THE BOOKMAN'S DIARY

Peninsula Partners Publishing today released its reproduction of the 1878 map of Brown County. The sheet shows the lower part of the bay of Green Bay, Fort Howard, the city of Green Bay, and the upper portion of the Fox River. The map also illustrates remnants of the French long lot system in and around Green Bay.

Paul Burton just dropped by to alert me to a delay in the printing of Door County’s Islands. While I initially wrote that we were expecting the book around the end of the month, it looks like it will be delayed a couple more weeks. Copies can still be pre-ordered on the website, and we still expect to have copies available for the presentation and signing on the evening of September 16.

Trygvie Jensen, author of Wooden Boats and Iron Men: A History of Commercial Fishing In Nothern Lake Michigan & Door County 1850-2005, will have a second book on the shelves soon.

In the course of researching and writing Wooden Boats and Iron Men, Jensen compiled many hours of interviews with the fisherman of the northern part of Lake Michigan. He also accumulated hundreds of photographs. Much of this material did not fit into the history, but Jensen conceived of using the fishing stories and photos for another book devoted to more personal tales of the trade.

This much anticipated book is now set to release at some point in the next few weeks. Through Waves and Gales Come Fishermen’s Tales is nearly 500 pages and includes some 40 illustrations and maps as well as 182 photographs. Presented as an oral history, Through Waves and Gales contains the stories of the fishermen as they were told to the author.

If the success of the first book is an indication, Through Waves and Gales should be well received. We will be setting up a pre-order space on the website so that our customers can reserve copies. Alternately customers can call the store to place one on hold. All pre-ordered and reserve copies will be released immediately when the book is delivered to the store. Also, watch for an up-coming release party and book signing at some point in October.

Around midday yesterday, I had a moment when the store was empty. As it was Sunday, and as I have been showing up for work every single day for the past few months, I did not feel any guilt to have a seat for a moment in the store’s one armchair. I scanned around the room, looking for shelves that needed attention. Then I noticed, just in front of me at the corner of a display table, sat the last copy of a book I formerly had a pile of. I had intended to go through this book months ago, but now with only the one remaining, I picked it up.

While I was expecting a book about bees and beekeeping, A Keeper of Bees: A Story of Hive and Home by Allison Wallace is really a memoir in which bees loom large in the background. Wallace is introduced to her first hive as a doctoral candidate living in rural North Carolina. Her neighbor had come into a hive, and eventually it becomes her hive to tend. Her interest turns into an infatuation. Throughout the rest of this memoir she uses bees and beekeeping both as metaphor and mile marker for the changes in her life.

I am always curious about books about beekeeping because my grandfather, Charlie Kopecky, was a beekeeper. I will always remember the uniquely sweet smell inside the old Ford Econoline that was his bee van. This van was also the one we rode in when going fishing. Most months of the year you could find the dried up bodies of dead bees in the crevices and corners of the van. That scent of the honeycomb persisted into the wintertime when we would sit in that van on frozen lakes fishing for bluegills and walleyes and drinking thermoses of sweetened coffee with cream packed by my grandmother.

As a boy, I was equally fascinated with and terrified by those bees. I was intrigued by my grandfather’s ability to use a box of insects to produce beautiful blond clover honey. It seemed to be a magical production of something from nothing. In my mind at the time, the bees were malicious insects, purposefully causing harm to anyone they would come into contact with. I now know that bees are not so intent on stinging, but at the time, that thought made my grandfather seem heroically brave, being willing to move boxes and steal honey in his bee yard sometimes only wearing his netted helmet and coveralls. I would have liked to work beside him, but would have been too frightened to actually be of any use.

My uncle John now maintains the tradition, keeping bees in his own yards, only a few miles from were his father’s hives resided. Anytime I see my uncle our conversation invariably turns to the bees. I suppose like any other type of livestock, there are always problems. Mites, harsh winters, swarming, and now this phenomona known as “hive collapse” give beekeepers plenty of headaches. At times one is forced to wonder how it could be worth the trouble.

Still, since all those years ago riding in my grandfather’s van, I am also attracted to the idea of keeping bees. After the dedication page in her book Wallace begins with two quotations. One is from Sue Hubbel’s A Book of Bees. It reads “Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.” This is yet another enticement, though perhaps I have the causation confused; could the practice impart wisdom to the beekeeper? Could it impart some wisdom to me? From my grandfather and uncle I know that the bees make you a student of the weather, of crops and blooms, of seasons, and a student of their own pests and problems. Wallace also must learn this discipline. Would I?

Yesterday, after an hour with the book, I found myself on the internet searching for bee packages, boxes, helmets and smokers. It is a foolish thought, and not one for next spring, but perhaps someday.

Charlie Calkins and I founded Peninsula Partners Publishing little more than one year ago. We were able to complete two map reprints our first year. In 2008 we released the 1878 Door County sheet, and the 1914 plat for the Town of Gibraltar.
Thus far in 2009, we have released an 1881 plan of the City of Milwaukee, and a map of Chamber’s Island that was originally published as part of a sales prospectus for lots in a proposed development of the entire island that failed. We have just received the proofs for our fifth project, an 1878 Brown County sheet. The 1878 Brown County map shows the lower portion of the bay of Green Bay, the upper Fox River, the city of Green Bay and numerous other towns and post offices.
The printer we have been working with most recently has been doing a great job of keeping our projects moving along, so we expect to release this next sheet very soon.
All of our map reproductions are lithographically printed on an 80lb. semi-matte stock, the same sort of stock that is used for fine art prints.

In my previous post about Everett Ruess, I wrote that his remains have never been found. As it turns out that is now incorrect. Very recently his remains have been conclusively identified. The following link leads to a fascinating story from National Geographic Adventure:

National Geographic Adventure

Preparations are underway for the first ever fine art exhibit here at The Peninsula Bookman. The exhibit opens this Friday, August 21 at 7pm with a reception, the work will remain on display for two weeks.

Budelman is a collage artist who works a lot with found objects, he seems to have a particular attraction to old letters, used tickets, postage, and other sorts of daily debris. I have been saving interesting paper for him for a few years. Lots of books come into the store that are at the end of their useful lives. Some of them go to the recycle bin, but the interesting ones go into a pile for Bill. He has ended up with lots of otherwise destroyed illustrated childrens books, tattered atlases, water damaged cartoon books, and so on.

As I have an appreciation for his work, it gives me some satisfaction to know that I may be supplying something useful to the creative process. Much better for these otherwise doomed books to find new life as donors to a new composition altogether. I don’t know how much (if any at all) of the paper delivered out of the store will return on Friday night. Still, I do know that it must have served to expand colors on the palette at least a little bit.

I am quite interested in the book and paper art. When I write this, I must be careful to qualify that I am not talking about fine binding and handmade papers (though I have an interest in these things as well). What I am referring to here is art that employs paper and books themselves as the medium. There are artists that carve books, artists that cut pages and covers of books into figures like pop-up books, others that render them entirely into three dimensional sculpture, some do large installation sculptures built out of hundreds, sometimes thousands of whole books. Truly new life for old books. I am hoping that the Budelman exhibit will be the first of a series of shows featuring book and paper art.

Please join us on Friday evening if you are able. If you are not, you will still have the opportunity to view the work until Labor Day weekend.

I do not intend to devote this post to the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, but in that famously incoherent rambling he was right about one thing: there are many things you don’t know that you don’t know. That is one of the central joys of bookselling. Sometimes the gaps in one’s knowledge are embarrassing, other times you must simply concede that one cannot know everything. Most times it is a pleasure to find out about something that you were utterly unaware of previously. To fill a gap.

Like most days, I had one of those experiences today. In fact, just moments ago.

An older gentlemen approached me at the counter, saying he had a difficult question. I responded by saying I would try to help. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have a lot of information.” “Well,” I said, “I will still try to help.”

This sort of exchange is pretty typical for this business. Sometime it leads to an answer, often not, but we try.

He began with his story. There was, he explained, a German sub that was  somehow able to navigate around heavy British defenses at Scapa Flow in Scotland, defenses that included a net to specifically keep the u-boats out. Once inside the defenses, the u-boat was able to sink a British battleship and then remarkably, it was able to escape. Eventually back in Germany, the captain of the u-boat wrote a book about his experiences, especially the sinking of this boat at Scapa Flow. Unfortunately, the gentleman could not remember the commander’s name, or the name of his book, but it was this book he wanted.

I read a lot of history, including a fair amount on the Second World War, but this story had escaped me. I had not even a hazy recollection of any bit of it. I asked him if he could remember any other details of the story, such as the name of the battleship or the number of the sub.

The sub, he said, was U-236. Easy enough, I thought. I keyed U-236 into the Google search field. Up popped uboat.net with every detail about the career of this boat, including order date, launch date, captains, etc. (What a site!). As we read through the career, looking for bits about the captain, it became clear that U-236 was not the boat we were looking for. It was launched late in the war, and was used only as a training vessel. Wrong boat.

What about the name of the battleship that was sunk? The gentleman gave me a name that I can no longer recall, but as he did, another customer from the far corner of the store piped in: Nope, that boat was sunk at (and he named a location I cannot now remember, either). The gentleman conceded that the other customer was, in fact, right. Wrong boat.

Two strikes.

The next step was to cast a broader net. I simply keyed the search string “british” “boat” “sunk” “scapa” “flow” into the Google search field. Turns out, as many of you will know, this is indeed a rather famous story. Among the numerous results it was revealed that the British battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk at Scapa flow in 1939 by the German U-47 under the command of Gunther Prien.

Gunther Prien later wrote a book about his career titled U-Boat Commander. The book is out-of-print. It also turns out that it is not in stock at The Peninsula Bookman. Some further searching revealed that there are copies available in the secondary market, but a nice one will cost a bit more than your average book. I recommended that the customer have his library track a copy down, and then decide whether he wanted to order a copy.

As a result of this exchange, I was not able to make a sale. However, that does not exactly make it pro bono work. I now have a cursory familiarity with another incident of the war; an incident I was utterly unaware of before. Also found a website that could be quite helpful in the future. And who knows, maybe he will decide he needs a copy and give me a phone call. Regardless, I am pretty sure that he will stop back in next time he is in Door County.

Last winter I spent a month traveling on the road buying inventory for the store. My intention was to first head south to Texas and then to head west, ultimately making my way up the California coast before turning east for home. As it happened, I never made California and ended up spending most of the trip driving in west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Perhaps the revised route was the will of my subconscious, or perhaps it was the result of my reading as I traveled. Perhaps they were intertwined.

As I was traveling alone, and through lonely country, my chosen companions were those who had documented the same experience. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was an easy and obvious choice for weeks in the desert. William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways was by my side as well. Abbey made me feel a bit guilty for whistling past so much of the landscape viewing it only through the windshield. He would have preferred me to have a slower and more deliberate experience of the land. Least-Heat Moon admonished me for using the interstate highways, rather than his approach of exploring the backest of backroads searching for diners with lots of wall calendars and surly waitresses. In the end, my excuse for both of them was that I was on a business trip. Neither seemed very satisfied with my excuse – I could tell by their steely silence.

Before I left for the trip I began reading Everett Ruess’ A Vagabond for Beauty. I have always had an interest in adventure and exploration lit, but I have a particular fondness for solitary adventurers and travelers. I was unaware of Ruess until I was introduced to him by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the Wild, about another solitary traveler, Christopher McCandless.

Everett Ruess was from an artistic middle class family in California. In the 1930s, his later teenage years, he began wandering California and the desert southwest. He traveled with little money, paying part of his way selling block prints he made of the landscapes he was so enchanted by.

On his very first solo trip, armed with either a simple charm and self-confidence or disarming naivete (or both), he arrived unannounced at the home of the already famous photographer Edward Weston to introduce himself. Apparently he instantly ingratiated himself with Weston, and this easy way with people was apparently a pattern for Ruess, whether he was meeting artists and musicians in the cities or Indians and desert rats out in the great expanses of the southwest. Eventually he met and befriended Ansel Adams, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange.

Vagabond for Beauty is an edited collection of Ruess’ letters sent to his friends and family while on his travels. He was consistently awestruck by the natural beauty of the desert landscape, and he managed to skillfully render into words his own wonder at the scenes he was viewing. In the end, that is the beauty of these letters: In his aesthetic quest, Ruess never seems to find a limit in his capacity for fascination and amazement, and somehow he is able to communicate this sense of awe to his reader.

Everett Ruess wandered the the desert, largely in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico for four years.  In 1934, he disappeared at the age of 20, virtually without a trace. His last known camp was in southern Utah, near the Escalante River.  There has been some mystery and much speculation about his disappearance, but he has never been found. What remains are his letters, journals, poetry, wood-cuts, and a few photographs. Together they are the legacy of his adoration of wild places.

With Vagabond for Beauty fresh in my mind and on the top of my stack of reading, I too was drawn into the desert. One of my only sidetrips was to Canyon de Chelly in the remote northeastern corner of Arizona, and deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation.  Ruess was there in 1932. It took under two hours of driving to reach the park office once I left the interstate highway (Canyon de Chelly is now part of the National Park system). It would have taken Ruess days of trekking to reach the Canyon from Kayenta, which is something like 40 miles away. Walking the canyon and standing before the Anasazi ruins, I was filled with wonder like Ruess. Still, I would imagine the experience would have been different had I spent weeks hiking into the desert with a burro.

White House Ruin at Canyon de Chelly National Park © 2009 Peter D. Sloma

To date, 2009s best-selling book at the Peninsula Bookman is Lynda Drews’ Run at Destruction, nosing out Gail Lukasik’s Death’s Door by a mere handful of copies. There is a lot of this year left, and both books continue to do well, so it really is a virtual tie. After Paul and Frances Burton’s Door County’s Islands releases (expected in the next few weeks), it will likely be a three-way competition for overall 2009 best-seller.

Run at Destruction is the story of the death of Pam Bulik. Bulik was a member of Green Bay’s burgeoning running community in the 1980s, and a friend and running partner of the author. Drews meticulously traces the story of the investigation of her death and subsequent trial of Bulik’s husband for her murder. Probably unlike any other work of true crime writing, the story is deeply involved in the community and culture of running.

Interlacing the investigative details of the story with details of the community of runners broadens the appeal of the book considerably. Sitting at the top of the recommended reading list of True Crime superstar Ann Rule doesn’t hurt either. Rule has called Run at Destruction “A must read for true-crime readers.” While the book is drawing national attention, most of the customers buying the book here in Fish Creek remember details of the story from the local papers and news broadcasts.

Customers commenting on the book have expressed some strong opinions about the outcome of the murder case, based on what they remember from the local news. Interestingly, Drews herself presents the work without any foregone conclusions. More interestingly still, when she was here in the store for a reading and book-signing, she explained that her own thoughts about the death her friend evolved over the course of writing the book.