Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the South Dakota Book Festival in Deadwood along with numerous other book enthusiasts. The festival is a surprisingly well-attended  event with plenty of interesting sessions and a large number of authors and exhibitors selling their latest publications. Ted Kooser’s presentation was a highlight of the first night and it did not disappoint. The man has a way with words that most of us only wish we had. It is a very good thing that Ted is a friend of the Press. I need to mention that Deadwood is an absolutely gorgeous venue … Continue reading The Marketeers Club: South Dakota Book Festival

I recently had the great fortune to spend a couple of days in the company of Alan Day and Lynn Wiese, co-authors of the forthcoming UNP book The Horse Lover: A Cowboy’s Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs. We met outside of Valentine, Nebraska, a small community in the north-central part of the state, mainly because it is the closest population center to Alan’s old ranch,  Mustang Meadows, which sits just across the South Dakota border from Valentine. Alan hasn’t ranched Mustang Meadows since 2003, when he closed the door on a rehabilitation program for wild mustangs. The 35,000-acre ranch at … Continue reading Doc Martyn’s Soul: The Author-Marketing Relationship

Have you ever wanted a book so much that you'll do whatever you can to get it? Spend over two hundred dollars? Call every used bookstore within a fifty-mile radius? Shop on eBay until you drop? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t gotten overly excited when my mom gave me her first edition of the Twilight series (no judging, please) or when I received a beautiful special edition of the Brontës sisters’ collected works for Christmas.  But I’ve never spent more than forty dollars on a book that I really wanted. Like most people in my position (happily … Continue reading The Marketeers Club: Quest for the first edition

The one hundredth Tour de France started Saturday,
June 29. Each summer for the past fifteen or so years, I anticipate the guilty
pleasure of sitting on the couch in a climate-controlled house—watching as the
Tour riders gut it out in a range of weather conditions on their epic journey
to Paris. The three-week, twenty-one-stage race packs in a surprising amount of
human drama as the ever-shifting alliances and tactics play themselves out
against the backdrop of long-standing rivalries.

The riders endure desperate ascents, thrilling and
terrifying descents, daring breakaways, heartbreaking crashes, injuries, and
sickness. They do this within reach of hundreds of thousands of fans who line
the course—mostly adoring, often drunk, and at times dangerously hapless. The
race finally ends on the cobblestones of Paris with a mad sprint for the final-stage
victory.

When the Tour riders cross the finish line in
mid-July, they will have covered 3,479
kilometers, averaging something like one
hundred miles per day for three weeks, much of it in the
mountains, with just two rest days. Their will to undergo the necessary
suffering, with or without doping, never ceases to amaze me. The glory of a Tour
rider’s triumph, however, is often eclipsed
by the shadow of doping. Although doping has possibly existed (in more
rudimentary forms) as long as racing itself, its modern pervasiveness is frustrating
and confounding. With darkness threatening to overshadow cycling’s most iconic
race, I return to a book that I love because it celebrates the bike as a thing
of beauty and a renewable source of joy.

The book is Frenchman Paul Fournel’s compact and understated
gem Need for the Bike, translated and introduced by Allan Stoekl and published
in 2003. Fournel has had a career in publishing and is a longtime member of the
Oulipo literary collective. His wonderful writing and his deep and abiding love
of the bike are both antidotes to despair. I cannot resist quoting from Fournel,
but you will soon understand why: 

Continue reading “The Marketeers Club: Need for the Bike”