Site icon Joanna Campbell Slan

Bits and Pieces for Friday

Here’s a round-up of information, ideas, quotes and trends you’ll want to explore:

1. Trade Paperbacks Surge in Popularity http://tinyurl.com/dmr83k

A mass market paperback is one of those smaller paperbacks like you buy in a drugstore. A trade paperback is larger, maybe 5 x 7 inches or 6 x 8, inches and it’s almost a cross between a paperback book and a hardcover. Hardcovers are very pricey, except that many discount big box stores like Kmart and Target discount them heavily. Booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders and Books-a-Million also discount them. To me, the biggest problem is weight. Yeah, with the cost of additional luggage constantly rising, a hardback book–although that’s my preference for the joy of the experience and for the longevity of the product itself–is too darn heavy to cart around.

2. E. Desmond Lee, St. Louis Philanthropist, Dies

I can’t begin to list all the ways that Des Lee influenced St. Louis with his generosity. His name appears all over town on buildings and in hallways. I remember when my husband David first met him. Des Lee wanted to know all about my husband, which I think was probably a clue as to why Des was such a treasure: Despite his own illustrious career and his business success, he genuinely cared about others.

http://tinyurl.com/yewkpce

3. This from a New York Times article, a quotation about whether there’s any merit to being private (as opposited to using to Twitter to record one’s every waking moment) attributed to the poet C.K. Williams–

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings, I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression, sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact.

In other words…maybe conducting your person business over a cell phone in a crowded public place is NOT the height of cool, folks.

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