Well-Read Life™

On this Father’s Day, remembering Churchill’s daughter

The story I remember is that Churchill didn’t want any statue of himself because he didn’t want pigeons mucking up his head. But there is a statue near Parliament in London, and I heard that the head is electrified to keep the birds off. I have no idea whether any of this is true, and it hardly matters. What does matter is that his memory stay alive, and stories can do that. 

And we will need these stories more now, as the man Winston Churchill really was slips inevitably out of living memory.

The recent celebration of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landing showed the Greatest Generation dying off at a fast clip. One soldier who didn’t land on the beach also just died: the Lady Soames, a Dame of the British Empire and Ladies Companion of the Garter, Britain’s highest chivalric order. She was also known as Mary, Churchill’s daughter. 

She did what others could not to keep the memory of Churchill alive well into the future. A tiny part of her efforts was realized at Levenger, in the form of books written by and about Churchill, and lovingly published by our small publishing arm.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison recounts her meeting with this last living family member of the man who, as Kennedy said, “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

                                                                                                                                     Steve

Lady Soames was busy writing her memoir that would be published, in 2012, as A Daughter’s Tale, when I met her on March 15, 2005. Levenger had published an illustrated edition of Winston Churchill’s essay, Painting as a Pastime, in 2002, and Lady Soames had graciously agreed to write the foreword to it, even though she barely knew who Levenger was.

Faxes were still popular then, and Lady Soames’s neatly typed manuscript had sprung forth from the Levenger fax machine one day. She had not only written a loving tribute to her father as a painter; she had also signed the piece at the end, deliberately and boldly: Mary Soames, with an inked flourish beneath it. It meant that we could reproduce her signature in our book. That was Christmas enough for me that year.

 We followed our first Levenger Press book on Churchill with another, much larger one: the edition by Minnie Churchill  and David Coombs that showcases all of his paintings, which number over 500. Minnie, for whom Lady Soames was Aunt Mary, had been instrumental in Levenger’s being the publisher of both books, and it was she who had generously arranged that I meet Lady Soames. Aunt Mary thought I should see some of the paintings contained in Levenger’s books.

 The daughter who went to war

Her home near London’s Embassy Row had the feel of a charming cottage. As Minnie, Simon and I walked past the black wrought-iron gate that had been left open, I looked up to a second-floor window and saw a room filled with bookcases. It was where Lady Soames was writing her memoir, taking care to corroborate stories for fear of, as she put it, “colliding” facts.

Lady Soames was 82 at the time but looked much younger, and anything but frail. Some of that was her voice—low and deliberate, lacking the lisp of her father’s, but a strong and distinctive voice nonetheless.

“Come sit by the fire and have some Champagne,” she said in greeting. As we walked through the foyer, I spied a big red leather box tucked casually beneath a small table. Scuffed and ripped and faded, it might have been any family catchall box, but of course it wasn’t. It was Winston Churchill’s dispatch box that he had used during World War II, his name lettered on top in gold foil.

In the living room Lady Soames’s scoop-me-up-size dog, Trish, was trying to hide on the loveseat near a pillow that spelled out the home’s pecking order: My dog isn’t spoilt. She has me well trained.

Never mind that Trish’s mistress had enlisted in the British army as soon as women were allowed to, at age 19, and had shot down enemy bombs during the war. It was Mary, the youngest of Winston and Clementine Churchill’s children, who accompanied her father to North Africa for his meeting with FDR, and to Quebec when he helped to plan Operation Overlord—what became known to the world as D-Day.

Papa’s paintings

Not surprisingly, the walls of Lady Soames’s home were a canvas for many of the oils her father had painted. “Papa painted snow so well, even though he hated it,” she remarked, stressing the second syllable of Papa.  

Churchill didn’t begin to paint until he was 40, and he approached it with something akin to ebullience, describing it in Painting as a Pastime as a “joy ride in a paint-box,” for which “audacity is the only ticket.”

But there was a certain humility as well. Churchill seldom signed his paintings and when he submitted them to juried shows, he kept his identity secret. His paintings showed well.

There were more of her father’s paintings upstairs, and so Lady Soames took us up into her bedroom, where among the oils was the first one her father had given her. It hung above her bed, as if her father were watching over her.

 (Later, Minnie told me how rare it was that anyone saw what I just had. “There are family members who’ve never seen Aunt Mary’s bedroom,” she said.)

Up we went again, to the third story of Lady Soames’s house, to see more of her father’s artwork. Then it was off to an Italian restaurant, a neighborhood place where they knew Lady Soames well.

The War Rooms

I was too excited about the evening to recall what I ate, or even if I did, but I do remember the conversation about how good the Queen looked when she had come to the opening of the new wing adjacent to the Churchill War Rooms just a week or so prior. Churchill was Prime Minister when a young Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952.

“Have you seen the new museum?” Lady Soames asked me. I told her I hadn’t yet but hoped to during my stay in London.

The opening had focused some of the media attention on Lady Soames. She described it with a wry wit that made it clear she was her father’s daughter. “I’m old, you know,” she said with a mischievous smile, “practically extinct, like the dodo bird.” Reporters were figuring this might be their last chance to interview Churchill’s last surviving child. It wasn’t, fortunately, but they were wise to seize the opportunity. Even though, as Lady Soames said to much laughter, not all the interviews were “worth getting your hair done for.”

The next morning, early, I got a call from Minnie. If I could be at the Churchill War Rooms for ten o’clock that morning, the director would give me a private tour. I assured Minnie that she didn’t have to make such a special arrangement for me. She laughed and said, “Oh yes I do. Aunt Mary said so.”

 The dream

Before we left Lady Soames’s house for the restaurant, she asked me about the book that Levenger was about to publish, The Dream. A brief essay that Churchill wrote in 1947, shortly after the Allied victory that Churchill had been so instrumental in, the story recounts a dream Churchill had of his long-dead father, Randolph Churchill, returning to see him.  

Winston had spent the early part of his life seeking but never winning his father’s approval. Randolph died in 1895 when Winston was 20, well before he would make his indelible mark on history.

Lady Soames told me she had once asked her father, when he was in his late eighties, what he regretted, if anything. “I thought it would be not receiving the VC,” she said, referring to the Victoria Cross medal for valor. But that wasn’t it at all. 

What her father regretted most was that his own father had not lived long enough to see him make something of himself.

Unlike his father, Winston Churchill was a loving and doting parent to his children. His daughter Mary made her own mark on history, honoring her father in death as she adored him in life. The way only a devoted daughter can.

Mim

P.S. Another statue of Churchill stands in Paris, and on a trip there last month, I saw schoolchildren run over to it with their sheets of paper and pencils, on assignment, writing at his feet.

Steve

 

 

How to read a hummingbird

When I was in college I read an article, I believe in Scientific American, that I have never been able to forget. It was about hummingbirds, or rather, a mystery about them. The scientists described a migration of a certain species of hummingbirds that traveled more than 1,000 miles across open ocean. The scientists couldn’t figure out how they could make it. Calculating how much energy they would have to burn during transit, it just wasn’t possible that they could complete the flight without stopping to refuel. Yet, they did.

The authors of the article explained that the littlest bird’s energy burn rate was so high during flight that at night, when sleeping, they had to lower their body temperatures to hibernation levels just to avoid starving to death before breakfast.

I haven’t bothered to keep tabs on whether the scientists have yet figured this out. The truth is, I savor the mystery. It’s like watching the birds themselves from my mother’s back porch in Nevada—how they hover, and then extend their beaks like Olympic fencers into the red feeder my mother fills with sugar water. The pitch of their hum changes when they extend themselves. I say a silent blessing of thanks for their existence. 

My feeling of awe has been shared by humans for a very long time, but few have done more about it than a fellow named John Gould. A nineteenth-century British scientist and artist, his paintings of these avian wonders now fetch thousands of dollars. Our most recent Levenger Press offering is a facsimile of 58 of Gould’s prints, each presented individually in a portfolio box so you can frame them if you wish. (Guess what my mom is getting for Mother’s Day.)

John Fitzpatrick, the director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, wrote the essay that’s part of the portfolio. Like the creature he has studied and documented, John’s essay is a little gem. He tells us, for example, the speed that these tiny specks of turbo-charge can reach: usually 55 miles an hour, but as fast as 93 mph. Their wingbeat rate averages 80 per second—and that’s just when they’re hovering.

And we humans thought we were hard-working.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison spoke with John in the course of working on our Humming-Birds 1887. Here are portions of their conversation:

 Levenger  Press: We Americans like everything supersized—our coffees, our flat-screen TVs, our SUVs. Why is there such a fascination for tiny feathered creatures no bigger than our thumbs?

John Fitzpatrick: There’s something magical about such a little bird, the tiniest in the world. With other birds, you can see their wings, their feet. With hummingbirds, you see this speck, often flying backwards, and hovering. They’re doing all these things that other birds can’t do. They’re little gemstones in flight.

LP: Who is more taken with hummingbirds, women or men?

JF: The passion for hummingbirds is sex-blind. I’ve led a lot of tours of hummingbird watchers, of both sexes and of all ages. Even bankers and lawyers—everybody’s captivated by them.

LP: Have they signaled changes in ecosystems and climate patterns the way other birds have?

JF: Probably not, given that hummingbirds are mostly tropical and reach their peak diversities in tropical environments, which show less change in habitats. But hummingbirds are highly attuned to seasonal change, as they’re attentive to peaks in flowering. (What also lures us to hummingbirds is their attraction to colorful flowers.) They will shift elevations, going up and down as needed according to seasonal conditions. The hummingbirds in the northeastern United States disappear entirely during our winter and go to Venezuela. They are amazingly mobile.

LP: Why are John Gould’s hummingbird illustrations so highly regarded?

JF: For one thing, Gould illustrated all of the hummingbirds, and he did them exquisitely, with the brilliant colors that represent them. He was able to capture their allure in an elegant, lively way. I think the fact that he painted them before there were photographs of them also appeals to people. It’s one reason why we like our Audubons.

LP: You personally discovered a new species of hummingbird, the Royal Sunangel. What did it feel like to encounter a new member of the pantheon?

JF: We were on a ridge top in northern Peru, where we had already discovered a new bird, a wren. But we kept seeing this particular hummingbird. This was 1975, and there were no good field guides at the time, so on our last day there, we netted the hummingbird so that we could compare it with species in museums once we got back to the U.S. There was no match, and because the bird we had netted was a male, we didn’t know the genus. So the following July, we designed a new expedition just for this—to get the female specimen, so that we could determine the genus. On that trip, we also discovered three other bird species. It was the hummingbird that had drawn us back.

LP: How do hummingbirds figure into the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and are they part of the eBird citizen-science project?

JF: At the Cornell Lab, we provide high-level scientific training to professionals, but we’re also seriously trying to engage the ordinary citizen into doing science. eBird is one way we do that. It’s now the world’s largest biodiversity database, and hummingbirds are part of it. In fact, every species of hummingbird has been submitted to the database. We get 300,000 to 400,000 checklists of birds a month in eBird. There are now more than 150 million observations. It’s birds as messengers of science—and those messengers include the littlest birds of them all.

**

John Fitzpatrick, it turns out, is as much a Renaissance man as John Gould (who was an adviser to Darwin). He, too, has tried his hand at capturing hummingbirds with paint, as you will see here:

The rest of us can be more than content with enjoying John Gould’s painterly odes to these tiny Type-A birds.

 

Lincoln at Gettysburg: 150 years later, what did he say…really?

These are the times when I delight in being a book publisher. In our small cadre of
books are some mighty topics, one being Lincoln’s five versions of the
Gettysburg Address that he wrote by hand. I had no idea of the remarkable
stories they contain until we began to put together our book, Long Remembered: Lincoln and His Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address. 

 This November 19^th marks the 150^th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of his address at Gettysburg. The President was instructed by one of the event planners to come to Gettysburg and deliver “a few appropriate remarks,” and that was what he did. How is it, then, that such a succinct speech—about 272 words—has held such mystery for so long?

 And why does no one know for sure exactly what Lincoln said?

Shorthand and telegraph lines

One likely reason is because of how he said it. Those of us who saw the film Lincoln know that our sixteenth president had a reedy, high-pitched voice. Lincoln was hardly given to a stentorian delivery that would thunder across the field at Gettysburg. It would be difficult for reporters to catch every word, especially since they would have been caught off guard by the brevity of the remarks.

Another reason, according to Doug Wilson, the Lincoln historian who wrote the lead narrative  for Long Remembered, was that most reporters at the time took notes but not shorthand. What often resulted were approximations of what was said.

Doug gives this example of how the Chicago Tribune relayed the opening of Lincoln’s address:

 Four score and seven years ago, our fathers established upon this continent a Government subscribed in liberty and dedicated to the fundamental principle that all mankind are created equal by a good God, and now we are engaged in a great contest.

Enter Joseph I. Gilbert of the Associated Press, the hero that most of us have never heard of, to mostly save the day. As Doug relays, Gilbert was allowed to transcribe the text from the manuscript that Lincoln read from. These were the words that raced across telegraph lines throughout the North.

And that, more than once, encountered ERROR IN TRANSMISSION as they did.

Fortunately, it’s been possible to compare the A.P. text with the transcription by a reporter who was well-versed in shorthand. Scholars have been able to, as Doug writes, “arrive at a very close approximation of the words Lincoln uttered from the platform.”

Mystery vs. myth

What remains even more of a mystery is just what manuscript Lincoln read from. It’s a question that Doug and the other scholars in Long Remembered still puzzle over, and a story well worth reading.

But even if that mystery is solved, we still can’t be certain that Lincoln uttered every word that he wrote. After all, the technology of audio recording was decades away. The best oratory undergoes
eleventh-hour revisions as the remarks are being delivered. John F. Kennedy never made a mark on the pages he read from for his inaugural address, but he made repeated edits (included to his iconic “ask not” sentence) as he delivered it.

Better that we embrace these mysteries of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, though, than succumb to its myths. One of the most pernicious is that Lincoln crafted this masterpiece of near-sacred text with a few hasty scribbles, on an envelope, in the train that took him to Gettysburg.

Anyone who has ever toiled over a piece of writing knows better. Lincoln’s words may have been few, but they were written deliberately. Those sentences that fill one wall of the Lincoln Memorial were written not for the moment, and not for the day, but for the ages, by a man who cared deeply about words. Just listen as the actor Sam Waterston recites them:  

And now to you...

If you’ve visited the Lincoln Memorial or Gettysburg, how did you feel when you encountered Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks”? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Stargazer, note-taker, troublemaker: Galileo’s disruptive technology

“Consult the reliable little book by Galileo…which describes observations of the stars first made by him.” So read the blurb (in 1611) for the book based on the notes that Galileo took while he peered at the heavens through a spyglass of his own making. But admiration for his book,The Starry Messenger, soon turned to castigation. Galileo went from stargazer and note-taker to first-class troublemaker. Scientists still thank their lucky stars that he did.

 Some 400 years after its publication, The Starry Messenger still causes a stir, but for different reasons.

One is the book itself, and the attempts that have been made to forge it. The other is the book as radical thought piece, and what it meant for modern science that Galileo was able to upend the conventional wisdom of his day. He caused some tremors that still reverberate.

 These two different aspects of one little book (the original is just 30 pages) converge in the new facsimile edition of The Starry Messenger that Levenger Press has published with the Library of Congress. The Library has one of the few intact copies of Galileo’s modest but monumental opus, mercifully left untrimmed by book binders who didn’t know better. It is housed within the Library in a vault made of glazed brick and outfitted with the latest in fire-retardant technology. Kept under temperature and humidity control, “the reliable little book” is also kept under lock and key, accessible by only a few. Clearly, this is a troublemaker of the first order.

 The editors of the new facsimile edition, Daniel De Simone and John W. Hessler, are among the Library staff who have access to the book. Dan is the curator in charge of the Rosenwald rare-book collection that houses Galileo’s. John is the curator of another of the Library’s collections and a lecturer in the history of early modern science at Johns Hopkins University. The two of them talked with Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison about The Starry Messenger and what it can teach us about the world today.

                                                                                                   —Steve

 Levenger Press: Galileo based his notes on what he saw through a simple spyglass that he cobbled together. Was he, in fact, developing some new and disruptive technology?

 John Hessler: Galileo did not, of course, invent the telescope, but rather improved it in important ways. The idea that he cobbled it together is an interesting way to put it, since we do see him experimenting a great deal with different kinds of lenses and tubes and different methods for making better lenses. One of my favorite Galileo manuscripts happens to be a shopping list from late 1609, at the very time he was making improvements to the instrument, which not only has things like raisins, chick peas and spelt listed on it but also an organ pipe, rock crystal and fine clay to grind lenses. The list shows Galileo as the true garage inventor, working to quickly perfect an instrument that he thinks might make him some money.

LP: In our very first meeting about the book, you said of Galileo: “He trusted his notes.” What part does Galileo as a good note-taker play in The Starry Messenger?

Daniel De Simone: The Starry Messenger was one of the first books based almost totally on observation, and the evidence that Galileo used to construct his thesis was based on the notes he compiled during the process of observing the moon, the Milky Way, and Jupiter. Observation became the hallmark of the scientific revolution, and much of the original evidence that scientists used was based on the notations that they made during the process. Once an observation was made, recorded and reported, other scientists could check the findings by making their own observations. Galileo trusted the notes he made and rushed to publish them before someone else made similar observations and reported their findings in print.

LP: Was this the first time a scientist of Galileo’s stature could actually prove his point, thanks to his telescope and notes?

John: Galileo was not a committed Copernican before his telescopic observations. The idea that the earth moved around the sun as put forward by Copernicus in 1543 provided a slightly simpler way of calculating the positions of the planets and stars, and predicting eclipses and equinoxes, when compared with the older, Ptolemaic, earth-centered universe of the ancient Greeks. Galileo’s observations of Jupiter’s moons, and even more important, of the phases of Venus, changed all that and actually provided empirical evidence that Copernicus was, in fact, correct.

LP: When The Starry Messenger was first published, it was not the controversial book that it became. What happened to sway people’s opinions?

John: When the book was first published, Cardinal Bellarmine, one of the most important theologians at the Vatican, had the book examined by some of the best mathematicians at the Collegio Romano. This group found that Galileo was correct on all points and that his observations of the mountains on the moon, the additional new stars and the moons of Jupiter were, for the most part, correct. It was only later, after what had actually been shown in the book began to sink in, that several prominent theologians started to regard the Copernican system as against Biblical teaching. The fact that Galileo held that the earth did, in reality, move, and did not consider the Copernican system simply a convenient calculation device, got him into trouble. It was a position that he would later recant in order to avoid prison.

LP: Not only did the contents of the book get him into trouble--the book itself has been at the center of some controversy because of attempts to forge it. But the Library’s copy has helped to distinguish the real from the fake. Is the proof essentially in the paper?

Dan: Not exclusively in the paper. An analysis of type and image is also a method of determining authenticity. For example, in many books woodcut initial letters were used to decorate volumes during the hand-press period. Because of the methods used to forge books, a distortion is sometime detectable when the images of these initials are examined. The same goes for typefaces. With a practiced eye, these subtle distortions become apparent. Also, an understanding of period book bindings will help to detect a sophisticated binding or a remboitâge binding, a modern repair meant to resemble an original work. So in effect, the study of the book as a physical object, in all its component parts, is required in the detection of modern forgeries.

LP: We learned a new word reading your preface in the book: filigranology. Why is it important to Galileo’s book?

Dan: The study of watermarks, or filigranology, as it is sometimes referred to, has become an extremely important element of bibliographical study over the past sixty years. Alan Stevenson, an American researcher working in the libraries of Great Britain after World War II, began to notice that editions of printed books that did not have imprint information such as printer, city of publication and date, could be identified in some cases by the watermarks that appear on the printed leaves of the book. Conversely, books that were attributed to a place or date could be questioned based on the watermarks that appeared on the paper of a given copy. This was important for the study of Galileo’s books because recently a number of copies appeared on the market, at prices above a half million dollars, that were being sold as originals. Because the copies of Galileo in the Rosenwald Collection have such strong provenance, the copies in questions were brought to the Library of Congress so a comparison of watermarks could be made to see if the watermarks matched.

LP: We hear a lot about the need for stronger science and mathematics in schools. Galileo was both scientist and mathematician. Is there a lesson we can learn from him?

John:  Science is about experiment and not about ideology, it is about patience and observation, and it is not an easy road to follow. It is revisable and not fixed for all time. Sometimes what scientists find is not always what the rest of the world wants to hear. Today we can reflect on controversies that surround evolution and global warming as the same sorts of battles that Galileo was waging.

LP: For those of us who are not scientists (or mathematicians), why is The Starry Messenger still a relevant book?

John: The Starry Messenger is more than simply a book. It is an icon, a symbol for the way science is done. We can see in it not only empirical experiments and observations, but we can also see lurking in the background the luck that we sometimes need in order to stumble into a discovery. Galileo started his observations with a telescope that was no more than a child’s toy, a gift given to him by a close friend, and with it he created a revolution in thought that gave us much of our modern world view.

 

                                                                       

 

 

 

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Tell me what you hold dear

Special message to all who commented on this blog through May 19 (thank you!). We have selected six winners of our Holding Dear contest (see the announcement on our Facebook page). But we were so moved by these many entries, we wanted to find a way to thank each one of you. So I would like to extend to all who sent in their story this special offer. If you would like to purchase a copy of Holding Dear, take $10 off the purchase price, May 21 through May 27. (This applies to new purchases only.) Just enter code HDBLOG at checkout. Click here to go to the Holding Dear page. With my thanks, best wishes, and admiration. —Steve

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When I show friends our L-Tech fountain pen and stylus, I like to tell them that they’re holding three centuries of technology in their hand—the 19^th century fountain pen nib, the 20^th century machine-age brass barrel, and the 21^st century silicone stylus tip. Then I like to watch the smile that comes over their faces, as they think about what an old—and new—object they’re holding.

One object, three centuries

This three-century object manifests for me just how lucky we are to be able to tap into such a broad spectrum of technology. I love the feel of the fountain pen as it glides on my paper with the lubrication of liquid ink. In a quiet room, you can hear it, as well as feel it. (Charles Frazier, in his book Cold Mountain, described that sound as the scritch of the pen.) The ink glistens for a few seconds before it permeates the paper with its deep, dark blue.

Then I’ll cap the pen, flip it upside down, and use the stylus to draw on my favorite writing program, 51 Paper. I have a notebook therein where I practice writing, in Spanish, the expressions I read in English. It’s a modern and quite pleasing chalk slate. Bliss!

Now that we can enjoy fountains pens, ballpoints, and digital styli, why would we want to give any of them up?

In the era of virtual, still physical

It’s not just a matter of sentimentality; it speaks to our productivity. For connectivity, breaking news, and immediate communication, you can’t beat digital. But for communication with yourself, nothing beats the quiet pleasures of pen on paper—especially a pen perfectly suited to your hand and writing style, and paper, like an untouched field of fresh snow.

The digital—the virtual—will take us ever farther and higher into the cloud. It’s exciting to speculate on how we will work and create in ways we can’t yet imagine. Yet we are physical beings still, living in a physical world.

Consider the solidity of a strong wooden desk under your arms. It holds your computer ever so steady. Or the touch of a leather case that warmly and securely embraces your smartphone. It is carrying on the long tradition of using leather to give our fragile human bodies purchase on life—shoes, saddles, reins, quivers to hold our arrows.

Now that the heritage technologies we used to construct our civilization—like printed books, notebooks, and ink pens—are technically obsolete, we are free to truly understand their benefits and choose to use them when we desire.

A $100 gift card for the best stories of what you still hold dear

For my new book, Holding Dear: The Value of the Real, I was able to ask some of our customers about the physical object that inspires their thinking and creating. We’ve reproduced some wonderful—and surprising—stories by David McCullough, David Allen, Patti Smith, Ann Patchett and others. I especially liked our technologist friends Paul Saffo and Kevin Kelly weighing in on the analog objects of their affection.

But a book, in its paper iteration, has a finite number of pages, and we need to continue the conversation.

So I’m asking you to share a story with me. Tell me, dear reader, about a favorite box, or a certain painting, or a prized volume of poetry inscribed by a loved one that just wouldn’t be the same as a digital book, no more than a photo of people hugging substitutes for a real hug. Or whatever your object may be.

What thing, when you touch it, touches you back?

For the best stories (in our terribly subjective judgment) that we receive between now and May 19, a $100 Levenger gift card awaits. It’s good for acquiring other objects you hold dear.

Post your story as a Comment to this blog

Just click on the Comments link below with your story. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

We’ll notify the winners by email and announce them on our Facebook page. (Fyi—we may want to share your story in our social media or other Levenger communications channels.)

Gift card or not, each of you will be rewarded as you think back about what physical object you’re grateful for in our increasingly virtual world.

With thanks and gratitude to you, I am

Ever yours,

Steve

 

Capitalism Even My Mother Could Love

At age 32, when I announced on a phone call to my mother that I was starting a business, the line seemed to go dead. My mother, whom I love deeply, is not someone you would call business-friendly. As a retired California social worker and occasional head of her local Democratic Party, she distrusts big business.

She isn’t alone.

Business in America, according to the book I’m about to review, has an approval rating of around 19 percent, two points above Congress.

My father, on the other hand, a retired CPA and mall developer, admires business. When I was still in high school I remember him telling me, “Profit is one of the most beautiful words in the English language.” He regularly complained about anti-business prejudice in the media and academia. As I was setting off to graduate school in sociology, he told me to enjoy myself, “but don’t believe everything your professors tell you.”

My parents divorced when I was six.

My mother had hoped I would become a doctor or teacher, as was customary on her side of the family. My father had already abandoned hope that his journalist/consultant/analyst son would ever become an entrepreneur, and so was delightfully surprised when I made the same phone call to him. He called me his “late-blooming son.”

As a product of both my parents, I set out in business somewhat conflicted. Serving customers felt natural and good, but to survive in business, would I have to be ruthless? With degrees in biology and sociology, my education was devoid of business courses of any kind. Did I miss out on learning how to be hard-nosed?

'Give capitalism a chance'

In the early months of Levenger, working out of our townhouse in Boston, Lori and I had plenty of days with no sales, and one day I shall always remember, with just one sizable return—that is, a negative-sales day.

Was it too late to become a doctor, I wondered?

Yet in our fledgling business I did feel I had finally found my calling. (I discovered this with the help of another book called Minding the Store by Stanley Marcus, who taught me that being a merchant could be a noble thing.)

After a dicey first two years of taking no salaries, success came dramatically to our company. During those early years of success, I would hear business executives speak at charity events about the importance of “giving back” to their communities. I chafed at this. It implied that business was taking and that we business people, like criminals, had a debt to repay.

Yet I watched our own business employ people, help them grow in their careers, make our suppliers happy, keep our accountants busy, and give our customers something that, judging by the many heartfelt letters we received, they had been yearning for.

How could this be a bad thing?

One day a promising young customer service rep at Levenger who was about to graduate from college came to see me. She told me she was quitting Levenger to work for a nonprofit, because she wanted to do good in the world. I said I was sorry to lose her but understood that people must follow their hearts. I suggested that it was also possible to do good in the world while working for a company. I even gave her some examples. But she wasn’t buying it.

As we parted, I said with a smile that I hoped she would “give capitalism a chance.” She laughed, as did I, but she left the company anyway.

From profits to purpose

If the new book Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business succeeds in changing the world the way the authors hope, my remark about “giving capitalism a chance” will no longer be a joke. Because future young people graduating from college will just assume capitalism can do good in the world. They won’t think they have to join a nonprofit to follow their hearts.

They will understand that a “for-profit” company can just as easily be described as a “for-purpose” company, and that profits are one way, and sometimes the best way, to sustain noble work.

At present, though, that future seems far off. 

That’s why John Mackey, the co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Raj Sisodia, a professor of marketing at Bentley University, wrote this new testament of business. They named it after the movement they helped found, Conscious Capitalism.

Its credo begins with this sentence:

We believe that business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

Part of the problem, explain the authors, is an image problem.  Corporate malfeasance, real and fictional, gets lots of play in the news and movies, while the goodness of business does not.

But most of the problem is more invidious.

The noble purpose of business has been hijacked. And this hijacking is not the work of cynical professors and journalists, but of business people themselves who willingly share the myopic belief that business is, first, foremost and finally, about profits.

The economist Milton Friedman, in his widely cited 1970s essay on social responsibility, claimed that profit was the only social responsibility businesses had. Too many people have interpreted his advice too narrowly, to everyone’s detriment. Mackey and Sisodia convincingly demonstrate that it simply isn’t true. Businesses that focus first on purpose, and then expand their view widely to benefit all stakeholders—rather than just narrowly serving shareholders—are better businesses, and better by all financial measures.

Unfortunately, write the authors, capitalism “developed in a stunted way, missing the more human half of its identity.”

The 70% solution

One of the most serious consequences of this dwarfed manifestation of business is that the average engagement of workers in the United States hovers around 30 percent. Some 7 out of 10 workers just aren’t that into their jobs. Think of the opportunities for everyone if those ratios were reversed.

It is the job of business leaders to help engage that lost 70 percent, and to help employees realize that in their hands—and hearts—lies the basis for the positive transformation of societies and communities.

The authors of Conscious Capitalism ask us to imagine a business “built on love and care rather than stress and fear,” a business where staff members are able to “craft a purposeful life while earning a living,” and where employees can experience “the joy of service, of enriching the lives of others.”

Even if you aren’t a doctor or a teacher.

Conscious Capitalism: from good to great

It’s a different way of thinking about business. Instead of viewing situations as tradeoffs (high wages leads to lower profits), the authors advise that we think in terms of mutual wins: living wages lead to happier staff members, which creates happier customers, which generates higher sales, which results in satisfied shareholders.

Conscious Capitalism is a good book. It’s well-researched, well-written and has already received favorable reviews in major publications. But what is exciting is its potential to become a great book—the kind that triggers a fundamental and pervasive change in attitudes.

Could Conscious Capitalism do for business what Silent Spring did for the environment?

The widespread view of capitalism as some sort of necessary evil is a kind of DDT to human potential. Breaking into an enlightened conception of capitalism could liberate human potential, leading to new levels of innovation and personal fulfillment.

But as powerful as Conscious Capitalism can be, it is not an elixir for business success. The most enlightened capitalists must also go through the hard work of developing an effective corporate strategy—that long and difficult process of examining options and selecting the very few to pursue. Then comes execution, a topic that rightfully has filled volumes of business books and launched the careers of untold numbers of business consultants.

Just as essential, in order for Conscious Capitalism to be sustained, it must be embraced by the current generation of young people starting businesses today. Only if they take it up—which they will do in their own ways—does the movement have a chance to change the world.

There are promising signs.

Tearing down the Ivy Curtain

More colleges are focusing not only on entrepreneurism, but on social entrepreneurism. Students will do their own mashups to create businesses that feel like nonprofits, and nonprofits that are run like businesses.

I’m hopeful that students will tear down the Ivy Curtain that for my generation separated the so-called impractical liberal arts from majors like business and accounting. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more business students with their heads in the clouds, and art-history majors who like accounting.

My own sons, college classes of 2010 and 2013, are reading Conscious Capitalism, so we can discuss it as a family. Already they’ve let me know it seems rather obvious to them.

And maybe that’s our best hope—that young people setting off in business today will just assume capitalism can do good in the world. “Like, duh, Dad.”

I hope so. And I hope when they call my mother to tell them about their businesses, the conversation will be anything but silent.

Now to you, dear reader: Does Conscious Capitalism make sense to you? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments.)

My love is like a red, red Redouté

In the few months that have passed since we published the famous flowers of Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840), I’ve enjoyed showing this unbound book to customers and friends, untying the crème ribbon and folding open the linen panels, then asking what they imagined it cost. Their estimates are always higher—sometimes way higher—than our price, which makes me happy that such a beautiful work of art is also such a great value.

Few things are more beautiful, or fleeting, or appreciated, than fresh flowers. What human who has witnessed their beauty hasn’t wanted them to last—hasn’t wanted them to stay as dewy fresh and magical as they are at their glory? 

Redouté may be the closest yet to answering that wish—despite being 150+ years old. In our Redouté collection, we publish 128 of his flowers, gathering them loosely, like a magnificent Valentine’s bouquet, into a portfolio. 

Don Rakow at Green Cay with Redouté

Donald Rakow, the executive director of Cornell Plantations, wrote one of the introductory essays that accompany the portfolio. When Don told us he was coming to Florida to speak at the Green Cay Nature Center just a few miles from Levenger, we welcomed the chance for another conversation.

On a gloriously warm and sunny January day, Don and Mim Harrison, the editor of Levenger Press, sat on a bench overlooking the preserve and talked about the everlasting love of a Redouté rose.

Levenger Press: At Levenger we refer to Redouté as the Audubon of botanical art, since Audubon was not only a contemporary but also an admirer. As a scientist, do you find that Redouté was as rigorous as Audubon in terms of accurate portrayals?

Donald Rakow: There are three qualities that both Redouté and Audubon exhibited that unite them. The first is that they were both absolutely dedicated to anatomical accuracy. Up until this point, objects in nature were not accurately portrayed. Before Gutenberg ushered in the era of multiple copies of the same page, one monk would copy a drawing of a flower specimen, another would copy the first monk’s drawing, and so on—much like that telephone game where the message the last player hears barely resembles the message the first player sent.

Also, throughout much of the Middle Ages it was considered sacrilegious to accurately portray one of God’s objects. The botanical artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reversed this. Artists like Redouté were committed to dissecting flowers, understanding their parts, then reconstructing them on canvas.

LP: So anatomical accuracy was the first quality Redouté and Audubon shared. What was the second? 

Don: They were enamored of their subjects and dedicated to depicting them in artistically beautiful ways. Audubon would place a bird in a tree, even though he would be working with a stuffed specimen. Redouté would often combine different flowers in one illustration. 

LP: They were, in fact, equally artist and scientist. 

Don: Yes, and maybe a bit of alchemist as well. Because the third quality that united them is the most inscrutable component of all: each was able to animate his subjects so that they looked fully alive. Light, color, texture—they used all these to bring the animus to the drawing. Redouté would place dew drops on a petal, or have a butterfly alighting on the flower. Subtle elements like these were part of their magic. 

LP: As a botanist, what do you find the most striking about the Redouté prints? 

Don: They look so contemporary. They don’t look like period illustrations. There is a true universality to his work.

LP: Even with the growth of photography, Redouté’s illustrations never seem to have lost their appeal—or value. Why do you think this is? 

Don: Redouté’s pieces are so artistically beautiful that no photographer or engraver has ever been able to re-create them. Even today, in an age of computer graphics, we still value Leonardo’s hand drawings. There is an intellectual brilliance to art like this.

LP: Do botanists still hand-draw?

Don: Yes. There is an American Society of Botanical Illustrators, which recently held its national meetings at Cornell. The members are hired to illustrate scientific texts and journals. They also exhibit their work as art.

LP: Why would there still be a demand for hand-drawn illustrations?

Don: In a photograph, you’re capturing an instant. An illustration can capture the essence of that flower or fruit over the course of its life. It can show that flower in all its stages—as a bud, in full flower, in its post-flowering state.

LP: You mentioned fruit, and Redouté painted some beautiful fruits. Why is he known more for his flowers? 

Don: I think we as humans are more interested in looking at flowers than fruits. Many fruits are rather similar looking. Flowers are complex, and phenomenally varied—in their petals, their pistils, their stamens. And there is a sexual nature to flowers.

LP: How about the rose, which Redouté is so famous for: what is its enduring appeal?

Don: In part it’s the rose’s role in Victorian society, and the language the Victorians assigned to it. Many flowers were the Victorian equivalent of an emoticon. The small bouquet known as a tussy-mussy that Victorians would often give would basically tell the recipient a story, based on what flowers had been gathered. The rose always held particular meaning, with different colors signifying different emotions. A red rose signaled deep passion; a pink, less so, but still affection. A burgundy rose spoke of unconscious beauty. A lavender rose was a declaration of love at first sight.

LP: So Robert Burns’s famous line of “My love is like a red, red rose” is fraught with passion.

Don: It speaks to how easily we can anthropomorphize flowers because of our deep affection for and connection to them. Consider the number of women’s names that are based on flowers. Besides Rose, there’s Daisy, Tulip, Iris, Lily and, of course, Blossom.

 

Now to you, dear reader: We’ve found that many of our customers have had a passion for the flowers of Redouté. Are there other artists whose works draw you irresistibly? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments). And Happy Valentine’s Day!

                                                                                                     Steve

Does Hand-Writing Matter?

Now that that old bloodhound Writing-by-Hand is banished to the doghouse out back, while the twin white poodles named Tapping and Typing are on our laps at the dinner table, should we care? Is there any evidence that taking pen in hand is somehow better for thinking or remembering? At Levenger we have a dog in this fight, since we sell lots of nice writing instruments and quality paper. So I’ll admit we have a bias to seek out such evidence and share it widely.

With that confession, let me also say that we’re attempting to take a balanced look at the evidence. My biggest fear is that we jettison writing by hand on paper prematurely, without considering its benefits. And one thing is sure—we’re all falling more deeply in love with our smartphones and tablets, me included.

So I’ve asked Mim Harrison, editor of Levenger Press, to do a deep dive into the literature and write up her findings. Here is her report:

—Steve

Richard Mason’s novel The Gilded Curve: History of a Pleasure Seeker is not just a digital book; it’s a multimedia, interactive experience known as an eLumination. Tap onto an illustration of a street or building and it comes to life in video. Tap the gramophone icon (gramophone!) and it’s an audiobook, with one of the cast of Downton Abbey reading to you. Historical context of the story, set in Amsterdam in 1907, is just another tap away.

What you’re really tapping into is your imagination, in ways that an electronic platform can uniquely offer.

There’s one other button to tap, and that’s the one where this 36-year-old author tells you why he wrote his novel—by hand.

“I wanted to introduce something physical to the process,” he says in the video clip. Hand-writing, he says, “encourages concision and briskness and quickness.”

Or, as the novelist Mark Helprin  says, “a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel.”

A number of neuroscientists would agree.

It is all in your head

Humans have been writing—putting their hands to something­—since the Sumerians started chiseling away at cuneiforms around 3500 B.C.

“Handedness is uniquely human,” writes the neurologist Frank R. Wilson in his book titled, appropriately, The Hand. We humans are the only one of the evolutionary bunch to favor one hand over the other.

It’s one of those instances where saying “it’s all in your head” has more than a modicum of truth. “Any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function…is grossly misleading,” Dr. Wilson asserts.

Brain changer

Our brains are wired in ways not only intricate but specific. We use one set of circuits to add, for example, and a different set to subtract.

Much of this wiring begins early. At the Library of Congress’s international summit on books and literacy, Karen Keninger, the director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, stressed the importance for the blind of learning Braille when they’re young.

“It’s difficult to learn Braille as an adult because of the wiring you have to do between your hands and your brain,” said Karen (who is blind).

Occupational therapist Marion Wilm maintains on her Child and Family Development blog that children who don’t know how to hand-write are compromising the development of their fine-motor skills. These skills provide the kind of dexterity that surgeons and scientists need.

As it is with surgeons and scientists (and plumbers and mechanics), so it is with humans who write: tools matter. Picking up a pen can put in motion a different set of circuits from tapping on a keyboard.

Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, two European researchers, describe some of these different “neural pathways” in their 2010 study, “Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing.” (Think tactile for haptics; from the Greek for to grasp.)

They cite experiments that showed how Japanese readers would use different sets of circuitry in their brains when they read two different kinds of Japanese writing, kana (used for foreign words, proper names, and grammatical elements) and kanji (which is based on older, Chinese characters).

These different neural pathways were also evident in another study the researchers cite, where some subjects hand-wrote characters and others typed them. Magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI (the f is for functional; it measures changes in blood flow in the brain) revealed that different parts of the brain kicked in, depending on whether someone was hand-writing or typing.

How, then, does this different circuitry affect how we think and remember and execute?

Write, memory

A 2010 study at Indiana University showed, again through an fMRI, that children remembered letters better when they wrote them out than when they merely studied them. Adults have been shown to respond in a similar way, particularly when learning a new set of symbols or characters.

But does hand-writing have the upper hand over typing where memory is concerned?

There is some evidence to indicate that it does.

On a keyboard or typewriter, every letter or symbol is exactly the same touch (those haptics again). With a pen or a pencil, as University of Washington educational psychologist Virginia Berninger has noted, your hand is acknowledging each stroke involved in making that symbol or character. Your brain seems to pay more attention when your hand is so invested. Her studies, often conducted with other researchers, have found that schoolchildren who hand-write have better recall.

“The physical act of writing or tracing provides an additional layer of memory,” write three other researchers from the University of Central Florida, Timothy J. Smoker, Carrie E. Murphy and Alison K. Rockwell. Hand-writing involves distinct, specific movements. Typing is the same, repetitive movement. Handwriting, say these researchers, “creates more context, thereby increasing retention.”

This results in more than simply remembering the letters you wrote. It can make you a better note-taker.

Take note

Philip Hensher, the author of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, is also a frequent classroom lecturer. He can tell you which students do the worst and the best in his classes:

“The students who make no record…do worst….The second worst are the ones who plonk a tape recorder on the desk….The worst ones after that are the ones who get out their laptops, and type furiously as you speak….because typing as someone talks encourages transcription without much thought.”

And the best?

“The very best students are the ones who take out a piece of paper and a pen, and write down the things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it as they go.”

A 2011 study conducted by Tina Weston and Randy L. Newman at the University of Manitoba corroborates clinically what Hensher found empirically. Taking notes by typing on a laptop worked better than hand-writing notes if the students were tested immediately, but this advantage disappeared if testing was delayed.

“Handwriting,” write the Manitoba researchers, “is more likely to withstand the test of time.”

Brain craves

In a virtual world, then, there is still virtue—and value—in the physical. And, says technology forecaster Paul Saffo, “it isn’t just the ink. It’s the interaction of ink and paper and stylus.”

He is using stylus in its ancient reference to a writing utensil. But what about the new definition of stylus—the kind you use to tap an iPad and a smartphone? How will writing and learning and memory change, the more we use a 21^st-century stylus to write on a 21^st-century tablet?

In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, author Charles Duhigg tells us that for an activity to become a habit, there must be not just a cue and reinforcement but also a craving.

Many of us came quickly to crave email, then smartphones, then e-readers and tablets. We’re teaching ourselves new habits as far as how we read as well as write. Our brains have apparently readily engaged with the digital.

So does it really matter if we no longer write by hand, even if it can be beneficial? Most of us can’t easily read Middle English, either, but we can readily find a modern-English version of The Canterbury Tales.

True. But here’s the thing: we have a unique opportunity in this decade to use both these skills, hand-writing and digital printing—whether the latter be keyboarding or texting or writing through voice-recognition software. Why not leverage all our assets? Use all of our tools—and more of our brains?

We do eventually lose the skills we don’t use. But why relinquish something that’s so easy to hold onto?

Especially since we now know that the kinesthetics of writing by hand affects how we think by brain.

“I think, therefore I am,” wrote Descartes long ago. Perhaps today he would say:

“I write, therefore I think.”

What think you?

—Mim

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Seven Practices for Finding the Time to Read

It’s easy to find more time to read: all you have to do is pick up a book you can’t put down.

Then repeat.

Sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m serious. So how do you find those books you can’t put down? Start by picking up books you think you might like, and just start reading. If you don’t love it, set it aside and try another.

Pick up enough of these candidate books, and you’ll never again have trouble finding the time to read. Unless, of course, you have to work. But at least you’ll be dying to get back to your book—and that’s the formula for a well-read life.

Moreover, it’s never been easier to find those books you think you’ll like. Here are seven practices, including both tried-and-true traditional ways as well as practices newly enabled by technology.

Practice One: Jump on your friend’s book. Friends often—although not always—love the same kind of books. When you find a friend reading something, read a few pages yourself. Reading books together is one time-tested way to get more from your reading, and from your friendships.

Practice Two: Listen to what wise readers recommend. Down through the centuries, wise young people have asked wise old people what books they have liked. This works as well now as ever, but today it’s easier because we have access to a long pantheon of greats. Here, for example, is David McCullough’s Jefferson Lecture, in which he tells us what books as a young reader led him to his calling as a historian. They are as great today, he assures us, as they ever were.

Better yet, listen to David read his 38-minute talk, and feel as though you’re at the dinner table with him.

Practice Three: Watch the movie first. At Levenger, we call these movies-to-books boovies.  Many people think they’re cheating if they don’t read the book first, but this is mistaking precedent for reason. The truth is, a movie can be a pleasing portal to the longer treatment of a book—even if the movie is bad.

Consider these facts: Most movies last about two hours and are based on a script of about 100 pages, whereas most novels are 250 to 350 pages and take from 8 to 20 hours to read. Plus, while movies excel at action and special effects of the visual kind, books allow readers to experience that unique special effect of mind reading—when the author conveys what a character is thinking.

Reading the book first can naturally have you expecting to see all the characters and scenes of the book, so it’s easy to be disappointed. A screenwriter and director must toss out whole chapters, and even characters, to create movies people want to watch.

So what if you do watch the movie first but leave the theater disappointed?

Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books and partner in the film company Mazur-Kaplan, explains why movies often fail despite being based on a great book:

“A good movie depends both on an excellent treatment—the screenplay—and excellent execution of the movie itself. That’s very hard to do, and bear in mind that producers don’t get paid unless a movie is made, so sometimes compromises are made.”

As for the original book?

“As a matter of course, you can’t go wrong choosing a book that has been made into a film,” Mitchell says. “There is something attractive in it—story, mood, texture, a character, or the world it created.”

If you actually like the movie, it’s almost a sure bet you’ll love the book, and be richer for the double experience.

Last year saw big-budget remakes of Les Misérables and Anna Karenina plus debuts of The Hobbit and Life of Pi. This year, we’re in store for more luminous popcorn burners:

• “Ender’s Game,” based on the popular science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, starring Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.

• “The Great Gatsby,” another filthy-rich attempt to screen The Great American Novel, this time starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, with Toby Maguire as one of the most famous narrators in literature. You can watch the trailer now. Think it will out-luster the movie made 39 years ago with Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston?

“Paranoia,” based on the deliciously dark corporate espionage novel by Joseph Finder, starring Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman and the very busy Harrison Ford.

What a red-carpeted year in books it promises to be.

Practice Four: Try audiobooks—again. Some people tell me they don’t like audiobooks. When I ask how many and how recently they’ve tried, I often hear they tried only one or two, and years ago. News Flash: Today’s audiobooks rock!

From their sketchy cassette-tape commercial beginnings in the 1970s, audiobooks have blossomed into beautiful art forms that garner their own awards and fan clubs for narrators. Narrators (usually stage actors) are reviewed ceaselessly by listeners, and only the great ones read today.

Audiobooks are, in my experience, best for novels, histories and narrative nonfiction. They are one of the blessings of our age—an unsurpassed way to get more books in your life. Don’t tell me you don’t like audiobooks unless you’ve tried at least three, and recently. One more thing, now that I’m lecturing: they’re not just for driving.

Check out AudioFile Magazine for award winners and reviews. Let an audiobook change your life.

Practice Five: Browse shamelessly. No bookstore, physical or virtual, will kick you out for browsing. The more books you taste, the more books you’ll eat up with gusto. Technology has paved our book streets in gold; we just have to know it.

Practice Six: See your way into books. I loved Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. But don’t take my word for it. See her TED video, which 3.5 million introverts have already quietly done.

See or hear the brilliant Steven Pinker explain his masterpiece, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, as he presents his Long Now Foundation SALT talk in San Francisco. After his presentation he’s interviewed by Stewart Brand. Wow!

Before spending hours reading Sherry Turkle’s rewarding book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, see her seven-minute interview with Stephen Colbert.

Thinking about reading Warren Buffett’s newest? Start with six minutes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Can you see yourself laughing your way into new books? I can.

Practice Seven: Listen to a podcast. Today it’s easy to download podcasts and feel as though you’re on an intimate phone call with very interesting people. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Steve Mirsky, a beloved editor at Scientific American, is like a great jazz musician: he’s a master at asking just enough of the scientists and authors he interviews, and then stepping out of the way. Listen to him interview David Quammen about his latest nonfiction thriller: Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.
2. Jeff Kline interviews business leaders on the future of Conscious Capitalism (a bright future, indeed). Listen to his interview of author Cindy Wigglesworth on her new book about learning spiritual intelligence.
3. Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness—mild-mannered book salespeople by day, celestial book mavens at night. After listening to their Books on the Nightstand, you’ll want a bigger nightstand.

Okay, I’m stopping at seven. And I haven’t even mentioned book reviews, blogs, and our treasured librarians.

It may seem counter-intuitive, given that we’re trying to find more time to read, to first spend time surveying and sampling books. But remember that chefs who wish to prepare a sumptuous feast rise early and go to the farmer’s market.

So let us get our coffee or tea, my friend, and start walking the book aisles, with morning’s golden light at our backs.

And now to you, dear reader: What would you suggest for Practice Number Eight?  I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Kate DiCamillo’s mouse that soared

When author Kate DiCamillo addressed the American Booksellers Association’s award luncheon a couple years ago, I was smitten. Few authors speak as powerfully in person as on the page, and Kate is one of them. She told of how, as a young girl, she discovered books in her town’s small local bookstore, and how it changed her life forever.

Years later, Kate DiCamillo would change the lives of countless young readers herself. She did it with the help of a very small mouse.

The Tale of Despereaux is the book that not only won the most prestigious award given to children’s books—the Newbery Medal—but also gave to children and adults a story that will likely endure alongside those from Hans Christian Andersen, A. A. Milne  and E. B. White. Despereaux, you see, is a little mouse with the big ears and bigger heart who is desperate to save a princess.

Despereaux went Hollywood several years ago, with a full-length feature film from Universal Studios. In 2012, Kate and Levenger conspired to bring him into 3D as a bookend. And this bookend itself tells a story.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison spoke with Kate about Despereaux’s morphing from an idea in her head to an object on her shelf. Here’s their conversation: 

Levenger Press: What has it been like to have a two-dimensional mouse made into a three-dimensional bookend?

Kate DiCamillo: It is an odd and humbling thing to sit alone in a dark room in the early hours of morning and try to imagine your way into the heart and soul of a (smaller-than-average) mouse, and then to watch him come to life in so many different ways. It truly seems like a dream to me.

LP: How is it different from seeing him being made into an animated film?

Kate: There is something wonderful about being able to reach out and actually touch the top of Despereaux's head. It was grand to see him up on the screen. And it is comforting to think about having him on my bookshelf.

LP: When you’re first creating the characters for your books in your head, do you see them in 3-D?

Kate: I do!  They are whole, complete, multi-dimensional, complicated and confounding in my mind.

LP: Despereaux is a children’s book—the recipient of the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, in fact—and yet you use grown-up words like coda in it. How do you write to appeal equally to children and adults?

Kate: I just work on trying to tell the story in the best way I am able. That is, I try to get out of my own way and let the story tell me what to do.

LP: For readers who haven’t read Despereaux (cripes, as Despereaux’s brother might say), what would you want to tell them about why there’s a spool of red thread on the bookend?

Kate: Something like this: that red thread is there to remind us all that there is a way through our troubles.

LP: Your message on the bottom of the bookend says, “Reader, I hope you found some light here.” What did you mean by that?

Kate: Stories are light to me. To read a story comforts me. To tell a story comforts me. The reading and the telling both illuminate. And that is a grand, grand thing.

And now to you, dear reader: what was the book where, as a youngster, you found light and comfort? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).