Category: Books

Taking a bit of a vacation

/ Matt Talley

It has been almost two years since we moved from Deutschland and I now believe that I have enough distance to finish my book about our life there and the funny/sad/wonderful/disturbing things that happened to us.  I had maybe 65 pages written, but in but I put the manuscript down for a while because I found that it was overly biting and my sarcastic prose leaned over the hateful line when discussing my former employer.  No one wants to read a travel essay that is spiteful.   I hope to have it done and edited by this summer.  Publishing in the current economy is part luck and part Voodoo so it might take a while (and a couple more re-writes) before it is Amazon ready.

I have promised myself not to rush things and to use a real publisher.  My ego is not so big for me to even consider a vanity press.  If my musings are not good enough for publication using a legitimate publishing house that will be rude to me, not answer or return my calls, edit my work with a heavy hand, and take 80% of the book’s profit, then I don’t want it out there for the world to read and snicker at.

Soooo…  I have decided to slow my blog postings about the ironic crap I find out in the world from day to day, leave my witty observations in my head, and commit myself to using the time I would spend here on crafting my book.  For now, I will continue with project updates, book status, and life events and after I am done with “A Year of Ordered Chaos” I am sure I will have loads of material and opinions to blog about.

BOOK SALE P0RN

/ Matt Talley / 3 Comments

Some people collect books out of compulsion: odds and ends, with no order to their accumulation.  We have our issues, but to call it a compulsion is a stretch.  Unlike many of our bibliophilic brethren, we can actually sell a book from time to time and are somewhat choosy where and on what we spend our money on.  I think that our current library sits at about 1,200 volumes, equally split between history and fiction.  With the purchase of our home and my subsequent attempt to return all the period architectural details and furnish the living room as the original owners might have done, I have started to gather a few editions that could have been found in our home that first Fall.  I have 1928 editions of:

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle,
Hermann Hesse – Steppenwolf  (German edition)
Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa
Agatha Christie – The Mystery of the Blue Train
The Common Book of Prayer
Felix Salten – Bambi: a Life in the Woods (Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde)
Herbert Asbury  – The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
André Maurois  – Disraeli
T. E. Lawrence  – Revolt in the Desert

To add weight to the our pre-stock market crash collection, I been on the search for a complete set of 1909 Harvard Classics, the 1917 Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, and a set of the 1910 11th edition set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as this is THE edition to have (for the Über-booky folk).  All taken together, this will give our parlor a true sense of period nerdiness.  None of the above volumes are particularly pricey ~ $6 each in decent condition and ALL of them are available for download since enough time has passed that the works are in the public domain.  The wealth of information contained in them isn’t the sole point for wanting them; it is also their tangible quality – the faded bindings, the smell of their paper, the care taken with the block-printed illustrations…  These are all books that have witnessed the same history as our little home and deserve a safe and revered place there.

This past weekend we attended the bi-annual Friends of the Seattle Public Sale, where we usually pick up some Travel Lit, a few mountain climbing related tomes and the odd cookbook.  Well, on this trip I hit the motherload!  I found 14 mountaineering books that are on my “List” and in the Sets and Rare Book Room I happened upon a complete set of 1910 of the EB.  I may have swooned.  I snapped up those bad-boys faster than a lawyer cashes a check.  The set is of Ex-library stock and there is some serious shelf wear on a couple pieces, but nothing that would keep them from being used for another 80 years.  For a grand total of $33, I walked out a very happy little hobbit.  I will work on the rest of the list as further opportunity presents and as time and money are available.

A few notable biblio-quotes:

“Anyone who has got a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.” & “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den”
-Phillip Adams

“I cannot live without books.”
– Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to John Adams in 1815)

“With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character. “
— Nicholas A. Basbanes

The Magic Book Press

/ Matt Talley / 3 Comments

As a constant list maker and recorder I go through Moleskine’s like a fat kid tears into Halloween candy.  It gets pricy at $15 each and I had long thought about just making my own notebooks, but book binding/making is not a skill found on every corner.  A few years ago, while on a train through the Czech countryside a dear friend and book nerd started my binding education with a list of materials needed (I had just picked up a bone folder at an estate sale and it started the book making itch anew…) for my first notebook and a few sketches to get me started.  She stayed with us some weeks later and by the time she left for the airport I was the proud maker/owner of a monastery-bound 6” plain cotton paper notebook.  I had to improvise a bit during the construction because I lacked the one serious tool required to make books – a book press.  I used a combination of cement blocks and carpenters clamps to get the job done, but it wasn’t pretty or particularly easy.  I have been on the hunt for a simple iron press since then and while I have found a few online or in antique stores, they have been REAL pricey or in terrible shape.

I stopped by one of my favorite recycled building material places the other day and as I walked in the door, this sleek and sexy press appeared in my line of vision.  I was drawn to it and I got all fuzzy inside.  It was amazing!  Steel & brass, in perfect shape, not a spec of rust, it had not been refurbished, was the right size, and instead of the ubiquitous gear wheel on the top it had thick bar ended with globes of steel so that one might be able to exert serous pressure.   Laurel couldn’t look at it.  She felt that if she acknowledged its beauty that I would plop down the credit card right then and there.  She knew that I wanted it, that I NEEDED it.  I placed a hold on the magic press until I could find out a little of the piece’s history and negotiate the price the next Monday.

The press was built in the 1920s, imported from London, and used by a lady that had a part-time bindery in her home here in Seattle.  I bargained lightly (I didn’t want to lose the item) and got them to come off the asking price by 15% – it was worth every penny.  The final price included some serious bargaining with my better-half and I had to finally agree to give up my part of discretionary funds from our household budget until September: no eating out for lunch, no book buying at B&N, no new tools from Woodcraft, or Starbucks Coffee at break-time…  It’s going to hurt some…

book press

Garage Sale Weekend Booty

/ Matt Talley / 2 Comments

This past Saturday was the West Seattle Annual Community Garage Sale.  There were 197 “official” sites and who knows how many people saw their neighbors selling stuff and flung open their carports and started bargaining old stuff away.  We went just looking for a food dehydrator and a trail-a-bike.  Laurel found the former and I struck out with the latter.  I did manage to pick up a few other items though:

snowboard bag – $5
Baguette cutting board – $3
Food dehydrator – $2
New Belguim Beer Glass – $.50
iPod Nano sports band – $1
Connect-Four game – $4
Moonshine Making Book from 1909 – $19

Buying a house/in debt FOREVER!

/ Matt Talley

After living in a1980’s Miami Vice-prefab over grown house in the endless suburbs for the last eight months we are done. We are trying to buy a place in the city, in an urban-ish area full of cute houses and green lawns, where we can walk to the grocery store, read a paper at a neighborhood coffee shop on Saturday morning, and would be within stumbling distance from a local pub. As an added bonus, it is about 500 yards from the first man-made rock-climbing wall in the US with views of the Puget Sound and Mt. Rainer at the end of the street. Just a few houses away is a branch of the King County Library – books, books, books! The place and location are great, but the buying process has been a nightmare!

The house is a rock solid 1928 craftsman and we made an offer about 6 weeks ago. It was accepted by the individual seller of the home, but still no official word from the mortgage holding bank or closing schedule. I have put something like 3-4 hours a day for the last 5 weeks (really!) getting paperwork ready, scheduling structural inspections, sewer line inspection, submitting paperwork, re-submitting the same paperwork, transferring funds, property surveys, title insurance, answering countless stupid questions and providing minute details of our lives in writing – I had to legally declare my middle name as an alias at one point before we could proceed. It is like having a second job as an air traffic controller that I pay for the privilege of going to after my real job everyday.

This is THE time to buy a house in the US: cheap prices, tax credits, lower property taxes, cheap materials for upgrades, carpenters and electricians with open schedules, etc… and we are having to BEG someone at to take our money and relieve them of bad debt. It is mind numbing and my cute little sweet gentle wife is ready to brain someone with a bat – really!