Illinois Press Book Blog

Billie Jean Isbell’s book, Finding Cholita, will receive the honorable mention award for this year’s Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. The committee was very impressed by the melding of genres and portrayal of long-term psychological reality of chronic violence.

Isbell has been invited to read from her work during the SHA session at the annual AAA meeting on Friday, December 4th.

black cat bone
I believe my good gal have found my black cat bone
I can leave Sunday mornin’ Monday mornin’ I’m tippin’ ’round home.
—Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Broke And Hungry,” 1926

A hoodoo charm held to confer magical powers upon its possessor, including invisibility and the ability to triumph over sexual rivals. In the above song, the performer is suggesting that his girlfriend has been able to prevent abandonment by virtue of using his own black cat bone. As dispensed by some conjurers, the charm was represented as a bone boiled from a live black cat that made no reflection in a mirror (Puckett, 1925). An ex-slave noted: “First, the cat is killed and boiled, after which the meat is scraped from the bones. The bones are then taken to the creek and thrown in. The bone that goes up stream is the lucky one and should be kept” (Minnie R. Ross, as quoted in Born in Slavery). At the same time, the phrase was loosely applied to mean “just a bone they put in that hoodoo bag . . . [with] a piece of lodestone, some kind of red cloth; they got it mixed up together” (Willie Moore).

From Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary by Stephen Calt.

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Update 10/29/09: snooker

October 27, 2009 – Champaign, IL and New York, NY –The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program. 

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009.  Together, participants in this Program aim to create an improved online work environment for faculty and students by bringing complete journal runs from multiple publishers together in one place, to ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and to promote a more cost-effective publishing environment for the scholarly community.

“For the last several years the University of Illinois Press and JSTOR have worked together through the History Cooperative, building strong ties of respect and trust,” said Willis G. Regier, Director of the University of Illinois Press.  “We take this step with the blessings of our colleagues in the University of Illinois Library and with high anticipation for our journals.”

Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011.  This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. University of Illinois Press-published journals available as part of the Program will include American Journal of Psychology, American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of American Ethnic History among others. The journals will also be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

“The University of Illinois Press has been a leader in promoting digital scholarship, innovation, and new publishing collaborations in the humanities,” said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. “The Press not only shares our aim to deliver excellent scholarship at good value to libraries, faculty, and students, but brings a spirit of cooperation and a strong desire to support new forms of scholarship using digital technology.  We are thrilled to be working with them to advance scholarship through the Program.”

With the addition of the University of Illinois Press, the current issues of at least forty journals will be available from JSTOR for the 2011 subscription year. Other organizations are being encouraged to join the Program.

Rebecca Simon, Associate Director of University of California Press and Director of Journals + Digital Publishing added, “It is terrific that the University of Illinois Press is joining this effort and bringing their fine portfolio of titles to the Program.  The more like-minded participants we have, the greater the benefits we are able to deliver to libraries and to users.”

For more information, see: http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp

The University of Michigan Library announces MPublishing, the new uber-publishing initiative that includes the University of Michigan Press alongside other campus units devoted to scholarly communication.

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.

 
Gary Cialdella discusses his new book The Calumet Region: An American Place on WGN-TV’s Midday News.

As a first-time author, the whole meeting-the-readers idea is still pretty new to me. I’ve spent virtually all of my writing life working in a vacuum, very rarely having any contact with anyone who reads my work. That suits the shy side of my nature just fine, but promoting a new book offered a different experience that I thought might be interesting, or with luck, maybe even fun. It turned out to be that and more.

My book, King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, tells the tale of an innovative and important record company that operated in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1943 to 1971. I know that many people in Cincinnati are interested in the history and legacy of King Records—and feel strongly that King has never received the credit it deserves as a pioneering American record company—so I obviously hoped to reach that core group with the book. I was fairly confident they’d at least appreciate King of the Queen City. What I hadn’t expected was their gratitude.

I felt that gratitude most strongly at two Cincinnati events, the annual multi-author Books by the Banks festival, sponsored by the Cincinnati Public Library and held downtown at the Duke Energy Convention Center, and a book signing the next day at Shake It Records, the coolest record store I’ve ever had the pleasure of shopping at.

The first book I signed at Shake It was for a woman who had to rush off to catch her daughter’s soccer game. She bought a couple of books and promised to buy several more for holiday presents. She then said, sort of apologetically, “I know you’ve heard this a million times already, but I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this book. I know it must have been hard, and my husband and I thank you for sticking with it.”

Well, no, I haven’t heard that a million times already, but I heard it over and over at those two gatherings. Most of the thanks came from folks who said they “had been waiting years for this” and/or that it was a story “that needed to be told.” The high point for me was hearing that from Zella Nathan, the nonagenarian widow of King Records founder Syd Nathan.

It was highly gratifying for a new author to sell some books at these two functions and fairly surreal to be asked to autograph them. I look forward to hearing from people that they enjoyed reading it and that they’ve recommended it to friends. But being thanked so profusely by so many people for doing what was essentially a labor of love—that goes way beyond gratifying. That will take some thinking about.

*****

Jon Hartley Fox is the author of King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records.

On October 20, 2009, photographer Gary Cialdella was interviewed on WTTW-TV’s Chicago Tonight about his new book The Calumet Region: An American Place.

Last week, The Jerusalem Post newspaper featured a review of Walter Rimler’s George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait.

“Rimler shines in weaving together anecdotes, correspondence and a wealth of interviews with the composer and his contemporaries to create a vibrant, flesh-and-blood picture of the man and his music in a readable and enjoyable book. Rimler’s Gershwin is genuinely likable, if somewhat arrogant: a mama’s boy to a coldhearted matriarch; a brother who was abandoned in deteriorating health; and a playboy who finally tried to settle with the wrong girl.”

The New York Times reports how libraries are lending e-books:

Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.