Janette Sadik-Khan for City Manager for starters

So Thursday, when the blogging delegates arrive at the Mercantile for the blogging convention which, while admittedly not quite as large as the recent NAACP convention (although the delegates to that convention were eerily invisible on downtown streets) is still every bit as important in the minds of the conventioneers who are, I warn you, a talkative lot, where will they be parking their Raleighs and Jamises and Kymcos and Vespae? No place convenient. This is a city that hasn’t even begun to think about making life pleasant for the people whose decision to move on two wheels rather than four frees up both parking and maneuvering space for those whose fibromyalgia requires them to drive Siennas. There will be no bike locker. There will not even be a bicycle rack closer than the southernmost municipal bike rack on Fountain Square.

What do we have to do to lure Janette Sadik-Khan from New York to Cincinnati to straighten out our twisted lives? Brilliant, easy on the eye, a former employee of Parsons Brinkerhoff, Janette Sadik-Khan actually knows what Ciclovia is about. They’re doing something like it in New York next month. God knows when we’ll get around to it.

-Nemo Wolfe

Covers from the Hall Collection

Talk about a recipe for maladjustment, poor kid. -Ed Scripsi

You can find more Covers from the Hall Collection here.

The Castro Code

It has come to our attention that pages 249 through 281 are missing from The Library’s recent acquisition “Fidel Castro: My Life”.  This encompasses chapter 11 “The Conspiracies Begin”, through 12, “The Bay of Pigs”, and 13, “the Cuban Missile Crisis”.  Could this be the work of some razor-wielding bibliopath? Or perhaps the shadowy machinations of a government agency?

The suspect had a gray beard, wore olive-drab cover-alls, and smelled of cigars.   If you have information regarding this incident, please report to the circulation desk.        -Ed Scripsi

Not in your packet

If you are a delegate to the 99^th convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and you are reading this blog, you are our kind of conventioneer. You will have noticed that nowhere in the 12,000 packets of information handed out to the 12,000 delegates at your convention is there anything addressing the needs of people who like to seek out the odd membership Library when visiting an unfamiliar city. That is because the people at the Convention and Visitors Bureau cannot themselves imagine anyone wanting to visit a Library. But, again, if you have made it this far, you are well enough read to see the point in stopping into a vast, cool, quiet, book and art filled sanctuary some eleven stories above the noise of the streets.

Don’t be put off by our name or the fact that this is a membership library. We’re delighted to show the place off to visitors whenever they drop in. Which they do. Maybe even more than Cincinnatians do.

Look for the historic marker across from USBank in the 400 block of Walnut Street. The Library is open from 9-5:30 weekdays and 10 -3 Saturday. The horse carts come right to our front door. Or you can walk from the Duke Energy Center. It’ll take you ten minutes.

-Nemo Wolfe

Reader Help Wanted

There’s no reason readers shouldn’t know that the city’s senior library relies heavily on Kirkus Reviews in carrying out the core business of book buying. Kirkus is a pre-publication review service presenting anonymous book reviews unsupported by the advertising that makes other prepubs a little less trustworthy. (It must be noted that the Library’s non-blogger thinks Kirkus has gone soft in recent years, giving gooey warm reviews to books that would have been laughed off in the eighties. Is it possible that the non-blogger has herself become just a little tougher than she was in the eighties?) In an effort to jazz the magazine up, Kirkus has taken to stapling in thematic inserts – Best Beach Reads – Most Truthful Memoirs – which we largely ignore. But the June 15 issue contains the 2008 Graphic Spotlight which is actually sort of interesting but way over the head of the book ordering department. So fumettimangagraphicnovel fans are invited – make that encouraged – to weigh in with advice on what to buy that might actually get read. Email, comment, or come in and look at the issue to see what’s coming.

If this works, we’ll try the same thing for sci-fi.    -Nemo Wolfe

More adventures of the Rev. Walter Colton, U.S.N.

Heading, as I am, into bear and mountain lion country, I thought it best to consult one of the Mercantile’s more recent resources on the subject: Three Years in California by the Rev. Walter Colton, U.S.N. (New York, 1859).

Three Years in California By Walter Colton

-Ed Scripsi

Won’t you please help?

Think about this: while you’re sitting in your comfortable home joyously contemplating your up-to-date globe, patrons of a certain old timey not-for-profit library are forced to use an ancient globe that features such imaginary countries as Czechoslovakia and the USSR.  Right now, a poorly informed Library patron is about to waste hours trying to book a flight to the non-existent nation of Yugoslavia.  Another is going to take the losing side of a $5 bar on how many Germanys there are.  A third is squinting vainly, wondering if the city of Peking he sees on the globe is anywhere near Beijing.

But for pennies a day- a tiny, tiny fraction of the price of a cup of coffee- you could be bringing information about the true names and borders of modern nation states to knowledge-hungry readers in the developing library world.  You can change a life. Donate your used (but up to date) globe to the Mercantile today!

Operators are standing by, because standing by is much easier then just ordering a new globe from Staples.

-Norm De Plume

Bookflix… er, Netbooxs

I’ve heard it said that it is impossible to throw a rock in downtown Cincinnati without hitting at least one lawyer.  Well, next time I put this supposition to the test, I will be sure to drag the attorney’s unconscious body back to the Mercantile, and once he or she revives, I will use the threat of another, even larger rock to make him or her scratch out a Cease and Desist letter, for it has come to my attention that a bunch of jokers called “Netflix” are ripping off the Mercantile in the worst way, and they must be stopped.

Since the dawn of time (April 17, 1835) or so, the Mercantile has been sending books to our members in the mail with a return envelope, then sending the next book on the reader’s list once we get the previous book back.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, I agree- these Netflix schmoes have some nerve.  Okay, so maybe we do charge late fees, but at a mere 10 cents/day, it’s almost like we don’t.  Plus, since we use a pre-paid postage system rather then a flat monthly fee, you don’t have to spend money from your account if you aren’t getting anything sent to you.  If you keep Netflix’s copy of Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil’s Son-In-Law for over a month without sending it back and getting something new, you still have to pay $20.  Advantage Mercantile.

Well, Netflix may have stolen our idea, but I’m about to steal it back.  I’m going to tell everyone who will listen how much better our books by mail program is then Netflix.  And I’m going to go find a rock.  A nice, aerodynamic rock.

-Norm De Plume

Crime Scene

The fates smiled on me in my frantic Friday evening search for something to read over the weekend, guiding my addled self to Lush Life, the latest crime novel from Richard Price. I remembered that Lush Life got unusually heavy review coverage for a crime novel – not always a good thing, by the way – it’s kind of annoying when card carrying book-chat types discover that genre fiction is not only entertaining but actually better literature than 95% of the Iowa Writers Workshop approved stuff. Kind of? Make that deeply annoying. And when I got home and got into the book I saw right away what had sucked in the reviewers: Price slathers on way more writing than, say, Elmore Leonard. But that shouldn’t be held against him. That’s just the way he does it. Anybody who lives in Over The Rhine or is thinking about living in Over The Rhine or who goes to school there or to clubs should see lots of parallels between Price’s murder scene, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and our own transitional semi-cool semi-slum. Good read. But no better than the less adulated George Pelecanos who, even before he picked up some notoriety writing for the Wire, was doing in book after book for Washington DC what Price does for New York in Lush Life. Pelecanos has a new one – The Turnaround – coming out on August 1. We’ll have it in before then. And we’ve got all of his others.

-Nemo Wolfe

The Mercantile’s Guide to Style

Today we continue to explore how to comport oneself via email. The first rule here is brevity. The message you want to convey is, of course, your message, but also that your time is valuable, more valuable, in fact, than clarity, and that you are far too busy to bloviate ad nauseum over last week’s sales numbers, or even to play Scrabulous on Facebook, surf eBay for vintage fountain pens, or google your old college chums. Ideally, you don’t even have time to type properly. For those of us typing with all ten fingers, achieving the proper degree of obfuscation takes practice… results can easily be achieved instantaneously using ordinary Scotch tape. Simply wrap tape ten or twelve times around the fingers of both hands. Now type, as quickly as possible, your message. Just because email reduces our text to uniform type doesn’t mean we need to bid farewell to those happy days when the illegibility of an office missive increased in direct proportion with the authority and importance of the writer. Doctors have managed to keep this principle alive and well–just because we can sew your aorta back together under a microscope, their scrawls imply, doesn’t mean we can operate a pen with any more facility than an Orangutan. Ergo: