[I’m composing this entry online. It’s not done yet. So linking to it, or expecting anything it says now to be here later would be foolish. When this message disappears, it will be done.]

[I’m still not quite back yet from my trip, but things seem to be improving on all fronts and I should be back online daily again by the weekend. Meanwhile….]

As I’ve mentioned before, we live in a Booktown. Ann Arbor boasts (actually, I think it’s the Chamber of Commerce that did the boasting) more bookstores per capita than any other town in the US. As a result, there’s a lot of thought given to the books business here. Insofar as this is the home town of the Borders chain, particular attention is paid to the relationship between big corporations like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Little Professor and small independent booksellers.

Painted in over-broad strokes, the picture is something like this: As with many retail businesses, there’s been a decades-long shift, which has been accelerating since the heyday of the Waldenbooks/B. Dalton chains, from independently-owned bookstores with personal service and hand-picked stock lists, towards bigger and more standardized stores. These days Borders and Barnes & Noble sit at the top of the food chain, with Amazon acting as a powerful ethereally-distributed competitor.

A similar effect has been happening among sellers of used and rare books. In comparison to the retail new books trade, the antiquarian business is crippled by the inherent bottleneck of inventory control, so virtual bookstores consisting of big databases and order handling systems have an advantage for the moment over bricks-and-mortar used bookstores. Alibris.com, ABEbooks.com, and even Powell’s online effort and eBay handle this quite well. But the clear efficiencies of online business doesn’t stop aggregation from succeeding — if only by attrition. Among the bricks-and-mortar bookstores, witness the power of Powells, the lordship of John King in Detroit, and the growing number of dead or dying small independent booksellers specializing in used and rare books.

I am reminded, this week, that not everything in the world is books. To some folks, this may come as a bit of a shock.

I’m in Cleveland at the moment. My mother is moving in with us, and I’m helping her sort out her household, accumulated over 50 years in this house they built. Like me, my parents have been almost-but-not-quite hoarders, and aficionados of estate sales and auctions. Along with many beautiful books stored away in my Dad’s “lab” in the basement we’re collecting a startling pile of valuable antiques and collectibles. Not just things that have accrued value through age (like tartan-decorated picnic coolers and formica Moderne end tables from the 50s), but pottery, china, pressed glass, textiles, tools, clocks, electronics… you name it.

At the same time, friends of my Mom are also moving house after 30+ years, and I’m helping them in the same capacity. Nancy is not merely an avid collector, but knowledgeable: a highly-trained generalist expert on antiques and collectibles since her youth, she has accumulated through her social network of nice old ladies and friends and shop owners and a tendency to go to the right estate sales a household that might as well be donated to a museum. Well, not quite. But close.

In order to move, they need to downsize. So Nancy has set aside a number of items, ranging from pewter to glass to little toys. Those that she doesn’t think I can sell on eBay to good effect, she’ll sell in her garage sale in a few days at a serious loss, say $0.25 for an item that in the right venue would bring $20 or more. Unlike many folks, Nancy knows what these things are. A little green-looking pressed glass dish I might put under a small potted plant in the windowsill is from the 1860s and worth $120 when I check market prices on eBay. A little 3” tall porcelain doll you would expect to see in a jumbled box lot — and which would sell in a garage sale for $0.50 or so — would set you back $80 or more. Even her personal effects, like her 1960s nurse’s cape, which even she would have pitched or sold in the garage, would bring $40+.

Market efficiency is a myth in this space. Even Nancy, who is more knowledgeable about these things than many museum curators, misses some stuff I catch. And this brings home a very interesting (but tangential) observation I’ve made before about collectibles and antiques: knowledge is money. Your average little old widow, selling her lifetime’s accumulation of history (that her children almost inevitably do not want) will realize only the tiniest fraction of the value of the items. Instead, the flocks of garage and estate sale gleaners will wander and pick (without saying a word), and they’ll then carry it on to some dealer (more below), who should expect a 100% or higher margin, and from there if it’s quite nice it may make it to a show or premium venue where it will realize another few hundred percent.

In my personal experience, as one of the people who’s played the gleaner role as well as the upper-end dealer, we’re almost certainly talking about 1000% at a bare minimum, with something like a 30-fold or higher net increase in price over the whole process on average. So what I buy from a “source” for $1 or so, I expect will sell to a final consumer for $30 or more. And I frequently see 100-fold or higher.

The value comes directly from knowledge that the buyer has, but which the seller does not. Every step of the way. Either knowledge of meaning or context (I know to look for Rackham illustrations or certain science fiction authors), or (less frequently) knowledge of and therefore access to a market where the uptick in price can be realized (I know who to take old science and engineering books to. I know where to sell old arithmetic primers).

That’s why I’m helping Nancy out: Because with our shared knowledge of value of the items and venues in which they can sell, we can collaborate to realize much of that value.

So, given that knowledge is value, I’d be remiss as a businessman if I didn’t keep up on research and market status. So yesterday, after spending a couple of busy days packing and hearing stories from Nancy about Rockingham glazes and how to tell real old milk glass from modern stuff, my Mom and I went to do some market research in the local shops.

Ten or even five years ago, we woould have driven downtown towards the urban center of Cleveland. There, along Detroit Road, used to be the strings of antique dealers and jumble shops. Not the topmost peak of the food chain ever (in Cleveland, that would have once been Wolf’s), but up there about where I as eBay seller sit in the process.

They’re all gone. Dead. Empty. Tehre may be a few hidden away with bars on the windows down there somewhere, but you can’t see them from the car while you’re driving.

So I checked the metropolitan phone book, and see that while there are a number of scattered dealers out in the country ring (the belt of the Greater Cleveland area that’s most likely to be plowed up and sprout into greige developments in the next five years), the problem here is exactly the fact that they’re scattered. The driving we’d need to do to visit any pair would amount to maybe 50 miles.

But there’s also the Medina Antiques Mall. Aka, the future.

Those of you who have visited most antique shops will have learned that they are generally very dark and crowded agglomerations of precariously-balanced stuff, typically in older reclaimed low-rent buildings fraturing cloudy windows and creaking floorboards and damp cellars. Those of you who have visited most antique “malls” will know of them as about the same, only bigger, and typically consist of the same sorts of stuff arranged in the same sort of teetering manner, but subdivided into thirty or forty “stalls” rented by semi-independent or cooperative dealers.

A few years back, I had some downtime during a business trip to Des Moines when I discovered the Brass Armadillo. My eyes were opened. Like the few others of its generation, the new face of the business physically reflects an utter transformation in the business model. It’s a big old supermarket, thousands of square feet and fifty-foot ceilings. Light, and bright, and open. And like the underlying supermarket, the stuff is arranged in aisles, in cases or little areas. Visibe, sorted, clean, unjumbled.

Hundreds of dealers under one roof, not tens. An order of magnitude over the original (now dead) shops.

Sound familiar? Bookstores again?

And the Medina Mall is another step up. An element of a national chain that’s becoming the Borders-like pinnacle of the antiques food chain.

[more to come]

A family medical emergency, the need to clean out my Mom’s flooded basement in Cleveland, and a number of other things have conspired with one another to happen all at once. I’ll be back online in a bit.

Email will work, in the interim.

Karl Marx as murder suspect. The Music Hall’s darker (nay, darkest) side. The Kabbalah and the nature of the inimical world. Murderous diarists. Limehouse — the Limehouse of Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The reading room of the British Museum, where all great minds meet by accident. Gin and prostitution and tawdry cloying fog. Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, terrifying the natives as a vision of Things to Come. Harrumphing and fawning barristers. Hanging reform. Modesty. Evisceration as an artform. Egyptomaniacal architecture along the Thames. London as the Golem, or perhaps as Demiurge. And maybe those are the same thing….

And I’m not even half done yet.

I’m listening to Peter Ackroyd’s The Trial of Elizabeth Cree from Recorded Books. This is an excellent performance produced in a very unusual style using three readers, but directed and performed in the unassuming style that makes Recorded Books my preference for any audio book. Indeed, I cannot say that the book would hold up as well to mere reading (good as it is) — the readers do that good a job.

And it is ever so good. Lovely and terrible and enchanting, playing with worldly philosophy and esoteric history and deep reflective irony like the tangled skeins of narrative and implicature and (occasionally) intrestines that tie its characters together. Each personal node is connected like the mystical elements of a kabbalistic diagram… indeed, I begin already to suspect that the main characters are Binah, Hokhmah and others, linked to one another by the mistakes forged by Ackroyd’s world.

This is a good book. If you think Umberto Eco is too wordy and is just showing off… well, maybe you’re right. We all go on sometimes. But because of the similarity and interconnectedness of all things on many levels, you should also read this Ackroyd, and see some of the eerie beauty of the social world rendered with economy and strength.

And if you are interested in social networks… that’s what it’s about. Too. Things mean things, and Ackroyd’s art lies in pointing out that those details of life — the esoteric and ephemeral and trivial things that are so often unremarked by historians — also mean things, and that in fact they outnumber the broad, “important” things we do bother to note.

This had better not be the New Climate. I’m done with it already, and it’s just the second day.

Tornado sirens at 1am, just after we had fallen asleep thinking the lightning was far away. Well, it was — and barreling down on us with tornadoes in hand (none hit). Then another round this afternoon where we took the dog down into the basement just on a hunch, inspired in part by the virulent green sky, the half-inch of hail and the 95 mph — 95 miles per fucking hour — winds.

And now another one is looming on the radar map at NOAA, hauling up a big stripe of brightly-colored Wisconsin-heated Lake Michigan just so it can dump it on our heads.

I’d rather this did not go on much more. Because they seem to be getting bigger, and settling into a damnably inconvenient pattern of once every twelve hours or so.

Ah, well… off to shut down the computers. Again.

[At the moment, the glitchy movie of the last 24 hours can be seen at The NOAA satellite viewer. I’ll replace this ephemeral link with a Quicktime move in a little bit. We live, for those who may not know it, in that little mitten-shaped part under all the goddamned storms.]

In sorting my Dad’s papers a few weeks back, I came across a fragment of stationery bearing the following in his handwriting, with a little diagram:

6.) What is the possibility that a coil about the throat of a rocket could relieve the heat transfer load at the throat? The short-field spreading flux would tend to pinch the conducting fluid away from the walls, hence less heat transfer.

It would have been written sometime between 1970 and 1980, given the state of the paper and his penmanship. A little Googling (which I encourage the reader to try) leads me to think that he was definitely on to something.

This is an interesting and frankly moving fragment, given my recent interest in starting a community for those with questions and notions and projects just like his. I find, rummaging through his workspace, that he must have had notebooks filled with stuff like that. Just sitting around, growing and gathering dust.

Just as I do.

There should be a place for it. Not a museum, not a records office like the patent office or even a magazine, and surely not an archive of physical papers in a handful of select universities. A place that our ideas should go to live and grow and spread. A place to build them into something more.

It should not be relegated to our estates. Nor, for that matter, merely left languishing in our libraries.

Not all information “wants to be free”. Some of our thoughts are ours, and we should have the right to sell and protect them. But I come to think that many of our ideas should be free — to form the basis of conversation and endeavor and hopefully eventual insights among strangers. We should all be able to start such conversations, and then to push them forward towards the point of usefulness, with some expectation of living to see the results.

When there is no hope of short-term reward from your ideas, your creative work — due to your profession or social status, or the difficulty and prohibitive cost of patents and properly vetted research — isn’t there a strong argument for reaping the long-term reward of their eventual consequences as they are realized by others?

I think so.

What were 1-5? None of us will ever know.

We’ve just returned from visiting Tom and Cindy Hollander’s new digs, in the chic and trendy Kerrytown shopping district here in Ann Arbor. The Hollanders are amazing people, and they employ many other amazing people to sell their amazing inventory of supplies and inspirations for book and paper artists. Now they have a sufficiently amazing space: several thousand square feet of renovated Victorian warehouse, lovely floors, high ceilings, exposed beams and bricks. The perfect setting.

They’ve apparently built the perfect store of their type. But wait, there’s more….

In the basement, with the help of wood engraver and letterpress maven Jim Horton, they’re beginning to set up the Kerrytown Press. Another thousand or two square feet filled with excellent workspaces for their classes, printing presses from the late 19th and early 20th century that you can learn to use, several cabinets filled with lead type, great lighting. They give classes. They will soon have open studio hours, I’m told. I take wood engraving classes there now.

Very close to a perfect space for art instruction, with a focus on traditional letterpress work. Very, very close.

That’s downstairs. Upstairs… well, upstairs is empty.

What they need, I think, is a complementary store upstairs. Their clientele is book-oriented, and so an antiquarian or other bookstore is a strong option. But this is Booktown. We have more booksellers per capita than anybody else in the country (so says the Chamber of Commerce). That’s a stiff barrier to entry: after all, there’s an excellent antiquarian just down the street, and another great one a few blocks farther on, and an easy dozen used booksellers within a ten-block walk and another half-dozen new bookstores (including one of the largest Borders).

That’s a pretty high barrier to a new venture. The space is great, it would have a great chance for walk-in traffic, it looks just as amazing (being trendily modernized warehouse space (Cf. beams, wood floors, exposed brick, halogen lighting, &c; &c;), it would have a great complementarity with Hollanders, and there are inevitably many, many people here in town and visiting from outside who would shop there.

And thus do we arrive at: What makes a perfect used-and-rare bookstore?

A little reflection informs me that even my own criteria fluctuate. I like those that have a broad selection of difficult-to-find items. I like those that have a muddle of stacks on the floor, because then I can root around and find treasure. I like those that are vast. I like those that are small and tidy. Some days I like to go down to the Reuse Center and root around in the books that have been discarded at the dump (even for $1 a piece, they can be amazing). Depends on the day, my mood, the weather, my stake.

No, what this town needs is a… well, what?

Hmmm.

Well, one thing this town has more of than bookstores is booksellers.

Hmmmm.

So is it just me, or was that the best line?

Robert Hooke seems more impressive all the time. This excerpt from the introduction to his little-read but quite important free-wheeling scientific treatise from 1655 (or so) touches on the scientific method, invoking a number of quite modern concepts along the way:

The Understanding is to order all the inferiour services of the lower Faculties; but yet it is to do this only as a lawful Master, and not at a Tyrant. It must not incroach upon their Offices, nor take upon it self the employments which belong to either of them. It must watch the irregularities of the Senses, but it must not go before them, or prevent their information. It must examine, range, and dispose of the bank which it laid up in the Memory: but it must be sure to make distinction between the sober and well collected heap, and the extravagant Ideas, and mistaken Images, which there it may sometimes light upon. So many are the links, upon which the true Philosophy depends, of which, if anyone be loose, or weak, the whole chain is in danger of being dissolv’d; it is to begin with the Hands and Eyes, and to proceed on through the Memory, to be continued by the Reason; nor is it to stop there, but to come about to the Hands and Eyes again, and so, by a continual passage round from one Faculty to another, it is to be maintained in life and strength, as much as the body of man it by the circulation of the blood through the several parts of the body, the Arms, the Fat, the Lungs, the Heart, and theHead.

and this, from later on, a cunning bit of observation and insight on self-organization and sorting in vibrating granular materials:

Having therefore in short set down my Notion of a Fluid body, I come in the next place to consider what Congruity is; and this, as I laid before, being a Relative property of a fluid, whereby it may be said to be like or unlike to this or that other body, whereby it does or does not mix with this or that body. We will again have recourse to our former Experiment, though but a rude one; and here if we mix in the dish several kinds of sands, some of bigger, others of less and finer bulks, we shall find that by the agitation the fine sand will eject and throw out of it self all those bigger bulks of small stones and the like, and those will be gathered together all into one place; and if there be other bodies in it of other natures, those also will be separated into a place by themselves, and united or tumbled up together.

From Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

[via Barbara’s distributed proofreading this morning]

Creative Commons provides a proposal for a science commons.

Not a lot different, on the face of it, from what I was asking for back in March.

I’m reading it, and will report on how it sounds….

The recent release of SubEthaEdit 2.0 by The Coding Monkeys is a testament to their powers of developing useful, funcational software. It looks to be extraordinary. Among other things, they have somehow managed to identify and implement the three most important missing features that made me rely on their commercial BBedit competitor. I’m very close to switching irreversibly now.

What I want to know is: Did they develop this amazing product, which has so many great XP-friendly features, using XP? I think so, because I think it shows.

Well done.

Advice to The Coding Monkeys: WriteRight — do it, please.

Advice to Windows users: switch now Maybe someday there will be an equivalent package for you.

Now and then I come across extracts of old texts which display a remarkable quality of salience. Perhaps I’m imposing my own assumptions on them, perhaps not. One way or the other, I’m accumulating them here, in the form of a commonplace book.

[this brief explanatory post replaces a mis-positioned one, which now resides here.]

I was purchasing a medium soft drink at Panera this morning, and it was $1.33. Thinking that I probably had correct change, I handed the counter lady a dollar, saying “I think I feel something heavy in my pocket.”

“Could it be a pony?” she asked.

True Short Story™ by Ron Jeffries

Ken Brown, president of the Microsoft-funded Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, writes an amusing hinty kindof-but-not-really libelous account of the rapacious piracy-driven origins of the open source software community — covered in more than sufficient detail at GrokLaw this morning

It is always interesting to not merely laugh and move along, but also to consider context and semiotics when dealing with these things, so: Who is the audience for Brown’s statement? What change in their opinions or attitudes is he trying to effect? What implications can be read into it? Might the release be a intended as a signifier on some level other than its pure verbal content?

Details of Brown’s ridiculousness will be forthcoming in a number of studies, I am told.