Tag Archives: Books

Print Is Dead

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“Print is dead” – Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters

Earlier this week we received a letter from Dave. A novelty, it contained nothing too interesting, just some tax documents. What caught my interest was the stamp on the envelope. It featured the 2010 USPS stamp commemorating the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. It is pictured above.

Our two boys, Daniel and David, grew up reading this daily strip in the paper. Long after the comic strip ended and longer still since either of them had been six; they still enjoyed reading the books that collected Bill Watterson’s works. Many a long car trip went much smoother with a stack of these books in-between our two boys. Later Aunt Jane gifted this family with the massive three-volume set, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

Most if not all of our Calvin and Hobbes books were purchased at a Borders Bookstore. Even though it was a gift, I know that The Complete Calvin and Hobbes was purchased there too. This week Borders filed for bankruptcy. A company’s failure is never a pleasant event. I spent thirteen-years riding down my first employer’s demise, years that added little to my retirement.

Any subscriber to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch has seen the diminution of our newspaper. It is now only a shade of its former self. This is indicative of the overall decline of the newspaper industry. I doubt that Mr. Watterson would now be able to make his money, in eleven years, like he did back then.

In general, hardcopy media is suffering. Between the twin demons of Napster and iTunes the music recording industry has all but collapsed. This probably contributed to Borders problems too. The movie industry has erected barricades, which have helped, but internet and wireless bandwidth limitations have probably been more of an obstacle. Technology will eventually leapfrog these walls and lay bare Hollywood’s defenses to digital discounting.

Because the music recording industry has fallen so far, so fast, it now finds itself ahead of the curve. Going digital will never support the industry that was. Just like after the fall of the dinosaurs, only the smaller creatures will thrive. Many independent musical acts have already made this transition. They have become their own general contractors. They arrange their bookings, organize their tours and manage their own recordings. This throws more work on the shoulders of the artist and little of this new workload is artistic, it is all business. Still, musicians are making a living this way.

Online book publishing is flourishing. Outfits like Lulu, allow anyone to become their own publisher. Successful authors already have to split their time between writing and promoting. Multi-city book tours are the norm. As any author will tell you, at each stop, each volume is sold, one book at a time.

Dr. Spengler or whoever really first said that print is dead was wrong. A medium may wax or wane, but it is the current system that purveys the message that is dead. Like old Soviet central control, big music and now big bookstores are obsolete. Small and nimble is the new game in town. Like a Phoenix from its ashes a new book industry will arise. As long as there are new artists like Bill Watterson and new artworks like Calvin and Hobbes, people will buy them.

The Last Stand

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I’ve been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s history, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  Philbrick first splashed ashore the publishing world with his award-winning history, Mayflower, an engrossing account of the Pilgrims and their Native American counterparts.  With The Last Stand, Philbrick moves the European and American Indian conflict two centuries into the future and most of a continent away from where he began his recounting of it with Mayflower.  There is a large gulf of time and space between these two stories, but they make for suitable bookends to this tragic conflict, one near the beginning of armed conflict and one near its end. 

As his subtitle implies, Philbrick gives ample treatment to Sitting Bull and all of the other significant Native American and European characters leading up to, participating during and in the aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  It is Custer though, that always steals the show.  While he was alive, he lived a lifestyle that was larger than life.  After his death, Custer was venerated as one of America’s most cherished of fallen heroes.  This sentiment continued until the 1960s, when the paradigm cowboys = good and Indians = bad began to dissolve.  Thomas Berger’s novel, Little Big Man, capitalized upon this shift in perspective.  Director Arthur Penn’s movie version, starring Dustin Hoffman, gave this viewpoint an even wider audience.

Come on, you Wolverines! – Custer to his Michigan calvary at Gettysburg

Philbrick mentions Little Big Man and discusses the profound impact that it had upon him at the time, but by the end of The Last Stand we are not left with the buffoonish cartoon version of Custer portrayed in Little Big Man.  Nor do we have Errol Flynn’s sainted version either.  Instead we are left with a complex, but flawed man.  Custer was able to parlay his military disaster into his stepping stone onto the stage of history.  Philbrick has shined the light of clarity upon Custer, but his light also acts like footlights, making the actor larger than life.

The photographs with this post were taken at the Indian Arts Museum in Grand Teton National Park.  Anne and I visited this museum last July as part of our Yellowstone vacation.  I have already published these photos and I don’t normally recycle my media, but they relate well to the content of this post, plus they are nice pictures too.  One of the reasons that I picked up The Last Stand was that during our Yellowstone trip we were only a couple of hundred miles from the battlefield, at least as the crow flies.  When we make it back to that part of this country, I would like to visit its site.  I expect it is not much to see, rolling, grass-covered hills, but I still want to see it, such is Custer’s fame.

Sweat Louis

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Meteorological records have been kept in Saint Louis since the 19th century.  In that time only three other Saint Louis summers have been warmer than this summer has been, making the summer of 2010 the fourth hottest summer on record.  Meteorologists use the construct of the meteorological summer, otherwise known as the months of June, July and August.  Which just also happens to be the three best things about teaching.

Meteorologists calculate the hotness of a summer not through some prurient formula, but simply by calculating its average temperature.  Averaging a bunch of numbers tends to smear out the results.  This is certainly true of the top ten warmest summers on record in Saint Louis.  The hottest, 1901, had an average temperature of 82.7 °F.  This year, 2010, had an average temperature of 81.7 °F, or only one degree cooler.  The tenth hottest year, 1913, had an average temperature of 80.7 °F.  So we are speaking of a dynamic range of just two degrees among the ten hottest summers in Saint Louis.

As I’ve said averaging numbers tends to smear the results.  Averaging just doesn’t tell the full story.  The depression years, 1934 (3rd hottest) and 1936 (2nd hottest), set 25 record highs.  No records were broken this year.  The temperature reached 100 °F on 37 days in 1936 and 29 in 1934.  The temperature only reached 100 °F four days this year.  Our birth year had the hottest day on record, July 14, 1954 (5th hottest), with a high of 115°F.  In 1980 (6th hottest), the last really brutal summer here in Saint Louis and our first, had temperatures reaching 100 °F on 18 days.  You see the devil is in the details and I would be a real devil if I didn’t mention that a lot of these facts were in a Post-Dispatch article that I read on Tuesday.  👿

Listening to NPR’s Marketplace business show I learned that Borders will be adding Build-a-Bear sections to some of their bookstores.  This deal is a great opportunity for Build-a-Bear, a Saint Louis based toy company.  It will give Build-a-bear a national stage.  The pundits on Marketplace had fun with Borders though for this deal, claiming that the deal had more to do this year’s bear market then with marketing bears.  My favorite pundit though, summed up the deal neatly in just three words, Winnie the Pooh.