Happy Thought

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

When I was a little girl, my mom would read to me from a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses. Many of the illustrations were tiny detailed pictures of plants, flowers, leaves, and seedpods.

I still have a head full of those poems, that come to me at odd moments.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

Mmmm, apple tart.

Google Books has an 1895 edition with illustrations by Charles Robinson.

National Poetry Month

I've been reading some of the poems posted on other blogs and thinking of various poems I've enjoyed over the years.

The book set I posted about the other day has a lot of poems in the first volume.

I've had part of the first verse of "The Fairies", by William Allingham, stuck in my head since childhood:

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.

(Which is, of course, what comes to mind when I read Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.)

Growing up during the Cold War and being a treelover, naturally I loved and memorized David Ignatow's "Simultaneously":

Simultaneously, five thousand miles apart,
two telephone poles, shaking and roaring
and hissing gas, rose from their emplacements
straight up, leveled off and headed
for each other’s land, alerted radar
and ground defense, passed each other
in midair, escorted by worried planes,
and plunged into each other’s place,
steaming and silent and standing straight,
sprouting leaves.

As an introvert, Charles Simic's "Stone" is another favorite:

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

I have a dry and silly sense of humor, and thus a fondness for Ogden Nash:

The Termite
Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

And Shel Silverstein:

Early Bird
Oh, if you're a bird, be an early bird
And catch the worm for your breakfast plate.
If you're a bird, be an early early bird--
But if you're a worm, sleep late.

That's probably enough for one day.

30 Books (Only Thirty?)

Julie (Samurai Knitter) has started a sort-of meme, "Thirty Books I Dig".

Talk about easy . . . for me the hard part is limiting it to thirty!

Have I told this story yet?

When we were first married, we went to an estate sale, and out on a closed-in porch, we found bookshelves stuffed full of old science fiction paperbacks and magazines. At first we were trying to pick out ones we wanted, but then my husband said, "Let's just offer her $20 for the lot."

The woman running the sale said, "Sure!" she would take our $20, and gave us paper bags and cardboard boxes. Then she said, "Do you want these, too?" and opened up a big walk-in closet completely lined with shelves of books.

Gad.

We stuffed our little Honda Civic hatchback (a red Tardis of a car) with bags and bags and bags and boxes of science fiction until our backs ached.

Every author from Asimov to Van Vogt and Williamson. We have an eight-foot bookshelf double-stacked with science fiction paperback, and more in various places throughout the house.

We sold many of the older magazines (after reading them, of course) on eBay. That paid for two eight-foot bookcases from the furniture company I worked for back then. And I see we still have two computer-paper boxes with the newer (1970's) magazines like Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Barring the Fimbul-winter, it's not physically possible for us to be snowed in long enough to read every book on our shelves in one winter.

So that's about a thousand right there. (Do I joke? I've never really thought about counting them.)

But to get down to cases here, I'll think about some of my more personal shelves:

Travels in West Africa, by Mary Kingsley. I've talked about her before, and no doubt I will again. Quirky, opinionated, and full of wry good humor in the face of everything from mosquitoes to crocodiles.

Anything by Diana Wynne Jones. I started out with Archer's Goon and went from there. Being a dog lover, I'm fond of Dogsbody. (Argh, already I'm cheating and saying, "Just read the lot!"

Anything by Terry Pratchett. Okay. So I cheat. Read the lot!

What else is on these shelves over here?

Women's Work and Prehistoric Textiles by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

Textiles and Clothing by Elisabeth Crowfoot et al.

Nearly every tatting pattern book ever put out by Dover.

Charles Holdgate's Net Making.

Two different editions of Etiquette, by Emily Post. Amusing and sad and sometimes infuriating. Time travel in hardcover.

Three different editions (one in French) of Thérèse de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework.

A reproduction of Caulfeild and Saward's Dictionary of Needlework.

Sylvia Groves' The History of Needlework Tools and Accessories.

Old-Time Tools & Toys of Needlework by Gertrude Whiting.

A whole slew of dog books by Brian Kilcommons and Sara Wilson, Carol Lea Benjamin, Stanley Coren, the Monks of New Skete, and Job Michael Evans. (I love training dogs. It's the people that stir me up!)

Quite a few books by modular origami genius Tomoko Fuse in both English and Japanese. (I don't read Japanese, but I can follow an origami diagram.)

Music books including Lullabies and Night Songs by Alex Wilder with drawings by Maurice Sendak. (I used to play the ocarina a lot and the pennywhistle somewhat.)

On the self-help shelf, I have authors such as Barbara Sher, Suzette Haden Elgin, Martha Beck, Julia Cameron, and probably a bunch more that I'll slap my forehead for forgetting.

Oh! And over here is my collection of darn near every Ted Sturgeon book ever printed in paperback. And all the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter books.

I have five dictionaries. I have many knitting books, heavy on the historical. I have at least one cookbook. (The others are my husband's.) And we have many many many kids' books here.

Good heavens, is that the time? I'm sorry, I've kept you up - you really shouldn't get me started on books!

Random Thing I Forgot

(I'm still blaming this cold.)

The other random thing I meant to post about, which I just remembered, was about parent-teacher conferences and the No Child Left Behind act.

Our third-grader maxed out on the reading section. (Did I ever mention that we really really like to read in this house?) He got 411 out of a possible 411.

He learned to read by having Calvin and Hobbes read to him. Which probably explains a lot.

Then he took the STAR reading test, which claims he reads at 11th grade level (??) and says

"(child's name) likely reads for pleasure, information, and academic purposes. He can use indexes, glossaries, and footnotes in textbooks. (child) likely previews chapters before reading and takes notes while studying.

At this level, (child) needs to continue to read nonfiction materials, classic literature, and the daily news. . . . For optimal reading growth, (child) needs to continue recreational reading on a daily basis, ... identify bias, persuasion, and propaganda within text, and learn strategies for acquiring specialized or technical vocabulary."

O-kay. He's 8. Eight. Let's cut him a little slack on classic literature or learning to identify propaganda, eh?

And the stupid No Child Left Behind downside of this is that no matter what he scores in the reading section next year, even if he maxes out AGAIN, his achievement level will be:

"NO IMPROVEMENT"

And the school gets a ding against it, because the pupil showed no improvement.

When I Think Spring

When I think spring, I'm thinking spring flowers.
Yellow crocus and winter aconite.

And maple syrup.
As the sap boils down from the big soup kettle to the smaller saucepan and gets more concentrated, it needs careful watching or it boils over the second my tea-kettle-burning back is turned.

Fortunately for me, our son was watching it and alerted me when it reached that point, and from then on I sat on the kitchen stool with a book (Matthew Polly's American Shaolin) and checked it every two minutes.(The monk's robes don't end in midair on the cover. That's just my quick-and-dirty coverup of the big ugly library label in the middle of it.)

The other book I checked out at my husband's request, Kiko Denzer's Build Your Own Earth Oven. Apparently the idea is that I will wrestle with the mud and build the oven, and he will bake in it. Hmmm. Sounds a lot like work to me!

For some reason, right now the only knitting that appeals to me is this recycled-yarn scarf. The needles are pretty unique, a pair of old US 10 (5.75 mm) olive-green dpns from a thrift store, 10 inches (just over 25 cm) long.

I'm knitting it with yarn from a woven scarf that never really worked, just to change it to a usable form. And sometimes it's nice to have something that's not delicate and precious that you can just throw on, toss on the coat rack, and put in the laundry without worrying about it or fussing over it.

Simple Pleasures

Quite a few years ago, in a used bookstore, I bought a book that shaped me.

I found it in my favorite kind of used bookstore: old couch near the front, wooden shelves bolted to the ceiling and walls so they couldn't teeter, a huge science fiction section, more books crammed into less space than seemed possible.

There were shelves all along the walls, shelves that wrapped around corners, shelves in what had been a tiny closet. There were multiple copies of out-of-print paperbacks by authors I was discovering one by one.

There was a book called Simple Pleasures, by Nora Gallagher, with a dedication to Isabella Beeton, and sections called things like "Things to Do to Put Color in Your LIfe", "Things to Do on a Rainy Day," "Mean Things to Do (Simple Perversions)", and "Odd Things to Do."

It contained directions for things like "A Walk Around the Block" and "Sand Therapy." Even things I disagree with, like "Catching Mice Whole," have charming titles.

(Mice got in my silverware drawer. Once. After bleaching the inside of the drawer and all of the contents, I became a serious ender of mouse lives. I'm sorry for all the dead-mouse karma I'm accumulating, but I am NOT having mouse droppings in the spoons. NOT.)

This is the book that introduced me to Gaudy Night and Lord Peter Wimsey. This is the book that contains the phrase " . . .towels as thick as forty baby rabbits laid ear to ear," which has led me on a lifelong unfulfilled towel-quest. And it's the book that supports my stand on *buying myself flowers. ("If you can afford anything, afford flowers.")

It even has advice on doing Ghastly Tasks, like balancing the check book or cleaning the refrigerator. ("Do it when you are obsessed about a lover . . You can curse his or her name while opening the vegetable bin and discovering those things which should probably be donated to science.")

There are simple pleasures everywhere, and I'm grateful to have acquired the habit of expecting them.

*My husband is a great guy, but if I waited for him to buy me flowers, I'd be in a box with the flowers on the top. I'm not waiting. Especially in the dark, cold and freezing winter, I buy bouquets in the grocery-store aisle. While I'm alive to enjoy them.

Not A BashCar Fan

I'm not out to start an argument with NASCAR fans, although personally I'd rather watch weather radar than car races.

Doesn't look like much, does it? A little rip on the driver's side front bumper, a chunk gone off the passenger's side front bumper. Unfortunately for the budget, these plastic parts are apparently made out of qiviut, considering how much they cost. Argh.

And the man did lose some marital brownie points when he came home. He walked in the door and I said gloomily, "I burned the tea kettle," and he said, "What, again?!?"

Hmph! I didn't say "What, again?!?" when he called and said he hit something with the car again!

Why I have weeds in my yard:
The juncoes, house finches, and goldfinches love the family Chenopodiaceae, which I first realized when I watched goldfinches eating diamond-shaped snippets out of the leaves of the beets (beetroot) and spinach I was growing in my garden.

Rather than letting spinach go to seed for them, I let a plant of pigweed, Chenopodium album, grow by my bird feeder. I had a hard time getting a photo of the birds on it yesterday, with the wind blowing at 20 mph and gusting to 40 mph, but I finally got one with the bird in focus!

The other thing I did yesterday with the kid at home was my introvert-ish substitute for privacy, a fiction binge on the latest three Susan Wittig Albert mysteries, which I always feel like I should like more than I do. They have herbs, multiple income streams, mysteries, and a female protagonist, but somehow they just don't grab me.

Not the way a Terry Pratchett will sometimes get me, where I feel like my head has turned inside out and that I'm more there than here.

So no, I turned pages and didn't pick up the double-knitted mittens, although I did knit a row on a nothing made out of tatting thread on 4-0 or 5-0 needles.

And the metric micrometer I bought on eBay came in the mail (ooh, look, something to be grateful for!), so I've been measuring all my old steel dpns and Havel's tatting needles to see what size they gauge out at.

Never mind gauges with drilled holes: it would be cool if someone marketed a micrometer to knitters with needle size equivalents etched right on the frame!

Outa Books

Which is to say, I've read my way through the stack I bought last weekend, and am starting to sit up and look around at the world again.

I knitted a couple of rows on a pair of socks this week, but it was literally a row on each sock.

I tried printing out Jane Gaugain's 1847 The Lady's Assistant for Executing Useful and Fancy Designs in Knitting, Netting, and Crochet Work, only to discover the file was missing big chunks (like pages 80-250+).

Our son had Friday off from school following parent-teacher conferences, and my husband took a half-day Friday preceding his National Guard drill this weekend. So I had one or both of them home all day.

Yesterday (Saturday) I had to make the drive up to Grand Rapids to buy Truffles' dog chow. (She can't eat Ajax's, because it gives her hot spots. He can't eat her food, because it gives him diarrhea.)

And then I had to turn around and race home in time to take the child to the Pumpkin Patch event down the road -- the kids got to run around in a corn maze and pick out a numbered pumpkin, and after all the numbered ones were picked, the numbers were drawn for Halloween-y prizes.

So we came home with a respectable-sized pumpkin and a black Halloween cup of candy, spider ring, little plastic pumpkin, and other gew-gaws.

The weather was beautiful, in the 60's F., sunny and breezy.

And when I finally got the mail, my copy of Rutt's History of Hand-Knitting was in the box. Thank goodness for reprints -- they have made the price on the original, with the color plates, come down to a reasonable level.

The Book Meme

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why: I'll read pert' near anything in a cover, sweetie. Outsides don't matter that much to me.

2. If I were to own a book shop, I would call it: The Omnivorous Reader.

3. My favorite quote from a book is:

(In my case, this is more likely to be "a quote from a favorite book". Having one favorite is like having one potato chip. How can I, when they're all so salty and crispy? Anywho . . .)

How about a title of a book? Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (by Susan Jeffers, if that sounds like a book you need). I'd probably sit home most of my life if I didn't have that one handy.

4. The author (alive or dead) I would love to have lunch with is: Uh. Well, let me explain. I'm an introvert. Doing lunch, even with an author I feel I know very well from their work, would feel a lot like eating with a stranger. Is this on my fun list? Let me look . . . no, no it isn't. Sorry. But I do a very good eating lunch and reading in my car. Terry Pratchett, Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Hambly, Margaret Mahy, Diana Wynne Jones, got a slew of 'em in here.

5. If I were going to a deserted island and could only bring one book (other than a survival guide), it would be: ONE BOOK? What madness is this? All I can say is there better be a *&^% of a lot of string on this island. One book. Hah.

6. I would love for someone to invent a book gadget that: Book? Gadget? What is this "gadget" of which you speak? Got hands, got eyes, got book. Don't need no stinkin' gadget.

7. The smell of books reminds me of: The Dr. Seuss section of the library. A book about a dragon that shot orange and purple sparks. Some time before I was four.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book, it would be: Silly. I am the lead character in my own book.

9. The most overrated book of all time is: Of all time? That's a pretty sweeping statement, isn't it? Aren't you hitting those absolutes a little hard for this time of day?

10. I hate it when a book: I hate it when an author introduces a dog character for the sole purpose of killing the dog off later in the book to show you (not tell you) how worthless, depraved, murderous (fill in the negative) the bad guy is. About 98% of the time I can tell when the dog character is first introduced that author is going to do this, and I hate hate hate it.

In a broader sense, I hate when I read two of an author's books, pick up on the pattern, and know exactly what's going to happen in number three. Look, it's the Injured Person, the Innocent Protagaonist, and the Guy who Goes either to Jail or Crazy at the End of the Book. Borrrrring.

(And a PS to allicats: I got Connie Willis's Remake, Lincoln's Dreams, and Uncharted Territory, not to mention three old Lucky Starr books by Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French.)

Post-Action Report

The title is a clear sign that I listen to my husband too much: when I start to write a post about what we did Saturday, and the first thing that pops into my head is "After-Action Report".

Before we went to the Goose Festival, we went to an estate sale, and I bought me this:
A very nice old Brown & Sharpe micrometer, because sometimes a knitter wants to measure her needles right down to thousandths of an inch.

We walked around the house and didn't find anything we wanted, then I walked out into the garage, which turned out to be a machine shop. The first thing I looked at was a workbench with about five or six or seven different micrometers on it, with prices of ninety dollars, seventy dollars, twenty dollars. There were caliper micrometers, outside micrometers, digital ones, analog ones.

I opened and closed the wooden box on the ninety-dollar one and said, "Ohhhh, she wants it!" When I spotted this one for ten bucks, it was mine.

A brass sheep needle gauge is fifteen dollars, and it only measures needles that fit into its holes -- I wanted a micrometer because it can measure any needle I can fit between the anvil and the spindle.

I've seen micrometers go for less on eBay, but usually the postage pushes it right back up to the ten dollar mark again.

So now I can tell you that the two pairs of old Bucilla knitting needles above the ruler are 0.038" (about 1 mm) and 0.044" (about 1.1 mm). And which of my US size 3 needles are 3.125 mm (about 0.123"), and which are 3.25 mm (about 0.128").

Sorry about that, I was swooning over my new tool. Where was I?

Oh, yes, at the Fennville Goose Festival!

We got there in plenty of time for the library book sale, and walked out with two bags of books for $1 a bag, and an old computer. Then we walked uphill for the parade. I ran out of the house without my camera, so you will have to imagine firetrucks, the high school marching band, old cars of all vintages, floats, people throwing candy, and the Muskegon Regional Police Pipes and Drums.

We were right at the beginning of the parade, and I don't think my son has ever had so much candy thrown to him. He got to the point where his pockets were full, and he wouldn't even pick up the Tootsie Rolls any more.

From there we went home with lots to read. I peeled the price sticker off my micrometer and measured some of the needles I've been wondering about. My son sorted through the candy and gave away the things he doesn't like.

Soon my head got sucked into the bag of books. So if I vanish for a couple of days, I'll be off reading Connie Willis and Vonda MacIntyre.

Wrist Wrecking, Book Meme, Spring Break

It's not enough to blister my hands by pulling weeds: apparently I have to wreck my wrists, too, by hauling 30-pound concrete blocks. This lovely high-tech creation is my compost bin, made of cinder blocks from the old barn foundation. It's built on part of the concrete from the porch of the derelict farmhouse that was on the property when we bought our house.

I've used it for a couple of years and had already started throwing stuff at one end while letting the stuff in the other end rot for a year. Yesterday I decided to formalize that by building a divider in the middle. I'll shovel out the nice black compost from the left bin so I have a place to throw stuff this year, and meanwhile I'll let the coffee grounds, cabbage leaves, and grapefruit peels rot in the right-hand bin until next year.

I love this meme: take a photo of your bookcases and talk about them. (Consider yourself tagged.)

From left to right, the eight-foot bookcase with most of our science fiction paperbacks in it; (Should I mention that it's double-stacked or that I've read almost all of them?) the shelves with my origami, textile history and tatting books; another eight-footer of dog training books, baby books, and Victorian history books; the bookcase that houses my collection of Asimov's and Terry Pratchett books; and a shelf with most of my field guides and the complete collection of Andrew Lang fairy stories.

I've omitted another bookshelf that has mostly my husband's books on it, the rack that holds mycological field guides and Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side collections, and a bookcase that is solid with children's books. And the random piles of pulled-out books I'm referring to at any given time that haven't made it back on the shelf.

We, ah, like to read here. Which probably accounts for our son reading the books in the sixth-grade room. (He's in the second grade.)

Spring Break: Our son's spring break is next week, so blogging will probably be sporadic as we enjoy the spring weather roller coaster and wrestle over control of the computer mouse. [mine, mine, it's mine, bu-wah-ha-ha-ha!]

Reading

One of the fun things about being a mom for me is taking our son to the library. Basically, I will read anything that isn't nailed shut or trying to squirm away. (If you ever saw Bruce Campbell in "Army of Darkness" -- I would read that flying book!)

Anyway, when you're in the library with a kid, it's like a license to hang out in the fun junior and "young adult" book sections. There are a lot of great books in there: Diane Duane's "So You Want to Be a Wizard" series, anything by Diana Wynne Jones, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books, Terry Pratchett books . . . I'm always finding new things to read. I love science fiction and almost anything with magic in it.

This weekend I read Debi Gliori's Pure Dead Batty (the US title -- the UK's is Deep Water) and Dinoverse by Scott Ciencin. So I didn't get much knitting done.

We did our weekend chores, plus my husband took a section of our chain-link fence down, so the LP gas company can come and get our empty tank.

Having the fence down means I have to put Ajax and Truffles on the leash and walk them out to the "new" fenced section, instead of just letting them out the door. They don't know quite what to make of this. Usually "leash" means "car ride" or "walk". Instead we are just walking across a section of the yard where they are normally loose, and then I take the leashes off.

When we first fenced our yard, we fenced a smallish section by the house, so we could let Truffles in and out and keep her safe from the road. After we got Ajax, and as he began to grow, this small section started to get pretty beaten up by doggy footprints. So we fenced three more sides, starting from the east-west fence line of the original.

When we fenced the second section, our plan was to remove that middle fence and turn the two squarish parcels into one big rectangle. But we ended up leaving the middle fence, because it made the dogs run more, slowed them down, and kept them from beating paths straight out the door.

This also turned out to be handy when we were doing something in one section, and could leave the dogs shut in the other section. For example, if I try to dig, say to plant or move perennials, the dogs love to come and help me! Having dog paws in my shovel hole is not really "help".

It also defines the yard. I mow all of the "old" fenced section, but I mow paths and certain areas of the "new" section. That gives the dogs a somewhat shaggy, slightly wild place to sniff and explore. And I don't feel obligated to keep it as trimmed up as the part close to the house.

A Quiet Week in Southwest Outer Nowhere

(Yes, I do listen to "A Prairie Home Companion".)

Can you tell it's a quiet week, when the biggest thing on my blog is a horsefly?

I can give you a list of the things I haven't done:

-I still haven't finished casting off the second purple sock! It's about half cast off. Probably about twenty minutes' work, but I haven't done it.

-I haven't started pattern 6 of the Sampler M Knit Along.

-I haven't even knitted on the string "thingie".

Instead I've been digging old science fiction out of the bookcase, mostly Frederik Pohl. Quite a few years ago we went to an estate sale, and on the enclosed back porch found a treasure trove of science fiction paperbacks and old science fiction magazines from the 1950's through late 1970's.

After agonizing over which ones we wanted, we ended up making the seller an offer, which she accepted. Then we ended up stuffing the Honda Civic hatchback we had to the gills with books.

Over the years, we read the magazines and slowly sold some of them off on eBay. This funded the purchase of a pair of seven-foot-tall bookcases to house the paperbacks.

So when my brain wants a break from whatever I have been marinating it in, it has quite the library to choose from.

It's interesting to read the older books. In one of them, I continually stumbled over the fact that the author used the word "calculator" for what we would call a "computer". In another, I was struck by how similar the "joymaker" each person carried was to a cell phone with internet capability.

And speaking of books, I am reminded that I have to return one to the library today. Wish me luck, and maybe the knitting muse will fly back in my window tonight!

Someday

Someday, the printing industry will enter the 21st century. How many times have you gotten a great knitting book, a relatively new knitting book, with a living author, from the library, and thought it was so great you wanted your own copy? And then tried to find one, learned it was out of print, searched for it on Abebooks or your choice of used-book service, and found the thing is considered "rare", so the book is going for $90.00 -- or more?

Me, too.

Then I've taken the step of looking up and emailing the publisher, thinking if I gave them the heads-up that their book was selling for a hundred bucks on eBay, they might consider doing a reprint, only to get the email brush-off (if they replied at all!) telling me to check Abebooks or eBay.

That really irritates me when I sent them an email detailing the current prices on Abebooks and the results of recent auctions on eBay.

Then to rant about this on various Yahoo lists, only to be told condescendingly, pityingly, silly little infant, that of course the printers couldn't do another printing -- didn't I know that they would have to do a minimum run of X-thousand copies and sell X copies to break even?

Well, I aced Econ. in college. I understand supply and demand fine. And I deeply resent being forced to rely on the honesty of other library patrons for my ability to continue to re-read a great book, or work a knitting pattern in a book I CAN'T own, because it's not in print and used copies are rare and expensive IF you can find one. Especially since you know and I know that if I am willing to throw my honesty out the window and spend the time, I can make my own copy in these days of scanners and home copiers.

If I understand that I can digitize a book and make a copy, how come the publishing industry doesn't do this? If they get X requests for a book, hows about they digitize it and do a "print on demand"?

I give you, just for example, one of the Xerox DocuTech printing and publishing machines. Here are a couple of juicy details:

Prints up to 135 pages per minute at 600 dpi

Provides standard stitching and thermal binding finishing

Sounds to me like that could print out my "out of print" book in under two minutes.

Don't love Xerox? Okay, how about an IBM InfoPrint? Same basic idea, different manufacturer.

When I am Queen of the Universe*, every little hole-in-the-wall bookstore will have access to real live honest-to-gosh print on demand printing. If I come in and want a book that's "out of print", the bookstore owner will be able to order me up a copy, whether they print it right there in the back room, or have to "order out". The publisher will get their five cents. The author or copyright holder will get their five cents. The bookstore will get their five cents. And I will be able to toddle home with my OWN legal, paid-for copy, to sticky-note, and put bookmarks in, and keep for the rest of my life or the duration of my interest.

* And I already have the promise of several votes based on my position that in the 21st century, there shall be no such item as an "out of print" book.