A Factotum in the Book Trade

A Factotum in the Book Trade
Author: Marius Kociejowski
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 177196457X

The bookshop is, and will always be, the soul of the trade. What happens there does not happen elsewhere. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show there than anywhere else, and I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires. A memoir of a life in the antiquarian book trade, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey between the shelves—and then behind the counter, into the overstuffed basement, and up the spine-stacked attic stairs of your favourite neighbourhood bookshop. From his childhood in rural Ontario, where at the village jumble sale he bought poetry volumes for their pebbled-leather covers alone, to his all-but-accidental entrance into the trade in London and the career it turned into, poet and travel writer Marius Kociejowski recounts his life among the buyers, sellers, customers, and literary nobility—the characters, fictional and not—who populate these places we all love. Cataloging their passions and pleasures, oddities and obsessions, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey through their lives, and a story of the serendipities and collisions of fate, the mundane happenings and indelible encounters, the friendships, feuds, losses, and elations that characterize the business of books—and, inevitably, make up an unforgettable life.

The Last Bookseller

The Last Bookseller
Author: Gary Goodman
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1452966915

A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples

The Serpent Coiled in Naples
Author: Marius Kociejowski
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1909961809

A travelogue revealing the hidden stories of Naples. In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new destination in Italy. While many of its more unusual features are on display for all to see, the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things: Vesuvius, the mafia-like Camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.

Factotum

Factotum
Author: Charles Bukowski
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061842419

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author “He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next. Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

The Pigeon Wars of Damascus

The Pigeon Wars of Damascus
Author: Marius Kociejowski
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1926845226

Marius Kociejowski follows up his now classic The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool with The Pigeon Wars of Damascus. A metaphysical journalist in search of echoes rather than analogies, hints as opposed to verities, Kociejowski discovers once again at the periphery of Damascene society—for the outcast is often made of the very thing that rejects him—a way to understand the challenges and changes refashioning post-9/11 Syria and the Middle East, reminding us once again of the deeper purpose of travel: to absorb and understand the spirit of a place, and to return changed.

Foundling

Foundling
Author: David M. Cornish
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2008
Genre: Children's stories
ISBN: 0552555878

Having grown up in a home for foundlings and pssessin a girl's name, Rossamünd sets out to report to his new job as a lamplighter and has several adventures along the way as he meets people and monsters who are more complicated that he previously thought. Includes glossaries and maps.

The Dog King

The Dog King
Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-02-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307555682

From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize--a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity. World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past. The bomb has not yet been dropped--nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. And he meets the only other person Ambras welcomes, a strange and beautiful orphan girl named Lily who lives and hunts in the hills, who knows where the weapons are hidden and forages in the "free world for the goods the villagers crave. But Bering's new life begins to unravel as he succumbs to a strange eye disease known as Morbus Kitahara, in which the vision gradually darkens and which tends to afflict marksmen and sharpshooters. Only Lily can find help, can offer them all a possible future. The three make a courageous bid to escape, and the account of their flight brings the novel to its extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful climax. Searingly powerful, with a poetic intensity that stays with the reader long after the last page, The Dog King is a modern masterpiece.

What You Did Not Tell

What You Did Not Tell
Author: Mark Mazower
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590519094

**NAMED FINANCIAL TIMES "TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR"** **NAMED EVENING STANDARD "BOOK OF THE YEAR"** **NAMED NEW STATESMAN "BEST BOOK OF 2017"** A warm and intimate memoir by an acclaimed historian that explores the European struggles of the twentieth century through the lives, hopes, and dreams of a single family—his own. Uncovering their remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. It was a family which fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht. His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian-Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the Bolsheviks, civil war, and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against Tsarist troops, never speaking a word about it afterwards. His wife Frouma came from a family ravaged by the Terror yet making their way in Soviet society despite it all. In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell revitalizes the history of a socialism erased from memory--humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it is also an exploration of the unexpected happiness that may await history's losers, of the power of friendship and the love of place that made his father at home in an England that no longer exists.

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Tales of Ordinary Madness
Author: Charles Bukowski
Publisher: City Lights Books
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2013-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0872866386

Exceptional stories that come pounding out of Bukowski's violent and depraved life. Horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again. This collection of stories was once part of the 1972 City Lights classic, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. That book was later split into two volumes and republished: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and, this book, Tales of Ordinary Madness. With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground—people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time, a madman, a recluse, a lover; tender, vicious; never the same. "Bukowski … a professional disturber of the peace … laureate of Los Angeles netherworld [writes with] crazy romantic insistence that losers are less phony than winners, and with an angry compassion for the lost."—Jack Kroll, Newsweek "Bukowski’s works are extraordinarily vivid and often bitterly funny observations of people living on the very edge of oblivion. His poetry, in all its glorious simplicity, was accessible the way poetry seldom is a testament to his genius."—Nick Burton, PIF Magazine

A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800

A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800
Author: Mary Pollard
Publisher: OUP/The Bibliographical Society of London
Total Pages: 730
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780948170119

This dictionary attempts in nearly 2,200 entries to cover all workers in the various branches of the Dublin book trade until the Act of Union in 1800. All grades of workers from apprentice to master, and papermakers, engravers, hawkers and other peripheral traders are considered, as well as the all-important printers and booksellers. Entries naturally vary from one or two lines to one or two pages in length. The aim is to illustrate the working life of each subject by reference to contemporary sources such as records of the stationer's Guild, state papers, imprints, newspaper advertisements, customers' accounts, etc, with documentation for each statement made. Entries will thus give practical clues to dating undated books, as well as provide a basis for further research into individual traders' work and the Dublin trade as a whole. Some account of the history and organization of the Dublin Guild of St Luke (cutlers, painter-stainers, and stationers) appears as introduction.