The 21th annualNational Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held September 17-26, 2021 in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.
More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentationsthroughout the festival on stages for Children, Teens, Fiction, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, Genre Fiction, Science, and other themes & genres. Speakers include such writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, Roxane Gay, Nikki Giovanni, Joy Harjo, George Saunders, and many others.
Designated in 2008 as one of the very first UNESCO Cities of Literature in the world, Iowa City will be hosting the eleventh annual Iowa City Book Festival, October 1-6, 2019. In conjunction with the University of Iowa, FilmScene, the Iowa City Public Library, and the Iowa Arts Council, as well as other organizations and individuals, the six-day event will feature a Book Fair, readings by dozens of authors, and non-stop programming at many venues in and around downtown Iowa City. As usual, many of this year's events will involve the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, which was founded in 1967 by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle. During this period, over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries have spent a residency in Iowa City, where they have enriched the writing culture of the community while experiencing firsthand life at an American university. Sponsored by the City of Coralville, the annual Paul Engle Prize will be awarded to both Toi Derricote and Cornelius Eady, writers who have made "an impact on [their] community and the world at large through efforts beyond the page." Derricote and Eady are the co-founders of Cave Canem, a home for black poetry. The 2019 Schedule can be downloaded as a PDF, and full details can be found at the festival website.
The 19th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, August 31, 2019, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public.
More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentations throughout the day on stages for Children, Teens, Fiction, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, Genre Fiction, Science, and other themes & genres. Speakers include such writers as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, José Andrés, Raina Telgemeier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, and many others.
Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website. Mobile apps are also available for the Festival.
This year's poster was designed by Marian Bantjes; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2018 can be viewed here.
For those who may not know, the poet and publisher,Morty Sklar[1935-2018], died at the end of December 2018 in Jackson Heights, Queens. Morty had ridden his motorcycle out to Iowa City circa 1971, and ended up staying until 1989, when he moved back to New York City. The Common Curator met him in 1988 at a rooming house, where Morty happened to be the resident manager (the property, incidentally, was owned by W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, which became The Field of Dreams phenomenon). Morty was a true character, with a bottomless reservoir of stories and anecdotes, all conveyed with a pronounced New York accent that was never tempered in the slightest by nearly two decades of Iowa living.
Morty operated The Spirit That Moves Us Pressout of his then-quarters in the house, and a key element of his enterprise was a large, archaic IBM composing machine with which he electronically typeset all his books. His most notable publication was no doubt Jaroslav Seifert's The Casting of Bells (1983). In the following year Seifert won the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet was not then widely known in literary circles outside his native Czechoslavakia. Needless to say, after the prize was announced, journalists and critics from across the U.S. and abroad were scrambling to find copies of Seifert's work in English translation, and inundated Morty with book orders. Unfortunately, according to Morty's recounting, he had recently moved, and the phone company had messed up his call-forwarding request, hence he lost many potential sales as well as a good portion of once-in-a-lifetime publicity. Such are the travails of small presses!
The Spirit That Moves Us magazine was the first thing Morty published, in 1975, and he went on to issue a number of books of poetry, fiction & essays, including: The Actualist Anthology; Nuke-Rebuke;Editor's Choice (a series);Patchwork of Dreams: Voices from the Heart of the New America; and similar collections. In addition, he published volumes by individual poets, including Seifert (several titles), local Chuck Miller, and others. His own poetry, The Smell of Life: Poems 1969-2005, was also published under the TSTMUP imprint. Morty's final book was The Ultimate Actualist Convention: A Detailed View of Iowa City Actualism in the 1970s & 1980s and Its Migration to the San Francisco Bay Area, which came out in 2017.
The Common Curator last saw Morty in the late 1990's/early 2000's at the annual Small Press Fair held in Manhattan, where they both periodically exhibited their wares after leaving Iowa. There's a lot more that could be related, of course, and for those who are interested, below are compiled various resources that touch on Morty's life and career as an author, editor, and small press publisher. He was still giving readings as of last summer, and video of that and other things can be found at his YouTube channel.
Morty was always a New Yorker through and through, but it seemed that he nevertheless found Iowa to be fertile ground for his fertile mind, and that in the end he gave as much to the City of Literature as he harvested.
May the Spirit Move Us All in 2019!
* * * *
-- Obituary [Iowa City Press-Citizen, January 1, 2019]
-- Vibrant Tales In Small Book On Queens[New York Times article
about the anthology,Patchwork of Dreams, December 7, 1996] -- Little-Known in U.S., Nobel Poet Praised Here [New York Times article about Jaroslav Seifert, whom Sklar published the year
prior, October 12, 1984] . . . ''The
Casting of Bells,'' a 64-page collection translated by Tom
O'Grady and Paul Jagasich, and published in August 1983 by The
Spirit That Moves Us Press in Iowa City, Iowa. Morty
Sklar, who described himself yesterday as ''publisher,
editor, typesetter and stamp licker'' of the press, said his
is a small, independent press that publishes two books a year. He
published 1,000 copies of the Seifert book, but yesterday, upon
hearing the news from Sweden, he reordered 2,500 more. It is
available in paperback for $6.
The latest--and final--annual installment of the eclectic Wapsipinicon Almanacis now available for purchase and perusal. Published and letterpress printed since 1988 by Timothy Fay of Route 3 Press, the present issue, as with previous numbers, features an engaging mix of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, art, wit, and wisdom. Number 25 can be purchased at bookstores and other establishments or by writing the publisher directly at Wapsipinicon Almanac, 19948 Shooting Star Road, Anamosa, Iowa 52205. Single copies are $9, plus $2.70 for postage; Iowa residents should also include 63-cents for sales tax. The front cover shown here was designed by Will Thomson of Iowa City, his seventh cover overall for the almanac. A brief history of the publication can be viewed at the Almanac's website, and a video of "Linotype Operator Emeritus" Eldon Meeks in action can be viewed here.
Designated in 2008 as one of the very first UNESCO Cities of Literature in the world, Iowa City will be hosting the tenth annual Iowa City Book Festival, October 1-7, 2018. In conjunction with the University of Iowa, FilmScene, the Iowa City Public Library, and the Iowa Arts Council, as well as other organizations and individuals, the seven-day event will feature a Book Fair, readings by dozens of authors, and non-stop programming at many venues in and around downtown Iowa City. As usual, many of this year's events will involve the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, which was founded in 1967 by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle. During this period, over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries have spent a residency in Iowa City, where they have enriched the writing culture of the community while experiencing firsthand life at an American university. Sponsored by the City of Coralville, the annual Paul Engle Prize will be awarded to a writer who "makes an impact on his or her community and the world at large through efforts beyond the page." The 2018 Program can be downloaded as a PDF, and full details can be found at the festival website.
The 18th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, September 1, 2018,at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public. More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentationsthroughout the day on stages for Children, Teens, Youth Poetry Slam, Fiction, History & Biography, Understanding Our World, and other themes or genres. Speakers include such writers as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Tan, Dave Eggers, Jon Meacham, Annie Proulx, Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and many others. Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website.Mobile apps are also available for the Festival. This year's poster was designed by Gaby D'Allesandro; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2018 can be viewed here.
Edward S. Curtis [1868-1952] published The North American Indian [Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska] during the period 1907-1930. It comprised 20 volumes of narrative text accompanied by 20 portfolios of photogravures; the text tallied over 5,000 pages, and the photographic images numbered over 2,200. Less than half of the projected 500 sets were ultimately produced.
The original prospectus described this project as "The most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible . . . ." Curtis both authored the text and photographed the images, and was supported in his field work by the patronage of J. Pierpont Morgan. Frederick Webb Hodge, who worked at the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1905 to 1918 and later at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, served as the editor for the series. Theodore Roosevelt contributed a brief foreword.
In the course of his research, Curtis took over 40,000 photographic images of some 80 tribes, recorded over 10,000 wax cylinders of Native American languages and music, and observed and described many aspects of Indian traditions, customs, and ways of life. As valuable as Curtis' documentation is--and in many cases, it is the only such historical information available--it also reflects certain attitudes and mindsets no longer current among scholars and historians. Among other criticisms, the staging of some photographs raises important questions of representation and interpretation in Curtis' work.
To mark the sesquicentennial of Curtis' birth, Christopher Cardozo Fine Art is republishing Curtis' magnum opus in its entirety, with meticulous attention to reproducing the quality of the original set. The video above gives a brief overview of the process and rationale for the undertaking. Further details as well as ordering information is available at the publisher's website.
An online edition of The North American Indian is also available as part of Northwestern University's Digital Library Collections. The digitization of the set was largely funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The Library of Congress holds more than 2,400 silver-gelatin photographic prints by Curtis that were acquired through copyright deposit from about 1900 to 1930; of these, 1,608 were not included in The North American Indian. Over 1,000 prints in the Curtis Collection have been digitized and individually described.
The latest annual installment of the eclectic Wapsipinicon Almanacis now available for purchase and perusal. Published and letterpress printed since 1988 by Timothy Fay of Route 3 Press, the present issue, as with previous numbers, features an engaging mix of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, art, wit, and wisdom. Number 24 can be purchased at bookstores and other establishments or by writing the publisher directly at Wapsipinicon Almanac, 19948 Shooting Star Road, Anamosa, Iowa 52205. Single copies are $9, plus $2.70 for postage; Iowa residents should also include 63-cents for sales tax. The front cover shown here was designed by Elizabeth Munger of Iowa City, and depicts The Black Angel, a well-known local statue in Oakland Cemetery. A brief history of the publication can be viewed at the Almanac's website, and a video of "Linotype Operator Emeritus" Eldon Meeks in action can be viewed here.
The 17th annual National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be held on Saturday, September 2, 2017,at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The festival is free and open to the public. More than 100 authors, poets, and illustrators will be making presentationsthroughout the day in the theme-based pavilions for Children, Teens, Books to Movies, Contemporary Life, Fiction, Food & Home, Graphic Novels, History & Biography, International, Poetry & Prose, and Science. Speakers include such writers as David McCullough, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Dava Sobel, Ibram X. Kendi, Elizabeth Strout, Jesmyn Ward, Margot Lee Shetterly, and many others.
Further information, including a schedule of events and a map of the festival grounds, can be found at the festival website.Mobile apps are also available for the Festival. This year's poster was designed by Roz Chast; a gallery of all Festival posters from 2001 to 2017 can be viewed here.
The latest annual installment of the eclectic Wapsipinicon Almanacis now available. Published and letterpress printed since 1988 by Timothy Fay of Route 3 Press, the present issue, as with previous numbers, features an engaging mix of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry, art, wit and wisdom. Number 23 can be purchased at bookstores and other establishments or by writing the publisher directly at Wapsipinicon Almanac, 19948 Shooting Star Road, Anamosa, Iowa 52205. Single copies are $9, plus $2.70 for postage; Iowa residents should also include 63-cents for sales tax.
The front cover shown here was designed by Elizabeth Munger of Iowa City. A brief history of the publication can be viewed at the Almanac's website, and a video of "Linotype Operator Emeritus" Eldon Meeks in action can be viewed here.
