Category: Hangin’ out Backstage

In response to Junglemonkey‘s generous invitation to allow people to plug their blogs on her own, I’m doing the same – giving anyone who comments here the chance to sell their blog to the handful of bibliophiles (and Ealasaid-ophiles) who read this blog!

So, make a comment! Leave your name and let me know what kind of stuff you write. Do you portion out slices of life? Practice amateur comedy? Dissect current events? When you comment, there are a couple of rules:

1. You must be following this blog to make a comment.
2. You must do this on your blog too in order to give your followers a chance to gain new folks.

Come on – you have nothing to lose and perhaps a few friends to gain!

As you’ve probably heard, Borders is closing a number of its stores as it files for bankruptcy.

Part of me is doing a small, vindictive, schadenfreude-laden dance of EAT IT SUCKER! I remember when there were a fair number of independent bookstores in my area, charming little bookstores which started struggling and many of whom eventually closed as Borders and Barnes & Noble moved in. Admittedly, this is when I was a kid and didn’t have enough disposable income to do much book shopping, but my parents took me with them to bookstores, so I did notice the shift.

After college, I spent a lot of time in my local Borders where a guy had organized a regular Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game night. Every week, a handful of us would gather around a table the store kindly set up for us back in the music section, buy drinks from the store’s cafe, and stay until the store closed, gaming our little hearts out. I had a lot of fun — as a second-generation Tolkien nerd, I love LotR. The game was well crafted for the first few years, and a major championship game even made it to ESPN2 (one of my gaming group guys was on the commentary team for that broadcast, and had me coach him in correct pronunciation of the card names).

The group disbanded when the Return of the King release of the game was so bad that it made the game almost unplayable, but I always look back fondly on that time. Seeing the Borders when I drive past makes me smile. Even a corporate bookstore can be a positive location.

You’ll note, however, that I don’t smile because of hours spent buying books there.

I like to buy from indie bookshops when I can, and hopefully now that Borders is shrinking its reach the indies will start to thrive a little more. There’s even a handy list of indie bookstores near closing Borders stores you can consult for new places to go to get your hunt-or-gather on.

There’s something particularly charming about small indie bookshops. They don’t tend to have coffee bars or enough space for local gaming groups to hang out in them, but they tend to have knowledgeable employees and a rather more eclectic selection of books. Plus, the atmosphere just strikes me as me as more bookish! Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather browse in a bookshop that looked like this:

than like this:

I’ve done a lot of browsing in Borders over the years, but I can while away a lot more hours in a much more enjoyable way in indie bookshops. Long live indie bookstores!

It would probably surprise anyone who saw my bookshelves, but I don’t consider myself a serious collector — mostly because I don’t shell out tens of thousands of dollars for rare editions of centuries-old texts the way the hardcore ones do. I certainly have the urges, though, and when they hit, they hit hard. A case in point:

At a recent convention, I was perusing the shelves of a vendor carrying books and I found this little treasure. I paid $75 cash to the lovely lady and hustled out of there before anyone could notice and point out the utter insanity of me even finding this book, let alone getting it for such a good price.

I already own the Wolf Annotated Dracula in paperback (with its impressively hideous cover, bleck), but have always longed for the long-out-of-print hardcover edition. This one? This is a first edition. The vendor said she only finds one every few years, if that. I’ve found ones in good shape for sale for well over $100. This one has a Demco dust jacket cover protecting the lovely dust jacket (which is in surprisingly good shape) and aside from a general yellowing of the pages, it’s in excellent condition.

Much to my disappointment, almost none of my friends at the con got why I was so excited to have gotten my paws on this lovely tome. But then, it wasn’t a book convention, and there aren’t many people who understand why I own half a dozen copies of Dracula to begin with, let alone two editions of the same annotated edition (the notes are fantastic, and the text of the novel is a reproduction of the second printing ever).

That’s all right, though. I didn’t buy it to show off, I bought it because it makes me grin and do a little dance to hold it.

Looks like I’m a collector after all.

I spent a big chunk of time today at the Twitter Party for Profitable Idealism — Very interesting stuff! I even got super lucky and won the grand prize, free admission to the Profitable Idealism course! WOW.

If you missed it, check out the hashtag on Twitter and poke around the site. It looks like a great course! Go forth and sign up before the price goes up next week! There are pre-registration bonuses, too! DO EET. Preferably through my affiliate link there. 🙂

One of the questions that was both easy to answer and got me thinking was: who are your role models for changing the world?

Obviously, my answer was Eddie Riggs — I’ve written about him before — but after I sent in my reply I had a thought: is it weird that one of my inspirations is a video game character? And not just a video game character, but one from a heavy metal hack-and-slash-with-real-time-strategy game? Not to mention he’s played by Jack Black, who isn’t really known for being all about idealism and changing the world.

But, as I put it in my reply: Eddie saves the world and gets the girl, and all while serving others. His whole existence is about making life easier for artists so they can do their thing, and one idea that kept coming up in the conference call part of the party was that changing the world can happen through helping the people around you. Companies like Zappos.com are idealistic and world-changing because they’re so focused on employee and customer happiness.

From that point of view, Eddie is definitely an idealism/world-changing role model. He organizes, directs, builds, and takes major risks in the service of helping out the people he believes in — Lars, Lita, and Ophelia.  He works hard for little or no recognition in the our world before he’s taken to the Age of Metal because he loves music and is dedicated to being the best roadie he can be.

So yeah, it might seem weird, but my inspiration for being a world-changing idealist is Eddie Riggs, roadie, metalhead, and general badass.

John DeNardo posits here that there are two types of book buyers — Hunters, who know exactly what they want and enter a bookstore or library to find it, buy it, and leave; and Gatherers, who browse around to see what catches their interest. Of course, either sort may occasionally go into the opposite mode depending on the circumstances, but a lot of folks seem to fall mostly into one camp.

For me, it’s situational. Physical bookstores, especially those with used books, send me into Gatherer mode. I find myself wandering through my usual sections but occasionally being drawn into the others by an unseen tug that leads me to a strange book I either can’t stop myself from buying or stare at in amused horror and regale friends with the fact that it exists.

I’m enough of a collector now that I don’t use my local libraries (and with as many unread books as I have, it seems counter-productive), but when I was a kid I routinely checked out the maximum number of books allowed because I found so many interesting things while browsing. As a college student, going into the campus library to do research frequently resulted in me leaving with at least a couple books for my own reading (the library at the college I attended had some absolutely gorgeous older editions of novels that drew me like a moth to a flame).

Being a Gatherer has definite risks — I often joke that it’s not safe for me to take a credit card into a bookstore — but it also has great rewards. I can’t count the number of books I got because they were nearby a book I was looking for specifically, or because their cover or title or subject caught my eye.

Online, though, I’m a hunter. Someone will mention a book and it will sound interesting, so I’ll hit Amazon or Powell’s and get it. I don’t really browse websites, they’re too ethereal for me to get a sense of the book.

Which type are you?

I’ve no doubt I’m not the only one who loves looking at photos of beautiful libraries.

Wired.com gives us a little tour of Jay Walker’s Library, which occupies more space than some houses.

Librophiliac’s Compendium of Beautiful Libraries has some real lookers, including the above. I’m a sucker for those extra-tall shelves with little walkways on them.

Oddee gives us 20 of the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries. The spiral staircase in this one makes me drool.

Campus Grotto is more specialized, and gives us 25 of the Most Beautiful College Libraries. Georgetown’s has so much natural light, I almost wish I’d gone to school there.

However, I went to Occidental College, which has a spiffy library. As a loyal alumnus, I have to give it props. The stacks are actually my favorite part of the library, but I couldn’t find a photo of them. Now I have a mission for next time I’m in LA!

Last year, a game came out. A righteous game. A metal game. A game whose hero… was a roadie.

The game is Brütal Legend, and between its focus on heavy metal and the fact that its main character is voiced by and reminiscent of Jack Black (one of my fav actors), it was a match made in heaven. I adored it — all the more because its hero’s occasional philosophical ramblings about the duties of a roadie really appealed to me.

Last year I attended Ümloud,a charity event focused on Rock Band and similar music games. It happened right after Brütal Legend came out, so there was plenty of related stuff — costumes and so on — including one of a limited edition run of statues of the roadie hero himself, Eddie Riggs, up for bid in the silent auction. I’d been drooling over the things for months, trying and failing to win them in all sorts of weird contests, so I set myself a bid cap and went after it.

I managed to get it, partly by bluffing the crap out of the other guy who was bidding at the last minute.

Him: [outbids me].
Me: [outbids him with my maximum allowable expense]
Him: [reads the paper]
Me: [with a “make my day” expression] You wanna go for it? It’s for charity…
Him: Uh, you can have him.

I was overjoyed, even though when I got home, I discovered the statue had been damaged. The organizers of the auction had been carrying him around all evening and broken off the horns on his buckle and cracked the neck of his guitar.

Lucky me, though: I have an uncle who builds miniatures professionally. As in, has credits in movies for his work on them. He graciously agreed to take time out of his busy schedule to fix the poor guy up for me, and now he’s back in my possession! Look at that gorgeous guy.

Eddie’s determination and abilities really helped put into words what I’m striving to do here at The Book Roadie. He’s actually the reason I realized that what I was looking to be was a roadie… just, for books. It makes me smile every time I see him watching over my book collection.

Ahh, Thanksgiving weekend. Well, for those of us in the US, anyway. A four day weekend! If you work it right, you spend the first day with relatives and stuffing yourself, and then you can spend the other three days relaxing.

Me, I’m going to spend them reading. And probably doing Havi’s 77 Things game. Also, I hope, recovering from the cold I’ve caught. *blows nose loudly*

Catch you on the flip side, people.