Nancy’s Blog

Announcement from Cody’s:

After 52 years, Cody’s Books will shut its doors effective June 20, 2008. The Berkeley bookstore has been a beacon to readers and writers throughout the nation and across the world. Founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, Cody’s has been a Berkeley institution and a pioneer in the book business, helping to establish such innovations as quality paperbacks and in-store author readings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Cody’s was a landmark of the Free Speech movement and was a home away from home for innumerable authors, poets and readers.

The Board of Directors of Cody’s Books made this difficult decision after years of financial distress and declining sales.

According to Cody’s president, Hiroshi Kagawa, “[It] is a heartbreaking moment…in the spring of 2005 when I learned about the financial crisis facing Cody’s, I was excited to save the store from bankruptcy. Unfortunately, my current business is not strong enough or rich enough to support Cody’s. Of course, the store has been suffering from low sales and the deficit exceeds our ability to service it.”

I’m not surprised — I found their new location had a very odd collection and layout, as if they had brought with them mostly the books that hadn’t sold in their Fourth Street store.

Shortly before he sold the store, I heard Andy Ross, in an interview, say that Cody’s had deliberately shifted its collection toward more hardcover books. A big mistake: those are the books where Amazon offers the most significant savings, and the ones people are least likely to buy on impulse.

The last time I was in Washington, DC, I stopped in at what was one of my favorite bookstores when I lived there 1979-81, Kramer’s Books and Afterwards. It was packed with people, and the cash register was never silent. Kramer’s has a terrific cafe and a great location (Dupont Circle), but they also had a fantastic collection shoe-horned into a small space. I saw older books I had read and loved, and others I had been meaning to read, and yet others that looked interesting, along with new books.

Favorite old books, I realized, were an effective mechanism for selling me new books: remembering my enjoyment of those books, I was inclined to buy more. And the large numbers of books I knew were good gave me (rightly or wrongly) the impression that this store stocked “good” books, and I could trust that unfamiliar books that I discovered there would be enjoyable, too.

In contrast, in the new Cody’s I wandered among a lot of books I had never heard of, and had no interest in, and couldn’t find the one new book I had read a review of and come looking to buy.

This won Funniest Home Videos’ (the TV show) award for best ever.

They had the girls on; they’re now 5 and they are identical.

Meerkat Manor returns June 7 on Animal Planet. Last season, sadly, we saw the deaths of some of the meerkats we had followed for several seasons. One who died was Flower, the matriarch. She went into the family’s burrow after a poisonous snake, which had gone in after the babies who were too small to be out of the burrow. It was hopeless, but she defended her offspring.

I was in Washington DC a couple of years ago and went to an Imax show about lions of the Kalihari at the Museum of Natural History. I was one of the few adults unaccompanied by children, many of them quite small. The opening shots were of a variety of residents of the Kalihari. A clip of meerkats was greeting with a cry from the audience, “Meerkats!” How many kids would know what a meerkat was if they weren’t watching this show?

I went to the Oakland Zoo a few months ago to take pictures of their meerkats — and all through the zoo I heard parents and kids talking about visiting the meerkats. They’re TV stars.

And they ARE entertaining.

Please join us for the
UC Berkeley School of Information
Alumni & Friends Reception
at the
American Library Association
Annual Conference

Sunday, June 29, 2008
5:00 - 7:00 pm

Catal Restaurant
1580 Disneyland Drive
Downtown Disney
Anaheim, California

Space is limited - make your reservation today!

(No, I won’t be there.)

I’ve missed Cody’s on Telegraph enormously — not only for its convenience to campus, but its selection. Their 4th St store is convenient — I can usually find a space in their lot as long as its not a time when 4th St in general is very busy — but their selection is much reduced.

Now they’ve announced that they’re moving to smaller but more convenient space, and are holding a community meeting to ask what people need. From their newsletter:

We are very excited to let you know that Cody’s Books will move to the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Allston Way (2201 Shattuck Avenue, in the former Eddie Bauer space) in late March. This isn’t a move that we fully anticipated, but our Fourth Street rent skyrocketed…

Cody’s on Shattuck will be more intimate than our Fourth Street store. The upside in losing a bit of space is that we can focus on our strengths….

We’d love to hear from you about what matters to you at Cody’s. You’re invited to an open community meeting on Wednesday, February 27 at 7:00 PM at our Fourth Street store.

One of my favorite blogs — in fact, one of the very few that I read regularly — is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools. Recently he reviewed something of potential interest to a lot of the lurkers who read this:

Tips for Conference Bloggers
By Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman
2007, 6 pages
Free
Available as a PDF from here

It’s short — not much text on each page. And the advice is good.

What it lacks that I’d like to see is more about the content; this is mostly about process.  My frequent beef with conference blogging is that the blogger interjects his/her own uninformed reactions.  A straight report without reaction, or with reaction/evaluation at the end, can be useful.  An informed colloquy can be useful.  But what’s most annoying is when the blogger doesn’t understand the speaker, the content, or the context, but writes in a way that is intended to demonstrate the blogger’s superiority to the speaker.

Just like home?!

Originally uploaded by NVH

This guy was at The Cheeseboard this morning at 7:45 in his robe, pjs, and mukluks. I figured he lived nearby, but then he went out and got on this bike. Unclear because I was trying to be surreptitious - and when he walked by I hit the wrong button on camera. Probably just as well that he’s not recognizable. Cheeseboard does feel homey to the regulars but — in your robe?

Having terrible problems with WordPress — won’t let me edit the post below, takes me to an earlier version of it. ?!?

 Here’s the picture.

This is probably all over the web now, but if anyone still hasn’t run across this — well worth watching not only the YouTube excerpt but the long version.  (CMU site seems overloaded — this is an alternative source for the long version.)

I saw him give some parts of this, where he talked about his work over the years, at CHI in Portland a few years ago. He was then, and is now, fascinating — a terrific speaker, doing fascinating work, and reflecting on it. He’s now dying of pancreatic cancer at age 46, and this was his last lecture: on what he’s done, what he’s learned.

He says he’s had fun every day of his life and plans to continue to. I believe it.

A friend in LA told me about these and I’ve been looking for them. Turns out they’re considered Haagen Dazs Reserve not “regular,” so in Andronico’s, at least, they were over with the reserve ice cream and not the regular bars. GOOD. Found them in Solano Ave. Andronico’s.