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A few sightings from this year’s book publishing trade convention:

Dan Halpern of Ecco Press among a group of people hoping to win Sex and the City tickets.
Dale Pendell (Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown) strolling between halls at 9:29, headed for his autographing session scheduled for 9:30.
Numerous booksellers strangely still lining up for [...]

That’s what Rachel Donadio, in an article in the New York Times, calls this sort of situation: You’re in the getting-to-know-you stages of a relationship, and you encounter for the first time the other person’s bookshelf. Could what you see there cause you to break up the relationship then and there? How appalling would the [...]

For 7 Junipers, my new website on Asian Art and Culture, I am looking to make a few connections with other bloggers pursuing similar interests. If anyone knows of any good sites, resources, directories, etc., please let me know. Thanks! — Tom

Yourshelves.com is a project of kimbooktu, who explains:
I collect pictures of libraries of ordinary people. People who love to read - and collect - books from all over the world. Every time I get a new ‘library’ I am amazed at how book lover’s keep their possessions. The fun part is; all the libraries have [...]

It has become necessary for me to articulate policies that will be posted on my blogs.
Outright spam is straightforward to deal with, but here and elsewhere I am increasingly receiving marginal, opportunistic comments that, while they may appear to contribute faintly, are mainly intended to benefit the commenter through their links and anchor text. I [...]

Galley Cat is the blog to visit for insider news from the NYC heart of the publishing industry. I spent most of my career with independent presses outside of New York. Although I visited the city two or three times a year, I was never really a New York publishing insider. If you want to [...]

I’ll be among a group reading translations from Latin American literature. The other participants include Elizabeth Bell, Michael Koch, Anita Segástegui, and John Oliver Simon. The event will be at Encantada Gallery, 908 Valencia Street. We’re in the 8:00-8:45 pm time slot.

Ten Questions is an occasional feature in which folks involved in some aspect of publishing kindly oblige my interrogative impulses. Today I’m talking with Jeffrey Lependorf, who serves as executive director of two three different nonprofits, Small Press Distribution, based in Berkeley, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, based in New York City, [...]

Publishers Weekly compares three book cataloguing sites: LibraryThing.com, Shelfari.com and GoodReads.com. These sites allow users to keyword tag and comment on books they own or have read. The oldest of the sites, LibraryThing, has been around for a couple of years — a long time in internet terms — and publishers and book retailers are [...]

The images are of people who have been laid off from the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. They come from a feature at the newspaper’s website called “Colleagues Remembered.”

Or to put it another way, what do they have in common?
Make your best guess. Answer tomorrow.

Gerald Nicosia asserts that Viking Penguin and the estate of Jack Kerouac are “deliberately removing my name from books on the Beat generation and Jack Kerouac.” The Kerouac estate was passed to his third wife, but Nicosia had supported a failed claim to the estate by the author’s daughter, who argued that the will in [...]

This introduces “Ten Questions,” which may become an ongoing feature. Today I’m talking with Howard Junker, editor of the literary review ZYZZYVA (”The Journal of West Coast Writers & Artists”). ZYZZYVA (the name of a kind of beetle, and the last word in some dictionaries) publishes works by writers based in California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, [...]

I mentioned before the reading planned in San Francisco in support of the literary community of Baghdad (follow the link for a video; the contact to offer assistance is Beau Beausoleil at overlandbooks [at] earthlink [dot] net).
From London come details of two parallel events. The text of an e-mail announcement follows after the break.

Mutanabbi Street, a winding street filled with bookstores and book stalls, is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling. It is the present heart of one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished literary and intellectual communities. On March 5 a car bomb was exploded there, killing more than thirty people.
In support of the Baghdad literary [...]

To help answer people’s questions about the publishing process, and I hope to provide a forum for collaborative thinking, I’ve started a publishing wiki. Follow the link on the welcome page that leads to the overview of contents to get a sense of the probable content. (Please bear in mind that this is just in [...]

Recently I was doing a loooong overdo update of my rolodex (actually a filemaker pro database these days). The file began, as I recall, as an Alpha4 database back in the day, and I’ve been porting it over into new programs as I’ve upgraded over the years. (I needed it as a database because I [...]

Eighty-eight-year-old Sally Heriot lives in this one-bedroom apartment in a retirement community in Palo Alto. To live here she paid a nonrefundable entrance fee of $180,000 in 1991, and she has paid monthly fees of $2500 to $3500 since. In addition she pays for 24-hour private aides to assist her with tasks that have become [...]

The Wikipedia gestapo have struck again. Some idiot named “Acalamari,” who is a big Christina Aguilera and Star Trek fan, believes that “having race and an extreme emotion in one username … is likely to cause problems.”
Shortly after signing up for Wikipedia ABW found her name the subject of an extensive discussion. Read all about [...]

Wikipedia announced recently that it is going back to adding the “nofollow” attribute to its outbound links in an attempt to keep people from gaming the system to leach linkjuice off the the site for personal gain.
According to Google, “when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we [...]