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

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

You can find more Covers from the Hall Collection here.

Although the Library describes itself as a “Literary Center,” we are not snobs by any stretch of the imagination. At least mostly not. Definitely mostly not when it comes to books. At any rate, I’m pretty sure I speak for the entire staff when I say that creating a pleasurable experience for the reader is one of the most noble goals to which a writer can aspire.

That’s why I was so happy to read this review of Jimmy Breslin’s book “The Good Rat.” Not only does it make the book sound like a fantastic read, it also contains a great bit on pleasure as a criminally overlooked element of good writing.

Speaking of pleasurable reading, if you’re into that sort of thing you should check out this short interview with Breslin from New York Magazine. It makes me wish he was my cranky uncle. I can’t decide whether my favorite part is when he says they should let mafiosi shoot “the hedge fund people,” or the part where he blames plummeting newspaper circulation on “YouFace.”

-Norm De Plume

There is something deeply American about Eastern European and Russian crime, and I’m damned if I know exactly what it is. I think sometimes it is the crumminess that citizens of that part of the world had to carry around with them for so long. Crumminess you say? America isn’t crummy. And no, blogamerica isn’t crummy. And Obamamerica isn’t crummy. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Americans didn’t live like kings. And a crash of living standards is always possible here where we are all responsible for our fates. A crash to levels in the last days of the totalitarian states. And if you don’t believe me, take a drive through a trailer park. Or a rural village without a reason. Or Washington Park at lunchtime. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Maybe it’s the way they and we have had to live under the rule of ideas rather than the rule of family. Or kitchen. I don’t know. But I do know that fictional crime east of Germany time and again beats fictional Eurocrime.

This moody rant is seeping out of the battered keyboard of the Dell Inspiron that has seen better times because I have just finished Siren of the Waters by Michael Genelin (just out) in which the heroine is Slovakian police commander Jana Matinova. Crikey, it’s great. Tough and full of an absolutely absorbing place – a tiny country up against its own historic victimhood and mistakes – without being about the actual little piece of the vanished Soviet empire since it’s supposed to be about crime. I think you will find, if you can get your hands on it, that Commander Matinova lives and breathes instantly. God I hope this guy’s got a second book in him.

-Nemo Wolfe

One of my favorite books in the Mercantile’s collection is our copy of the 1953 edition of the American Thesaurus of Slang. It is easily the most entertaining thesaurus I’ve ever cracked open. For instance, check out this list of the options available to an early 50s scenester who wished to refer to a swing musician:

cat, clambaker, gate, gater, hepcat, hep gee, hepper, hepster, hipster, hot cat, hot man, hot musician, hot star, hotcha tunester, jive artist, jivecat, jiver, jivester, maniac, screwball, sharp cat, sharpy, swingaroo, swing cat, swingcopator, swinter, singing gate, swingman, swingologist, swingster, tin-pan alley cat, tub, whack

This book is so great, you can stick your finger in a random page, and you will find yourself pointing at something interesting. Here, I’ll do it now. Wow. Did you know that in hobo slang, the skid row district of Portland, Maine is called “Big Eddy”?

It’s also fun (Well, not “fun” fun. More like librarian fun.) to see words that used to be considered slang, but are now considered merely words, such as “phone” and “teenager.”

Be advised that this book is in the Mercantile’s reference section, so it cannot be checked out, but it can (and should) be perused at length in the Library’s Reading Room. As an added bonus available only to Stacked readers, check under the cut for an extremely pared down version of the Thesaurus’s authoritative list of things to say to someone when you don’t believe them.

Who the hell is Betty Martin?

-Norm De Plume

Applesauce!
Banana oil!
That’s ridick!
All my eye (and Betty Martin)!
Bughouse fables!
Can you tie that!
Croon another, Crosby!
Don’t be a goop!
Don’t give me any of those!
Don’t kid your grandma!
Don’t woof me!
I am an elephant!
I’m from Missouri!
In a horse’s neck!
Iron hat!
Like fun!
My aunt!
No smooch?
Nuts to that noise!
Pass the salt!
Skim it down!
Tell it to the horse marines!
Tell it to Sweeney!
That’s enough to make a cat laugh!
You’re full of hops!

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

My fellow web logger Scripsi found these old timey postcards at the Ohio Book Store. For the first time since I can remember, I actually don’t want to eat a coney right now.

-Norm De Plume

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

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

]]> http://cincinnatimercantile.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/reader-help-wanted/feed/ Nemo Wolfe http://cincinnatimercantile.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/more-adventures-of-the-rev-walter-colton-usn/ http://cincinnatimercantile.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/more-adventures-of-the-rev-walter-colton-usn/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:34:42 +0000 Ed Scripsi http://cincinnatimercantile.wordpress.com/?p=479

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