A premier Bay Area woodcut artist and one of our greatest living American poets collaborate on the most beautiful book I’ve seen this year—already a local bestseller because we should all own one. It is history, it is poetry, it is the history of local poetry and the art of local natural history. The woodcuts are the best Killions you’ve ever seen, 72 views of Mt. Tam, in prints a la Japonaise. Just the cover is a thrill, and that’s just the start. Christina Creveling, UPB Manager
“We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavenly and the earthly world.”
That’s Emerson on Goethe in Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write (Iowa, 2009), which I am nominating for UPB’s Best Gift Book of the Year.
“You should start,” he told his young friend, “with no skeleton or plan. The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for, anyway? Because you have something new to say? It is the test of the universities and I am glad you have made it yours.”
From Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson’s Creative Process, page 25, “Practical Hints” (University of Iowa Press, 2009)
From the description of Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press):
What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for “wholeness” refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh.
From the book:
“All of our stories really are part of the same great volume: the Book of Life. And unlike the logos, the words in this book do not have to become flesh in order to save us. They are flesh.” Introduction, page 14.
Some 125 people crowded into the Musical Offering Cafe on October 29 to hear a riveting discussion of this new book.
From the discussion:
“I never write about books I don’t love.” Kaja Silverman
We are often told by customers that they love our bookstore. We do, too. It is a wonderful place full of interesting books and people. We sit around the Great Table in the tranquil back room and hear proud authors tell us what they have learned. We talk to customers at the front desk. We read some of the books we sell, and we are better for that.
Yet, we suffer, as so many other book places have, decline. When Cody’s went down a few years ago, The Express wrote that it had died the “death of a thousand cuts.” We know some of those cuts and these are difficult times for bookstores, but we also know there is much to keep us going, including the great publishers we represent, the many hundreds of local authors we want to support, and the pleasures of being in Berkeley and next door to our sister business, the Musical Offering & Cafe.
We ask you to Become a Friend of UPB.
UPB Conversation with Phyllis Faber and Elisabeth Ptak of Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Marty Knapp, Pt. Reyes photographer, on HOW ART HELPS TO PRESERVE & PROTECT THE LANDSCAPE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
Yet another excellent book in the California Natural History Guide series edited by the admirable Phyllis Faber. I read it over the weekend before the author joined us for a UPB Conversation — an unusually rambunctious one as the subject of energy generates plenty of passion. This is an introduction by a skilled writer who brings together the history, geology, innovations, disasters, problems, and variety of future opportunities for energy in our amazing state. William McClung, UPB partner.
This book has sold 73 copies at UPB since publication. Talk about a mind on fire! Kat Anderson has written a white-hot study on the land use practices of California Indians after decades of deep research at Berkeley and among indigenous people around the state. The familiar history of dispossession, genocide, and assimilation is told in new detail and horror. More important is the remarkable range of examples and perspective Anderson presents on the ways California Indians managed and lived in our landscapes. They harvested and used many of the plants we value in the Berkeley Hills today — willow, elderberry, oaks, hazelnut, soaproot, yampah, miner’s lettuce, mugwort, bunch grasses, etc. – and they understood what kinds of disturbances help rather than hurt these beneficial plants. Yes, they burned frequently, but often very specifically. And their methods of irrigating, pruning and coppicing, sowing, tilling, transplanting, and weeding add up to a land-use sophistication far beyond our modern understandings of how to preserve and to protect our wild lands. William McClung, UPB, East Bay Hills land steward.
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We intend this UPB Post to be a kind of BERKELEY READS forum, a place where we and our intellectual friends can project what we find in books.
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Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books, Edited by Jo Steffens, Yale University Press, 2009, $20 cloth
A delightful set of meditations and lists (along with striking images of their heavily laden shelves and a gem of an essay by Walter Benjamin: “Unpacking My Library”) by several renowned contemporary architects who view their vocations and their passionate relations with printed volumes as bound up with a kindred aesthetic obsession, and for whom form, function and content (and contentment) are most happily wedded in the experience of their beloved beautiful books. Peter Johnstone, UPB Frontman
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