04-09-2015 05:04 PM - edited 04-09-2015 05:05 PM
I know this is a rather morbid topic, but I don't think any booksellers can deny that there seems to be an association between the death of an author and the subsequent demand for their books.
I think it might be helpful if we, as booksellers, inform each other of the deaths of any authors that may have flown under the radar.
You would think, given the rampant and ubiquitous social media transmitting all sorts of information, that any author's death, no matter how obscure, would not be overlooked, but I was recently shocked to discover that Theodore Hesburgh, longtime president of Notre Dame University and author of several books, passed away on February 26 at the the age of 97.
Knowing his advanced age, I had been holding onto a book signed by him. Yet, although I consider myself a fairly avid news consumer, I didn't learn of his passing until less than a week ago and that was only when I happened to flip through a month-old Catholic newspaper and saw a story about it.
I promptly listed the book, albeit about a month later than the ideal time, and fortunately got a bid on it.
However, I think it might be helpful to use this thread to inform each other of the passing of any authors. Not everyone garners the level of attention of Tom Clancy.
07-03-2016 07:33 AM - edited 07-03-2016 07:37 AM
@lludwig wrote:
Elie Wiesel was a witness to evil and a symbol of endurance
Thanks for bringing that article over. May Elie Wiesel finally rest in peace. I have read several of his books (as many as I could stand) and I was always amazed at how he could endure what he endured, witness what he witnessed and have the strength of spirit to move forward each day. His books were the original Holocaust literature, telling stories that needed to be told, and amazingly, many people denounced his books as lies, depicting events that never happened.
I have sold three or four of his signed books, picked up at a local synagogue rummage sale. I had wanted to keep them for myself but realized they didn't belong with me and I sold them hopefully to people who needed his signed books more than I did. The books that I sold had tipped in blank pages that had his autograph.
07-03-2016 08:54 PM
07-04-2016 08:24 AM - edited 07-04-2016 08:25 AM
@rockmaple wrote:
@lludwig wrote:
Elie Wiesel was a witness to evil and a symbol of endurance
I have sold three or four of his signed books, picked up at a local synagogue rummage sale. I had wanted to keep them for myself but realized they didn't belong with me and I sold them hopefully to people who needed his signed books more than I did. The books that I sold had tipped in blank pages that had his autograph.
Rockmaple - Your thoughts about how the books didn't belong with you but hopefully would go to people who needed his signed books more than you did caused a chill to pass over me. Finding a good home for books is what many of us as booksellers want to do, but you take it one step more in allowing books to find homes with people who need them.
I live in what is/was known as a 'Jewish neighborhood', more so when I moved in over 30 years ago. Around the corner from me lived a woman who had survived the Holocaust. I didn't know her more than to say hello an chat about the weather. Once when chatting I saw the number tattooed on her arm...no matter how many books I have read about the Holocaust, or photographs seen, or movies watched or lectures attended, nothing hit more like seeing that number tattooed on a human being. She has since passed away.
07-04-2016 10:18 AM
07-04-2016 12:12 PM
... a man who flew with the Wright Brothers and I understood to be the third person ever to fly an airplane ...
Do you remember his name at all? Just curious... I like your post.
Fig
07-04-2016 02:38 PM
07-05-2016 06:58 AM - edited 07-05-2016 06:58 AM
@bugler1998 wrote:
Fig: while i do not remember the name, somewhere ariund here I have a local cartoon similar to ripley's believe it or not that my dad cut out for me shortly after I met him. I may know where it is snd will try to find it.
As memory is not perfect, I do know this guy was not at Kitty Hawk, as I beleave orville and wilbur were by themselves, assisted only by locals from the lifesaving station.
Does anybody else have a memory of meeting an historical figure?
Thank you for the reply.
I don't recall meeting anybody who was famous enough to be considered an historical figure. It is an interesting question, though, and I hope others will reply.
07-05-2016 07:45 AM - edited 07-05-2016 07:47 AM
The only two famous people I can recall meeting were not exactly historical figures (unless pop culture is a valid part of history!).
I met Al Lewis, a.k.a. "Grandpa Munster", when I was in college and working as a hostess at a diner. He was performing at a local dinner theater and during the run of the performance, he was a "regular" at the diner. He found out I liked to write poetry and was always asking to read some of my poetry, but I was too shy to let him see any of my writing!
The other celebrity I met was Jerry Springer, a few years ago in Atlantic City. Although not a historical figure, per se, he did have a part in history in that both his grandmothers perished in Nazi concentration camps. His maternal grandmother died in Poland and his paternal grandmother died in the Czech Republic. His parents were Jewish refugees who escaped from Germany to England, where he was born in a bomb shelter during an air raid. So you could say he was a Holocaust survivor, as well.
07-25-2016 01:02 PM
07-25-2016 04:02 PM
Does anybody else have a memory of meeting an historical figure?
Not sure what qualifies as an historical figure - and I can't top Jerry Springer - but I've met and talked to the following well known dudes and (one) chick >>>
Max Baer (heavyweight boxing champion). I was a kid, and he called me "champ."
Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Mickey Cochrane.
Pro golfer Lee Janzen.
Shirley Jones (Partridge Family).
President Gerald Ford.
That ain't much, when I stop to think about it. Sheltered life.
Will you show me some of your poetry, Michele?
07-26-2016 06:10 AM
A list of the so-called celebrities that have been in the back seat of my cab from time to time:
When the Mike Hammer show was being filmed, the female lead lived on the first floor of a place I stayed for a while.
Kitty Dukakis
Ed Bradlee
Dianne Sawyer
Martin Mull
Jane Pauley
Garry Trudeau (all three, on the way to the Harvard Lampoon gala)
Ethel Kennedy and her boyfriend after the divorce from Ted (I don't remember his name)
Paula Zahn (in her underwear, it was that point in time in Madonna's career)
Robin Young (now an NPR person, local newsie).
I'm sure there were more I recognized and many I didn't.z
Some conversations were intelligent, some weren't talkative. Some weren't intelligent.
07-28-2016 12:38 PM
.
James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer, Dies at 72 - New York Times
James Alan McPherson, who overcame segregation and the narrow prism of a legal education to become the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, died on Wednesday in Iowa City. He was 72.
As a young boy growing up in the South, Mr. McPherson was an avid comic book reader until he discovered what he called the colored branch of the Carnegie Public Library in Savannah.
“At first the words, without pictures, were a mystery,” he wrote in a memoir, “Going Up to Atlanta.” “But then, suddenly, they all began to march across the page. They gave up their secret meanings, spoke of other worlds, made me know that pain was a part of other peoples’ lives. After a while, I could read faster and faster and faster. After a while, I no longer believed in the world in which I lived.”
Writer James Alan McPherson, Winner Of Pulitzer, MacArthur And Guggenheim, Dies At 72 - NPR
As a teenager, James Alan McPherson worked as a passenger-car waiter on the Great Northern Railroad. The experience shaped him as a man and as a writer; he would spend his life producing short fiction and essays exploring race and class in America — the gulf separating white privilege from the black experience. One of his first published stories, "On Trains," included in his fiction collection Hue and Cry, chronicles a white woman's unthinking treatment of black waiters and porters on a train, and subtly reveals its lingering effects on all involved.
He put himself through Harvard Law School working as a janitor; the month he graduated he sold his first manuscript to the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In 1972, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1978, he became the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his collection Elbow Room.
That same year, he talked to The Atlantic about his approach to writing, to race, and to life: "I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself 'citizen of the United States.'"
.
08-13-2016 08:22 AM
Thomas Steinbeck, author and son of John Steinbeck, just passed away on August 11:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Steinbeck
By the way, he looked like his father!
08-13-2016 08:31 AM
@bookthink wrote:Does anybody else have a memory of meeting an historical figure?
Not sure what qualifies as an historical figure - and I can't top Jerry Springer - but I've met and talked to the following well known dudes and (one) chick >>>
Max Baer (heavyweight boxing champion). I was a kid, and he called me "champ."
Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Mickey Cochrane.
Pro golfer Lee Janzen.
Shirley Jones (Partridge Family).
President Gerald Ford.
That ain't much, when I stop to think about it. Sheltered life.
Will you show me some of your poetry, Michele?
Too shy ...
😉
08-14-2016 09:17 AM