A lament for the vanishing bookstore

For this topic I’m going to refer you to an article by Mark Lisheron,  but note Chautauqua is misspelled throughout the article. Also, industrialization didn’t kill the traveling Chautauqua, radio, movies and the Great Depression did. The local business community put up the funds to bring the performers (like Redpath) to the rural communities.  When there are no profits, there is no charity.  My parents grew up in adjoining counties in Illinois (didn’t know each other) and Lee County had two Chautauquas  (one in Dixon, IL and one in Franklin Grove, IL).  His point is simple.  Even with Amazon, the independent bookstores are hanging in there and publishers and authors are making money.  At Thursday’s lecture on East Asia Gene Swanger recommended the book China goes global by David Shambaugh at least 3 times, and strongly recommended that we purchase it at our local bookstore, Fine Print, which just opened 2 years ago. (Before that Cokesbury had a branch here in the summer.) Even if it costs a little more, Gene said, the whole community benefits from having a book store, and he noted with pleasure that it usually has many children in it.

“Ann Patchett, prize-winning novelist and co-owner of one of those dwindling number of local bookstores, was giving [in the WSJ] another of those waspish scoldings schoolmarms used to regularly dispense in the old Chatauqua days.

This time the recalcitrant pupil was President Obama, who snubbed Patchett’s Parnassus Books in Nashville to deliver a speech on job creation Tuesday at an Amazon warehouse two hours away in Chattanooga.

Amazon, for the last 41 people in America who haven’t heard the familiar Walmart refrain, is a destroyer of small business, a killer of jobs, a giant bent on monopoly. . .

Book sales grew by 7.4 percent last year alone, $451 million more than the year before, according to Association of American Publishers figures. Amazon gets singled out, but I’ve purchased books from Alibris and at least half a dozen online sellers whose job-producing businesses weren’t even imagined in the heyday of little corner bookshop.

I’d like to believe that with $6.5 billion spent on books in 2012 somebody is making money. I hope one of those somebodies is Ann Patchett. Many of my books came from stores like hers. I loved some of those stores.  . . ”

Book TV

Each week I enjoy tuning in a few minutes or hours to Book-TV on C-SPAN, and it was gone! There in its place was a tour of Korea. So I googled asking what had happened to it. It's now on 94, which means I can't get it in my office because I don't have a box.

Bucyrus, Circleville, Columbus, Delaware, Galion, Kenton, Lancaster, Marysville, Mount Gilead, Mount Vernon, Pataskala, Thornville and Zanesville channel lineups

Big Ten Network will move to Standard Channel 58.

When available, BTN alternate games will air on Digital Channels 153-156.
Travel Channel will move to Basic Channel 14.

Time Warner Connection returns to Channel 24.

C-SPAN 2 will move to Digital Broadcast Channel 94.

Product Information Network (PIN) will launch on Digital Variety
Channel 166.

I just hate it when they mess with my favorites.

4213

Bad news, good news about education

As I turned off the vacuum cleaner and was wrapping the cord, I heard Edward Crane of Cato Institute say (on Book TV, 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged) that his 16 year old daughter's Spanish teacher had required the language class to watch Al Gore's "award winning" documentary. The audience twittered, because this movie and the education system's propaganda has become a big joke before the speaker can even get to the punch line. Then he opined (paraphrased, since I didn't have a pencil with me), "The bad news is they're teaching this; the good news is the kids aren't learning anything."

Earlier John Fund (WSJ) told about his role as a pinata at the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival . You almost knew before he described some of the speakers what was going to come--he said something about walking through the deepest thought at the festival and not getting his ankles wet (again, a paraphrase). Apparently while they consumed water from 7,000+ plastic bottles they were hearing that even if we could roll back emissions to the Robert Fulton era (steamboat), it wouldn't be enough. However, I looked through the list of speakers, and some of the program looked pretty interesting. The kids programming looked like 1970s reruns. If it didn't work for their parents, maybe it will work for them. Check out the link. Your experience in Aspen may be different.

I think I read Atlas Shrugged in 1963--all 1100+ pages. It was very interesting and challenging, better than most books by atheists.