Buying books in Bangalore, Screech and more book news
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In case you’re going to Bangalore anytime soon: save this great piece about the city’s bookstores, new and used, with recommendations from locals. These days, street sellers aren’t recommended. “Most pavement guys stock popular titles and bestseller novels that are pirated,’ says travel writer and photographer Arun Bhat. The pirated books’ quality is often lousy, and some are printed with missing pages. ‘The booming piracy is mainly because of the pricing. A bestseller is usually expensive and by the time it appears in a second-hand store it could be a few years,’ Bhat explains.
Curious readers in the U.S. won’t have to wait too long for the delayed book by Dustin ‘Screech’ Diamond. While the ‘Saved by the Bell’ alumnus may have been cut out of the recent reunion for People Magazine, he’s still, um, the most overexposed, if you count his 2006 sex tape. Earlier this year, Gotham Books dropped the planned memoir from Diamond; the publisher cited scheduling issues in an Observer article, although the article says that may not be the end of the story. Now Transit Publishing -- which you’d think might be busy enough rushing an unauthorized Michael Jackson bio to shelves -- has said it will release Diamond’s ‘Behind the Bell’ on Sept. 29.
Perhaps Diamond’s book, which is said to detail ‘sexual escapades,’ would be right for a reading at -- of all places -- the British Library. That esteemed institution, according to an essay in the London Times last week, is a hotbed of sexual tension. Because books are sexy.
All libraries are, of course, petri dishes of simmering lust, but the BL is extreme: its walls contain more erotic pressure than an oil rig, a North Sea fishing trawler and several series of ‘Mad Men’ combined. And it turns out that I’m not alone in thinking so. In 2005, Olivia Stewart-Liberty reported in The Spectator that “the whole building sighs with hothouse groans, which swell and fade to muffle other sounds”; in 2006 a gay website exposed the British Library as a cottaging ground and the regular BL readers who I’ve discussed it with concur.
Not that we can agree as to why. Explanations put forward include: the intrinsic erotic appeal of women in pencil skirts, stockings and Sarah Palin spectacles telling you off; the intrinsic filthiness of all librarians (after all, Casanova was one); the enforced silence and bookish atmosphere, which conspire to make you want to do something loud and physical in response; the safety (the theory goes that people feel free to flirt without feeling obliged to take things farther); the presence of books, which after all, are intrinsically sexy and have been connected to seduction for hundreds of years; the unexpected corners.
Our friends at Bookninja point out that it’s fine to be um, moved by books, but the library-as-erotic-hothouse may be entirely subjective. ‘Don’t assume that the librarian is giving you smoldering looks,’ the blog cautions, ‘when really she’s wondering if she should call security.’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
