13015 Larchmere Blvd.
Shaker Hts., OH 44120
216.795.9800
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UK POSTCARD 3: CARDIFF CASTLE, WALES Thursday, July 31, 2008 (written 7/27/08)
Brenda
Aboard ferry from S. Wales to Ireland, tonight's hotel is in Waterford. Beautiful weather continues, sunny but windy here on top (11th) deck of big ferry, where I'm at picnic table in breeze. The Chapmans are inside out of sun & wind. Many people babbling in too many languages all around. This morning's tour of Cardiff Castle lots of fun. It's a fantastical place. Guide belonged on stage & had responsive audience w/ us. Drive through beautiful countryside to coast. Our Globus guide is Welsh & has a good voice in nice humor & loyalty to Wales. Played traditional music for long drive. Getting used to New Zealanders & Australians (60% of group) & their reference to rugby heroes. Not much free time at all, & busy days.
[Harriett says: in case you can't tell, that's a fully-fanned peacock in the foreground.]
LARCHMERE
IMPROVEMENTS Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Harriett
Larchmere Boulevard, just east of the commercial strip here from N. Moreland to the crazy intersection at Shaker Lower Lake, has been repaved, halleluiah! We've been referring to this part of the road as the "cobblestone menace" of late, and it required low speeds or wheel realignments to navigate. But just yesterday, the project was officially finished, and the street is smooth enough to satisify even rollerbladers and bikers. Hooray.
AND, to make it even better, Shaker Heights has decapitated the parking meters on the Shaker side of Larchmere, so parking in front of Loganberry is currently free! (Can't tell you what new heads these meters might grow, but take advantage of the freebie while you can.)
SNEAKY FURRY Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Harriett
It's time for an Otis update, I think. Yes, he's outgrowing some baskets around here, and sometimes opts for just lounging over the books themselves (especially in the front window, which is too cute for words). He's certainly still a kitten, but he has those adolescent lanky-legs now, and a cat-like gait (when he isn't playing sneaky furry attacks). He's mostly independent but friendly, especially with children (he'll wake up when he hears children in the store and go say hi). And he may yet win over the other Furry Fatsos at home, where he persists in kitten antics and invitations to play, despite any superficial growling and impatience. I guess that's what makes kittens so irresistable.
SUZIE'S
CAT!!Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Harriett
I just got pictures of my goddaughter's kitten, Cleopatra. I must share! Ok, world, here is Cleo! What a cutie. Suzie is off at camp at the moment. I'm sure she misses Cleo, but is having a blast all the same.
UK POSTCARD 2:
DARTMOORTuesday, July 29, 2008 (written 7/24/08)
Brenda
Oh no - postcard and/or journal writing is not going to be possible. Days are too long & full, & end at bedtime exhausted. Yesterday left London 7am for Canterbury, then Battle (Hastings), Brighton (Royal Pavillion) & hotel on sea by 6:30, with dinner & walk on promenade. Today long ride with 4 stops, Winchester (I loved this cathedral), Stonehenge where we had picnic on sunny grass w/ view, & up moor to Widecombe, a charming place. We saw these little wild ponies, I have photos to prove it!
PURPLE THE WORLDTuesday, July 29, 2008
Harriett
On Sunday we had a purple paint party. Every summer we have some improvement project: LitArts floor, new air conditioner, rehabbing the Annex Gallery... this year, it was turning the white wicker furniture into (what else?) . . . purple! We rented an industrial paint sprayer (should have seen the bookies with the big boy tools), and we coated everything in loganberry purple. It looks rich and shocking all together and by themselves, but with cushions in place on the red floor, it looks glorious. No more "Hamptons patio" effect, but good ole' Loganberryness. As such, it looks very natural and in place. :-)
SOLAR Monday, July 28, 2008
Harriett
Erika made the paper again with a solar project-in-process (something photogenic about photovoltaics). What the article doesn't cover is how difficult building departments and the now-defunct Ohio residential renewable energy rebate program have been. Not to mention homeowners wanting to play contractors. But, more solar is good news, however it happens to happen.
UK POSTCARD 1: LONDON Saturday, July 26, 2008 (written 7/22/08)
Brenda
Oh my, it's really all quite glorious, even the sunny warm weather! Arrived at 6:30am (1:30 my time), after easy flight, and had lunch at Asian restaurant, then took 4-hour tour to Windsor, followed by lovely French dinner at Globus's choice restaurant, then sunset cruise on Thames. Big Ben chimed at 9pm as our boat went by :-). Hotel breakfast rather spectacular, and then a tour all morning, with an hour at St. Paul's. Taking lots of pix. Glad to leave driving to Globus. Now off on tube & bus to Chiswick & Kew on our own.
[Harriett says: I want to ride that ferris wheel on the Thames!!]
GREETING
CARDSWednesday, July 24, 2008
Harriett
There's an advertisement running on WCLV these days for a store in Rocky River that claims to be "the best card shop in Cleveland." Since my inventory and reputation for good cards continues to grow, I thought I'd put this claim to the test. First step: inventory how many different card lines we carry here. Next: go visit aforementioned shop and size it up. But I'm sure Loganberry is in the running for the title.
Here's the list of card names we have available. Obviously, I don't have every card by every manufacturer, several don't have websites, and there are some that I buy through consortium companies and sales reps (which accounts for most of the British cards). No Hallmarks here! In total, I count 53+ card lines carried by 30+ card companies purchased through 3 card reps and 20 direct sales. Not bad.
- Abacus Cards, Acorn
Designs, Antioch
Publishing, Archivist,
Art File, Bodleian
Library , Bottman Design, Bug
Art, Catch Publishing, Caroline
Gardner, Clare Maddicott, Collage, DeWit Marchant, Diane
Seskes, Earthworks, Flaunt, Found Image Press, Great
Arrow, Green
Field Paper Company, House-Mouse
Designs, Jon Abrahamson, Knock
Knock, KOCO
New
York, Laini's
Ladies, LFL Photography, Little
Fish, Lori Molesky, Madison
Park Greetings, Nelson
Line , New Yorker Cartoons,
Notes
& Queries, Palm
Press, Peace
Craft, Peaceable Kingdom Press,
Point
of View, Pomegranate,
Quentin
Blake, Quotable,
Real
and Exciting Designs, Real
World Images, Salutations, Saturn
Press, Sierra
Club, Simon
Drew, Soul
UK, Spotbear, Sugar
Bean Press, Syracuse
Cultural Workers, V&A
Collections , Visoni Poster Art,
Waste
Not Paper, We'Moon,
Woodmansterne.
INDIE BOUND
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Harriett
I attended a seminar today hosted by the Great Lakes Booksellers Association and the American Bookseller Association to launch the marketing strategy that replaces ABA's Book Sense program. The new program is called IndieBound, and the graphics and tools that come with it are slick, hip, and book-lovin'. Who can resist a t-shirt that says "Peace. Love. Books." Not me. I want one. And I want the gigundo banner that says "Eat. Sleep. Read." too. In purple, of course, which is legal, despite the official branding of red. And I want everyone to understand what localism really means in our economy, and what bookstores mean to community.
We watched a short film called "Paperback Dreams" that documents the rise and fall of two revered west-coast bookstores: Cody's Books and Kepler's Books. It has its superhero and maudlin points, and the tale is well-known by now, but worth re-telling. What is the fate of independent booksellers in this age of hyper-internet and attention-deficit culture?
I could rant here, but I will try to refrain. Compatriots and competitors as we booksellers are, we have much more to weather before the chains, big-boxes, internet, penny sellers, Kindles and POD services see their day. But we might as well band together under a national Indie-brand and try to educate the consumer about the value of localism. It's about the hometown community -- the buying, the selling, the sales tax, the main street, the comaraderie, the recommendations, the hang-out joint, the coffee. I'll try to get a screening of "Paperback Dreams" here: target date will be October 16th.
IN MEMORIAM: SHERMAN E. LEE
Monday, July 21, 2008
Harriett
I'm a little late on the news here, but Cleveland icon Sherman E. Lee died July 9th, 2008. He put Cleveland on the international art map the way Severance did for classical music. He ran the Cleveland Museum of Art during the pop-contemporary period (1958-1983) but focused on building an unsurpassed Asian collection. He was known as a gentleman of art rather than a meteoric businessman, but the Museum saw meteoric growth during his tenure all the same. His text standard A History of Far Eastern Art (Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 1964) is still highly regarded and widely used, and his catalogs for exhibitions Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration and China: 5,000 Years are classic texts in their own right. His daughter Katherine Lee Reid was head of the CMA from 2000-2005, and began the path towards its current multi-million dollar expansion and renovation. The legacy lives on, and Cleveland remembers.
SHOW AND TELL
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Harriett
You just never know who will show up for a NOBS Show and Tell session.... Tonight we have about a dozen players, some serious bookies, some hobbyists, some self-professed novices. Book samples ranged from a huge folio limited edition Maya Angelou, to stories and oddities by J.D. Salinger and Pablo Picasso, to notebooks of rocket science created for pre-NASA employees, 1890 Catholic histories, samples of paper marbling and super-rare Jessie Willcox Smith tiny pamplets printed by Good Housekeeping. Great fun, guys, really great fun.
LOCAL
AUTHORS
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Harriett
It’s hard to be a self-published author and get the word out about your book. That’s just one of the reasons Loganberry hosted a Local Author Book Fair in conjunction with the Larchmere Flea Market and Festival. The other reason is to enjoy the community and the connections interesting people make.
Case in point: Carolyn Nilson is an author of training manuals (Team Games for Trainers, The Trainer's Handbook), most published by mainstream presses like McGraw-Hill. They’re professional textbooks really, and I warned her there might not be a huge demand for these expensive books at the Flea Market. However, she had a blast!
Her letter sums it up best: “It was fun interacting with such an interesting cross-section of area folks, and although I sold no books, I did meet a fan! who said he has 3 of my books and uses them in his engineering consulting work. I also met a guy who offered me a job—in Columbus!”
The spirit expressed here sums up the Larchmere Flea Market & Festival perfectly for me. And she’s been back to the shop twice since the festival, with friends in tote. What fun to see these connections being made!
MONDEGREEN
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Harriett
A new entry in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary rivals the famed "spoonerism" and "malaprop" favorites of mine.
mondegreen -- "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung" -- has delighted wordplay aficionados for years. Mondegreen was first coined by author Sylvia Wright in 1954 in Atlantic magazine, when she confessed to a childhood misinterpretation of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Moray." When she first heard the lyric "they had slain the Earl of Moray and had laid him on the green," she felt terribly sorry for the "poor Lady Mondegreen."
Like spoonerism (named after William A. Spooner in 1900, who had a kind of alliterative lisp) and malaprop (named after the character Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan's comedy The Rivals, 1775), mondegreen is a case of mistaken indenties in verbal wordplay. While all three words are technically different, I find it fascinating that one is named after a real person, one after a character, and one after a noted instance of word confusion. Now our vocabulary is complete!
And, to celebrate, you can contribute your own favorite mondegreens on Merriam-Webster's website. "The ants are my friends / they're blowin’ in the wind..." Check it out.
DEBORAH'S BIG
DAY
Saturday, July 12, 6-8pm
Harriett
After 20 years of performing at concerts, coffeehouses, festivals, rallies, conferences and other special events in Northeast Ohio, Deborah Van Kleef has recorded her first CD, "Works in Progress." Tonight we're celebrating the official CD release, with food, friends, and music, of course. Come join us.
KANDINSKY SAYS
Friday, July 11, 2008
Harriett
I gotta tell you, Kandinsky is really jealous. Kandinsky, or Baby K, came into my life in late summer 1999. He posed for official Loganberry postcards in November 2000 -- and I'm not exactly sure what happened, but just about then a new kitten waltzed into the picture and stole the limelight, as kittens are wont to do. That was Lydia, and the first official Loganberry cat postcard pictured a kitten Lydia posed with a stack of very nice children's books. For a while, both Lydia and Baby K visited the shop, but neither became permanent residents. Then there was Nikita, a cat I was babysitting for a while, and who posed for a postcard in October 2001. She was decidedly not a shop cat, but that babysitting venture turned out to be a rather permanent home gig. Hedda, my original, first, and official shop mascot, finally posed for a Loganberry postcard in September 2005. She died unexpectedly less than a year later.
And now there's Otis. Otis commanded the camera early, and without meaning to take postcard shots, I captured a perfect postcard pic and it immediately graced an official postcard. He's also been coming with me to work almost daily, and making quite the hit with customers, kids, and staff. He may actually become an official shop cat, we'll see.... I certainly like having him here.
But I digress. This post is about Kandinsky. Kandinsky, see, is jealous. He posed again for postcards in October 2007, but I thought we needed some tweaking (particularly regarding my fuzzy camera work, need for wooden ladders instead of metal, and LitArts clean-up -- nothing personal, K!). And so K is jealous of the little Squee at home, of frequent visits to the famed bookshop, and most particularly of the postcard. Despite the huge popularity of the Otis postcards (oo! can I have one? is this free? oo, look at this), I have, like, 5,000 of them. I need to make amends, or bribe Kandinsky that he'll have a special 10th Birthday Card or something.... yikes....
FIVE-POUND FURRY
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Harriett
Yeah, he's getting bigger, a whopping five pounds now! Yes, I'm still carrying him to work in his red Sherpa bag (he doesn't like the car, but he doesn't mind being walked in the bag). Still as cute as ever, still a playful kitten, still a snuggle bug when he's all worn out and tired. He also knows how to hide behind bookshelves and chase flies in the window and rotate sleeping buckets from the front, to the checkout counter, to late-afternoon snoozes in Strong Bindery. Need an Otis postcard? Just send me your address!
WELCOME
AMAR
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Harriett
It's always good to follow a memorial post with a welcome to the world post. This one is for Amar Herve’ Daidžić, born July first in Mankato, Minnesota. He is the son of Roberta Zamma, who used to work in Strong Bindery, one of the finest paper conservators I have met (she studied with monks in Italy). She and husband Nihad moved to Minnesota a few years ago, and we miss them still. I love the fact that the birth announcement comes in four languages: English, Italian, Croatian, and German. Welcome to the world, Amar!
IN MEMORIAM: THOMAS
DISCH
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Harriett
I just read a heartbreaking obituary of Tom Disch, a science fiction writer I've never heard of. Well, I'm sure there are many writers I don't know, and perhaps The Genocides, Camp Concentration, 334, and The Brave Little Toaster deserve a wider readership. But I was most intrigued by this paragraph in the friend's memorial:
Disney subsequently asked Tom if he could develop further projects. Tom delivered to Disney as "work for hire," a clever adaption of Shakespeare for the kids, and transported it to Africa, even giving it an ecological subplot - and without a credit or the slightest stake in its future, but for the grand sum of $5,000 - this astoundingly literate, self educated poet and non-businessman offered up to the world something called The Lion King.
I have no reason to doubt this. And I'm sure that so many hands went into each variation of the story (short story, storyboards, animated film, musical) that ownership is virtually impossible to trace. But I thought I'd investigate to see if a name was actually credited with this storyline, and found that it's even more contested and confusing than the Tom Disch tidbit. And this just makes me shake my head with wonder at the commercial world and it's misuse and obfuscation of the writer's role. Rather than try to figure it out, I offer my condolences to authors and writers everywhere who are misunderstood, unrecognized, wrongly teased with celebrity, re-written by committee, and otherwise forgotten, unattributed or buried as some proto-influence. Rest in Peace, Tom Disch and under-recognized authors everywhere.
WORLD'S MOST
EXPENSIVE BOOK
Monday, July 7, 2008
Harriett
This month's issue of Fine Books and Collections has an article titled "The Botanist's Desire" about a podiatrist from NJ who has created the most expensive new book ever sold. The first of 10 copies of Jonathan Singer's Botanica Magnifica has been donated by a sponsor to the Smithsonian for a reported $2.5 million. It's a likely home: the specimens photographed are from the Smithsonian's exotic plant collection.
The work has been frequently compared to Audubon's Birds of America, and with good reason. First, the size: huge double-elephant folio. Second, for its hyper-realist depiction of rare species. The modern book features photographs instead of lithographs, and is in 8 volumes, beautifully bound in leather with fabulous inlaid floral designs. What most intrigues me is that it was printed on a 20-year old ink jet printer by Cone Editions in East Topsham, Vermont. I know East Topsham well, and never knew such a high-class printer resided in this Y-intersection tiny town. Fascinating.
BLOSSOM
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Harriett
Every summer I treat all the Loganberries to a night at Blossom Music Center. It's an absolutely beautiful setting: a natural amphitheatre with an amazing architectural shell with a sweeping slate roof and fabulous natural acoustics. And the band ain't too bad, either.
I've been to the famous Ravinina and Tanglewood and other outdoor orchestra hotspots. They don't hold a candle to Blossom.
On tonight's program: Orff's Carmina Burana, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (with fireworks, of course). Not bad.
BOOK BIZ
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Harriett
Just to recover focus from festivals back to books, I thought I'd comment on some notable news in the book world. Mind you, you might think a flea market has little to do with books, but it has everything to do with being a small business and getting the word out about your offerings. Case in point:
Losses amount from opposite ends of the continent. Cody's Books in Berkeley CA has closed after 52 years. And in New York City, the Strand is closing its Annex branch at 95 Fulton St. Don't panic, the flagship store at 12th and Broadway remains open. Meanwhile, Amazon.com continues to fight sales tax issues, but the fight is getting harder.
The New Yorker cover pictured above sums it all up beautifully: a bookstore owner opens his shop, while his residential neighbor accepts an Amazon.com package from the UPS guy. I knew the cover existed, but it took me a while to track down a copy. I walked into my neighboring barber shop for a haircut and there was a stack of New Yorkers. So I made a deal with Rebecca and took home the magazine. I intend to frame it.
On a good note, at least the inane legislation in Indiana requiring all retailers to register and pay a fee for selling anything with a hint of sexual content has been overturned. Some sanity still exists. Happy Independents Day, everyone. Take a day off, why don't you?
GOOD GRIEF LARCHMERE
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Harriett
I'm a big fan of locally-owned business, and not just because I own one. In the bigger scheme of things, shopping locally is a strong economic tool, a sustainable choice, and a community necessity. It's part of the reason why I'm so active in the Larchmere Merchants Association, and why I spent countless hours of my own time and employee time to produce the annual Larchmere Flea Market and Festival. The event was a success by all counts, even despite the late afternoon rain.
But the merchant meetings make me crazy. "Can we do this every weekend" - "...every month?" Well, sure guys. Who's signing up to do the work?
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