RT @slate: RT @nytimes: kidz diss blogs 4 #fb and #twitter http://slate.me/g0nTzG 

For those between the ages of 34 and 73:

So apparently youngsters are moving in droves to sites like Facebook and Twitter in large part because they’re easier to use and require less writing. 

Meanwhile, the rise of blogging among the 34-to-73 set continues apace, driven by our need to express ourselves in a less-fragmented online medium that allows more than 140 characters.

More evidence that while everything changes, nothing really does. I am reminded of a favorite tweet from a fellow attendee at last week’s TOC (O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing for those of you not wearing skinny pants). She wrote, “Pardon me, but is anyone here under 25?”

Here is a recent message from author Jim Ballowe, whose Christmas in Illinois arrives later this year from UIP. Jim is writing to Gary Deneal, southern Illinois historian and editor of Springhouse magazine, about how Gary’s book connected Jim with a stranger at a wedding in Turkey. You can’t make this stuff up!

Ruth and I have just returned from a very good two-plus weeks in Turkey.    After walking through a great deal of history and seeing face-to-face a rather fascinating culture, we attended the wedding of a nephew this past Saturday evening.  At the wedding, which was on a boat on the Bosphorus, I had a conversation with a friend of the groom, a fellow from Austin, Texas.  When he learned that I was from southern Illinois, he began to talk excitedly about A KNIGHT OF ANOTHER SORT, saying that he had read it twice and was fascinated by Çharlie Birger and your treatment of him.   I thought you’d like to know that you have been extolled at the gateway to Asia.   Oh, yes, he even remembered that I wrote the foreword to the edition he read.  His mother-in-law, a professor of history, had given the book to him.

The book in question is A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger –a classic of southern Illinois true-crime noir that I read in its first edition at my grandmother’s house over 30 years ago. (I was also involved in the launch of the second edition while at SIU Press in the 1990s.)

From Illinois to the Bosphorus, and from a book that led to a conversation that led to an email that ended up on our blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed: good stories live on.

We may not be forced from our positions at the point of a spear or watch the governor (like archbishop Theophilus) reduce each library “to a heap of rubbish” or see them all “closed forever, like tombs” as in fourth-century Rome.

But the fate of our public libraries in tumultuous times speaks volumes about the men and women occupying seats of power, their wisdom, and their values.

Among the many stories generated by the Tiger Woods debacle is this one from the Chronicle’s Tweed column. 

A book in the floorboard of the famously wrecked Escalade appears in a photo published widely by news outlets. That book is the unfortunately out-of-print Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbins. I’m not sure what this says about human nature, but after the photo appeared, Mr. Gribbin’s book’s Amazon rank jumped by 394,000 spots.

An Amazon customer review posted on December 2 says it best:

This book is great, but I wouldn’t recommend keeping it in your car. It is so good that it might distract you, causing you to mysteriously run into fire hydrants and trees.

Bess Lomax Hawes, folklorist, singer, and defender of the folk arts, died last week in Portland, Oregon. We are honored to have published Hawes’s 2008 memoir, Sing It Pretty, as part of our Music in American Life series. She is remembered in today’s New York Times:

As the youngest child of the song collector John A. Lomax, and a sister of the folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Ms. Hawes was part of the premier family of American folk scholarship. She assisted her father in his research and had a distinguished career of her own, teaching anthropology and directing the folk arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1940s she performed alongside Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the Almanac Singers, and she later taught the rudiments of folk guitar to generations of musicians.

Here, too, is a tribute from Peter Dreier in The Huffington Post that demonstrates Hawes’s creative juggling of child rearing (of three very small children) and guitar teaching:

In the late 1940s, she and her husband Butch were living in the Boston area and sent their three children to a cooperative nursery school organized by graduate students at MIT and Harvard. She frequently brought her guitar to the school to perform for the students. Some of the parents, mostly the mothers, asked her to teach them how to play guitar, banjo and mandolin. Bess agreed to charge them one dollar each for each lesson, which lasted several hours, what she called “a whole evening.” She would keep 50 cents for herself to pay for a babysitter and she’d donate the other 50 cents to the nursery school. Word soon spread, and others began to join her classes.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series “Star Trek”: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: “to go,” “to eat,” “to walk,” etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English — the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example — is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

The focus of MPublishing will be the development of information communities for well-defined audiences.   Key markets will include individual customers such as scholars, researchers, and students, as well as libraries and other institutions. Business models will be developed to best serve the needs of the specific target audiences and will include free access, paid access via online delivery and e-readers, site licenses, print, and other modes of distribution.

Like many editors, I am a master in the art of no. Show me your prize and I’ll find a way to reject it or tear it apart and have it completely redone. But Will was a master in the Art of Yes. Yes, the budget is tight, but we can do this. Yes, that schedule is crunched, but we can do this. Yes, that text is a conundrum of words and maps and charts and translations, but we can do this. I got so jazzed bringing a unique problem Will’s way and watching him solve it: Hey Will, looks like we’ve got an Arabic publisher interested in our English edition of the Swedish Moberg titles. What say? And then I’d receive e-mails, typed so hard and fast I could hear his fingers hitting the keyboard like an old newsroom reporter on a Smith Corona. I’d have queries and solutions and links to New York Times articles and then maybe a day or two later a sample, borrowed from the local library.