On June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in United States v. American Library Association. The decision upheld the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) against a challenge based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Inasmuch as the law at issue in the case involved a requirement that libraries install filtering software to block obscene or pornographic material involving children, it was bound to be of interest, to say the least, to those who sell books and who have a very soft spot in their hearts for libraries. On one of the book related discussion lists on the Internet, the comments were critical of the decision, and asserted the view that this decision represented a significant assault on First Amendment values. A representative comment went something like this: …I just want to underscore that the US Supreme Court decision means that libraries are being forced to impose automated censorship tools upon adult patrons. I responded with the statement that, as I understood the decision, which I had not yet read, this was not true. The editor of this newsletter asked if I would like to expand on my response, and I said that I would. I hope this isn’t too expansive. She asked, I suppose, because I have a law degree. Although I am blessedly free of the practice of law and now sell books, I once practiced law, and spent considerable time working in a partisan legislative advisory position, and also was a law clerk for a federal judge. I can still read a Supreme Court decision and figure out what it means. I. The Law. There are a couple of federal programs on the books which were designed to provide resources for libraries to offer their patrons access to the internet. The details of these programs aren’t particularly important to this discussion, but that fact is necessary background. The value of those resources amounted to about $200 million in 2002 (counting direct grants, and discounted access fees). In response to the growth of the internet in the years since these programs were instituted, Congress (and everybody else who connects to the Internet) became aware that there was significant pornographic content to be had on the web. And Congress became politically aware (angry constituents, I’d imagine) that it was accessible to children, and viewable by children while being accessed by adults, all within public libraries. They responded by passing the CIPA, which required the installation of filtering software to block access to such material. It is important to note that this law applied only to libraries that received funds or benefits from those federal programs. It is also a given that Congress is given wide latitude to attach conditions to the receipt of federal funds. However, the American Library Association (ALA) and several other plaintiffs filed suit contending that CIPA was unconstitutional on its face. II. The Trial. A three judge panel in the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania agreed. It held that “any public library that complies with CIPA’s conditions will necessarily violate the First Amendment.” It is important to realize that this decision turned on the notion that the law was unconstitutional only because it forced the libraries to commit an unconstitutional act. In other words, a library governed or operated by a public entity – a state or local government or public school – could not, on its own, install filtering software without running afoul of the First Amendment. According to the District Court, libraries’ content-based decisions are subject to a “rational basis” test. However, because internet access was used in public libraries for “expressive activity,” it should be viewed as a “traditional public forum,” and as such, the law should be subjected to strict scrutiny. Under that standard, the Court concluded that while the government may have a compelling interest in preventing the subsidization of pornography, the software filters required by CIPA are not narrowly focused enough, presumably because the filters are hardly a precise weapon. No one reading this will be surprised that it was generally conceded by all the justices that the filters blocked a lot of unobjectionable material. III. The Decision. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning this decision is complex in that the decision of the Court was joined by only four justices (Renquist who wrote it, joined by O’Connor, Scalia and Thomas). That’s called a plurality opinion. Justice Kennedy concurred, as did Breyer, but each wrote a separate opinion. Stephens dissented with an opinion of his own, and Souter also dissented in an opinion joined by Ginsberg. Generally, a plurality opinion does not provide a particularly strong precedent, and the concurring opinions which establish the majority are significant in that they are usually more narrowly focused and provide a more compelling basis for decisions which follow. However, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the opinions in the decision as the “majority,” to include the plurality opinion as well as the concurring opinions, and the “dissenters,” to include each of those opinions, unless context requires otherwise. The majority, and more pointedly, the concurring opinions, notes as crucial the fact that CIPA permits libraries to disable the filtering software in response to the request of an adult, or presumably a child when the software is blocking material that would be appropriate for the child. In fact, Kennedy’s decision intimates that he reads the law as requiring that action, and that the provision is constitutionally required. As to the determination of which test to use to adjudicate this law (which I would suggest will almost always dictate the result), the majority (except Breyer) adopted the more permissive rational basis test. Breyer would have imposed an intermediate standard – “heightened scrutiny” – which requires a balancing of the government’s interest and the seriousness of the speech related activity. The balance, in Breyer’s opinion, tipped in favor of the government by virtue of the simplicity of getting the library to shut off the filters for adults. The other members of the majority found the rational basis test appropriate, rejecting the trial court’s opinion to the contrary. The justices reasoned that the public forum doctrine that formed the basis of the trial court’s opinion was inapplicable because the provision of internet access to the public was simply not like the precedents that applied it. The easiest of those to understand is a couple of cases concerning restrictions on the use of student activity funds. The Court had held that such funds were designed and intended for providing the means to engender speech related activities. Under those circumstances, content-based regulations were subject to strict scrutiny. But libraries make content based decisions every day in choosing which materials to buy, and perhaps more importantly, which materials to segregate from easy public access. After all, the Court said, many libraries simply decline to stock pornography at all. Such decisions by libraries are not subjected to strict scrutiny according to well established precedent. The fact that the internet contains an especially broad range of information shouldn’t make any difference because it could hardly be suggested that libraries could not choose to limit access to some material on the same basis they do with respect to books, periodicals, or any other material they provide. The dissents concentrated on the factual record, which discussed how poorly the filters performed, blocking perfectly harmless material (and valuable material as well), and failing to block pornographic material. This fact was as important to the dissents as the ease of having the filters turned off for adults was to the majority. It was this problem that made the CIPA unconstitutional in the view of the dissenters. Representative is the following from the Stevens dissent: Because of “underblocking,” the statute will provide parents with a false sense of security without really solving the problem that motivated its enactment. . . . The effect of over-blocking is the functional equivalent of a host of individual decisions excluding hundreds of thousands of individual constitutionally protected messages from internet terminals located in public libraries throughout the nation. Stevens also quoted the trial court’s finding that there were less intrusive alternatives to accomplish the purpose including imposition of access regulations and punishments for those who violate them; requiring parental consent during unfiltered access or the presence of library staff. Conclusion. It is curious that the more conservative justices in the majority based their opinions on the freedom regularly accorded libraries. In the posture of this case, the deference traditionally shown libraries in their choice of materials determined the loss of the suit brought by the ALA. Since libraries could most certainly install filtering software on their own without Constitutional problem, it can hardly be unconstitutional for the Congress to condition receipt of federal funds on doing just that. The answer to the assertion cited at the beginning of this essay is certainly that the assumption forming the criticism of the decision was incorrect. There is plenty of room for argument on the wisdom of the CIPA. Nevertheless it is hard to see how it runs afoul of the Constitution. The language of the law itself leaves no doubt that adult access must be unfiltered if requested. Those of us who spend time on the Internet are well aware of both how prevalent pornography is and how imprecise filtering software is. But I can’t help but wonder about both the efficacy and the appeal of the “less intrusive” ways of accomplishing a legitimate governmental purpose. Punishment for accessing forbidden materials and requiring parental presence or consent – these are hardly unobtrusive. It seems to me that they’re pretty heavy-handed. There was certainly much more to the various opinions in this case. It runs about fifty single-spaced pages. I hope that I’ve covered the important points, but I would suggest that anyone interested give it a read. By: Don Gallagher gallabks@dimensional.com

I am one of those newer booksellers who came into the market in the last ten years. My story starts back in 1995 or ‘6 when I was broker than broke, not working very much, and had started picking up little collectible pieces at garage sales that I could put in to the two consignment stores in town that would take stuff from me in an attempt to help cover some of my living expenses. I started to get fairly good at this and within a year was often paying most of my rent off of my sales. I noticed that both stores had consignment books and I started thinking about putting books somewhere to make a few more bucks. The smaller consignment store had one of their book consignors pull out and so I approached them about my putting in a shelf of paperbacks in the available space and spent over half a year buying some assorted stock at garage sales while waiting for him to finally give me the OK. He finally gave me the word – he had sold his store to his biggest consignor of antiques and collectibles – so I went to work on the new owner. Unfortunately, the new owner decided to stock his own pocket books and I was left sitting on a pile of books with nowhere to put them. I looked around and finally talked with the people who were running the local flea market and arranged for them to take my books on consignment, set up my first 5 foot wide 6 foot high bookshelf and quickly expanded to about 20 feet of shelving. It was making me a little bit of money but then all of the other permanent stalls in the market realized they could make a few bucks selling paperbacks at 25 or 50 cents and that market went a bit soft as I was asking the normal used bookstore half cover price. In November of ’98 the larger antique and collectibles store had their main bookseller pull out leaving them with just one smaller antiquarian book dealer and I approached them about having my books in their store. They let 3 of us move in to an area about 16 feet square and I immediately expanded into hard covers and all sorts of other books that I thought were interesting. I soon discovered that even a very good or fine first edition hardcover just wouldn’t sell at even half cover in Vernon, which was quite depressing. The antiquarian seller and one of the other new sellers both told me that they were managing to sell books thru the internet and in October of ’99 I downloaded Homebase and started putting books in. By the end of March 2000, I had passed the hundred book level and took the plunge, listing on ABE. I soon expanded all the way up to about 400 books by the end of May and coasted from there to November. In mid November, I hired my son to do data entry as he had been having challenges finding work that he could actually make a living at and my books online quickly expanded, reaching about 1000 books by the end of the year and just about 4200 by the end of May ’01 when my son accepted an invitation and plane ticket from a lady he had been chatting with online and escaped to Hawaii, never to return. At that point, I hired two college students and an older lady to do data entry for me and ended up with about 8400 books online by the end of ’01. The college students eventually left and my g/f moved to town and took up doing the majority of my data entry for me as an employee, and I now have about 18,000 books online. Working on becoming a real book dealer, even though I only sell through the internet, has been a real learning process. I have made every mistake possible from mistaking book clubs as possible first editions to listing hundred dollar books for $5 or $10. I actively follow a number of online or email discussion groups about books where I often learn just how much I really don’t know. Many of the people who have been in the business for far longer than I have bemoan the loss of the time when the marketplace wasn’t swamped with all sorts of newcomers like myself. However, a lot of the old-timers have gone out of their way time and time again to help those of us who are relatively new in the business. As time goes on, the actual selling venues for books continue to change and grow in many ways. There are large corporate style listing services and smaller co-op style sites and all sorts of other places selling books. About a year ago, a number of people who were selling online decided to try a slightly different co-operative venture in bookselling by opening up a place for independent booksellers to show a unified front to book buyers while maintaining more of the flavor of independent stores, and Global Book Town was the end result. It is still in its formative stages but has grown quite a bit from the dozen stores it had when it first opened a site on the net last December. It now lists over 50 independent stores offering books for sale through their own private sites where customers can browse or search within a single bookstore’s books or look through a category list to see who specializes in certain book types. Being involved in getting this new site off the ground was another learning experience for me and, luckily, a very capable person has shown up and taken over as webmaster during the summer to do most of the work. The marketplace has definitely changed just in the three years I have been selling online. I am sure that it will continue to change as time goes on. By: Ken Dunn bookrack@shaw.ca

We spoke in the last column of the gravitational pull of collectors, and of a fitting home for the inevitable disposition of thematic treasure troves. One such hunter-gatherer, Lyall Squair of Syracuse, NY, collected in excess of 300,000 Teddy Roosevelt items over the course of four decades. It would take a separate essay to chronicle his motives and methods, but the upshot is that the Squair Collection was purchased by the New York State Library in 1998 for $200,000. Mr. Squair could have realized many times this amount by breaking the collection up or selling outright to a rival, but thanks to a firm sense of historical propriety (and years of patient coaxing from the Manuscripts and Special Collections Unit of the Library), it came instead to the heart of this great institution. I had a chance to survey these boxes before processing, and a quick sampling indicated that well over two-thirds of the material is what we define as ephemera. A good portion of this ephemera is virtually worthless. A print ad showing Teddy Roosevelt selling bottles of ketchup, torn out of a 1970s magazine, is only of value in terms of demonstrating the enduring popularity of this figure (President Chester Arthur, for example, could not return from the grave to hawk some modern day product). A hundred years from now such material, which seems so common to us, may be of more interest. A handsome black and white Swedish poster from the turn of the century shows TR pitching Tiedemanns cigarettes. This has monetary and historical value right now, because the former asthmatic would never have advocated such an unhealthful practice, and because the poster is contemporary to his presidency and in very good condition. In our first column we described ephemera as “the heete of one daye,” that which is not meant to last longer than the temporary purpose for which it was created. Survivor ephemera renders any collection ten times larger, more interesting, and more unique than it would be otherwise. The timing of this acquisition was fortuitous in another sense as well. We are undergoing a great resurgence in the appreciation of Teddy Roosevelt. A sickly lad, TR rose like a granite mountain to overcome every obstacle in his path. Though wildly popular in his day, there was a time not too long ago when the bluster and militarism of the man led to unfavorable revisionism. After decades of partisanship and scandal we now yearn for a president who combines robust decisiveness with incorruptible reformism (I do anyway, and this is a bully pulpit to say so). Not that he was perfect by any means, but read one of the many modern biographies on this scion of New York and you will be surprised and delighted on many fronts. One of Squair’s finds,The Most Interesting American (1915), carries an inscription from one W.F.C., “a Teddy man,” which reads, “John Hay once said in the Century Editorial Office, ‘If you don’t want to like Roosevelt, you’ve got to keep away from him.’” Lyall Squair produced a catalog of his TR acquisitions, housed in a black three-ring binder with the title, “The Theodore Roosevelt Library, 1961-1995” above a silhouette of his famous hero. It is arranged by category, and subdivided further by author, subject, or date. The largest category consists of “BOOKS ABOUT TR.” Although our main concern is ephemera, these books cross over due to their service to the larger collection, their inscriptions, etc. Let’s plunge right in with some curious titles, such as The Teddysey (1907), Monkeys and Monkeyettes: A Reply to Ex-President Roosevelt (1909), the privately printed Who is Bashti Beki? (1912), and The Extraordinary Adventures of Theodorus Gunpowder (1915). Did TR: Hero to His Valet (1927) serve its author well? Here’s the seventy-two page play Bully in book form (1979), with an intro by TR IV, in which James Whitmore portrays the ex-president on stage (John Davidson was doing the same thing in 1998). The Rev. S. P. B. D. Bland penned the eleven page President Roosevelt and Paine’s Defamers (Boston: Boston Investigator Co., 1903). From this unfriendly-sounding title we learn that Squair has mixed booklets in with books. Journal articles too, for the very next entry is “Ambassadors at the Court of Theodore Roosevelt” in an author-inscribed reprint from the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (9/1955, Volume 42, No. 2). I find one I’d like to read, Camping with President Roosevelt(1907) by John Burroughs. Titles requiring further research such as the fifteen page Roosevelt‘s Dakota Ranches appear with notations like, “no place-no date-no publisher.” The Roosevelt That I Know: Ten Years of Boxing with the President pops up in an autographed, limited edition. Can’t imagine boxing with Roosevelt. Who Was Who 5000 B.C. to Date (1914) seems like a stretch. One edition of A Cartoon History of Roosevelt’s Career (1910) comes with forty-three lantern slides. Many of the book titles contain fragments such as, “strenuous life,” “stalwart companions,” “greatest living man,” “man of action,” “happy warrior,” “great heart,” and the apt “paradox of progressivism.” And paradox he was. TR the ornithologist could record the hues of breast feathers one day and coolly blast a charging cape buffalo in the brain pan the next. His earliest work in the following section, “BOOKS BY TR,” is a four page folded sheet privately published at the age of nineteen and simply titled, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, NY. Squair has a first edition and three distinct reprints, as well as the original proof manuscript! (Little did TR know he would be whisked off this same mountain range to assume the presidency after McKinley’s assassination.) Here’s another rare and serendipitous item. R. W. G. Vail was a former director of the New York State Library, and a famous antiquarian book collector in his own right. Squair found several limited editions about TR which Vail was involved with, including a four page item titled, President Roosevelt’s List of Birds Seen in the White House Grounds and About Washington During His Administration. As a local auctioneer is fond of saying, “Where ya gonna find one?” On a more common note, if you can call numbered, limited, signed and inscribed editions common, there are several such copies of The Wilderness Hunter: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle (1893), as well as a 1906 edition in Swedish. All the gorgeous, two-fisted first edition Scribner’s, Putnam’s, and Houghton Mifflin titles are here in multiple, such as Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914 et al), but how many collectors have bagged “Mammals Collected on the Roosevelt Brazilian Expedition” as it appeared on pages 559-610 in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History (8/9/1916, Volume 35)? We find several editions of Rooseveltian Fact and Fable(1908 et al) by Annie Riley Hale, but only one of her slim supplement to this work, Bull Moose Trails (1912). The Winning of the West (1889 et al) requires two pages in the catalog, and includes a four volume Daniel Boone edition, limited to 200 copies, into which a sheet of the author’s original manuscript has been inserted! Not too shabby. The Rough Riders (orAlone In Cuba as one contemporary needled) was his most popular work, propelling its author onto the political stage. One 1899 first edition was inscribed by a surviving Troop H Rough Rider in 1964, and it rubs spines with a Signet Classic paperback edition from 1961 as well as a Classics Illustrated comic book of the same vintage. (The State Library happens to own the original typescript of this work, complete with TR’s handwritten annotations, donated as part of the great Gotshall Collection half a century ago.) We find many different editions and printings of the same title (e.g., at least seven variants of Hermann Hagedorn’s The Boy’s Life of Theodore Roosevelt). Of TR’s collected works, we find the Dakota, Elkhorn, Executive, Homeward Bound, Prairie, Sagamore, Statesman, Memorial, and National editions-some duplicated-running between fourteen and twenty-eight volumes, followed by the parenthetical notation, “Have many single volumes from other sets.” This is all-important evidence in the movement to have Mr. Squair’s wife considered for eventual sainthood. Rounding out this section on works by TR are wonderful collections of published letters to his children, diaries in book and serial magazine form, memorial books, and such flotsam as salesman’s samples, advance copies, publisher’s broadsides, etc. “BOOKS ABOUT THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR” includes eight pages of sabre-rattling titles. “THE ROOSEVELT BEARS” chronicles the children’s book adventures of Teddy B and Teddy G in a beautifully illustrated series penned by Seymour Eaton and published by Edward Stern & Co. in the early 1900s. There’s a section on books by TR owned by family members, followed by another on books written by or about seventeen different Roosevelt family members, not to mention Fala the dog. These include reminiscences, historical works, poetry, novels, outdoor adventure, etc. One cookbook simply contains a recipe for spice cake submitted by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. Squair collected blue, red and green cloth copies of this item. Many of these works contain family bookplates, or have calling cards laid in, and many are signed editions. One is inscribed to Squair himself by Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The Ideals of TR, with a forward by his sister Corinne, carries her 1923 inscription to one Albert Shelby Le Vino. “Le Vino was a big T.R. collector” follows this catalog entry. Most charming of all is the nondescript Sea and Shore, bound in cover-worn red cloth. You wonder why it washed up on these sands and will open it to hear, “Christmas/74, To Corinne from her brother Thee Jr.,” penned when he was only sixteen. “SPEECHES, REPORTS, PROCLAMATIONS, AND EXECUTIVE ORDERS” is fertile ground for those collectors with a more political bent. Lyall Squair has two copies of the earliest example, a twenty-three page report TR made to the U.S. Civil Service Commission entitled Upon a Visit to Certain Indian Reservations and Indian Schools in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas(Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1893). You can trace his streaking political career from a Naval War College address in 1897, through his proclamation for slain President McKinley and his first message to both houses of Congress in 1901, and on through many pages of speechifying right up to the last here, a July 1918 appearance before the Republican State Convention meeting in Saratoga, NY. Many of the public addresses in this section are personal use copies (some signed), and include photographs, menus, floor plans, and seating lists. Some are surely scarce, such as an address to “negro and Indian students” at a Hampton Institute Decoration Day event, some are in shorthand, and one is even printed in Dutch from a speech delivered in Amsterdam. There are a dozen or so official documents signed by TR as governor of NY or president of the U.S. Scandal does not rear its ugly head much in this catalog, either by dearth or design. TR was involved in a natural history dispute regarding “revealing and concealing coloration in birds and mammals,” in which some experts disagreed with his writings on the subject. Not too revealing or concealing compared to modern standards. There is a lengthy, privately printed 1914 bound transcript of testimony taken in Marquette, Michigan, Roosevelt vs. Newett, in which the latter is sued for publishing a libel which claimed TR was an alcoholic. A 1913 letter from his attorney, laid into this transcript, offers to reimburse the expenses of those witnesses who testified on TR’s behalf. Rounding out the paper ephemera, we have additional lantern slides, stereoscopic slides, including fifteen of the Rough Riders, over sixty examples of sheet music, many bound, loose and mounted newspapers and clippings, and hundreds of post cards. Of this last group, many picture historical sites and events, some are boxed sets from his post-presidency African trip, but no connection is too tenuous. Any ship or hotel named after TR was fair game, and even an Ulaula fish post card (scientific name: Rooseveltia Brighami) felt the yank of Squair’s hook. There are several interesting manuscript collections represented. The wartime papers of John D. Miley, an aide-de-camp to Major General William R. Shafter, the Commanding U.S. General in Cuba, contains some fascinating items, such as correspondence from the front, a list of authorized press artists and correspondents and the warmongering newspapers they represented, as well as his Rough Rider discharge paper “signed twice by Col. TR.” Correspondent Frederick E. Sturdevant followed the ex-president on his world travels, and saved many interesting paper items. Conservationists Clarence L. Parker and Charles Christopher Adams are responsible for seventeen boxes of preserved materials as well. This includes the history, early records, and publications of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station at the NY State College of Forestry in Syracuse. Next follows a fourteen page list of autographic material, going back to a business transaction record of payments by John and Jacob Roosevelt dated 1771! Many are important and/or official, but this body of letters and documents covers such sundry subjects as maple syrup, a subpoena, and the gift of a sewing table. There is also a nice group of political correspondence to and from Eugene Philbin in this autographic section, in addition to smaller groups. A cornerstone of the Squair Collection was his acquisition of glass plate negatives from the files of the photographic firm Underwood and Underwood. We see TR at his desk, in a buckskin hunting outfit, at the head of his Rough Riders in Montauk Point, taking the oath of office for president, enjoying the rustic hospitalities of Pocatello, Idaho, speaking to cowboys from a decorated platform at the Alamo, planting a tree, watching golf and polo, hunting in Colorado, traveling in Cairo, and visiting his son Quentin’s WW I grave in France. One early negative is simply titled, “TR Speaking in the Sun.” If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can feel the warm sun on his live cheek again in an instant with an image like this in a way words would be hard pressed to convey. This collection of fabulous glass plate negatives serves as a translucent stepping stone of sorts from books and paper to actual TR-related 3-D objects and artifacts of every description imaginable. It’s the dividing line where the NY State Library hands off to the NY State Museum, and where Dewey Decimal numbers give way to collection accession numbers. The National Portrait Gallery, with the aid of several historical institutions, organized an exhibit (TR: Icon of the American Century), which began touring in 1999. The printed catalog which accompanied this exhibition is a lavishly published guide to the various collections lent. In contrast, Mr. Squair’s typed list is simple, and its contents mirror the drive of the completist collector as opposed to that of the calculating curator with critical colleagues and limited exhibition space. Samples from both were on view when the national exhibition came to the State Museum, and I was able to observe the Museum staff selecting representative items for this pairing. Going through the list of Squair TR artifacts in categorical order, with some examples, in one long roller coaster sentence, we find BANKS (“shoots coin into tree, bear pops out top, reproduction”); BOTTLES (imported tequila, after shave lotion, syrup, salad dressing); CALENDARS (various advertising calendars with TR quotes and photos 1899-1999); CAMPAIGN BUTTONS (trays full, and the cream of the crop in my opinion); CIGAR BOXES AND BANDS (five cent cigars with “TR head and shoulders in gold wreath on cover”); CLOCKS (“TR mounted on prancing horse”); COMMEMORATIVE PLATES (a 10″ McKinley/TR tin plate from 1899, a 1903 NYS Fair blue and white Wedgewood with a quote from his speech there); GAMES (TR and the Lions); JIG SAW PUZZLES (by Saalfield, Whitman, Milton Bradley, some never opened); KERCHIEFS (“TR and Fairbanks–1904–Protection to American Industries,” red, white and blue, 24″ high x 22″ wide); PATRIOTIC AND POLITICAL CHINA (mugs, mustache cups, sugar bowl); PLAQUES (bronze, hammered copper, profiles and quotes); PORTRAITS (a 1919 oil, prints, lithos, gravures); SCULPTURE (a large bronze bust by James Earl Frasier as well as lesser bronzes, a 1910 plaster African scene featuring “A smiling TR in hunting costume with a lion one each side of him,” a ceramic Lefton, a frosted glass bust); THE ROOSEVELT BEARS (all kinds of items bearing these famous bruins); TEDDY BEARS (a large amount, from the real thing and early teddy bear-related items to lots of plastic and plush kitsch such as Koosh Critters-he went way overboard here); TEACHING AIDS (most featuring all the presidents); and TRAYS (“blue ceramic scalloped portrait tile,” other early metallic trays). Under MISCELLANEOUS we find book ends, cake decorations, a nifty campaign siren, Canal Zone matches, candy molds, coasters, dishes and dish towels, Carry a Big Stick incense sticks, milk cartons, napkins, notebooks with TR on the cover, paper cups, paperweights, pencil sharpeners, place-mats, playing cards, a ring with “black stone set in gold with TR in raised relief with a light blueish colored stone,” silk thread, spoons, straight razors, tickets, U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt stuff (caps, pins and the like), period Teddy’s Teeth (“metal 3 ½” wide x 1 ¾” high red lips and white teeth”), a wooden armchair with woven seat (he sent this from Oyster Bay to his sister’s home in upstate NY because he liked to sit in it when he visited her), wrapping paper, wallpaper, and a woven tapestry (“Cotton 58″ x 55″. TR in a wreath in the center. Shields, eagles, scenes of the west-cowboys, cattle, hats, pistols, and dogs. Color brown, cream, red.”). At least it wasn’t on black velvet like Elvis. Comparing the two collections, it’s clear that Lyall Squair excelled in his acquisition of books and printed ephemera-particularly with some of the rare and unusual items. As for the artifacts, many of the best examples were owned by Sagamore Hill or snapped up by the Smithsonian and other institutions long ago through donation or purchase. With the exception of a relatively few important and valuable pieces, many of Squair’s artifacts are more whimsical than valuable. (Their average age, for example, would date later than the average age of the paper items.) Squair might have secured the last four full bottles of TR Great American Buffalo Wing Sauce on this planet, but they only tell us what we already know about the man’s lasting popularity. Enough, then! I will let him rest in peace for awhile. As Cary Grant said to Eva Marie Saint under Mount Rushmore on Reel 6, Page 21 of the script for North by Northwest, “I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.” By: Shawn Purcell mail@balopticon.com #ephemera

I was born in 1969 and grew up in the GDR until its end in 1989. The seventies and eighties were a nicer time in this country than it had been in the time before. Some things were missed; we couldn’t travel to capitalist countries (with the exception of if you were over 55/60 or to special events for family members). The economy wasn’t very powerful but most people lived well, there was no unemployment, and you couldn’t fall deeper than to a certain social level. Reading books was very important here and the government supported it with lots of money for libraries and schools. Of course, not for all kinds of literature. At school we read books by authors from the Soviet Union, like Scholochow, Tolstoi or Gaidar, and writers from the GDR. Aside from that, of course, classics like Goethe, Heine and Shakespeare. Our education was funded and solid–tests in the nineties showed its advantage over those of many other countries. And if you have only two TV channels to watch (GDR 1 and GDR 2) plus a few more from the western part of Germany FRG (officially not allowed but not suppressed any longer then) it is understandable that people read a lot. I started reading very early and went by bicycle to the library each week. Soon I concentrated on Science Fiction and from 1980, I started to collect it. Science Fiction wasn’t called that in the GDR at the beginning. First, books were published by the Soviet Military Administration shortly after the end of World War Two. They were cheap paperbacks with stories by mostly Russian writers, for instance Beljajew and his The Tenth Planet . With the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the socialist part of Germany in 1949, the first GDR-SF-book soon followed. It was The Golden Bowl – A short novel about nuclear power and space ships, by Ludwig Turek. This and others in the following time dealt with some main themes. One was a kind of production novel: some (GDR or Soviet) engineers do an epoch-making invention, spies from capitalist countries (US or FRG) try to steal it but are arrested by the police after a hard fight. Or the revolution export: astronauts (here they were called cosmonauts) from a mostly communist earth travel to a far away planet and find a feudalist or capitalist society. They help the working class to overcome their circumstances (of course with some victims) and everybody is happy. That sounds simplistic and stupid but some writers (like Eberhardt del’ Antonio) packed all this in exciting action and so these books are readable still today. Then topics spread: aliens visiting earth (no invasions, all problems were only misunderstandings; there was the thesis: if a society is progressive enough to space-travel, they have to be communist), interpersonal problems in extreme situations, and some authors started to use satire and irony. And further, some writers like Heiner Rank or Johanna and Günter Braun wrote very cleverly about problems in our own country under the veil of SF. If these would have been novels happening in present time, they never would have passed the censorship but they were published as being SF. Even the high-literature-authors sometimes used the instruments of SF for their own purposes, like Christa Wolf. Another part of published SF was those of other socialist countries, mainly the Soviet Union. And that was it! We had the Strugazkijs, Ivan Jefremow, Kir Bulytschow, and these are highlights that show what this kind of literature can reach at its best. Else there were new editions of classic authors like H. G. Wells, Alexej Tolstoi and many others. With H. P. Lovecraft, Stefan Grabinski and others even some horror was published, but no modern splatter or anything like that; we had a very low crime rate and supernatural things were not in accord with our materialistic view of the world. And there was nearly no fantasy (with the exception of children’s literature), especially no sword and sorcery. The last part was very small; it contained books by capitalist authors like Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury. Our currency, the Mark, was not freely convertible into the Deutsche Mark of the FRG or the US-Dollars, so everything that needed foreign exchanges was in low number and hard to get. We called such books under the counterbecause they were not displayed in the bookshops–you had to know a bookseller to get a copy. Oh yes, about the name. In the beginning the genre was calledscientific-fantastic or utopian; in the fifties sometimes they were even sold as detective stories . But in the early eighties everything became less accurate and we said SF, too. The books in the GDR were made very carefully. Paper was expensive and so every story was read by editors and subject specialists again and again; they worked with the author to improve the result. Often they were nicely illustrated. SF was loved by the people and nearly every book sold within hours. Some had editions of some hundred thousands, today Germany publishers are happy if they can sell some thousands. Then, after the revolution that started in Leipzig in 1989 (I had the luck to take part and see this historic event) the great mystery happened. The SF-readers vanished. Thousands of readers didn’t like the new kind with space operas, BEMs and soldiers in space. Today, even large SF-publishers like Heyne are in their biggest crisis ever. Tie-in novels like Star Trek or Star Wars don’t sell that much now; years ago they were the big business and helped to bring out other non-bestselling titles. Fantasy and children books sell well because of the success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. A few small presses try to survive with that, but they don’t become rich at it. GDR-Science Fiction became soon a great area for book collectors. It is a closed territory and with the publishing of a (nearly) complete bibliography by Hans-Peter Neumann (more than 1000 pages!) everybody can see what books he still is missing. The prices went up and some titles are extremely rare, especially for books printed in other socialist countries but in the German language (if one has for instance Aderca’s Underwater Cities, hold it or send it to me. ;-); it is worth as much as Sauron’s ring). The only problem is they used cheap paper that started browning before the books even were sold. I have the luck to live near Leipzig, where a company named Zentrum für Bestandserhalt is specialised in a kind of book therapy that takes all acid out of the paper. It isn’t very cheap but I have more joy when I look at my books. A last few words about the SF-fandom. Every organization outside the government’s influence was unwanted. So in the seventies, the Stanislaw Lem-Club in Dresden was dissolved. Later things became easier and for instance in Leipzig the Circle of Friends of SF was founded, of which I’ve been a member since 1990. We often have authors from all over the world as our guests, so from the USA: Thomas M. Disch, George R. R. Martin, Tim Powers, Michael Bishop, Charles Sheffield, Nancy Kress and many more, and from the UK, Russia and other countries, too. We published some books, the best known isLightyear 7, a final book in a series and a kind of conclusion to the GDR-SF. We collaberated with editor Erik Simon on the Kurd Lasswitz Award for that (a kind of German Nebula). #collecting

Flawed Policies Led To Disaster in Vietnam The tragedy is “It needn’t have happened!” say people who were on the scene during crucial years of early 1960s By: Ken Fermoyle It is hard to envision this book achieving the success or honors (Pulitzer, National Book Award) that Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie earned in the late 1980s. That is unfortunate. In many ways it offers more important insights into why, despite massive U.S. efforts, South Vietnam fell to the Communists Excellent as Sheehan’s book was, it was filtered through the eyes of a third-party. As good a journalist and writer as Sheehan is, he simply observed or researched the events he recorded. Active participants wrote this book. They lived and worked down where the real action was, not insulated by layers of bureaucracy from the nitty-gritty of life among the Vietnamese people. A Bright Shining Lie also examined the Vietnam conflict largely from the viewpoint of John Paul Vann, a product of the U.S. military, and primarily a believer in military solutions, though he changed that view later as a result of a close friendship with one of the contributors to Prelude To Tragedy, Tran Ngoc Chau. As even a hawk like Vann came to realize, conventional military tactics at best only dealt with the more visible part of the growing Viet Cong insurgency during the 1960-65 period. It was like trying to get rid of weeds by pulling the tops off, but leaving the roots intact. Certainly military efforts were necessary at the time, but not the conventional tactics favored by the French, U.S. and South Vietnam leaders. “Winning the hearts and minds of the people” became a hackneyed catch-phrase during this critical time but that does not lessen the importance of the concept. Failure to understand this, and to understand the psychological, cultural, economic and especially the political factors it involved, was critical to the loss of Vietnam. Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam 1960-1965 focuses on the unconventional military tactics and even more important non-military efforts needed to remove root causes of the insurgency. Sadly, such efforts, even those that showed great promise, were cast aside or perverted by U.S. policy makers and a succession of subservient South Vietnam regimes that took power after the coup and assassination of President Diem. As the book’s editors note in the introduction: “During this period, fateful decisions were made that led the United States and South Vietnam down the slippery slope to shameful defeat in 1975…The real tragedy of the Vietnam War is that it didn’t have to happen.” Another tragedy is that few Americans realize that U.S. arrogance, compounded by lack of understanding, particularly of the peasantry, fueled the Viet Cong insurgency. There was almost an innocence in the lack of knowledge about Vietnam and its people on the part of most American civilian and military officials. We also had a military prepared for and trying to fight a totally different kind of war than what it faced. These are the factors that led to North Vietnam’s victory in 1975. Remember that this was during the heart of the Cold War. U.S. citizens, bombarded for years by dire threats of USSR plans to conquer the world for communism, could be excused for their ignorance about a small Southeast Asia country. Most knew little about Vietnam; few had even heard of the country before it began to make news in the 1950s. Our leaders, however, should have known better. It would have taken very little investigation to realize that the vast majority of Vietnamese people knew little about communism during the 1940s, ’50s and even into the ’60s. Few even grasped the concepts of democracy or communism. Those few were the intelligentsia, nationalistic activists and more enlightened Vietnamese. Many of that group learned about communism and communist indoctrination tactics while serving time in French prisons for advocating independence of Vietnam, land reform and other measures to improve the lot of the peasantry. (Once again the old adage proved true: prisons are indeed the universities of revolution.) The Japanese released thousands of political prisoners after they ousted the puppet French colonial government in March, 1945. Most of the communist cadres came from their ranks. To nationalist Vietnamese, these people were heroes because they had dared to defy the French and suffered in prison as a result. Vietnamese followed them not because of any political ideology but because they had proven themselves as anti-colonialists willing to fight and sacrifice for a free Vietnam. Most Vietnamese, on all sides and from all strata of society, were nationalists. Some historians and scholars call Vietnam “the Ireland of Southeast Asia” with good reason. It fought against domination by China for centuries, suffered under the colonial yoke of France for some eight decades. When France attempted to reestablish control over Vietnam after World War II, only a tiny fraction of the 25 million population were doctrinaire communists. Indeed, one contributor to this book, who was active from the very beginning, estimates that there were even fewer, perhaps two or three hundred, true communists in the Viet Minh military ranks and 2,000 in all of Vietnam (Translated. Viet Minh means League for Independence of Vietnam.) Tran Ngoc Chau, author of Chapter 6, My War Story: From Ho Chi Minh to Ngo Dinh Diem, adds: “In 1949, in my Viet Minh Regiment 83, I knew of only two dedicated communists, both high ranking officers.” (I must note here that Chau has been a close friend and colleague for some 15 years. He fanned my interest in Vietnam’s history, the conflicts that racked it in the past, especially during the 1945-75 period, as well as the causes and results of those conflicts. I hold him in the highest esteem and consider him my mentor in many ways. Thus, I was pleased and honored when, more than a decade ago, he asked me to help him write the full story his memoirs. It has been a most rewarding experience.) Some Americans who were on the scene did appreciate the situation in Vietnam during the critical 1960-65 period (including a few who were there even earlier). Chief among them was Col. Ed Lansdale, who at that time unquestionably had more experience with communist “people’s revolutions” and counterinsurgencies than any other U.S official at any level of government. Lansdale was the model for Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” and for Col. Edwin B. Hillandale in the Lederer-Burdick bestseller, The Ugly American. He worked closely-and successfully-with President Ramon Magaysay in the Philippines to combat the Huk Rebellion. He headed the Saigon Military Mission in the mid-1950s. President John F. Kennedy, impressed by Lansdale’s knowledge of and experience in Vietnam, wanted to appoint him ambassador to South Vietnam in 1961. Dean Rusk protested vigorously, threatening to resign if JFK made the appointment. A few Americans learned from their experiences in Vietnam but many did not. Among the former were Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who first went to South Vietnam in May, 1963 as a junior Foreign Service Officer in the State Department. He was assigned to the Office of Rural Affairs under Rufus Phillips, director of the newly-created organization in a State Department experiment “to diversify the foreign service experience.” For Holbrooke, it proved fruitful personally, if a failure overall. He makes a powerful point in the Foreword he wrote for Prelude to Tragedy: “In retrospect I think that what we were doing in Rural Affairs had little chance of success. Our efforts failed not for lack of effort or good intentions, but because our work was part of a larger policy that was fundamentally flawed.” He adds: “My work in Rural Affairs was seminal. It gave me an on-the-ground view of the opportunities and limitations of America’s efforts in Vietnam and, by extension, elsewhere…[it] shaped the rest of my career.” Holbrooke explains that “Vietnam’s lessons were still with me” when he went to Dayton, Ohio in 1995 as chief negotiator in talks that ended the war in Bosnia. Other Americans failed to understand the causes of U.S. failure, even in hindsight. One was Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during much of this period. Bert Fraleigh comments on this in his contribution to Prelude. The five Americans and three Vietnamese contributors to this book offer more valuable insights of what went wrong in Vietnam than McNamara did in his book: In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. One of the U.S. quintet was Rufus (Rufe) Phillips, a Lansdale protégé. Fittingly enough, he wrote the book’s first chapter, which clearly lays out the problems and some of the solutions he endeavored to implement while director of Rural Affairs for the U.S. Operation Mission (USOM) in Saigon during the early 1960s. This was Phillips’ second tour of duty in Vietnam. He was part of Lansdale’s Military Mission during 1954-56 and also spent time in Laos, so he had significant experience in Southeast Asia. His chapter, “Before We Lost in South Vietnam,” details some of the egregious mistakes made at top levels of the departments of State and Defense in Washington. Second chapter contributor Hoang Lac reiterates in “Blind Design” the recurrent theme that runs through this book: with few exceptions, Americans failed to “know the enemy.” A 1950 graduate of the National Military Academy at Dalat, he advanced to brigadier general, was a province chief and served in important military and government posts before the fall of Saigon. His summaries of the backgrounds of Ho Chi Minh and President Ngo Dinh Diem provide valuable insight into what shaped these two protagonists. The third chapter is “Counterinsurgency in Vietnam: The Real Story” by Bert Fraleigh, A Canadian originally, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers as a civilian and in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Later he rose to senior positions in various American assistance programs throughout Asia. Fraleigh begins his chapter by making the point that major U.S. players, even in hindsight, failed to understand why things went so wrong in Vietnam. “I am appalled by the superficialities and misinformation contained in former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. This feeling is shared by most of us who worked at the grassroots level in this [South Vietnam counterinsurgency] program.” In preparing his chapter, Fraleigh reviewed trunk-loads of his own files, government records and the literature from 1945 to the end in South Vietnam in 1975. What strikes him most is “the persistent unwillingness of American military leadership to recognize that this was a different kind of war. Put simply, it was unconventional and it demanded a thoroughly unconventional response.” Fraleigh cites just two exceptions to American unwillingness to combat unconventional tactics appropriately. The first was Col. Lansdale’s successful behind-the-scenes efforts to support President Diem and “stabilize South Vietnam for another six years.” The second came when “President Kennedy and his brother Robert, believing in the necessity of an unconventional response in South Vietnam, pushed both civilian and military conventionalists to develop one.” Fraleigh says, “We were well along in the job when President Kennedy was assassinated,” repudiating McNamara’s In Retrospect claim that the U.S. simply lacked experts on Vietnam and how to cope with the situation there. Fraleigh outlines his own extensive credentials in dealing effectively with local people “in the boondocks” and his theories, based on experience, on how it should be done. A key statement: “Experience…convinced me that world peace could best be achieved by helping equalize opportunities and living conditions among all peoples.” Lu Lan agrees in Chapter 4, “The People’s War or War on the People,” that South Vietnam was lost because U.S. and South Vietnamese leaders did not understand the nature of the conflict. They should have heeded the words of President Kennedy when he spoke about the need for, and how to, combat communism in general. “It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions,” JFK noted, to fight an enemy that “relies on infiltration rather than elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerillas by day instead of armies by night…” Lu Lan joined the local militia in 1945 but was discharged in January, 1947 “for reasons of social class.” (i.e. He came from a family of mandarin landowners and, he reports, was told that serving in his militia platoon “was a high honor reserved for the proletariat.”) Like the other two Vietnamese contributors to this book, he later was a graduate of the National Military Academy at Dalat. He served in increasingly important posts in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) until the fall of Saigon, reaching the rank of lieutenant general. Thus, he had ample opportunity to experience some of the deficiencies and problems he documents in this chapter. George K. Tanham tells us in Chapter 5, “Defeating Insurgency in Vietnam: My Early Efforts,” how he came to play a part in the Vietnam story. The RAND Corporation realized in 1953 that the French might lose and that the U.S. might become more involved in Vietnam. They began a series of war games (Project Sierra) to study all types of potential conflicts, from guerilla to nuclear warfare. Tanham joined as a consultant in early 1954, just as RAND began a guerilla-level war game. “After becoming involved and observing for several months, I thought that RAND was ‘playing’ the communist red forces, the guerillas, in almost exactly the same way that it played the blue forces, the Americans. This did not seem quite right to me because I had been following the war in Indo-China and noticed that guerillas seemed to behave quite differently from conventional soldiers.” Having studied the Belgian resistance movement and written about it in his doctoral dissertation for a PhD in history from Stanford, Tanham knew something of guerilla warfare. (What seems strange is that RAND think-tankers started their guerilla war-gaming the way they did. The very definition of “guerilla” makes it clear that guerilla tactics are unconventional.) Tanham discussed his misgivings with a superior, Ed Paxson, who agreed that the games were unrealistic. With Paxson’s blessing, Tanham began studying everything he could about communist revolutionary warfare in general and how it applied to Vietnam in particular. The French granted him permission to study a broad range of documents, including intelligence reports and post-battle assessments, pertaining to their fight against the Viet Minh. He also interviewed many French officers who served in IndoChina. He discovered that many were seriously critiquing operations there, determined not to repeat the same mistakes in future. “These French thought that psychological operations were an important ingredient in communist doctrine and should be addressed in counterinsurgency programs.” Tanham delivered lectures based on his extensive studies at the U.S. Army War College in 1947. He also prepared a 3-hour training film on communist revolutionary warfare at the Air University. These efforts and a handbook for RAND on the subject went for naught. The rest of his chapter details his continuing efforts to persuade U.S. officials at various levels, both in Vietnam and Washington, to understand communist strategies and how best to combat them. He relates instances revealing that Defense Secretary MacNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had no inkling of either factor, and no inclination to learn. Tanham particularly criticizes failure of the U.S. to find, train and motivate qualified South Vietnamese to lead counterinsurgency efforts and to govern themselves. He singles out James Killeen, who took over as director of USOM in 1964, for special criticism. “He knew nothing about South Vietnam and even less about counterinsurgency…and, as far as I could tell, made no effort to learn…” Finally, in frustration and disillusioned, Tanham left Vietnam, “deciding after about six months that I was wasting my time completely.” I’ve already mentioned my connection with Tran Ngoc Chau, author of Chapter 6, “My War Story: From Ho Chi Minh to Ngo Dinh Diem.” My personal feelings aside, it is fair to say that Chau’s contribution to Prelude to Tragedy is an extremely valuable one. Because of his unique background and innate intelligence, he understood the insurgency and how to cope with it far better than most Vietnamese or Americans. He proved that by initiating what was arguably the most successful pacification program of the era in Kien Hoa province, such a heavily Viet Cong stronghold that it was widely known as “the cradle of the revolution.” It was so effective, in fact, that American leaders in Saigon wanted to broaden it and convinced South Vietnam officials to create a national pacification cadres program, with Chau as director. Tragically, the CIA insisted on changes that destroyed the program’s basic concepts. Chau resigned as director and what finally emerged was the infamous Phoenix program, a complete perversion of tactics that had made Chau’s efforts successful in Kien Hoa. Instead of countering communist influence by political, psychological, economic and security measures at the local community level, as Chau had done, Phoenix used assassination and intimidation as its counterinsurgency tools. (Zalin Grant covered this matter, and Chau’s role in it, in detail in his 1991 book Facing The Phoenix.) Chau’s methods in Kien Hoa were so effective because he did indeed “know the enemy,” far more so than any of the top Vietnamese or U.S. officials. He learned great respect and empathy for the Vietnamese peasantry while living among them and fighting beside them during his years with the Viet Minh. He fought against the French, acquiring knowledge of the political indoctrination and guerilla tactics later used so effectively. He had military training under both the French and the Americans. He incorporated the knowledge from these experiences to craft the programs he developed later. Chau was one of many teen-age Boy Scouts who joined the Viet Minh’s National Salvation Youth in the 1940s. These fervent young nationalists, along with tens of thousands of political dissidents imprisoned by the French and released by the Japanese during their occupation of IndoChina, swelled the ranks of the Viet Minh during that period. They helped make Ho Chi Minh’s organization the most effective resistance group in Vietnam. Chau played a minor role, serving chiefly as a courier for an intelligence cell until the (WWII) war ended. When Japan surrendered, Vietnam was in limbo. Japan granted it semiautonomous status with Emperor Bao Dai as titular head of state after deposing the French puppet government in a coup de force on March 9, 1945. Near the end of August, Bao Dai turned over his authority and claims to legitimacy to Ho Chi Minh’s representative. Chau immediately volunteered for active duty with the first Viet Minh Army of Liberation in 1945. All told, he served five years with the Viet Minh, learning their indoctrination, training, propaganda and military tactics. He suffered the privations of life as a guerilla soldier in the field and at least one serious wound. “Like thousands of others, I received no pay, not even a uniform, during the first two years. We had one rifle for every three soldiers, a submachine gun for every platoon, usually about 40 men.” (Chau once told me that he had no shoes, not even rubber-soled sandals, for nearly two of those years.) From a rookie platoon leader in 1945, he moved up through the ranks to company commander in 1946, battalion commander and political commissar in 1947-1948 and head of the training section of Regiment 83 in 1949. By then, however, he began to question his allegiance to the Viet Minh. He was being pressured to join the Communist Party. He knew of only two Communists in the Regiment at that time. He admired them, but felt that he could never share their commitment to communism. “Both were entirely devoted to the revolution,” he says. “Their dedication, frugality and bravery were beyond reproach.” Chau’s religious education, family background and beliefs conflicted with communist philosophy. (He was, and is, a devout Buddhist.) “I also had grave doubts about the ability of the Viet Minh to defeat the powerful French military. I believed that a compromise would eventually be reached between Ho Chi Minh, Emperor Bao Dai and other nationalist factions and that a truly independent, noncommunist Vietnam would result.” So, near the end of 1949, Chau left the Viet Minh, transferring his allegiance to the newly-created state of South Viet Nam under Bao Dai. He graduated with Lu Lan, contributor of Chapter 4, in the first class of the National Military Academy at Dalat and served in the ARVN, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and earning the highest military medals in battle. He was awarded the Vietnam National Order while a lieutenant. Under President Ngo Dinh Diem, Chau served as province chief in Kien Hoa and mayor of Da Nang, second largest city in South Vietnam, and governor of the Danang- Quangnam area. He returned to Kien Hoa as province chief after the coup (the only province chief to serve under both Diem and the generals) and later was appoint director of the National Pacification Cadre program. He resigned in 1967 and ran for the National Assembly. He not only won the election but was elected secretary general of the House of Deputies. In mid-1968 Chau called for coexistence with the National Liberation Front in exchange for a peace settlement with North Vietnam. Consequently, Thieu’s governent imprisoned him on trumped-up charges of being a “communist sympathizer.” He was released and placed on house arrest shortly before Saigon fell. When Saigon fell, the North Vietnamese quickly arrested this “communist sympathizer” and held him in re-education camps and jails for 2-1/2 years. Ironically, a near-duplicate of Chau’s proposal for peace in 1968 became the basis for the 1973 Paris Accords. Meanwhile, casualties had soared as the war continued. John O’Donnell (Chapter 7 – “Life & Times of a USOM Prov Rep”) and Harvey Neese (Chapter 8 – “Destination South Vietnam 1959”) were the civilian equivalents of the army and marine “grunts,” American combat troops who began coming to Vietnam in 1965. They waged their part of the war among the peasants, in the hamlets and villages of South Vietnam. They were hands-on guys, not striped pants bureaucrats. Neither one came from the Ivy League background of most State Department personnel. In fact, O’Donnell came from about as far from New England and Washington as you can get and still be in the United States: a sugar plantation in Waialua, Hawaii. He majored in economics and history at Stanford. After college (1956) he joined the U.S. Army and served in the Psychological Warfare Unit, spending time in the Phillipines, Thailand, South Vietnam and Laos (where he met the famous Dr. Tom Dooley). Upon completing military service, he attended graduate school at the University of Hawaii, and then joined the Agency for International Development (AID) in October, 1962. Sent to Vietnam , he was assigned to USOM and the newly-created Office of Rural Affairs under Rufe Philips. At first he was assigned as provincial representative (“prov rep”) for seven Mekong Delta provinces south of Saigon. His orders from Phillips: “You go out there and work with the province chiefs and MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) to get the Strategic Hamlet Program going and then come back here and tell us what we can do to support you.” O’Donnell provides valuable background on the situation in the Mekong Delta area at the time. Problems included corruption and indifference on the part of some Vietnamese officials. On the plus side, he was “very impressed by the quality, motivation and high morale of the U.S. military personnel [all volunteers] in the provincial advisory detachments and at Seventh Army headquarters.” Texas-born Neese earned a BS in agriculture at the University of Idaho and started graduate studies toward a masters. Tiring of school, he dropped out and went to Vietnam in March, 1959 with International Volunteers Service, a precursor of the Peace Corps. He stayed for two years, learning at first hand the country’s customs, language and the difficulties rural Vietnamese faced. Neese’s account of his two years with IVS is interesting and often amusing (e.g., his elephant ride and first attempt at roping bulls). His comments on the ineptitude of many of American USOM advisors are more saddening. Neese worked with Nguyen Qui Dinh, who held a master’s degree in animal nutrition from the University of Arkansas and was part of South Vietnam’s Directorate of Animal Husbandry, to implement the Pig-Corn project. This program provided improved-breed pigs and information on how to raise them to the poorest farmers. The result: instead of 40-pound pigs that took two years to mature, farmers raised hogs up to 300 pounds that matured faster and provided more meat, more income and more fertilizer for the farmers’ fields-all at reasonable cost. It was exactly the kind of program that, expanded to other areas and encouraged from the top down, was needed to truly “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people in rural areas. It was especially effective because it was a joint U.S.-South Vietnam venture, with American involvement staying low-profile, rather than appearing dominant. This effort was too unconventional to impress top U.S. brass but the North Vietnamese government was quick to understand its value. The communists created a copycat program that duplicated the Pig Corn Project almost exactly. They even used a replica of the Pig Corn brochure, down to the Disney-type characters Neese and Dinh created! Neese returned to the University of Idaho in 1961, completed work on his masters degree in the field of livestock, then returned to Vietnam in 1963 to join the Office of Rural Affairs. The account of his time there, again working in the field and living among the peasants, reveals the trials, and occasional triumphs, of Rural Affairs efforts in a very personal, anecdotal fashion. The Conclusion of the book sums up the situation during those critical 1960-65 years. Reading the subtitles tells the story: Highest U.S. Policy-Makers Do Not Understand, Conventional Setting, U.S. Ambassador Requests General Lansdale (and was turned down, unfortunately), Beginning Of The End. The book ends with an Appendix, Bibliography and comprehensive Index. The Appendix provides a brief chronological history of Vietnam, from its colonization by France in the latter part of the 19th century, invasion by Japan, first contacts between the U.S. and Ho Chi Minh to the defeat of the French and involvement of the U.S. The Bibliography lists a number of books that cover various aspects of the Vietnam tragedy. One can only wish that Prelude to Tragedy had gained wide distribution, while facing the reality that such a happy result was never in the cards. The adage that those who do not learn from history are fated to repeat mistakes from the past is all too true. American arrogance has not disappeared in the past 28 years and lessons that could have been learned from the tragedy of Vietnam have been ignored all too often.

When I lived in St. Augustine, FL, I regularly attended the monthly antique dealer meetings, partly because I enjoyed the people and the food and partly because I enjoyed the Show and Tell portion of the meeting. Each dealer was encouraged to bring something from his/her antique shop that would be of interest to the other dealers, and we would try to guess what it was. This was my first encounter of a Palm Leaf Book, brought by another book dealer. A bit later I wanted to learn more about the books and asked members of the Bibliophilegroup.com mailing list to tell me more about them only to find that most of them didn’t know much about them either but they suggested that I search the web – so most of what I’m telling you today about the books today can be found by doing a Google search. The following is a summary of what I learned – there are also a number of photos available on line.http://www.arcavigraha.com/lontar.htm and http://www.swu.ac.th/hu/lib-sci/ifla99/books.html In brief: palm leaf books are manuscripts printed on palm leaves and have been a part of the culture in India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia. The leaves, after being flattened and polished smooth with sand (or boiled in water or milk to make them strong depending on the type of tree used), are strung on cords, bound in boards and often ornamented with gold or ivory. The size varies with leaf strips ranging from approximately 16-36 inches long and 1 ½ – 3 inches in width. The leaves are inscribed with a stylus and then filled with ink made from charcoal and oil so the words are visible. There are a few variations as to the exact leaf used (including lai-lan tree leaf, lontar palm leaves, talipot palm, palmyra tree) and some variance as to the source of the ink but the look of the items were as similar as our books are similar. Even after paper began to be used, the format remained the same! The manuscripts can last for 600 years and have been made since Roman times. Thousands of the books are now in monasteries and museums. Of course, some of the books are illustrated, some are for children, some are religious in content, some recorded the law, and some were literature. Isn’t it amazing that the desire to record our thoughts and messages has been consistent through the ages? Our connections to other cultures can be read on cave walls and palm leaves. There are currently 2 listed F/S on abebooks.com – $700 and $125. I’ll bet that there were good writers and illustrators then as well as those who weren’t so talented! I wonder if it was all that hard to get published? Were there some poor ‘wanna be’ writers walking around Bali trying to find someone to sell him some boiled talipot palm to record his story? Did the preparers of the special leaves control the market? I would have thought that the religious groups would have done the most of the work but I don’t really know. We only know about what has survived over the ages and that isn’t necessarily all that was popular at the time! You may also be interested to know that craft (or art) people have web sites with directions for making palm leaf type books:http://members.aol.com/leefamily6874503/palmbook.html Sources: CoOL (Conservation on Line), Arca Vigraha.com and Kathy Stice at Preservation Fact Sheet, Washington.edu. and miscellaneous others. Respectfully submitted by Madlyn Blom http://www.CenterAisleBooks.com Madlyn@CenterAisleBooks.Com Note: Two photo examples shown are from: http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Paper-exhibit/palmleaf.html (Cornell University) http://faculty.luther.edu/~martinka/art43/daily/2nd/day11.html (Luther College, Iowa) #reference

As a first-timer at BEA, my initial reaction was: “This is great!” Coming on the heels of the L.A. Times Festival of Books (see Vol. 4, No. 2), held at UCLA a month earlier, it reinforced the feeling that reading and books (and selling them) still matter to a great many people. This euphoria quickly gave way to panic. How on earth could I, even with help from my wife/photographer, cover this huge event in the single day that circumstances allowed? “You can’t,” I told myself, and resolved to take in as much of the Expo as possible, and report as much as I could for The Standard. Now in its 103rd year, BookExpo America offers a showcase of books in all formats, plus gift items and music CDs and DVDs, as well as new technology and services. It is an educational forum that looks at the business of books from many viewpoints and provides a meeting place for the entire book industry, from sellers and publishers to agents and authors. Total attendance for all industry professionals was 27,143, about 4,000 fewer than attended BEA 2002, which was held in New York City, traditional heart of the book publishing industry. The total number of book buyers who attended was 6,684, compared to 7,049 last year in NYC. All in all, it was a very respectable showing of support for the West Coast event. One complaint we heard from some publishers was that holding the Expo a month earlier (this was the earliest BEA in history) created problems for them. “We’ve had to prepare promotion and marketing material for some books due to be published in the fall without having seen the manuscripts,” was an off-the-record lament from one marketing rep for a major publisher. The same gripe may have simmered below the surface during the show but participants were careful not to let it spoil the generally upbeat tenor of the event. The Show Floor featured more than 2,000 exhibits, including the new Graphic Novel/Comic Pavilion and e-Book Experience area. The latter was prime evidence that the publishing industry takes electronic books seriously. Expanded areas included larger Children’s Book and Spanish Book Pavilions. Show representatives pointed out that there were more Show Special HOT DEALS offered by exhibitors than ever before. – and even a special HOT DEALS directory you could pick up on-site to help you find these Show Specials. Various educational programs were offered during the show. The American Booksellers Association (ABA) put together a comprehensive array of sessions and events for independent booksellers “covering all aspects of the business.” (“All aspects,” that is, for brick-&-mortar store owners. I guess IOBA should do something similar for independent online booksellers in the future!) Other events focused on children’s books and other specialized areas. The BookExpo America Program featured a record breaking 650+ authors in the traditional autographing and in-booth program. The Author Photo Center, where you could have your photo taken with one of 30 well-known authors and receive a press release for your local paper, drew big crowds. (Unfortunately, we learned about this too late and came home sans photos and press releases.) There were a lot of Special Events this year, many of them new or expanded. They included: ·Special Evening with Emmy-winning writer and comic, Ellen DeGeneres ·Variety magazine’s – Hollywood: Books to Blockbusters ·Children’s Books Too Good to Miss with Barbara Park, Robert Sabuda, Christopher and Walter Dean Meyers ·Author Breakfasts/Teas with Toni Morrison, Madeleine Albright, Michael Moore, Anita Diamant and Jonathan Lethem ·New MediaTalk Lunch with Molly Ivins, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly and Al Franken (I hated to miss a possible confrontation between Ivins and O’Reilly, but the timing was wrong.) ·New Graphic Novel Author events featuring Neil Gaiman and others ·New Spanish/Latino Author events featuring Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez and more ·New Emerging writers programs highlighting the book world’s up and comers There was lots more but we left after nearly eight hours, tired but happy, and weighed down with bulging bags of Show Specials, newly autographed books and stacks of catalogs for our reference files.

With all the financial pressures on Internet booksellers, from declining prices to shipping reimbursements which don’t quite cover the actual postage, it’s become more important than ever to be efficient. This is true even if you are a one-person shop, but even more so if you have paid employees. You can’t pay someone for fifteen minutes to ship one ten-dollar book and still make a profit. In my shop, much of the increase in efficiency has revolved around the use of bar codes. Bar codes came into our lives at The Book Den when I bought new inventory software by Anthology for the store. Along with the software came a Symbol Hotshot hand-held scanner and a rather expensive ($750) thermal label printer by Cognitive. I since found similar printers for amazingly low prices on eBay. The printer is quiet and amazingly fast and the scanner made ringing sales up at the register much easier, especially for younger staff who aren’t particularly adept at the number pad on the keyboard. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about what bar code readers do; they just decode the characters represented by the barcode and input them into your computer program as if you had typed the characters from the keyboard. In fact, most bar code scanners plug in between the keyboard and the computer. The labels produced by my software contain just the characters to represent the stock number of that book; there are no extra characters or codes. But there are various coding schemes for the barcodes found on manufactured products. For booksellers, the relevant one is Bookland EAN. These are found on the back covers of trade books and on the inside front cover of mass market paperbacks. You can recognize them since they all start with the numbers “978.” Almost all modern barcode scanners can decode these codes and return the ISBN, but sometimes it’s a feature you have to turn on when configuring the scanner. As helpful as barcode scanning is at the cash register, it really helps when doing inventory. The first inventory we took after getting all of our books bar coded went very quickly. We set up a computer at a central table and hired a bunch of strong young people to bring the books to the table a shelf at a time. We scanned them into a big long dBase file, which was used to update the on-hand field in the Anthology database. When we started selling books on-line, I quickly realized that the really time-consuming part of filling Internet orders was just finding the books. Is that biography of Elizabeth the First in the Biography section or in English History? Anthology has a “BIN” field for the physical location of the book but we had never used it. So, before taking inventory again, every shelf got a barcode label identifying it. By now I had realized what a bottleneck it was to only have one scanner during inventory, so I bought a whole lot of Worthington barcode scanning wands on eBay. These aren’t quite as quick or as easy to use as the hand-held pistol type scanners – you have to drag the wand over the label – but they were cheap (average cost twenty-five dollars). This time our dBase file had two fields, one for the ISBN and one for the BIN code. By the end of this inventory, we knew exactly where every book was. Having accomplished this feat, the data obviously needs to be maintained. We need to track books as they get shelved or are moved around the store. For this, we acquired our third generation of scanners. I had a retired Handspring Visor PDA lying around: it became redundant when my new cell phone included a Palm PDA in it. (Yes, I’m a bit of a gadget nut.) The Handspring PDAs have a slot in the back into which one can insert various add-ons. And Symbol makes a barcode scanner to fit this slot. (They also now make complete Palm OS PDAs with scanners built in.) So now our PDA is equipped with a scanner and database software by Tracer (a deal at $17.95). As we shelve books, we scan the price label and scan the barcode on the shelf. This data gets downloaded into a computer and updates the BIN field in our inventory. This is all very useful for those of us with brick and mortar stores, but what about Internet-only booksellers? The advent of ISBN look-up through such programs as Homebase and Readerware means that populating the fields of a book record can be very quickly accomplished. And using a bar code scanner lets you input the ISBN very quickly and accurately, saving you several seconds to be used in correcting the inevitable errors in the look-up data. If you look up books on ABE or Amazon for price-comparison, you can scan the ISBN right into the search field on the Internet. Likewise you can scan the ISBN into your invoicing program when you ship. We buy a database on CD-ROM from Baker and Taylor, the new book distributor. Anthology will make new stock records by importing data from the CD. I’ve written another little program that makes custom used-book records from the same data. The bar code scanner makes the process incredibly quick. Scan the ISBN into the program and two seconds later we have a new stock record. Some other barcode tricks: Do you sell a lot of an item, and you’d really rather not stick a barcode on every one? Put one barcode label on your monitor or the countertop. We do it for Book Den coffee mugs and 30-cent souvenir postcards. I learned this from my local hardware store. Likewise, if there’s a string of commands you type often, you can get an alphabet of barcode characters (Worthington has one on their web site) and then tape the correct string of characters to your desk. Since my inventory software will print labels, I cheat and make a stock record with the correct string in the ISBN field, print out the label and then delete the stock record. I’ve done the same with really long, elaborate passwords that I rarely use. I just keep a barcode label of the password in my wallet. Something I’ve thought about but haven’t done: When at book sales, I often find myself wondering whether I need a certain book. Do I have one copy back at the shop, or seven? Or none? And I might wonder how much we last charged for a certain out-of-print book. A little database in a scanner-equipped PDA would let me look such things up. And imagine having a web browser on an Internet-linked PDA. Look books up on Bookfinder or Addall right from the sale! I once attended a seminar presented by the head used-book buyer for Powell’s Bookstore in Portland. He said Powell’s buys and processes three to five thousand books a day. When they buy large lots of books – the inventory of a closed bookstore, for example – they have a conveyor belt, which passes the books under a scanner. The scanner finds the EAN barcode, and by the time the book reaches the end of the belt, it has been entered into inventory and a price label is sitting there waiting. To me, that represented the ultimate in book-processing efficiency, but the technology seemed way beyond my reach. But, I did just buy a supermarket-style scanner on eBay and I’m working out the software to look up common used books and add them to inventory all in one step. Now, I wonder if I can find a conveyor belt on eBay… About The Book Den: The Book Den is, to my knowledge, the oldest used-book store in California. It was founded in Oakland, California, in 1902 and moved to Santa Barbara in February, 1933. You can read about the store’s history at http://www.bookden.com. We’ve been on the same block of Anapamu Street, across the street from the Public Library and the Museum of Art, as long as we’ve been in Santa Barbara. We moved from next door into our current 3,600 square foot store in 1990. We stock between 20,000 and 30,000 general used and antiquarian books on all subjects, with a small selection of new books as well. We started selling on the Internet, on the late, lamented Bibliofind, in 1999 and launched our own web site in 2001. About 30% of sales come from the Internet, somewhat evenly divided between ABE, Alibris, Amazon and our own site, with a small contribution from the ABAA web site. About Eric Kelley: Eric Kelley started in bookselling by getting a job at a Brentano’s bookstore in Marin County, California after graduating from UCLA. Five years later, he moved to Santa Barbara with a business partner to buy the Book Den. After four years, he bought his partner’s share of the business. He is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of American, the American Booksellers Association and the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. He’s also, at the moment, President of the Santa Barbara Downtown Organization. He’s been involved in promoting several of the incarnations of the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival and has published a directory to the Booksellers of Santa Barbara. He lives in a Craftsman Bungalow six blocks from The Book Den with his wife, commercial artist Peggy Lindt, and their dog, Cosmo. Eric Kelley kelley@bookden.com

The Printer’s Row Book Fair is always an incredible event and, this year, again lived up to its reputation. It’s the Midwest’s largest outdoor book and author festival, which cannot be rivaled. Printer’s Row is great because it brings all the elements of the book world together; there are self-publishers, big name stores (Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Borders) and the used and antiquarian dealers, as well as amazing authors. As a bookseller with booth space at this event it is always hard to spend a lot time attending all the readings and signings offered, but still the added element they bring to the book fair always adds interest. The management of Printer’s Row Book Fair was taken over this year from The Burnham Park Planning Board (a neighborhood association) by the able staff of the Chicago Tribune. The promotion the fair received by having the connections with the city’s largest distributed daily paper was certainly advantageous. Exhibitors were given a slick comb bound booklet as our “Exhibitor Manual” which provided detailed instructions for participation. The staff on hand at the fair site did a great job of solving problems quickly, but there were a few glitches. For instance, when we arrived we had been given a one-table booth instead of the two tables that we had ordered. Nothing makes a bookseller panic like trying to figure out how to put two vanloads of books onto one 8 ft table! All was shortly solved, though, and the unloading could begin. Printer’s Row is an outdoor book fair that stretches for three blocks in down Dearborn Street in front of Dearborn Station in Downtown Chicago. This year there were 46 20′ X 20′ canopies, with sellers on all four sides of each tent. Plus, many dealers were allowed to set up on the sidewalks along Dearborn Street. There are hundreds of booksellers and publishers to peruse. It’s amazing the sheer variety of all the books and items being offered. Since Printer’s Row is outdoors, being prepared for the onslaught of the elements is a must for antiquarian and used booksellers. The sun can be pretty damaging on books, as well as so many customers (estimates at 20,000 each day) handling your books, not to mention the wind factor. Since there are tall buildings all around, the wind can whip through the streets quite fiercely. One year, I recall we wore long johns and gloves. You can go from wearing sandals and sundress to sweatshirts and jeans in the course of the day, so layers and alternative gear is always required. Saturday there were numerous author signings, including such luminaries as former Clinton Administration official Sidney Blumenthal and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. There was a Poetry Tent, a Culinary tent where hot and trendy chefs give food demos as well as sign their latest books, and Panels on literary theory and surrealism were presented. This book fair has much to offer young and old alike. Gems for the causal reader or advanced collector could be found. After the booths were all secured for evening, (most used and rare dealers leave their books wrapped and tarped for the night) and the security starting roaming the streets, we headed up to the VIP tent party for a bite to eat after a busy day. Sponsored by Powell’s and the Tribune, the food was catered by Bar Louie, a popular eatery in nearby Dearborn Station. The thrill of the party was that we spotted Canadian literary legend Margaret Atwood mingling. As for Sunday… Day Two of the Adventure- It started out slow and but soon the pace picked up and there was brisk selling until the rains came at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Torrential rain poured down and first we thought it would go away, but it didn’t. A quick tour down the street proved that many colleagues were packing up and heading out; no one wants to sit around for three more hours in the rain, and once the rain started, most of the casual customers dispersed into the local eateries along the book fair route for protection. Some sellers are very innovative when it comes to protecting their wares. One seller used vinyl shower curtains to close off his tent from the rain on Sunday afternoon. Others used plastic tarps and sheeting. We made a giant baggy of our bookcases, which were just enough inside the canopy to be protected. The book fair did provide an each table a flimsy plastic covering but that was not enough to protect some sellers. Many began close up shop early, but there were some issues with booksellers driving their vans into the booth areas while the fair was still going on. However, when the rain refused to let up, the fair management allowed sellers to load out. It always rains on Sunday at Printer’s Row, but usually it happens just shortly before the closing and is a short burst rather than the prolonged downpour experienced this year. Many sellers were stuck;­ it was too wet to even leave the protection of the canopy at times. But luckily the rain didn’t stop all the customers, and some of the dedicated ones were still trying to look at books under plastic sheeting and behind the protection of a shower curtain. All in all a rainy and wet success, and we look forward the adventure again next year, because–admit it, we like the punishment we get from doing such a book fair. It’s fun, you meet interesting people and you sleep really, really well on Sunday night.

The 9th annual Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair was held this past June 28 at the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown, New York. We had a full house again this year with dealers representing ten states and a multitude of collecting interests. The fair has now become an established yearly event in the final weekend of June in this beautiful and historic Catskill village of upstate New York. The fair was once again sponsored by the New York State Historical Association, which is located in Cooperstown and operates the very fine Fenimore House Museum as well as an excellent research library. The gate receipts from the book fair are donated each year to NYSHA. We try to attract a wide mix of dealers to exhibit at the fair. Both specialist and general dealers in books, maps, prints and paper ephemera bring a broad range from their stock. Among the fields of interest that seem to sell well are baseball and sports. Cooperstown, of course, is the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, but not many people are aware of the Soccer Hall of Fame down the road in Oneonta, New York. Classical music and opera also seem to sell well here. The highly acclaimed Glimmerglass Opera presents its summer performances in Cooperstown through July and August and the singers, musicians and production staff had been here for several weeks by the time our fair set up at the end of June. Preparations have already begun for the 10th annual fair, which will be held next year on Saturday, June 26, 2004. This will again be a one-day fair, open to the public from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Set-up hours for the dealers are on Friday from 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM and/or on Saturday morning from 7:00 AM until the doors open at 10. The air-conditioned Clark Sports Center is located on the outskirts of busy Cooperstown and has plenty of parking for both exhibitors and the public. Admission to the fair for the public is $3.00; NYSHA members are admitted free. We have begun to put together our list of dealers for the next fair. Depending on the mix of full and half booth, we normally have space for approximately 60 exhibiting dealers. If anyone is interested in either a full booth (3 eight foot tables) at $225.00 or a half booth (1-1/2 eight foot tables) at $175.00 please call Ed Brodzinsky at (607) 638 9962 or Willis Monie at (800) 322 299: E Ed Brodzinsky ed@atelierbooks.com

A gorgeous California Gold Country day provided the backdrop for the Third Annual GOLD RUSH BOOK FAIR, held on May 17, 2003, at the Nevada County Fairgrounds in Grass Valley California. The single day fair hours were 10am to 5pm. Holding the GRBF at the Nevada County Fairgrounds represented a change of venue, as the 2001 and 2002 Fairs were held at the Miners Foundry cultural Center in Nevada City. The venue change allowed for unlimited free parking, better lighting, better booth size and customer access, and better ingress and egress than the prior venue, and was greeted with enthusiasm by both dealers and the public. Some 54 dealers in old, rare and out-of-print book and paper dealers filled the hall. There was a broad spectrum of material displayed, and in all price ranges, although it was apparent that the largest single category was Western Americana. There were approximately 700 attendees, approximately one-third of whom were enticed by the GRBF’s liberal free ticket policy. Each dealer is allotted up to 50 free tickets, in the size and weight of postcards, to be given to the dealers’ favorite customers. In addition, free tickets were given to members of The Book Club of California and The Sacramento Book Collectors Club. Several participating dealers requested and received large numbers of free tickets to be mailed with the dealers’ catalogues, distributed shortly before the GRBF. Sales were mixed as usual. Three dealers told us confidentially that they had more dollar sales at the GRBF than they had ever had at any fair anywhere. Particularly encouraging was the number of high-end sales, with customers looking for legitimate and enduring values. Indeed, the quality of material displayed was impressive, and several dealers remarked that they regarded their buying at least as successful as their selling. Each year, the Gold Rush Book Fair designates a dealer as its “Honored Guest Bookseller,” for “Ethical leadership and scholarship in American bookselling.” Past designees were William Reese Company of New Haven, and The Arthur H. Clark Company of Spokane. The 2003 designee was Emmett Harrington Fine Books of San Francisco. As Honored Guest Bookseller, Harrington occupied Booth #1 at the Fair and stayed at a local B&B, all compliments of the GRBF. Participating dealers were treated to a Booksellers’ Banquet on the Friday night before the fair. The banquet is a sit-down affair, held at the historic Masonic Lodge in Nevada City. At the banquet, Emmett Harrington regaled the crowd with tales of his transition from full-time lawyer to full-time bookseller, including the compilation of his legendary catalogues. Prior to Harrington, the dealers listened attentively to remarks from Harold Berliner, Nevada City’s fine press printer and maker of lead type. Berliner, also a lawyer and the former District Attorney of Nevada County, stressed the importance of book dealers as “keepers of the flame” of preservation of books through the ages. Next year, the Gold Rush Book Fair will be held on Saturday, May 15, 2004 at the Nevada County Fairgrounds in Grass Valley California. Further information may be obtained by going to http://www.goldrushbookfair.com on the web. The Gold Rush Book Fair is produced by Hardy Books (http://www.hardybooks.com) of Nevada City, California. John Hardy books@hardybooks.com

The 15th Annual San Diego Booksellers Association Open Air Book Fair was held on June 8th, 2003, with glorious sunny weather and about 7000 people roaming the booths of the 56 new and used booksellers, publishers, authors and literacy groups. Thanks are due to the volunteers from the San Diego Booksellers Association and from the Hillcrest Business Association, for the time they spent making sure the Book Fair went off smoothly. Sponsors of the Fair were Harcourt Trade Publishers, Baker & Taylor, Ingram Book Co., Brilliance Audio, Ben & Jerry’s and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Authors Jean Ferris, Randy Wayne White, Mary Yukari Waters, J. F. Freedman, Diane Leslie and Ann Taylor Fleming, Abe Opincar and T. Jefferson Parker all held “author events” during this one day Fair. Lots of folks really seemed to enjoy seeing how many of their fellow citizens enjoy reading and words! By: Kris Nelson Bluestocking Books Bluestocking007@earthlink.net