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Hartfelt Gratitude Letter to the editor. “Please contact Jim Hart and express my heartfelt gratitude for the wonderful article he wrote about Dr. Len Lanfranco [‘Thoughts on a Friend’s Passing—Leonard Lanfranco,’ IOBA Standard, May 2002, Volume 3, No. 2]. I met him as an employee of the Columbia SC Post Office and worked closely with him on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Journal and many mailing projects. He was a ‘king’ among men.” Andy Ko

A quick scan of search sites reveals that 537 people can’t spell “Tolkien.” (And a further 58 can’t spell “Hobbit.”) “The Forsythe Saga” notches up another 129 errors. Does it matter? We all make typos from time to time, but this sort of error displays ignorance rather than a typing mistake and I reckon that it does matter. Quite apart from customers being unable to find your book (unless they have matching ignorance!), I, for one, given two reasonably equal copies of a book

Table of Contents From the editor Hunting Slobodkin From Clicks to Bricks: A Book Store . . . in HALE, Michigan An Interview with Vic Zoschak of Tavistock Books Globalization vs. Americanization, or, a Book Dealer’s Travels through Portugal Ephemeral Assays: Photo Finish Book Review: Of Bookmen & Printers, by Ward Ritchie A Moving Experience: Abracadabra Bookshop Shirley Dyess of The Dust Jacket, Irving,TX Bronwyn Smith of Dromanabooks, Australia Addendum “Yet More Bookworm D

Eudora Welty and my Eudora Pro email program (which they sort of named after her) remind me of the early days of online bookselling. She was a swell author and warm personality, and Eudora email works pretty well. The default New Mail sound is a nice little six note wav file that goes something like, “Do do, do do . . . do-do.” I remember the evening I first uploaded my books to Bibliofind (the briefly missing link between Interloc and pure-era ABE). No sooner did I sit down

I am perhaps the owner of the largest collection of Louis Slobodkin books in the whole wide world—which of course makes me very happy. Mr. Slobodkin drew the pictures and wrote the stories for a great many children’s books in his time and the happenstance by which I got involved with this man and his art has the narrative elements of a great story as well. Once upon a time I was walking down the road to work when I suddenly and silently declared: “Louis Slobodkin is my favori

“Have you lost your mind?” they keep asking. “A BOOK store, in HALE, Michigan . . .” one naysayer remarks after overhearing my news. She doesn’t ask me if I’ve lost my mind, but I can tell that the thought is crossing hers. There was a book store in Hale before, she tells me. Evidently it was in the building that the new Curves now occupies, which was a tackle shop before that. And yet . . . I AM opening a book store in Hale. I have plans, goals, and dreams. But I’m not a dre

-Tell us a little about yourself. Bookselling is my second career. As a ’74 graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy, I spent the first 23 years of my professional life as a “Coastie.” In the mid-80s, I discovered collecting first editions, Charles Dickens specifically. Knowing that someday I would be pursuing something other than Search & Rescue as a career, I looked at antiquarian bookselling as a possible pursuit. I established the business in 1989, home-based, and found I e

As a general rule, whenever I go to a foreign country for vacation, I start reading about the area several months in advance. I try to read at least one good traveler’s history, some novels set in that country, and one or two travel memoirs. This October, our vacation plans changed at the last minute. My wife and I found ourselves traveling unexpectedly to Portugal and by the time we boarded the plane, I had read only one rather dry traveler’s concise history. We had made sev