Bookshop of the Month – Page 45 in Nottingham

Now it’s remarkably silly when writing a blog like this to get into the foolish habit of entitling every other piece Book Loving Story of the Day, Bookshop of the Month etc. when you have neither the intention nor the time to follow through with all of the regular posts that would suggest, but it’s done, we are where we are, and there’s no going back and fiddling and crossing out now if I am going to get this piece written in the ten minutes I have allotted myself. So, here we have Bookshop of this month (and almost certainly the next month, and the month after that, and on and on up into the middle of December or whenever I next remember or find another bookshop almost as remarkable as this one).

I am currently putting together a list of books I will be ordering, and you will be reading next year. Exciting times. At least, I think so. And so does Stephen at Page45 in Nottingham, England, which is all the more remarkable given the fact that he has never met any of you. The simple fact of it is that Stephen, much like myself, is a book lover, a book evangelist no less, and a fanatical card-carrying loon for those wondrous creations, comics, and graphic novels, which combine the expressivity of two of the finest forms of human expression, writing and drawing (or drawing and writing, depending on how you look at it).

Well, I am getting rather carried away myself. But the fact remains that the bookshop, Page45 (and website, and Twitter account, and who even knows what else), that Stephen runs with the other wonderful people of Page45, is one of those beautiful things, a place full of and run by enthusiasts, people who are there and do what they do because they love it and want other people to love it even half as much as they do. That is why they get up in the morning.

A town, village, city, country benefits from having such places. Knock down a McDonalds or twelve and put one of these in its place and you watch what happens to the people within its catchment area, that is, the surprisingly large area around the shop which is affected by it. If there is not a system for working that out in Sim City or those other city simulation games you play, then send it back in disgust, and pick up a comic or a graphic novel – preferably one suggested by Stephen and colleagues – because these are the things that matter to a city and we should keep them going and support them as well as we can.

At 19:00 on Friday night, I wrote to Page45 asking for recommendations for books to buy for you guys. I had written to a few other places and people and got a few responses, each of which was more or less helpful, but I knew Page45 to be staffed by passionate people who talk comics all day and continue to engage on the subject in their free time.

I got a response almost straight away directing me to their recommendations page. I filled in the questions for myself, and then gave details about you guys, saying how old you were and that most of you are not native speakers of English etc.

I got a response the very next day. It gave recommendations both for myself (I had given a few details about myself too), and for you guys. It is worth quoting the recommendations for you in full:

“Right, now then, obviously we need to avoid a lot of slang and indeed phonetics* which sadly rules Jamie Smart books like FISH HEAD STEVE out. Shame: so good! As a substitute for stooopid, though, TEENYTINYSAURS is relatively free from slang and phonetics.

Moving on, the 3 ZITA books are actually very European in style. I think they would go down very well. MULP does as well. Also, who can be too young for Oscar Wilde’s THE HAPPY PRINCE (you may disagree.)

Oooh, AMULET. Fab! A real Haiyo Miyazaki sensibility.
 

The HILDA books have won so many awards and deservedly so, and SLEEPWALKERS won the British Comics Awards last year as voted for by schoolchildren.

 

BONE is an obvious one, but our Jodie who has read it more recently does warn of LOT of American contractions.

Instead for action / adventure I recommend THE UNSINKABLE WALKER BEAN and for sheer genius, the GLISTER pocketbook series by Andi Watson. Great for new vocabulary!

Lastly, on the MOOMIN front FYI the landscape books at £6-99 and £7-50 contain colour episodes from the £14-99 black and white hardcovers.

Hope all that helps!

Stephen @pagefortyfive”

I don’t know about you but I can feel the passion coming off the page. This guys wants you to love these books.

So do I.

So, Amazon is not going to build a warehouse in Brno. We’ll survive without. As soon as you are old enough to have money in your pocket, find a bookshop near you that has people who talk the way Stephen does about books, and you’ll do all right. While you are at it, click through to Page45 and see what I am talking about, because that dear readers, is my bookshop of the month!

 

* Stephen is here talking about phonetical spelling, which is how writers sometimes represent different accents and other unusual ways of speaking. Do not confuse it with phonics which is the way teachers usually teach you how to spell etc.

Humiliation

The British author David Lodge once invented a game called Humiliation in which educated people try to out-do each other by naming classic books they have not read, but which they think everyone else has. “That’s not a very fun game!” You might think, and you would be right, but in his novel, Changing Places, which you should not read until you are much older and a little more boring, the game is played by academics (people who work at universities), and one of them, Howard Ringbaum, wins the game and loses his job as a professor of English, by admitting he has never read Hamlet by Shakespeare.

Now, I’m not a professor of literature and I have read Hamlet – at least I think I have, it’s kind of long and has lots of weird words in it, but I seem to remember I wrote an essay on it once and I do know that pretty much everybody dies, so I must at least have opened it up and looked at it, so that’s got to count for something! – but, and here’s the biggie, I am a librarian in a primary school and, until I came back this year, I could have won the game humiliation with other children’s librarians, and perhaps lost my job, by saying I had never read…

…Harry Potter!

Now, that’s kind of understandable in a way because, if I’m not as old as Dumbledore, I’m still pretty old, and I was old enough not to be reading children’s books when Harry Potter was first published. That was way back in 1997. I was studying sound engineering in a college in an old car factory in the English Midlands waiting until my band took off and I never had to work again – well, I was waiting to form a band, and maybe to learn guitar, but these were minor hurdles that stood in my way and I was pretty keen – and so I didn’t really look up from my copy of Kerrang for long enough to notice some kiddie book about wizards.

Ok, maybe I exaggerate. I was reading stuff. I was reading some of the books you are supposed to read, and some of the books you should read, and some of the books some people probably think you shouldn’t read. I had gone to the library regularly as a kid, and had carried on then, picking up books by Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Heller, Alice Munroe, Douglas Coupland, and others I hope you too might discover when you are older. Some of these names were as important to me as the names of the bands I listened to at the time. Still, I didn’t yet know about J. K. Rowling, who must now be one of the most famous names in literature.

That came later. When I went to university a few years later, everybody was reading Harry Potter. By then it was a series. The third book had been published. By then, too, I had become a keen reader. I would read Chekhov, Turgeniev, Dostoevsky and other miserable classics of Russian literature. I read Irish plays and American short stories, long French novels about women who run off after their doctor husbands do a bad job of chopping somebody’s leg off, but I didn’t read children’s books about wizards.
Everybody was reading children’s books about wizards. Why would I do the same as everybody else? You see, I had a fairly fixed mindset that if everybody liked something, then that something was probably rubbish. If everybody was listening to Coldplay, for example, then Coldplay must be a bit rubbish.

The danger with this kind of thinking is that it is quite often true: everybody was listening to Coldplay, and Coldplay are kind of rubbish. What then happens though is that you think it’s true always and miss out on things that everybody you know is sharing and enjoying and which they will grow up together with. Sometimes this isn’t such a big problem, and the other, more hard-to-find, things you find because you don’t like listening to Coldplay everywhere you go, more than make up for missing out on all the rubbish they filled up albums with between the four half–decent songs they wrote. But now and again, you miss out on something special.

So where does Harry Potter come in to all of this? Did I enjoy the book more than I would enjoy listening to Coldplay’s back catalogue? Yes, as it happens. It is a children’s book, and I don’t think it’s going to compete with Chekhov or Alice Munro, Gogol or Bohumil Hrabal and those other Czech authors I have discovered since first coming to Prague in 2004. It is also true that it borrows a lot from other, perhaps more original, children’s books. But what is important is that it is readable. It has some very strong characters, and, on finishing that first book, you feel that you know them, and I can imagine that you really want to read on and find out more. Certainly, I have got the second book next to me at the library now, ready to take it out and continue with the series when I am nodding asleep on the metro to and from work. It is entertaining, and it is undemanding, and it is escapist, and, though it will never be the only type of book I want to read, I know that there have been hundreds of conversations with some of my best friends, people I have grown up with, which I have been excluded from before, and which I will now be able to join in with. Whether it is completely original or not, whether better children’s books have been written or not, all these adventures of Harry and Hermione, Ron and Hagrid, are something we will share in future.

Televisions, Trending, Surfing, and the Čapek Brothers

I don’t have a television and have rarely had one for years. Don’t I get bored? Yes, but far less than I would if I had a television, I assure you. Occasionally, it is true, I would like to watch something on television that I can not stream on the internet, like the Olympic hockey – which, yes, you can find on the internet, and sometimes without infecting your computer with a thousand viruses intent on sending your banking details to some enterprisingly unscrupulous individual in Nigeria, but you can be sure the signal will fail just at those moments where everybody in the Czech Republic is texting their mate to watch the hockey because it is getting exciting. Usually though, I miss out less by not watching these programmes, than I would miss if I had a television, came home from work tired three days out of five, sat down to watch whatever was the least worst thing on at the time, and then realised several hours later that I had done nothing else but watch some people who can’t sing singing badly, convinced that they would be the next Taylor Swift, and some cats falling asleep before falling off worktops.

Don’t get me wrong, watching cats falling asleep and then falling off worktops is invariably funny, I just don’t think that when, many years from now (I hope), I look back on my life from my hospital bed with a mere few days left, when my friends and relatives are gathered around me and I talk about my life with the usual mix of pleasure and regret, that it will be not watching enough cats falling asleep and falling off worktops that I will regret the most.

What has all this got to do with the price of bread? I’m starting to wonder that myself because what I opened this page to tell you about is a virtual tour of the Čapek Brothers’ villa. I am beginning to doubt my own ability to get there and am reminded of the Irish folk tale of a man stopping in a remote Irish village to ask for directions.

“Which way for Dublin?”

“Well if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.”

But start from here I did, and since I can only assume I had some sense of which meandering route I wanted to take to my goal when I started out – though this is far from always the case – I’ll blunder on… by noting that every day, when I get on the metro, somebody tries to hand me a free newspaper. Now, being a librarian and a keen reader, every day I have a book in my bag, but, since I have to run for buses or trams, or from trams to buses, before I get on the Metro, I have normally not started reading until I get there. Now, the Metro newspaper is free, that is, it is paid for by companies which place advertisements to sell you things (few things are really free, including Facebook and Google, and knowing where the money comes from can tell you a lot about the type of information contained inside, but we won’t get into that here), and because it is  free it is not very good.

Now there is nothing much wrong with the Metro, and there is nothing wrong with it being paid for by companies placing advertisements for things, most of which I don’t want. But, the problem for me is that it is easy, that it is something that I could too easily spend my time on day after day for no better reason than that it is there. I could take a book with me to work on a long Metro journey every day for two weeks and have read no more than a few pages because I picked up the newspaper most days and read that instead, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting or informative or well-written on any one of those days. And so, now, I try to do nothing just because it is placed in my hand. If I want to know what’s going on in the world, it is much better to buy a newspaper once in a while, stream the News from the internet every few days, or read a newspaper in a cafe for free, than read the Metro newspaper every day.

All of this was always important, perhaps, but now it is more important than ever because not only do we have television, which, in a way, does the same as the man or woman on the Metro handing out newspapers, but also the internet, which most people now spend more time on than in front of the television. The danger of spending our time being drip-fed information, shown pictures and videos, music and sound, that somebody else chose for us, is greater than ever.

I mentioned Taylor Swift. It is, I think, impossible not to know who she is, to have seen pictures and videos of her, or to have heard her music. Turn on the radio, the television, or open up your computer on one of the three or four homepages your internet browser is probably set to display, and you will probably soon be shown links to videos and internet pages which are trending, meaning that they are popular – millions of people are reading them. If you ask yourself now where you went to, what you read and watched, last time you opened up the internet and clicked a couple of links, and if it was something that you were interested in finding out about before you turned on your computer, you may discover that you were not, that it didn’t interest you at all, and you might perhaps also discover that lots of things would have interested you more than what you eventually read about or watched. Taylor Swift is all well and good if she is more interesting and more talented than other singers and performers you might have found if you had followed your own interests and not been led by the hand, but sometimes that’s not the case.

My, but I have taken the scenic route this time, but no matter, it’s the last day of term. What started me off on this train of thought today was a free newspaper that I found in my mailbox the other day. A newspaper printed by the local council for Prague 10, I expected it to contain a lot of births and deaths and boring budget-related information of what had been spent in the area in the last month or three, but glanced over it before putting it in the bin. In fact, what I saw was a piece about a lovely website created to show the villa of the Čapek Brothers.

Karel Čapek was a writer who was chosen by one of my students in 2K as his favourite famous person for a recent Famous Person Day. His brother Josef was a painter and illustrator who also wrote books, sometimes with Karel himself. Karel wrote books about travels in England, about Tomáš Garigue Masaryk, about robots, and about his dog, Dášenka. The website has a virtual tour of the villa. This was something that was worth my time.

If you look around and look upstairs to the lovely study (Pracovna), you will see that Karel and Josef had something that you might never know: a place dedicated to books, to writing or drawing and to the quiet time for thinking, imagining and discovering, undisturbed by people or anything other than their own mind and where it led them, that all creative people need.

I would be surprised if your bedrooms looked the same.

But however it looks, and however you choose to spend your time, spend some time asking yourself if it is indeed you who is choosing how you spend your time, and that it is you who is deciding what to look at, what to read, and what to discover. There are interesting television programmes, magazines, and internet pages, but the chances are that if you follow what is easiest and what gets thrown up first, you will be unlikely to find them.

I personally think that if over the holidays you find a little time on your hands, and find yourself on the internet, you could find out a lot of information about your favourite people and writers, artists and illustrators and even sportsmen and women, by turning on your computer with a purpose and following it, instead of being distracted by what is thrown up in your face. But I also think that time away from the keyboard, and away from the television, time spent with a book or a pen or paintbrush and a blank piece of paper – time spent in a way that the Čapek brothers may have recognised, and in a quiet environment such as you can find in this virtual tour – might reward you better.

What do you think?

Oh, I forgot about surfing. Long story short, “surfing” the internet isn’t like surfing at all. Why? You tell me. Best answer to that question (paragraphs and full sentences please), gets as many housepoints as there are answers.

New Books

I often add new books to the library. I tend to come across books all the time, picking up decent second-hand books from the donated shelves of libraries such as the various branches of Prague’s Metropolitan Library (where you all ought to register), and buying them for peanuts in second hand books shops, and even being given them, as was the case with a great series of true story Czech comics called O Přibjehi about Roma people living in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

I love comics, and graphic novels as they are sometimes called when they are written for adults, and I find that comics are great for learning languages. Some of my first words of Czech were learned reading the Czech translations of the Garfield comics I read when I was in the last years of primary school in England.

One of the books I added today, another Czech comic (this time a translation of a French comic) is especially interesting not only for its subject, which is the second world war as seen through the eyes of a young America soldier who later told his stories to the author – but for its unusual drawing technique.

Those of you based in secondary, where this book will find its home, could perhaps ask your art teacher if he knows anything about this technique of drawing with water. Click on the link to see a short video of how the book was drawn.

A Peek into a Writer / Artist’s World

Ok, so I don’t normally fire up Fronter when I’m at home, still less on a Friday night, not to mention a Friday night at the start of a two week holiday(!), but, having stumbled upon something wonderful on-line, I had to share it with you. I am quite a fan of graphic novels – comics in other words. Unfortunately it is true that I often forget how much I enjoy them and struggle on with challenging novels, usually in Czech, time after time. And then the times I do remember how much I enjoy them, remember, for example how they combine the pleasures of reading with the pleasures of watching a good film, I still most often don’t buy them because they are so expensive, and I forget to get them out of the library, even though I am a librarian and I have seen the stacks of great graphic novels in the metropolitan library at, for example, Opatov. (Odd how often you forget to do the things you enjoy when you get older, and how other things get in the way if you let them.) Anyway, sometimes I come across something that reminds me, and that happened today. Somewhere else on this Fronter site, I showed a video of artist Emmanuel Guibert demonstrating the drawing technique he used in Alan’s War. Today, I’ll share a video showing a little of the style used in a wordless comic / graphic novel for children, and a little of the genesis of that story, that is, the thoughts that led to it. This page discusses the book. The video itself is halfway down. We don’t yet have the book in the library and might not make many purchases for a little while, but this video should fire up your imaginations all the same. Enjoy.

Crowd-Funding and Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude

I wrote a little about alterrnative forms of publishing some time ago when I discussed Cory Doctorow’s books which are published under a creative commons license so they can be shared on-line for free. A different alternative to the standard forms of publishing, film and music production is known as crowd-finding where somebody with an idea asks people who would be interested in seeing it made – in reading it, watching it, listening to it etc. – to give money towards it.

This form of funding (this means getting money) for films, for music, and even for books, has been increasingly common over the last five years in particular, and I think you guys will be seeing it a lot if you keep an eye open in the world of the arts and the creative ‘industries’. One film I came across the other day which will, with any luck, be funded and then made in this way, is Too Loud a Solitude, based on the novella by the famous Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal who was born 100 years ago this March.

E-books and Literature On-line

A few days ago I followed a link to a site offering a collection of Jaroslav Hašek’s stories (in the original Czech) for free. I have been listening to Hašek’s famous Osudy Dobrého vojáka Švejka on audiobook recently, and I imagine these stories are equally as anarchic and, frankly, as rude as Hašek’s most famous work; nevertheless, they belong to the classics of Czech literature. There are many other such Czech classics on offer at the Metropolitan Library’s website including Rozmarné léto by Ladislav Vančura, Karel Hynek Mácha’s poems, and, of course Božena Němcová. There are many other sites which offer ebooks in Czech.

Now, this got me thinking. I own an Amazon Kindle. I don’t often use it. I like books, physical books, which you can hold, which you can buy in antikvariáts in Prague, which you can sometimes make notes in in pencil (if they are your own and they are hard to understand or you think you will have to go back to find something out). There is no denying the convenience of ebooks though, and though most people I see reading on my way to and from work are reading ‘real’ paper books, I do also see people holding e-readers every day, and, although there are thousands of uses books have been put to which you would struggle to imagine if you sat down brainstorming for hours at a time, still, ebooks have probably now been used for most of them, and the ones they haven’t are being ticked off all the time. Very occasionally, even purists like myself acknowledge that ebooks are, in some instances, better than ‘real’ books. I can read a little French for example, but my ereader can help in this area by having a dictionary. When I come to a word I don’t understand, I hold my finger over it, and get the definition right away. (Last time I checked, this doesn’t yet work from Czech to English, but it does work the other way around.) This has helped me to read L’homme qui plantait des arbres, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, for example, which is one of the most beautiful stories you could ever read, is very very influential in the ecological movement, and is very often available for free on-line.

I last read an e-book on a trip to Krkonoše the weekend before last. I had another book to read (I don’t understand people who get onto busses and trams, let alone airoplanes without something to read), but fancied something a little different for the trip than my usual commuting book. I have an iPod, which is chock full of audiobooks and podcasts, including the New Yorker‘s excellent Fiction podcast, podcasts from BBC Radio 4 and some audiobooks from audioteka.cz. I also have a few ebooks which I don’t often turn to as the screen is too small for comfortable reading, but which occasionally turn up a few surprises, as they did on this trip.

I have, first of all, lots of classics downloaded for free from Project Gutenburg. Project Gutenburg, named after the inventor of the printing press, is a volunteer-run project to digitise classic books who copyright protection has ran out, meaning that anyone can buy, sell, or distribute them without paying royalties.

Time for a digression, I think. Doubtless you know lots of people who acquire free music, films, software and books in all kinds of ways without paying royalties, but many of the people who do this are doing so illegally, and people who earn their money from royalties on sales of the music, films, and writing they have produced and created, are losing out from them doing this just the same as if they walked out of a restaurant without paying. Bruce Springsteen might not miss some of this money, perhaps, but the Czech book industry, to take one example, is not doing so well, and few even of the leading Czech authors earn enough money to live on through the money they earn through their writing. The position is similar for those who sell music, and software, including computer games (the designer of successful Czech computer game Machinarium estimates that only 5-15% of people who use the game paid for it, for example). Try to be aware of such issues when you buy or download books or other media. People make their living from making these things we use, and if we would like to see more of them, it is good to support some of these people*.

In terms of literature, I found one of these alternative sources some time ago. A very well-known and highly respected writer of novels for young adults (so called YA literature), is Cory Doctorow. Doctorow mainly writes about technology, both for adults and children, and, being a supporter of copyright reform, he makes all of his books available for free, and even allows people to translate them. I found one of these books, A Place So Foreign on my iPod that day, and it kept me occupied for the three and a half hours or bus, train and bus, that took me to Pec pod Sněžkou in Krkonoše. I don’t often read science fiction, but this book made me feel that this might be an oversight.

Either way, whatever are you preferences, you should be able to find something to read using some of the resources mentioned above, and others, which I am sure you could find without much difficulty.

Or, then again, perhaps you are already a regular user of ebooks. If so, I would like to hear from you, and I would like to see how the library can move towards supporting this new form of literature.

*We might object to the way things are usually sold and controlled by big companies such as Amazon who runs the Kindle, for example, but we can find alternatives to them. I frequently use Bandcamp.com, for example, to find and buy music, supporting independent artists. Here, for example, are Czech artists.

Posts from Fronter

Fronter is the blogging platform we use within the school. It has its uses, but also its drawbacks. Only registered pupils, teachers, and parents can log in and see the materials we put up on Fronter, so there is limited scope for interaction from a wider community of, to use examples most appropriate to the library, book lovers, children, writers, illustrators, and other librarians, all of whom will, I hope, one day contribute to these pages in one form or another.

Since this open blog is my preferred medium, I will copy some of the old posts from Fronter into this blog to encourage as much discussion as they may merit. The next few posts, then, were originally published on Fronter and will remain there for current students.

Labelling & Categorisation

I will, I hope, soon get back to some of the more interesting topics I hope to cover, including how I’m getting on with Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Quartet, which I picked as the first as a kind of Reading Club choice, and possibly a post on interactive fiction, which I am researching for a piece of fiction I am working on myself, but for now, my first day back in the library over the summer, I have a few technical details to settle. The first of these is labelling & categorisation.

I inherited the library last year with what would appear to be an improvised system of labelling using coloured stickers. Most of the stock I inherited had two of these. Many of them also had a barcode, though these did not scan in the system, largely because the barcode reader had not been initialised. In one sense this was useful, because books were recognisable as school library books. This is not a trivial point, as books which can be recognised in this way from the spines will more likely be returned to the library than those which cannot, which may be slotted into bookshelves and forgotten about.

The trouble was that the labels were not very useful. Each book had two, one to indicate the level of the book in terms of language, another to indicate its type. Fiction is yellow, for instance. Non-fiction is, I think, orange. Red, then is a notional level which makes fewer demands on the reader, green makes more, and blue makes the most. There are several problems with this. The levels, as far as I can see, have been fairly arbitarily applied, with blue and green stickers applied to the books on the General Fiction section across from me following no system that I can discern. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment takes a green sticker for mid-level, as does Oliver Twist and the unadapted text of Moby Dick. Book 3 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Anna Carey’s The Real Rebecca and David Grimstone’s Gladiator Boy get a blue for high level. The Czech books are similarly stickered in this way, though none of last year’s library staff and helpers had sufficient Czech to rank them. Both of the labels were stuck on the bottom of the books, and though this appears to have been done systematically, in the sense that the fiction books at least, are regularly labelled first with the yellow, on the bottom of the spine, and then with their level, there is nothing separating the two colour schemes so that one can be understood as the level, one as the categorisation scheme. More problematic still is the fact that non-fiction books demand two such categorisation stickers, having first the orange for non-fiction, and then a second for the theme, taking none for the level. Red means both History and low level.

It is easy, of course, to find fault and the best is the enemy of the good, but a librarian has to understand the internal logic of the systems s/he works with, and this was not one I could work with. I could not continue with this system as we ordered new books, and, though I made stabs at printing stickers and sourcing creative commons licensed images for categories of non-fiction, did not yet have sufficient time to systematically re-categorise and re-shelve the books.

What I did do was look into systems of categorisation that have been applied elsewhere.

One very helpful source of information and inspiration was the Mighty Little Librarian blog and its post on Ditching Dewey, the system which continues to be widely used in libraries all over the world. A second was the Metis Innovations site. Metis being a recent addition to the alternatives to Dewey.

Both of these sites include links to labels and logos for the given categories. The former is released under a creative commons license so that they may be used by libraries anywhere else in the world.

The problem is that I have the opposite problem to those who set up the library last year. While they, it appears, picked a system and ran with it, knowing it was better than nothing, I am fastidious to a fault, and want a system that appeals to me both logically and aesthetically. I want, in the 4 x 6cm space available to me on the base of the spines and the front and back cover either side (so realistically, in the 3 x 1 cm space afforded by most paperbacks), and possibly in a couple of additional stickers at the top, to give an obvious sign of the type of book and an indication that it is one of the library’s books. The images/logos must be scalable to shelf labels and even A4.

I am attracted to monochrome line art and pen and ink logos, and find the labels in the websites above a little busy for my taste.

Any thoughts on either categorisation or design would be greatly appreciated, though I know it’s early yet to be expecting these posts to be widely read or to attract much in the way of interaction.

Still, this is one of the areas I will be working on in the next few weeks, and, though it may be tight with me being away for all of August, I hope to get it nailed by September! First, though, lunch!

Comics

I am a big fan of books, and I am a big fan of comics books, which, as the name suggests, are books. There are those people who will try to convince you that comics are somehow less serious than “proper” books, who believe that pictures are unserious, and that it is right and proper that books should have fewer of them as their readers gets older. Yes, there are such people. And then there are people who love books. Because, in fact, years ago illustrations were as much a feature of adult books as children’s books, and real book lovers are likely to know this. (The most famous books by some of the most famous Czech and British authors were accompanied by illustrations, and some of you might look that up and see if you can work out who these might be, and if you could find some images.)

I ordered a lot of comics for both school libraries in the last order, and they ought to be heading their way to Prague as we speak. I also plan to place an order for comic books with the good people at Page45, my bookshop of the month when I go back home following some of the tailored advice they gave me on placing those orders. I bought a Czech comic a couple of weeks back, the latest from Czech comics genius Lucie Lomová, and my cultural highlight of last year (as they say in the newspapers), was an Exhibition of Czech comics at Dox gallery.

Now, I got onto that in a roundabout way. A German graphic designer friend wrote to me from Hamburg to say that a British comics artist called Lizz Lunney was coming to Prague and would like to find some Czech comics and maybe some Czech comics artists. Three countries. One internet. So I looked around, and because I love comics and had been reading a lot of Czech comics, and because I always take the opportunity to enthuse about Czech books which would otherwise be overlooked, I contacted a few people, found a couple who were keen to meet up, but outside of Prague, and found the comics exhibition.

That was last year, but I travelled to Hamburg after school broke up on Friday and then travelled back via Berlin. In Hamburg I saw Clara, the graphic designer friend. In Berlin I didn’t see Lizz Lunney (though coincidentally she was there), but did see some of her work in a comic shop over there hidden away behind a cinema in the Mitte district.

I have a couple of Lizz’s mini comics, which I will be putting in the library as soon as I have made them a little more unbreakable than they are at present (I know my students), and you can order more from her on-line shop, and also follow her web comic on-line.

There are many such on-line comics, and though I don’t always think that the internet is the best place for either reading or writing (there are so many distractions), it is definitely worth taking a look at these now and again to see if any take your fancy. Comic artists tend to work more for love than for money and they need to sell their work to make what little money they do earn. Many comic artists draw web comics as an extra to draw people in to their real work in print. Lucie Lomová’s site includes comics in both Czech and English but you will find her most important work both for children and adults in bookshops (unfortunately only in Czech and French for the moment). Sometimes though, comics are exclusively drawn for the internet, and this appears to be the case with one I heard about today, called Moose Kid Comics. It looks great.