +0000

Workers wait to release balloons prior to the inauguration of the expo boulevard at the World Expo 2010 site in Shanghai, China on January 22, 2010.

Credit: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

In the bloom

The Librarian — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:53:00 +0000

Summer plankton, by Spike Walker. Wellcome Image Award winner, 2009.

actual post date: Feb. 4, 2010.

The Scottish ostriches of Christmas

The Librarian — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:56:50 +0000

Yeah, I don’t get it, either. But this was a holiday window display at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.

Credit: Viridia.

Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen

The Librarian — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:43:07 +0000

Late January and February are when the Great Horned Owls are courting, hooting their way around my house. That’s when this book is for.

Looking for Jerusalem

The Librarian — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:22:40 +0000

The Frontispiece from William Blake’s Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion. The image is (edited: thank you, EleanorB) Los Entering the Grave: Los, the spirit of creativity, is carrying a globe of light as he descends into Albion’s tomb. I’ve always found Blake’s mythopoeic works unreadable — they’re Bible fanfic, all right, but on LSD — but I love his art more all the time.

Credit: The Blake Archive; the Yale Center for British Art.

The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Lee Marriott

The Librarian — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:23:56 +0000

One hundred years of Kiowa history, in stories about ordinary lives, based on personal memories.

Reddish white-ish blue-ish

The Librarian — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:29:04 +0000

From the Brookside Gardens Holiday flower display. I thought this would be an easy one. Not for me, it turns out.

Credit: The Little Review.

Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, by Lacy Ford

The Librarian — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:19:58 +0000

In 1776 Southerners said slavery was a regrettable and probably temporary necessity; by 1859 they said it was the foundation of their society and their liberty. Men of the Upper South, like Thomas Jefferson, were always more ambivalent than the planters of South Carolina. But over time, a paternalistic image of slavery became the standard for both the Upper South and the Deep South, unifying the region around their “peculiar institution”.

Ford’s book is even longer than its 600+ pages suggest — the print is a point smaller than usual, to fit in *all* his research. The great mass of detail supports some rather uncomfortable conclusions — which is not to say that I don’t believe them.

To me Ford seems to show that the turning point for Southern ideology come when the abolitionists started to argue that slavery was an unmitigated, absolute evil. Southerners had been able to deal with the idea that slavery was not the best of all possible arrangements, a weakness that they might work their way out of. But the idea that they might be bad people because of it was not to be borne. Their paternalistic ideology was a reaction to abolitionism, a kind of moral doubling-down. They did not merely deny that slavery was evil, they raised their commitment to it and claimed it was an active, paternalistic good.

As part of their doubling-down, Southerners made race an ever stronger determinant of free status. They moved toward an ideology of white populism: all white men were free, proud and equal (unlike the “wage slaves” in the North, they said). Meanwhile, free blacks were actively disenfranchised in North Carolina (where they were common) and in Tennessee (where they were rare). A quick googling suggests that Ford is wrong to see this as a Southern phenomenon — a shocking number of Northern states also disenfranchised free blacks during the antebellum period.

Ford definitely looks at the usual antebellum suspects: the different economies of the South and North, social structures, education, expansion. But to my mind he really brings out the importance of Southern self-image, what they called “honor”. It reminds me of the way many people react to being told they’ve said something racist: they’ll defend the indefensible, because “being racist means you’re a bad person” and so must be rejected utterly.