Bits and Pieces for Friday

Here's a round-up of information, ideas, quotes and trends you'll want to explore:

1. Trade Paperbacks Surge in Popularity http://tinyurl.com/dmr83k

A mass market paperback is one of those smaller paperbacks like you buy in a drugstore. A trade paperback is larger, maybe 5 x 7 inches or 6 x 8, inches and it's almost a cross between a paperback book and a hardcover. Hardcovers are very pricey, except that many discount big box stores like Kmart and Target discount them heavily. Booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders and Books-a-Million also discount them. To me, the biggest problem is weight. Yeah, with the cost of additional luggage constantly rising, a hardback book--although that's my preference for the joy of the experience and for the longevity of the product itself--is too darn heavy to cart around.

2. E. Desmond Lee, St. Louis Philanthropist, Dies

I can't begin to list all the ways that Des Lee influenced St. Louis with his generosity. His name appears all over town on buildings and in hallways. I remember when my husband David first met him. Des Lee wanted to know all about my husband, which I think was probably a clue as to why Des was such a treasure: Despite his own illustrious career and his business success, he genuinely cared about others.

http://tinyurl.com/yewkpce


3. This from a New York Times article, a quotation about whether there's any merit to being private (as opposited to using to Twitter to record one's every waking moment) attributed to the poet C.K. Williams--

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings, I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression, sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact.


In other words...maybe conducting your person business over a cell phone in a crowded public place is NOT the height of cool, folks.