Henry Bemis Bulletins: What's News With Us Today?

December 22, 2017:



BookRiot, the website for keen readers, has unveiled its 2018 Reader Harder Challenge: 24 tasks to broaden our reading horizons! As BR says, it's "24 tasks that will invite new genres, new authors, and new worlds, both real and imaginary, into your reading life."

It's a worthy list, even for the well-read: as the old saying has it, there's so many books, and so little time. Here's the list:

A book published posthumously
A book of true crime
A classic of genre fiction (i.e. mystery, sci fi/fantasy, romance)
A comic written and illustrated by the same person
A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, or South Africa)
A book about nature
A western
A comic written or illustrated by a person of color
A book of colonial or postcolonial literature
A romance novel by or about a person of color
A children’s classic published before 1980
A celebrity memoir
An Oprah Book Club selection
A book of social science
A one-sitting book
The first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series
A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
A comic that isn’t published by Marvel, DC, or Image
A book of genre fiction in translation
A book with a cover you hate
A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author
An essay anthology
A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
An assigned book you hated (or never finished)

We're going to give it a try here at Henry Bemis, LGBookT, (taking all 24 tasks from an LGBT bookshelf), the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, and the Rare Book Cafe, and invite our friends to take part on your own!

Here's the 24 tasks, in a handy, editable PDF you can also use to enter BookRiot's contest 52 weeks from now.

Every two weeks, Henry will remind you what task comes next. If you take it on, all we ask is that you send us a note: what title did you pick, and what did you think of it?


We'll report the results as we go, and with a big summary at year's end! Perhaps- just maybe- there will also be prizes! Since each page may have its own twists on the project the possibilities are infinite. So start thinking, and set up your tally sheet- the game is afoot starting January 1, 2018!

December 12, 2017:

We've added a page of pages:  all of our last catalogue segments for the holidays!

December 6, 2017:

Henry Bemis Books has hit 650 Likes on Facebook! Despite the endless downward pressure Facebook keeps on business page reach (to accomodate paid material and more cat videos) our numbers continue to be strong, and our online holiday sales offers draw good traffic.

LGBookT is a couple of weeks old and continues to realize surprisingly big reach numbers for a nascent page. And on Day 2 of Book Week, we have passed the 140 Likes mark!

We've also updated the Meet the Henry Bemis Team page.

January 2, 2017:

We've updated the Literary Birthdays page here, through today's entries for Isaac Asimov and Lynda Barry. The list now stands at 311; new additions over the last month include Jane Austen, T.C. Boyle, John Berendt, Kenneth Roberts, Mark Salzman; Nicholas Sparks, and James Thurber. You can find the list on the right-hand-side of the Henry Homepage.

"This has been a labor in self-education," HBB owner Lin Thompson says. "It is a real pleasure to re-learn what I had forgotten, add things I didn't know, and get to share it with a few friends and passers-by."

The series, begin- like most things here- haphazardly in March 2015, and assumed a life of its own. Thompson, who has written all the entries, generally allows an hour for research and writing each one. "If it's someone I feel a personal affection for, I make take two hours," he says. "Invariably, they are the least-read. Maybe I'm trying too hard to seem serious with them."

The profiles average 2000 words each. Thompson reckons the series has now surpassed the word count of Tolstoi's War & Peace by nearly 20,000. "I guess that shows I have no excuse not to be cranking out a novel every year, he commented. "Well, other than the complete lack of original ideas."

The Literary Search Guide can be found on the Henry Bemis Books blog.

October 3, 2016:

Jerry Morris, publisher of a number of book blogs, including  the monthy survey Biblio-Connecting, is including Henry's post on the slavering booksellers' nightmare that is California Assembly Bill 1570, signed into law by Governor Brown last week.


*****

9.1.15: Jerry Morris's Biblio-Connecting blog named Henry Bemis Books its August 2015 Blog Pick of the Month "because they have exceptionally good taste." We are grateful for the accolade! We claimed bragging rights for the month on Henry's Facebook page, where our Milestone announcement gained over 600 views. We got a hundred more here from Mr. Morris' kind words. We're grateful for the boost, and recommend his blog highly for a comprehensive monthly overview of what's going on in collecting.

8.20.15: Henry Bemis Books owner Lindsay Thompson has published an article on the value of a liberal arts education in the August 2015 issue of By the Lake, the online alumni magazine of St. Andrews University.

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