Celebrating Independent Bookstore Day

This week in North Philly Notes, Temple University Press celebrates Independent Bookstore Day, Saturday, April 28.  Join the Party! Visit one of these participating area bookstores:

• Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Lane, Mt. Airy Village, Philadelphia
• Doylestown Bookshop, 16 S. Main Street, Doylestown, PA
• Main Point Books, 116 N. Wayne Ave, Wayne, PA
• Open Book Bookstore, 7900 High School Road, Elkins Park, PA
• Towne Book Center & Cafe, 220 Plaza Drive, Suite B-3, Collegeville, PA

What is Independent Bookstore Day?

Independent Bookstore Day is a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April.  Every store is unique and independent, and every party is different. But in addition to authors, live music, cupcakes, scavenger hunts, kids events, art tables, readings, barbecues, contests, and other fun stuff, there are exclusive books and literary items that you can only get on that day. Not before. Not after. Not online.

Why are we celebrating independent bookstores?

Independent bookstores are not just stores, they’re community centers and local anchors run by passionate readers. They are entire universes of ideas that contain the possibility of real serendipity. They are lively performance spaces and quiet places where aimless perusal is a day well spent.

In a world of tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads, bookstores are not a dying anachronism.  They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.

Can the Row’s Relics be Rescued?

This week in North Philly Notes, Dotty Brown, author of Boathouse Row,  writes about working with history buffs on Boathouse Row to find ways to preserve and archive the clubs’  fascinating historical records. 

We have all this stuff. Where do you start? What do you do with it?”

Henry Hauptfuhrer, of the Bachelors Barge Club, was not talking about cleaning out his house. This was about how to preserve 150 years of Boathouse Row history, everything from oil paintings and silver trophies to old log books and financial records.

Last week a handful of rowers toured two 19^thcentury upriver social clubs – the Button (belonging to the Bachelors Barge Club) and Castle Ringstetten (Undine Barge Club) – then traveled down to the Malta Boat Club to survey artifacts desperately in need of preservation.

The problem is ubiquitous on the Row, where important historical records – many dating back more than a century – are variously stored in plastic storage bins, closet-like rooms with no air conditioning, or in the attics of officers’ homes.

Over the years, some clubs have moved their most valuable papers to facilities such as the Independence Seaport Museum or the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where they are preserved, catalogued, and available to the public for review, sometimes even on the internet. But their space is limited (where to put all those trophies?), and archiving costs money which would have to be raised.

The quantity of stuff is so great, it could fill an entire museum – and many wish a Rowing Museum could be launched in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, a rump group made up of Henry Hauptfuhrer of Bachelors, Rick Stehlik and Chuck Patterson of the Malta Boat Club and Katie Biddle of Undine, who is trained in archival work, hope their effort will pick up speed along the Row. Expect announcements of meetings and suggestions for taking steps to prevent papers from mouldering and how to move on from there.

A memorable moment of our little gathering was the quiet presentation by Bachelor’s Henry Hauptfuhrer of a 96-year-old gold pocket watch to the Undine Barge Club.

“A friend who knew I rowed alerted me about the watch” which was for sale decades ago at a jewelry store in Wayne, Henry explained. “It was engraved, “Peoples Regatta, Philadelphia, July 4th 1922, Senior Single Shells, 14 Mile Dash, Won By:….”

“I knew this would be an important item from the glory days of Boathouse Row,” Henry said. “However, the winner’s name was missing and I had no luck over the years” learning who might have won it.

But Rick Stehlik, in perusing old clippings in Malta’s trove, found that the watch had been won by Thomas J. Rooney, a champion rower of the years around World War I. In 1916, rowing for Long Island’s Ravenswood Boat Club, he won the National Singles Championship and would have gone on to the 1916 Olympics, but the games were cancelled because of the war.

It’s not clear how he ended up rowing for Undine in 1922, but his name appears on the club’s 1922 Mileage Trophy, honoring the member who rowed the most miles that year.

The watch, now returned to Undine, comes with its own challenge – that of figuring out how to safeguard it. Along with safeguarding so much more.

Anyone interested in joining this adventure in archiving, please contact Rick at rstehlik1@verizon.net, Henry or Katie or me at bhrthebook@gmail.com

This column was re-posted from www.boathouserowthebook/blog   Follow Dotty on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BoathouseRowBook/ 

Temple University Press Titles the Organization of American Historians Conference

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight the books and authors at the Organization for American Historians Conference, April 12-14 in Sacramento, CA.

Visit us at Booth #210!
Titles on Display include:

Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis.

This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work-and not work.

“A Road to Peace and Freedom”:  The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954, by Robert M. Zecker

Mining extensive primary sources, Robert Zecker gives voice to the workers in “A Road to Peace and Freedom.” He describes the International Workers Order’s economic goals, commitment to racial justice, and activism, from lobbying to end segregation and lynching in America to defeating fascism abroad. Zecker also illustrates the panoply of entertainment, sports, and educational activities designed to cultivate the minds and bodies of members.

Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century, by Rachel Ida Buff

Despite being characterized as a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has seen a long history of immigrant rights struggles. In her timely book Against the Deportation Terror, Rachel Ida Buff uncovers this multiracial history. She traces the story of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) from its origins in the 1930s through repression during the early Cold War, to engagement with “new” Latinx and Caribbean immigrants in the 1970s and early 1980s. By tracing the work of the ACPFB and its allies over half a century, Against the Deportation Terror provides important historical precedent for contemporary immigrant rights organizing. Its lessons continue to resonate today.

On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia, by Sean Scalmer

“Stumping,” or making political speeches in favor of a candidate, cause, or campaign has been around since before the 1800s, when speechmaking was frequently portrayed as delivered from the base of a tree. The practice, which has been strongly associated with the American frontier, British agitators, and colonial Australia, remains an effective component of contemporary democratic politics. In his engaging book On the Stump, Sean Scalmer provides the first comprehensive, transnational history of the “stump speech.” He traces the development and transformation of campaign oratory, as well as how national elections and public life and culture have been shaped by debate over the past century.

Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment, by Harold L. Platt

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation,” by J. Mark Souther

Souther explores Cleveland’s downtown revitalization efforts, its neighborhood renewal and restoration projects, and its fight against deindustrialization. He shows how the city reshaped its image when it was bolstered by sports team victories. But Cleveland was not always on the upswing. Souther places the city’s history in the postwar context when the city and metropolitan area were divided by uneven growth. In the 1970s, the city-suburb division was wider than ever.  Believing in Cleveland recounts the long, difficult history of a city that entered the postwar period as America’s sixth largest, then lost ground during a period of robust national growth.

Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s, by Maureen A. Flanagan

Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.

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Celebrating National Poetry Month with Temple University Press books

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight our books featuring and analyzing poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. 

Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America, by Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate

In Mayan Drifter, Juan Felipe Herrera journeys to the Maya Lowlands of Chiapas on a quest for his Indio heritage and a vision of the multicultured identity emerging in America. He attempts to shed the trappings and privileges of his life in California in order to reduce his distance from the dispersed and shrinking Mayan population. In Mexico, Herrera seeks a deeper understanding of his homeland’s history, its exploitation, and looks to realize his own place in relation to the struggle of his people.

Like the Mayan drifter, the text crosses and extends boundaries. In a variety of narrative voices, poems, and a play, across time, Herrera recounts how the Maya have been invaded by the Spanish, the government, the multinational corporations of the petrochemical industry, and anthropologists. The Maya survive and resist as their numbers dwindle and the forces that mount against them become more powerful.

Inspired by the Maya’s resilience, Herrera envisions the disappearance of borders and evokes a fluid American self that needs no fixed identity or location.

Forthcoming in July from Temple University Press…

Who Will Speak for America? edited by Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin

The editors and contributors to Who Will Speak for America? are passionate and justifiably angry voices providing a literary response to today’s political crisis. Inspired by and drawing from the work of writers who participated in nationwide Writers Resist events in January 2017, this volume provides a collection of poems, stories, essays, and cartoons that wrestle with the meaning of America and American identity.

THEFT 

Fran Wilde

–For Mia

That morning the officials
stole all the words

We bit into apples sliced thin
and drank coffee, not noticing
that the table had disappeared,
the window
even as we talked and chewed and laughed.

Friends wrote columns of blank space
demanding a return
of sense and empathy

and the officials heard the
and saw the

Then they returned our words
in sacks. Gave them back
to us upside down.

So we sit at the thin
and sip at a table

And we bite into windows
The brittle glass stinging our tongues
and we refuse to stop chewing

Also of interest….

On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan by Carlos Bulosan, edited by E. San Juan, Jr.

A companion volume to The Cry and the Dedication, this is the first extensive collection of Carlos Bulosan’s short stories, essays, poetry, and correspondence. Bulosan’s writings expound his mission to redefine the Filipino American experience and mark his growth as a writer. The pieces included here reveal how his sensibility, largely shaped by the political circumstances of the 1930s up to the 1950s, articulates the struggles and hopes for equality and justice for Filipinos. He projects a “new world order” liberated from materialist greed, bigoted nativism, racist oppression, and capitalist exploitation. As E. San Juan explains in his Introduction, Bulosan’s writings “help us to understand the powerlessness and invisibility of being labeled a Filipino in post Cold War America.”

Yo’ Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes and Children’s Rhymes from Urban Black America edited by Onwuchekwa Jemie

Collected primarily in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia during the classic era of black “street poetry” (i.e., during the late 1960s and early 1970s) these raps, signifyings, toasts, boasts, jokes and children’s rhymes will delight general readers as well as scholars. Ranging from the simple rhymes that accompany children’s games to verbally inventive insults and the epic exploits of traditional characters like Shine and Stagger Lee, these texts sound the deep rivers of culture, echoing two continents. Onwuchekwa Jemie’s introductory essay situates them in a globally pan-African context and relates them to more recent forms of oral culture such as rap and spoken word. 

I HATE BOSCO

I hate Bosco
It’s no good for me
My mother poured some in my milk
To try and poison me
But I fooled my mother
I poured some in her tea
Now I don’t have no mother
To try and poison me

Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River by Beth Kephart

The Schuylkill River — the name in Dutch means “hidden creek” — courses many miles, turning through Philadelphia before it yields to the Delaware. “I am this wide. I am this deep. A tad voluptuous, but only in places,” writes Beth Kephart, capturing the voice of this natural resource in Flow.

An award-winning author, Kephart’s elegant, impressionistic story of the Schuylkill navigates the beating heart of this magnificent water source. Readers are invited to flow through time-from the colonial era and Ben Franklin’s death through episodes of Yellow Fever and the Winter of 1872, when the river froze over-to the present day. Readers will feel the silt of the Schuylkill’s banks, swim with its perch and catfish, and cruise-or scull-downstream, from Reading to Valley Forge to the Water Works outside center city.

Flow‘s lush narrative is peppered with lovely, black and white photographs and illustrations depicting the river’s history, its people, and its gorgeous vistas. Written with wisdom and with awe for one of the oldest friends of all Philadelphians, Flow is a perfect book for reading while the ice melts, and for slipping in your bag for your own visit to the Schuylkill.

Yellow Fever
It was a low-flying sheen that I could hardly see through.
It was a murderously persistent whine.
The eggs were slime.
I was too shallow.
Forgive me.