A Basket Full of Holiday #FridayReads

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PT #FridayReads photoDelighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
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My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.


Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.


I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.


I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.

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Enjoying the Holiday with the Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams

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Going back to my days at Franconia College, when a professor there, Bill Congdon, introduced me to the work of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) I’ve adored his music. And though I’m Jewish and don’t observe Christmas, I also enjoy RVW’s “seasonal” music. So, just like this day last year, I’m listening to some of my treasured LPs, one with songs he collected in the field with early recording equipment from nonprofessional musicians and singers. This was similar to the work of Alan Lomax in the U.S., in later decades. RVW was part of a worldwide interest on the part of symphonic composers who cultivated folk idioms, such as Smetana and Dvorak in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Sibelius in Finland; and Aaron Copland in the States. It should be said, that Vaughan Williams didn’t just take folk themes and rework them–-he was also a bold, original composer with an edge, exhibited in such works as his modernist Fourth and Sixth symphonies. Having enjoyed the album of songs pictured in my tweet above, I’m now playing a gem of RVW’s called “Five Tudor Portraits.” If you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to RVW’s music, I urge you to discover his work. For starters, here’s his Wikipedia page.

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A Freelance Writing Assignment to Grow On

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Bonnie Clyde from History® websiteBack in September, thanks to a referral by publishing friend David Wilk, I was hired to write a 1200-word article for the November/December issue of H Magazine, the publication of the cable channel known as History® (formerly History Channel®). On a rush basis, they asked me to do a piece about what would be History®’s December 8-9 broadcast of a new 4-hour miniseries on Bonnie & Clyde, airing simultaneously on History® and sister networks Lifetime® and A&E®. Materials I could review–for a sense of the production–were scant. Before accepting the job, I submitted a brief opener to what I might write, a kind of imagined interior monologue of Clyde Barrow sitting behind the wheel of a car waiting for Bonnie Parker. When I heard back that they liked that bit, I knew I had a path to successful completion of the article. When I handed it in five days later the editors liked it, and so it runs below pretty much as I turned it in, with them adding their own title (I had called it “A Bonnie & Clyde for Our Times,) pictures, captions, and their own headlines and sub-heads. 

A few days after the mini-series aired last Sunday and Monday, I got some print copies of the magazine in the mail. I’ve scanned the relevant parts of the issue and am sharing them all below. I later found it’s also online [link since taken down], but I think it’s more interesting to read the actual glossy pages, so here they are. You may read them in full by pausing the blog’s slide show at the top right corner. As readers of my blogs will know, I write a lot of personal, reportorial, expository, and essay-type prose, which made it a special treat to channel my imagination in to the fictional exercise that makes up the first half of the article. This is a sort of writing I have not done for a long time, and I’m glad I had the chance to do it here. Hoping to do more like it in 2014. Thank you David Wilk, History® and the editors of H Magazine.

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William Morris’s Historic Printing Press Gets a New Home in Rochester, NY

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Albion No. 6551On December 5 New York Times reporter David Dunlap published a fascinating article about the forthcoming sale at Christie’s auction house of the illustrious printing press that under William Morris’s cultivated hand and eye printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, with illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Completed between 1894-96, it is among the most important modern fine press books ever printed and published. I’ve always enjoyed Dunlap’s reporting, in which he usually covers architecture. He brought the right sensibility to this article, which I loved for it being stuffed with factual nuggets like these:

“The instrument on which this artwork  [the Kelmscott Chaucer] was composed was the Improved Albion Press No. 6551, a hand press almost seven feet high, weighing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds, that was made in 1891 by Hopkinson & Cope in England. It is to be auctioned on Friday by Christie’s [in New York]. The estimate is $100,000 to $150,000.”

I’ve been waiting to blog about Dunlap’s article, because I wanted to report the auction result, if I could. And from a report I just found today, I’ve got that now, and also great detail on the provenance of the press. For instance, I’d been wondering: 

How did the Albion Press No. 6551 even get to North America?

Turns out, in 1924, noted type designer Frederick Goudy shipped the Albion across the Atlantic to his print shop in Marlborough, NY. I’m glad it wasn’t wartime, when the ship could’ve been the target of a U-Boat crew. In a real sense, the precious Albion carried the legacy of Morris’s elevated enterprise, so devoted–all-in, as we say now– to cultivating the art of the book. In 1960 the press was acquired by J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman of White Plains, NY. Under their ownership it was moved on three occasions, the last time when they moved house to Ardsley, NY. Though the family had long been active in fine printing circles, they came to find day-to-day operation and maintenance of the press beyond their capacities. Current owners, Jethro K. Lieberman and his wife Jo Shiffrin, told Dunlap, “It’s time for someone who will put it back into service.”

Dunlap reports that over two years in the last decade of the 19th century, 438 copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were printed by Morris and his pressmen on the Albion, and that every copy is accounted for, whether in institutions, libraries or private hands. He writes,

“Four belong to the Morgan Library & Museum. John Bidwell, its curator of printed books and bindings, permitted this reporter to examine a volume bound in white pigskin.The sheer amount of ink on paper is breathtaking. The decorated pages are blacker than they are white. Yet the printing is so exact that there is not so much as a stray smudge in this jungle of leaves, vines, berries and flowers.”

The report on the auction, running at What They Think, a site devoted to news of the commercial printing industry, reports that the Albion N. 6551 will now be housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate NY in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. It was bought for RIT by the “Brooks Bower family. Bower, a 1974 graduate of the School of Print Media, is an RIT trustee and chairman and chief executive officer of Papercone Corp., an envelope-manufacturing firm in Louisville, KY.”  The auction price was $233,000, well above the estimate. It will be put in to regular use by RIT students. I was pleased to read this thorough provenance of the press, which includes a lovely bit of history provided in part by Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection:

“’From 1932 to 1941, Albion No. 6551 was owned by the Cary Collection’s namesake, Melbert B. Cary Jr., director of Continental Type Founders Association and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. . . .Cary bequeathed the press to his pressman George Van Vechten, and in 1960, J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman acquired Albion No. 6551 for their Herity Press. They topped the press with a Liberty Bell, a reminder of the vital role that private presses play in the freedom of the press.’ Albion No. 6551 will join the Cary Collection’s Arthur M Lowenthal Memorial Pressroom, a working collection of 15 historical printing presses and more than 1,500 fonts of metal and wood type. Supporting study of the press is a collection of Kelmscott Press publications and archives of material related to Frederic Goudy and Cary’s Press of the Woolly Whale. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is located on the second floor of The Wallace Center at RIT. Hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For information, call 585-475-3961 or go http://cary.rit.edu.”

It’s been a good week for the art of the book, as last Friday I saw gorgeous printed materials at the Center for Book Arts’ holiday open house, and now this news about the outcome of the Christie’s auction. I hope to see the Cary Collection and the Albion No. 6551 someday. The photo at the top of this informational post and those borrowed below for it I happily credit to Eddie Hausner and Marilynn K. Yee, photographers of The New York Times, and thank them for this fair use.Kelmscott ChaucerJPKELMSCOTT1-articleLarge-v2

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A Belated #FridayReads–Peter Warner’s Smart Spy Novel “The Mole”

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In early November I’d been to the launch party for the spy novel The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates, and am only now getting around to reading it. I’m really enjoying this heady thriller whose narrator and protagonist is a Canadian transplant to the U.S. that finds himself on the staff of the real-life senator from Georgia, Richard Russell. I tweeted about the book last Friday and neglected to share about it here until now. Highly recommended, the sort of book for which I’d like to put my work aside so I can burrow deeper in to the unfolding tale.

Note: This piece is cross-posted at my other blog, Honourary Canadian.

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Celebrating Books & the Season at the Center for Book Arts

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Center for Book ArtsHad a great time at the Center for Book Arts holiday open house and sale last night. My wife Kyle, a visual artist, used to teach a course on printmaking at the Center and it was fun for both of us to revisit the big loft space in Chelsea on W. 27th Street and see the place full of people. We found the work of many, many talented book artists and paper artists on display, Kafana Mundial, a musical trio (clarinet, accordion, and percussion) playing Balkan music, and lots of nice food & drink. Everywhere my eye landed I saw printing presses, drawers of old metal type fonts, bookbinding materials, and beautiful examples of paper craft and book art. We enjoyed speaking with Alex Campos, director of the Center; Barbara Henry, master of letter press printing who’s done a stunning Walt Whitman book under her Harsimus Press; Roni Gross, book artist and publisher of Z’roah Press; and Esther K. Smith, artist, author and co-publisher of Purgatory Pie Press. Here are the best pictures Kyle and I took last night. Please click here to see all of them  

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Coverage Under Obamacare for 2014–Done!

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A Welcome Change in My Household

Hallelujah! Kyle and I have just completed health insurance enrollment in NYS for my family with Emblem, formerly called Health Insurance Plan of NY (HIP). We will enjoy comprehensive coverage and a huge savings compared to the ridiculous premiums we’ve had to pay for the past 5 years, since I became self-employed. Kyle and I send a big thanks to Venus Emmanuel and Esther, skilled navigators at Harlem United, a fabulous social service organization! Also kudos to President Obama for spearheading this effort, despite the most absurd litany of opposition to it; to all the members of Congress who voted for the new law; and to Governor Andrew Cuomo who’s mandated facilitation and implementation of the ACA in NYS.

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Chris Christie—Playing Petty Politics over the Great Gray Bridge

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January 9, 2014 Update: In the month since I first posted about the mysterious closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge, the episode has mushroomed in to a full-blown scandal, especially with yesterday’s revelations that aides to Governor Christie deliberately targeted the mayor of Fort Lee for political retribution. In light of this news, I am urging all visitors to The Great Gray Bridge to read this October 10, 2013 story by the New York Times’ Michael Powell, which chronicles the quashing of a lesser-known criminal case against a close Christie ally. Like #GWBridgeGate, this story deserved much more attention before New Jersey voted for governor last November, but that didn’t happen. Again, as with #GWBridgeGate, Powell’s story should be much more widely read and shared, as evidence of the climate of casual and criminal corruption surrounding Chris Christie and his administration. Below is the opening from Powell’s lengthy article. You may read it all here.

“Prosecutors sent tremors through rural Hunterdon County when they announced a sweeping indictment of the local Republican sheriff and her two deputies in 2010. The 43-count grand jury indictment read like a primer in small-town abuse of power. It accused Sheriff Deborah Trout of hiring deputies without conducting proper background checks, and making employees sign loyalty oaths. Her deputies, the indictment charged, threatened one of their critics and manufactured fake police badges for a prominent donor to Gov. Chris Christie. When the charges became public, the indicted undersheriff, Michael Russo, shrugged it off. Governor Christie, he assured an aide, would ‘have this whole thing thrown out,’ according to The Hunterdon County Democrat. That sounded like bluster. Then the state killed the case. On the day the indictment was unsealed, the state attorney general, a Christie appointee, took over the Hunterdon prosecutor’s office. Within a few months, three of its most respected veterans lost their jobs there, including the one who led the case.”

A Power Play Goes Awry

As a blogger whose site is inspired by the look and lore of the George Washington Bridge, aka the Great Gray Bridge, I’m following with great interest the current political scandal unfolding around the administration of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who before becoming chief executive of the state was a US Attorney in the state. If you’re just catching up to this bit of tawdry political theater, it seems probable that Christie and minions of his unleashed a vendetta against Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee, NJ, the small city at the western end of the busy, busy span.

Multiple news reports, including an audio and written piece by WNYC reporter Andrea Bernstein and this NY Times article suggest that the trouble began when Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, declined to endorse Christie in his recent re-election. Back in September, as the gubernatorial campaign unfolded,  local access lanes to the tollbooths approaching the bridge from Fort Lee were closed without explanation. Little notice was given to bridge or Port Authority officials; those who were told anything say they were informed the lane closures were supposedly for a traffic study, a claim that since been debunked. They were also told not to report it or discuss the matter with colleagues. The result, during the first week of public school with traffic peaking right after Labor Day? This is how the Times reports it:

“Cars backed up, the town turned into a parking lot, half-hour bridge commutes stretched into four hours, buses and children were late for school, and emergency workers could not respond quickly to the day’s events, which included a missing toddler, a cardiac arrest and a car driving into a building.”

The  person behind the scenes pulling the strings was David Wildstein, a close friend to Governor Christie who has now resigned from his state job, lamely claiming he doesn’t want to be a “distraction.” Beyond that, he declined comment to reporters. Meanwhile, Christie denies any role in the episode. Democrats in the NJ legislature smell a rat. They are subpoenaing officials and holding hearings, trying to get to the bottom of the stupid, petty vendetta against Mayor Sokolich.

A month before Christie’s re-election, which came by a wide margin over his Democratic challenger, the excellent NY Times reporter Michael Powell published a story that should have gotten a great deal more attention than it did. The Quashing of a Case Against a Christie Ally detailed how in 2010 a serious public corruption case against local law enforcement authorities in NJ’s Hunterdon County was halted with no apparent reason and local prosecutors who had prepared the case against County Sheriff Deborah Trout and an underling were fired, on orders that came from a longtime Christie ally in the state government. Having read that story, I’m not at all surprised that Chris Christie may have pulled such a petty stunt as this new one, or countenanced the conduct. Powell’s story includes this paragraph:

“There is no evidence that Mr. Christie ordered the dismissal of the charges against Sheriff Trout. But his attorney general, Paula T. Dow, who had served as his counsel at the United States attorney’s office, supervised the quashing of the indictment and the ouster of the respected prosecutors. Sheriff Trout had political ties to the administration. She led an association of county law enforcement officials that backed the candidacy of Mr. Christie and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who had previously served as sheriff in Monmouth County. Ms. Guadagno and Ms. Trout exchanged chatty e-mails, according to court records. After the election, Ms. Guadagno thanked Sheriff Trout for sending her deputies to work on the campaign. Ms. Trout left office in 2010. But the case and the Christie administration’s role in killing it have surfaced again because one of the dismissed prosecutors, Bennett A. Barlyn, has filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming that the attorney general killed the indictment to protect prominent supporters of the governor. In August, a New Jersey judge ordered the attorney general to release the grand jury records to Mr. Barlyn, who said the records would detail the considerable strength of the now-dead case. The state has appealed the decision. “I was frog-marched out of the prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Barlyn said, ‘because I objected to the dismissal of a viable case against an important local official.’”

As Christie revels in his 30-point win last November and moves ahead with what I expect to be a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination I’m sure there will be efforts to dismiss this affair over the GWB and people will joke about corruption being a common affair in New Jersey. However, I believe that the deliberate instigation of traffic jams on the bridge has a potent resonance that just about everyone can relate to, including people who don’t follow politics closely.  I hope that media stay on the climate of casual corruption that has infected the Christie administration.

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