Books!

Not the April tally, granted, but books! April and May tallies very soon...

Lady Chatterly Discarded...

...on Capitol Hill earlier this week, the Penguin paperback edition. What would decency crusader Anthony Comstock say?

For some reason

I am experiencing difficulty blogging the April tally. I have the numbers all ready to go, and yet...

Serial Holding

In the past I've written about serial borrowing, in which, drunk on the possibilities of borrowing nearly any book I want, I borrow them all at once.

A spin-off of this phenomenon is serial holding, in particular, serial holding of new books. This is a tricky proposition as new books are in greater demand than the old or merely recent, and as it is hard to gauge that demand, often enter the library's system in small quantities.

In the last month or so my holds queue has witnessed the arrival and delivery of the following titles: Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance by Dean Wareham, Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier and Neil Gaiman, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu, and The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel.

While none of these titles currently top best seller lists, they share in common, that relative to their audience, they are new and in demand. They are also titles currently in my possession or recently in my possession. Finally, I have not had the chance to crack the spine on a one of them (no doubt to the annoyance of those waiting for them).

Call it a case of too many new books and not enough time. I have to admit, I'd love to have these titles aging on my shelves for just the right moment.

Coming soon: the April tally.

Travel

I'm flying to San Francisco tomorrow to visit some friends for a few days. As always Ill pack a few books and, as always, I'll forgo cracking a single one of them open, opting instead for International CNN or an overpriced and ever so slightly out-of-date magazine.

So, why do I do it? And why do I risk taking a library book on a flight, increasing the risk of losing it?

I think, in part, because books are like travel companions, especially when traveling alone. Even on a brief trip, even an unread book can keep you anchored, reminding you either of home or a need to explore.

As it is, I rarely leave home without my copy of New Goose by Lorine Niedecker. It's small, readable, and something you just don't encounter at every library or Barnes & Noble. Even if I am just walking to and from work.

Pretentious? Possibly. Well, probably. And I've been known to carry even worse with me, say, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Joyce's Ulysses. Why? Well, God forbid, but what if something happened? What if I got lost, or worse? Who better than Agee or Niedecker having your back when approaching a complete stranger for help?

Sometimes you pick the author, the library picks the book

I'm always on the lookout for Western authors. Not Western in the sense of Louis L'Amour or Zane Gray, but 20th Century to the present, perhaps embodied by Wallace Stegner or possibly even Raymond Chandler.

So I was excited to read in this Westword blog post about John Fante, in honor of his 99th birthday. Fante, who died in 1983, was an under-the-radar author from Colorado. Apparently his childhood experiences in Colorado shape and shade many of his writings, though many take place in California. I also learned that he inspired and influenced Charles Bukowski, but I won't hold that against him.

The author of at least ten novels, multiple short stories and screenplays, the Denver Public Library has plenty of his titles amongst their holdings. The one I found when I stopped at the Central Library on a break this afternoon was The Brotherhood of the Grape. I know next to nothing about this title written by an author I know next to nothing about.

But I am looking forward to getting started.

The March Tally

Mismanagement of my fantasy baseball team and a seventeen-month-old with an ear infection have kept my hands full of late, but I will get back into the swing of things as I have several observations and items to share about not buying books.

After three months I am surprised at how easy it has been to acclimate to what I thought would be a major shift in my spending and reading habits. Maybe it is the ease with which I can reserve books online, or that the library is so close to my work. Three months into this thing I have not had a major urge to buy a book.

I will be curious to see if that trend continues as the days get longer and, more importantly, hotter. Not being a native, I find Colorado summers rather unpleasant. Many people hole up and read during winter, perhaps I will reverse that trend and increase my reading – and perhaps my desire for books – in the summer.

More on that later, let’s take a look at the March tally:

I checked out 12 books this month. One of these books I acquired via Prospector. I am proud to report I actually finished a few of them, including Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear.

Of these 12 books, I determined that I would definitely have bought 7 of them. These books would have cost roughly $95.25.

When I plug these numbers into the Denver Public Library's "Library Value Calculator," for my 12 books (1 of which was an inter library loan):

My individual return on investment for March was $45.69. This means for every dollar in taxes I spend on the library, I received $45.69 value in return for the month.

In addition, the Library Value Calculator reports that for the month of March I received a monthly value of $190.00.

More soon!