A Factotum In The Book Trade

Download or read book A Factotum in the Book Trade written by Marius Kociejowski and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Last Bookseller written by Gary Goodman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Serpent Coiled in Naples written by Marius Kociejowski and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Factotum written by Charles Bukowski and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

Download or read book The Pebble Chance written by Marius Kociejowski and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kociejowski draws on all these aspects of his life in these engaging, idiosyncratic personal essays ... [that] proffer the reader equal measures of autobiography, insight and quirky charm." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post In the game of bocce, no matter how intensely you study the world's surface, there is always a chance an unseen pebble will knock your ball in an unexpected direction. In these essays, poet, antiquarian bookseller, and celebrated travel writer Marius Kociejowski chronicles serendipitous encounters with authors, manuscripts, and eccentrics, in which “the curious workings of fate” and “art's unbidden swerve” intervene to shift the course of fortune. Carried by keen wit, aphoristic prose, and a rich sense of characterization, and featuring chance meetings and comic misadventures with such figures as Bruce Chatwin, Zbigniew Herbert, and Javier Marías, The Pebble Chance is a sumptuous offering of belles lettres exploring the incandescent moments when skill and providence collide.

Download or read book Marlowe and Shakespeare written by Robert Sawyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instead of asserting any alleged rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Sawyer examines the literary reception of the two when the writers are placed in tandem during critical discourse or artistic production. Focusing on specific examples from the last 400 years, the study begins with Robert Greene’s comments in 1592 and ends with the post-9/11 and 7/7 era. The study not only looks at literary critics and their assessments, but also at playwrights such as Aphra Behn, novelists such as Anthony Burgess, and late twentieth-century movie and theatre directors. The work concludes by showing how the most recent outbreak of Marlowe as Shakespeare’s ghostwriter accelerates due to a climate of conspiracy, including “belief echoes,” which presently permeate our cultural and critical discourse.

Download or read book Factotum written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: