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

These Just In

One of the drawbacks (for some people) or pluses (for others) about living so close to the country’s most endearing cultural institution is that there is not enough of a commute to stay on top of the radio world, which means that your reporter has completely lost track of what’s eating the talk radio world and has absolutely no idea of what today’s music might be. He could, one supposes, listen in the house, but for some reason the only radio in the Wolfe household is a satellite job that seems to be permanently welded to the opera channel. Your reporter does, however, get out occasionally on weekends on errands and in search of sporting venues. And he has heard The Splendid Table on NPR enough to have developed something of a taste for it. Quite a taste for it, actually. What he really likes is the recipes – particularly the ones that Lynne Rossetto Kasper makes up on the spot to use up the extra tablespoon of pesto and the odd chickpea, so he is happy to announce the arrival on the Mercantile shelves of The Splendid Table’s How To Eat Supper which is full of not only recipes for cheese-gilded linguine with smoky tomatoes and edamame and smoked tofu succotash (found in the classics section – is it a classic in your house? What an interesting house you must live in.) and which is interlarded with lots of those little snippets of food wisdom with which LRK bubbles so freely. Since your reporter never has a pencil in his moving vehicle, he never remembers any of the tasty menus once the car is garaged, but now there is this really quite handy book.

Also in: America Between the Wars From 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror. (How’s that for a catchy title?) This will appeal to those who like to run their tongues over recently vacated dental sockets.

-Nemo Wolfe

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

Recommended River Reading

For a number of incredibly boring reasons, this year our intrepid barque “Lil’ Scamp”, a 14-foot Sears Roebuck canoe, was not part of the glorious flotilla that is Paddlefest, which is odd, because as a fan of books about rivers, I am currently in the thrall Old Glory: a voyage down the Mississippi by Jonathan Raban.

It might be irresponsible to recommend a book with which one is not yet finished, except in this case, the nonfiction plot is that of the Mississippi river itself, and if the last hundred pages are half as good as the first couple of hundred, I can state with confidence that this book is worth your while.  The British Raban, all his life having been fascinated with the Mississippi, decides he’s going to buy a boat and navigate its vast and convoluted length.  The result is epic, at turns bizarre, hilarious, poetic–always energetic and fresh.  His is an alien’s prespective of the American culture to be found along the Mississippi’s alluvial shore circa 1980.  He travels in an open, outboard-equipped flat-bottom boat, stays in seedy hotels, mixes with locals in  Podunk, hick bars and with a collector’s ruthlessness, collects the neighbors of the great Midwestern artery on the pike of his pen.

For others whose day jobs prevent them from taking off for the summer and hitting the water, here is some reading (warning, reading not to be substituted for actual experience):

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.  Possibly the greatest book ever written about a river.

The Ohio by R. E. Banta.  Surprisingly sarcastic for what starts out as an ordinary book about the Ohio River.

The Mill Creek: An Unnatural History of an Urban Stream, by Stanley Hedeen…  not just about the Mill Creek, a must-read cultural and economic history of Cincinnati.  Which is perhaps what makes books about rivers so fascinating is that, as subjects, they connect so much while remaining conducive to good old-fashioned story telling.  -Ed Scripsi

A Desire Named Streetcar

The Library’s official position on the exceptionally fabulous plan for a streetcar that would bring countless visitors directly to our front door even as it scoops up eager Findlay Market shoppers from the Banks and eases the way for beerfuddled visitors from the many locavegetarian restaurants of the Brewery District back to their hotels in the salsadancing Fountain Square neighborhood is that we have no official position any more than do the churches that invite gubernatorial candidates to the pulpit to share their totally non-partisan thoughts on salvation, but we will say that it was a pleasure to see the lankiest mayor in America take the stage in the swampy heat of Arnold’s courtyard Thursday evening to whip the friends of the Cincinnati Streetcar into a warlike frenzy of readiness to do battle with the Sansabelt Streetcar opposition forces. The famously cautious mayor usually limits expending his political capital to fights like the war on trans-fats where he is unlikely to encounter unpleasantness, but there he was, waving his arms, summoning up dreams of Prague on the Ohio, cracking jokes, and looking like — well, like a mayor.

Readers who like to wallow in Cincinnati’s dreamy transportation past are encouraged to check out the Library’s copies of On The Right Track: Some Historic Cincinnati Railroads and The Green Line: The Cincinnati, Newport & Covington Railway which are sort of porn for rail buffs. Great stuff.

-Nemo Wolfe

Attn: Mercantile Book Procurement Department

At last!  Someone has finally documented the adversity and tribulation my people have faced throughout their centuries-long quest for freedom and acceptance.

We SHALL overcome… just as soon as we level up our dwarf clerics.

-Norm De Plume

Bodice ripper ripper

Business took the editorial us to the administrative offices of the junior, bigger, richer library up the street yesterday. There was a “crikey this town is too bleeding small” moment as we cooled our heels in the heel cooling area where the decoration is a collection of portraits of all the Cincinnati Public Librarians including Carl Vitz, the Minnesotan who made Woody Garber’s sleek mid-century main library happen and whose historian son Bob we had just left in our own senior, smaller, poor but honest library where he was continuing the word by word crawl through the Mercantile minutes since the beginning of Mercantile time, a labor that he had begun months ago with the idea of updating the very slim existing histories of the Venerable Institution.

We had made the trek up Walnut to talk about this year’s book festival with Kim Fender, the present Librarian. Once we had dealt with the festival Ms Fender wondered if we would like to see their latest gizmo, a state-of-the-art book scanning device and we said you bet. Book scanning devices are what all those subcontinentals and Middle-Imperials in the employ of Google use to work their way through the collections of the half-dozen major libraries that signed onto Google’s control of the universe project that will turn every one of their books into binary bits. We had imagined that a book scanning device would be something sleek and grey and intimidating, but the real thing is strangely – well – dorky. It has to be. It’s an automatic page turner and snapshot device that looks like just that, amusingly reminiscent of turn-of-the-twentieth century printing presses, Rube Goldbergish and deeply unsleek. But just because we found it slightly wacky doesn’t mean that we weren’t immediately and powerfully seized with bookish gadget envy.

We went back down Walnut Street to the ML where Professor Vitz was beavering through the year 1876 and fired up the laptop to price similar gizmos, quickly locating something called the Atiz Booksnap. The Booksnap looks sort of like the high-speed scanner at the Public only not quite as weird except for its marketing slogan “It’s not a scanner It’s a book ripper,” which gave us the heebie-jeebies.

-Nemo Wolfe

Covers from the Hall Collection

A classic story of attempting to open a stuck lock with the closest tool at hand, a bloody dagger, only to realize that that isn’t a lock or, for that matter, a door, and how the heck are you going to explain this one away?  This is the first of the Charlie Chan series.    -Ed Scripsi

You can find more Covers from the Hall Collection here.

Buffed beauties

“In the walk of ladies, the step ought not in general to exceed the length of the foot; and the pace should be neither too slow nor too quick, but natural and tranquil, without giving the appearance of difficulty in advancing, and active, without the appearance of being in a hurry.

Nothing can be more ridiculous than a little woman, who takes innumerable minute steps with great rapidity, to get on with greater speed, except it be a tall woman, who throws out long legs as though she would dispute the road with horses.”

This interesting and very helpful advice is taken from Exercises For Ladies Calculated to Preserve & Improve Beauty by Donald Walker. We were reminded of this small gem by our colleague’s post on Scientific Self Defense. The two volumes sit close by each other in the fabulously rich Mercantile stacks. Written in 1837, the profusely illustrated Exercise for Ladies lays out a sort of Jacksonian tai ch’i and supplements that regimen with tons of useful scientific and physiological information.

How forward thinking the Young Men of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library must have been to have acquired such useful knowledge for the Young Women in their lives.

Readers who find this book helpful may also want to spend some time in the Library’s nineteenth century golf advice area. Nobody understands the complexities of gutta percha better than the Mercantile Librarians.

-Nemo Wolfe