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If you put ‘Charles Dickens’ into the booksearch search engines, lowest price upwards, the first 19 entries cost one penny. Only at the 166th entry does the price finally reach $1. If you repeat the experiment with ‘John Grisham’, you have to go to entry 390 before you get above one penny! And you have to almost reach the 1,000th entry before a whole dollar is charged! What on earth is going on? Are these people making money? The answer is no, they are not. They are deluding

Can a standardized, scripted reading program meet the diverse needs of a class full of unique students? During my credential program at the University of California in Santa Barbara, I was able to observe a scripted reading class on a daily basis for six weeks while serving as an observer/student teacher as in a “Reading for Success” class. This class was composed of students who tested below their grade level on the standardized language assessment test administered at the e

Betcha didn’t know that Sherlock Holmes had five different cookbooks? Bet he didn’t know either, what’s more I bet Mrs. Hudson didn’t know. We all know about Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook, but did you know that there’s a Hemingway Cookbook? A Steinbeck Cookbook? How about a Jane Austen Cookbook? Mind you, NONE of these people spring to mind as people most happy puttering around in a kitchen. But that doesn’t stop people from pretending or publishing for that matter. This rant isn

Shortly after the turn of the last century, four men and one young woman were engaged in an unusual enterprise from their small suite of offices in Manhattan, little more than a stone’s throw from the heart of the city’s book publishing industry near Union Square. The location was no accident, since publishers were the most frequent buyers of their products. Known as The Decorative Designers, the firm had by this time established itself as a large-volume purveyor of a most un

Editor’s Note: Felix Stenert is a graduate student in Germany, and this article is a portion of his master’s thesis (we will probably have other applicable portions of his thesis in future Standard issues, with Felix’s permission). Felix is getting a degree in library science from Fachhochschule f|r das vffentliche Bibliothekswesen in Bonn (FhvBB) (University of Applied Sciences, Bonn/Germany) and he is writing his thesis on libraries using online bookshops and databases, and

I’ve been musing about something, brought on by the reactions of my husband and my sister to some of my risk-taking behaviors in buying books (they’re horrified; wouldn’t dream of risking the amounts I do but have grown used to my ways and seem to now feel I’ll guess right 90% of the time–probably). Granted, most of the time, those behaviors have a ‘sort of’, halfway, educated guess behind them (maybe that ‘book sense’ Aimee spoke of), but some of my behavior is just flat wil

A bookseller is always either making decisions or postponing them. About five years ago I attended an auction and acquired a station wagon load of books and ephemera. This would not be an auction that would fade from memory. I bought someone else’s memories and I still have some of them. Even before I drove down the driveway, I acquired another memory that also won’t go away. I stuffed my little wagon and could not fit it all in. I had to make decisions about what to leave be

On the letterhead of the Butte Saddle Mining Syndicate Offices in the Bacon Building, Oakland April 2nd, 1909 This is a memorandum for you, I have this day put in escrow 100,000 shares of the Butte Saddle Mining Syndicate Stock owned by me with a like number of shares owned by each Mr. John R. Richards. And Mrs. Josephene Chick. This stock being pooled was put in the Security Bank and Trust Co. Oakland, Cal., for safe keeping. For three years. Mr. Richards. And Mrs. Chick hav