BOOK 'EM!

Libraries, Books and Other Words on Paper

Hi there, Readers!
     What is it about a book?  There is something truely amazing
about the words we read in books.  Suddenly, it's not just little
markings on paper - we can learn a story of the past, the
present, or even the future.  Whether the story is true or not
doesn't really matter, only whether it speaks to us in some way. 
Through books, we can learn from all of those who have gone
before us.  Or, we can read a trashy romance novel just for the
guilty pleasure of it.
     People have been predicting the death of books for a couple
of generations now, yet they continue to survive.  Every
communications technology that has come along has been forced to
measure itself against books as a way of communicating ideas. 
The rise of technology has made books even more available without
replacing them; reading a novel online is still pretty unusual,
but one of the Web's biggest businesses is the online bookstore
Amazon.Com, which claims to be the world's biggest bookstore. 
For all of the high-tech content, they still send an actual
printed book on paper to your house, a concept that the ancient
Greeks would have found familiar.  Even Virtual Reality isn't
really all that new a concept - it has existed since authors
first realized that they could construct a story completely in
the reader's imagination.
     Thanks this week to our highly literary friends and
contributors: Jerry Taff, David Zach, Sue Yan, Sylvia Libin He,
Rosana Leung, Peter Adler, Timothy McChain, Ray Sewell, Nnamdi
Elleh, Laura Hong Li, John Adler, Carol Becwar, Junji Taniguchi,
Kerry Miller and Karen J. Crooker.  Books still make excellent
companions when your friends aren't around.  As American comedian
Groucho Marx said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best
friend.  Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
     Have a Great Week,


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FINE WITH US...
------------
     Eve Lettice from British Columbia was cleaning out her
family home when she discovered a library book stuck away deep in
a closet.  Of course, like most overlooked library books, it was
overdue.  More than a little overdue, in fact; that copy of
Stephen Leacock's "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town" was
supposed to have been returned to the Victoria Public Library
back in 1916.
     "We're just glad to get the book back," said Chief Librarian
Sandra Anderson at a small ceremony held to celebrate the book's
return.  "It's in very good shape.  It's definitely not going
into the book sale." 
     Library officials told Lettice that the full fine would have
been C$7,200 (a little less than $5,000 US).
     It's just a good thing the book hadn't been taken out on her
card.  (Reuters)


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BOOK HER, DANNO!
---------------
     Meanwhile, in Clearwater, Florida, the local library is
taking more drastic steps to recover missing materials.  When
they say to return a book, they really mean it.  Not that they
don't have reason to be concerned:  librarians there said 178,000
materials checked out by borrowers were never returned in 1995. 
That means that funds intended for new books are being used just
for replacements.
     One of the patrons who ran afoul of the new "get-tough"
policy was Jennie Basile.  When police stopped her recently for
driving without lights, a computer check turned up the fact that
there was an outstanding warrant for her arrest because she sill
had an outstanding library book called "The Notebook," which was
a year overdue.
     And the working mom could be facing jail time on the charge,
though library officials say that all she really has to do is
return the book and they'll forget about it.  
     Though she hasn't said what she intends to do just yet,
Basile admitted that the book wasn't very good.  (AP)


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BOOKS WE'D LIKE TO SEE...
----------------------
     Here are a few book titles that don't really exist, but we
wish they did.  Wouldn't you like to see books like:

     "The Life of Lewis Carroll" by Alison Wonderland

     "Writing Winning Resumes" by Anita Job

     "Do It Yourself House Construction" by Bill Jerome Holmes

     "The Unknown Rodent" by A. Nonny Mouse

     "Let's Play Billiards" by A. Q. Ball

     "The Potatoe Cookbook" by Dan Quayle

     "Handbook of Mental Health" by Sy Kosis

     "Plumbing Handbook" by Dwayne Flood

     "Crossing the Great Desert" by Rhoda Camel

     "The Long Walk Home" by Misty Bus

     "The Empath" by Ophelia Payne

     "How to Write Winning Fiction" by Paige Turner

     "Making Money In Auto Salvage" by Rex Toad

     "The Big Wave" by Sue Nami

     "My Life as a Lumberjack" by Tim Burr

     "I'm Fine" by Howard Yu

     "Japanese Cooking" by Terry Yaki

                            - Thanks to: Harold Reynolds & John
                              Gregory


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THE PERILS OF PUBLISHING...
------------------------
     A business consultant in Sweden labored for 13 years on a
well-researched book describing business and economic solutions. 
Finally completing the 250-page manuscript, he took it to the
local copying center.  There, a worker instantly reduced the work
to 50,000 strips of waste paper by confusing the copier with the
shredder.
          [ First item for business solutions in the
          author's next manuscript?  Better worker
          training. ]

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ALL THE WORDS THAT FIT, WE PRINT...
--------------------------------
     A writer's most basic tool is a good dictionary.  A writer
in English has quite a number of good dictionaries to choose
from, especially the weighty - and slightly stuffy - Oxford
English Dictionary, which has long been considered the world's
most complete dictionary.
     Until now.
     Recently, Dutch Queen Beatrix and Belgium's King Albert
attended a celebration marking the completion of the new
"Dictionary of the Dutch Language."  The 40 large volumes of the
new dictionary list the origins and usage of several million
words in over 45,000 pages of text, making it by far the most
complete dictionary in terms of size and content.  Word origins
are traced back in excruciating detail to the emergence of modern
Dutch in the 1500's.  It took teams of lexicographers almost 147
years to compile the new dictionary, which is intended to serve
as a model for all future Dutch dictionaries.
     But there is at least one problem with the new dictionary;
despite it's completeness in describing older words, the
dictionary's authors included no words originating after 1976. 
So there are no terms such as: "yuppie," "Internet" or "ATM" in
the book.  (Reuters)
     [ And, at the rate they work, we can't afford to wait
     around for the second edition. ]

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     "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university
     stifles writers.  My opinion is that they don't stifle
     enough of them."
                            - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

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SHORT SUBJECTS...
--------------
A short list of short books...

   - "Advanced Subtraction"

   - "A Guide to Arab Democracies"

   - "American Foreign Policy Successes"

   - "The American Medical Association's Guide to Good
     Penmanship"

   - "A Compendium of German Humor"

   - "The Amish Telephone Book"

   - "The Educational Guide to MTV"

   - "The Engineer's Guide to Fashion"

   - "Everything Men Know About Women"

   - "Great American Cars of the 1980's"

   - "The Whole Truth," by Bill Clinton 


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NON-FICTION CATEGORY...
--------------------
     The book titles we've mentioned above are just for fun -
they don't really exist, of course.  But that doesn't mean that
there aren't books titles that are just as silly.
     Two authors from England, Russel Ash and Brian Lake spent
years digging out the most bizarre book titles they could find,
and now the have listed them.  In a book.  You saw that coming,
right?
     The book titles they list in their work are pretty strange. 
Despite its intriguing title, "The Romance of Leprosy" doesn't
sound like another "Bridges of Madison County."  Or, how about
"On Cancer of the Scrotum in Chimney Sweeps and Others."
     But, as weird as they are, they have pretty stiff
competition from "Do-it-yourself Coffins for Pets and People,"
"Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented" and "Hand Grenade
Throwing as a College Sport."
     Like inappropriate authors?  How about "Motorcycling for
Beginners" by Geoffrey Carless or "Death in Early America" by
Margaret Coffin.  (Reuters)
     Of course, the authors of the book had a built-in advantage
by writing in England.  For some reason, the famous British
Library seems to be a magnet for all sorts of weird books.  Among
the other titles found there are a 1936 book called "Why Bring
That Up? A Guide to Seasickness," "A Pictorial Book of Tongue
Coating," "Daddy Was An Undertaker," and an 1816 book titled "A
Short Account of the Origin, Progress and Present State of the
New Rupture Society."


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IT'S TIME TO TURN YOUR COMPUTER OFF & READ A BOOK WHEN...
------------------------------------------------------

   - You wake up at 4 AM to go to the bathroom and stop to check
     your Email on the way back to bed.

   - You name your children Eudora, AOL and Dotcom.

   - You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, as
     if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

   - You find yourself involved in passionate, almost violent
     discussions about whether Netscape is better than Internet
     Explorer.

   - You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two,
     just for the free Internet access.

   - You laugh at people with 14.4K modems.

   - You start using smileys :-) in your snail mail.

   - You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using
     a wordprocessor.com

   - You can't write to your mother...  she doesn't have Email.

   - You tell cab drivers you live at:
               http://1000.edison.garden/house/brick.html

   - When your Email shows, "no new messages", you feel really
     depressed.  So you check it again.

   - You don't know the gender of your three closest friends
     because they have neutral screen names and you never
     bothered to ask.

   - After reading this message, you immediately Email it to a
     friend!
          [ Oh, go ahead!  How do you think these
          things get started? ]

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