Friday, September 29, 2017

Saturday's Cafe Guest: The Youngest Bookseller

Quintin 1.jpg

Quintin Smith, 10, a bookseller of St Petersburg, Florida, has ink for blood.

His grandfather, Michael Slicker, is celebrating 40 years in the field at St. Pete’s Lighthouse Books.

Quintin’s mom, Sarah, is managing director of the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.

And last April, Mr Smith decided to hang out his own “Open” sign as the 36th annual book fair’s youngest dealer.

Saturday he’ll be telling us how he made out in the cutthroat world of the St Petersburg Coliseum, and his plans for conquering his second book fair next April.

Join us at 2:30 pm Saturday as we peer into the future of rare books.

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Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.



We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Saturday on the Cafe: As E.B. White reminds us, "Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."


This Saturday’s Rare Book Cafe considers the car: fetish, art object, collectible, literary character, investment vehicle (literally).

If not the first appearance, author Andrew Taylor says one of the first sightings of an automobile in literature came 109 years ago, thanks to a British writer:

" ... far behind them they heard a faint warning hum, like the drone of a distant bee. Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, advancing at incredible speed, while from out of the dust a faint 'Poop-poop!' wailed like an uneasy animal in pain."

Published in 1908, the year Henry Ford produced the Model-T, The Wind In The Willows also featured the first literary car theft by Toad, who sets forth on a series of misadventures: "'There cannot be any harm,' he said to himself, 'in my only just looking at it! ... 'I wonder,' he said to himself presently, 'I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?"'




Cars drive plots as well as people. However, the American car "has always been more than just transportation: it is status, success, dreams, adventure, mystery and sex," writes Roland Primeau in Romance Of The Road: The Literature Of The American Highway.

Think of Gatsby’s 1928 Rolls Tourer. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the Rolls-Royce that kills Myrtle Wilson began a series of events that lead to Gatsby's death, literary scholar Paul Ryder says. "If you take the motor car out of texts such as The Great Gatsby, the wheels literally fall off the text - you don't have The Great Gatsby without a motor car."

He also points to the car crash in E.M. Forster's A Passage To India as foreshadowing a subsequent court case that goes wrong. A car crash can be "symptomatic of a breakdown in relationships", he says. "When cars crash, look out for other things crashing as well."

Take J.G. Ballard's Crash. His aim was to write the first pornographic novel based on technology.

"He describes the book as an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation," says Dr Rebecca Johinke, a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. "It's both a warning about the dangers of technology and about society's values in what was the 1970s and a brave examination of sexuality."

Humbert Humbert’s fantasies culminated in his and Lolita’s escape in his Melmoth: a name teeming with literary footnotes (Nabokov got it from an 1820 Irish gothic thriller, Melmoth the Wanderer, about a man who sold his soul for another 150 years of life and, finding it intolerable, roved the globe seeking someone to assume the contract. The author, Charles Maturin, was Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle; during his post-prison exile, Wilde wandered Europe as Sebastian Melmoth. John Banville’s 1989 The Book of Evidence features the theft of a car from Melmoth’s garage).

Tom Swift, the boy inventor, had his Electric Runabout by 1910, and was getting held up already:


Nancy Drew wasn’t just a plucky teen detective- she had a car, in the 1920s, when most Americans still rarely saw one.

The auto has spawned whole genres of literature. The road trip tale: Jack Kerouac was on the road with a 1937 Ford, a 1947 Cadillac limo, and a 1949 Hudson Commodore.

The cars that come alive, a la Stephen King’s 1953 Buick Roadmaster, and the 1958 Plymouth Fury, Christine.



Rolling the dice to save their company, 1950s Ford Motor Company consulted the renowned poet, Marianne Moore, for the name of their new car. The vice president who hired her saw the task in aspirational, literary terms:

We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds.

She offered these:

The Ford Silver Sword
Hirundo (Leslie Charteris, author of The Saint novels, put Simon Templar in a Hirondel)
Aerundo
Hurricane Hirundo (swallow)
Hurricane Aquila (eagle)
Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
The Impeccable
Symmechromatic
Thunderblender
The Resilient Bullet
Intelligent Bullet
Bullet Cloisoné
Bullet Lavolta
The Intelligent Whale
The Ford Fabergé (That there is also a perfume Fabergé seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith)
The Arc-en-Ciel (the rainbow)
Arcenciel
Mongoose Civique
Anticipator
Regna Racer (couronne a couronne) sovereign to sovereign
Aeroterre
Fée Rapide (Aerofee, Aero Faire, Fee Aiglette, Magi-faire) Comme Il Faire
Tonnere Alifère (winged thunder)
Aliforme Alifère (wing-slender a-wing)
Turbotorc (used as an adjective by Plymouth)
Thunderbird Allié (Cousin Thunderbird)
Thunder Crester
Dearborn Diamanté
Magigravure
Pastelogram
Regina-Rex
Taper Racer
Varsity Stroke
Angelastro
Astranaut
Chaparral
Tir á l'arc (bull's eye)
Cresta Lark
Triskelion (three legs running)
Pluma Piluma (hairfine, feather-foot)
Adante con Moto (description of a good motor?)
Turcotinga (turqoise cotinga—the cotinga being a South-American finch or sparrow) solid indigo.
Utopian Turtletop

Ford chose another name.



________________


Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.



We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Today could be your last 24 hours. Waste 2:30 to 3:30 with us. It's the Cafe Doom Show.


Today the Cafe regulars consider the prediction that the world might end before, during, or after the program, with recourse to famous apocalypses and dystopias that just killed off most, but not all.

Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.



We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

 Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.


The end: not with a bang, but with a loudspeaker announcement and three pints of bitter





Regular viewers of Rare Book Cafe may wish to watch Saturday's show from your local. And take a large paper bag.

See, the world is supposed to end September 23. A report on Fox News says so.

We had plans for a show already, for Saturday, the Rare Book Cafe Facebook page, 2.30 pm EDT.

We're betting we can still work it in. 

But on the off chance we're wrong, here's a clip from an end-of-the-world instructional video. It was passed off as a movie called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so as not to cause worldwide panic.

Alas, everyone thought it was a comedy, so the point got entirely lost.

So, as the publican says, "Last call, then?"

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Saturday: It may, or may not, happen. Plan accordingly.


A Christian numerologist, promoted by Fox News, says the end of the world is Saturday, sometime.

The Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says it's 2 minutes and 15 seconds to their version of the end: midnight.

Either way, in the time you have left, you could do worse than reading some good books, or talking about books about the end of the world with fellows in the "we who are about to die salute you" club of book savants.

So join us- if circumstances permit- live, Saturday, at 2.30 pm EDT for Rare Book Cafe's Doom Show: a look at authors' dress rehearsals for the End of The World As We Know It. We'll be on the Cafe Facebook page, unless....




Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The Doom Show Saturday: think of it as the ultimate liquidation sale.


A Christian numerologist whose cv includes expertise in highly aerodynamic designs for Pinewood Derby cars says the end of the world is sometime Saturday, September 23.

Undaunted, Rare Book Cafe is putting on The Doom Show, live on the Cafe's Facebook page, Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT- at best. Join our panel as we wallow in dystopias that don't kill you and alternative literary apocalypsii that do. 

Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.



We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Coming Saturday 9/23: The Doom Show


A Christian numerologist called David Meade says the world will end Saturday.

What better way to spend your last minutes with us?

Rare Book Cafe: live to the end. Saturday, September 23, on your local Rare Book Cafe Facebook page, 2:30 pm EDT until....

Friday, September 15, 2017

Nothing can keep the Cafe off-air for long! It's time for The Storm Show!





We're back! Granted, held together with chewing hum and duct tape and bailing wire, but Rare Book Cafe will be open Saturday, September 16 at 2.30 pm EDT, and serving double shot espressos as everyone decompresses and talks about their experiences in The Big One.

We are all safe and home (several of the team never left) but in varying stages of disruptedness. Electricity, cable, and wireless are not simultaneously restored. Lives have been upheaved. Check-in calls must be made and answered.

So we'll ad hoc our way through the hour with stories of storms, real and literary, and news of our colleagues in FABA. Join us! We want to hear your tales, too.

And Irma? Last we heard, she was off to Hotlanta, got stuck looping the beltway, and then vanished.


Image result for hurricane irma cartoons




Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.





The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.




Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.





We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.






Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Giving credit where it's due: whether with thanks to benign weather spirits, St. John of God, or blind luck, the Rare Book Cafe team has survived Irma

With over half of Floridians without electricity, it will be a while before we have news of colleagues in the rare book trade, but we can celebrate, even now, that the Rare Book Cafe team is all safe.

Thorne Donnelly and dog Katie boarded up and hunkered down in Palm Beach Gardens and report they are well. Kara Accettola and family and pets decamped to Ohio, and they are not only well but have great road trip stories.

Allan Smith and his wife moved to slightly higher ground with friends in Sarasota and emerged unscathed, Hurricane Irma obliged by easing up on the storm surge in the Tampa- St. Pete area, and first reports were of minimal damages chez Smith.

Steve and Edie Eisenstein retreated to an interior unit in their Miami Beach condo tower. They and the cats are back in their own now, getting by without power but with lights an cooking fear, and without damage.

They also report gratitude for the messages of support received from friends in the book community on Facebook; Steve even offered a shout-out to "the patron saint of booksellers."


And it turns out there is, in fact, a patron saint of booksellers: Joao Duarte Cidade (1495-1550).

Cidade was born in Portugal to once well-off family. Probably kidnapped at eight, he ended up a street orphan in Toledo, Spain. A local landowner took the boy in as a shepherd, and Cidade did so well the owner wanted to marry him to his daughter.

The skittish Cidade joined the Army of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, instead, returning to the farm four years later.

In 1525 Cidade returned to military service and spent another eighteen years under arms. Mustered out, he traveled, experienced a growing, if indistinct, pull of religious activism, and set up in Grenada as a printer and bookseller after a vision from the Infant Jesus. He converted to Catholicism in 1537 and was, by all accounts, a model citizen, rescuing people from fires, aiding the poor, and circulating religious texts from his press.

At 42 he had a mental health break with reality and was confined to an institution for a time of suitably barbarous treatment. His reason returned and he created a ragtag volunteer care group that grew into the Order of Hospitallers. Cidade was renamed Father John of God and worked himself to death at 55. Sensing his nearing demise, Father John went over the order's accounts, appointed his successor, and died at prayer.

A biography was published in 1585; the Vatican canonized him in 1690. He is now the patron saint of booksellers, printers, firemen, the sick and nurses. The Order of Hospitallers is now officially charged with the medical care of the Pope and has medical operations in over fifty nations.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Our First Non-Promo: the Cafe Cancels A Show


Literature's Irmas are a tough lot. 

There's Irma Bunt, who in On Her Majesty's Secret Service tried to kill James Bond by nicking his cheek during a shave with a razor dipped in Japanese puffer fish poison. Bond, of course, shot her.

Everyone remembers Irma Lair as the class clown of the animated series W.I.T.C.H., but she had a destructive superpower: the ability to see visions in, and manipulate water.

Irma Pince, the "underfed vulture" who guarded the Hogwarts library through the entire Harry Potter series, was another tough old bird, so devoted to not lending books that when Dumbledore agreed to make a facsimile of Quidditch Through The Ages, she was struck by a sudden paralysis and he had to pry the volume loose from her grip.

So it's no surprise an Irma has forced Rare Book Cafe to evacuate our Saturday time slot. Two of the Cafe team are at ground zero in Miami Beach; three more are weighing options dependent on how bad it looks in their Florida locations.

Irma seems intent on leaving no one out: even co-host Lindsay Thompson- 730 miles north of Miami, is under a state of emergency covering all of North Carolina. 60 mph winds and half a foot of rain is expected Monday or Tuesday.

So it's clear- and easy to figure- that everyone- including half our regular viewership- has got more pressing things to deal with. We plan to return next Saturday, September 16.

Please, everyone, keep our friends in mind.

*****

Rare Book Cafe is streamed by the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair every almost every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

Hosted by Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, the program features a revolving set of cohosts and regular guests including Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein; ephemera expert Kara Accettola; and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.

We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers: Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte. 

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtually live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.