That naughty library exhibit in Paris is finally open (”A Library Exhibition Not for the Children’s Room,” New York Times):

"Hell at the Library, Eros in Secret," which opened at the National Library here last month, offers a peek at its secret archive of erotic art, putting on display more than 350 sexually explicit literary works, manuscripts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, film clips, even calling cards and cardboard pop-ups.

Visitors to the library can listen to a modern-day recording of an 18th-century "dialogue" during sex (simultaneous orgasms included) and watch a six-minute excerpt from a grainy black-and-white silent pornography film made in 1921 (one man, two women, intriguing lingerie).

Writer Elaine Sciolino uses the exhibit as a jumping-off point to discuss shifts in French public morality, vis-a-vis l’affaire Sarkozy et cetera. (Yes, I’m mixing French and Latin, and poorly–you want to make something out of it?) Frankly (pun fully intended), France is starting to depress me a little bit. If they renounce short workdays, joie de vivre, and amour, the best way to visit will be via literature. If I want to observe a workaholic, sexually conflicted society, I can always stay home.

I’ve been enjoying the posts at Book Group Buzz. Yesterday, Misha Stone’s “When Fiction and Reality Collide” addressed–well, you’re probably one step ahead of me on that one. Says Stone:

As a Fiction Librarian, I often get a little annoyed when patrons distinguish the difference between fiction and non-fiction as "fake" versus "real."

As a fiction reviewer, writer, and made-up person, I, too, get annoyed when I meet someone (usually at a cocktail party where the non-profit and for-profit worlds collide) who informs me that they don’t like to read novels because they like to “learn things.” Nothing wrong with simply preferring nonfiction to fiction, of course, but those who dismiss fiction out-of-hand usually strike me as being people who don’t know what to do with the facts they have. Facts are important, but what good are facts without insight? Fiction plays free with the facts in order to investigate even deeper matters.

This topic must be in the Booklist zeitgeist, as Joyce Saricks’ soon-to-be-published column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read,” confirms. She begins:

A few months ago, I came across a comment that got me thinking: readers read nonfiction to learn something. Though seemingly innocuous, the remark, in context, implied that one doesn’t learn from fiction. I confess it got my dander up: Is nonfiction essentially superior because it offers information, the opportunity to learn something? And is it true that we don’t learn from fiction? 

How does she conclude? I’ll add a link on Monday, when her column goes live, so you can read for yourself.

This is all to say nothing of the real-versus-fake issue facing memoir, about which enough has been said already to last us until 2009.

(Unless I think of something really, really clever. Then I won’t be able to help myself.)

Update: Here’s the link to Joyce Saricks’ latest column, “Reading to Learn and Learning as We Read.”

Well, I’m back. I shaved off my holiday beard (it grows red and green, natch), tightened my belt, and now I’m raring to go…home, so I can sleep for just a few minutes more. But books never sleep, and neither should I.

In the New York Times (”The Library’s Helpful Sage of the Stacks“), Sam Roberts was written a feel-good profile of David Smith, the New York Public Library’s “Librarian to the Stars.”

Susan Nagel, who has written a book about Marie Antoinette’s daughter that will be published next spring, said: "Every now and then I have an emergency: I can’t read my own writing, I can’t find the proper sourcing, I was hoping that something would come in the mail from France and it hasn’t in time. Somehow David always rescues me. David has had a dream of beginning a writers’ services division of the New York Public Library, but the truth is, he is already that department in one man."

The article starts out by describing Smith as a well-kept secret. Not anymore.

I like books, and I like libraries–and I think parking garages definitely need a makeover–but this still didn’t work for me. A little theme park-y, maybe?

It’s the parking garage for the Kansas City Public Library, as photographed by Jonathan Moreau. (Spotted by Ben Segedin, Booklist’s Production Director.)

Just one post today–to let you know about the launch of Booklist Online’s second blog, Book Group Buzz. We had some interesting conversations at the old Booklist Book Club, but what people kept telling us was that what they really wanted were resources to help them with their in-person (I disdain the digirati’s use of “meatspace”) book groups. And, by golly, that’s what we intend to give them.

Mary Ellen Quinn, Booklist Online’s managing editor, has recruited a crack team of contributors, including:

• Amanda Blau, Children’s Services Program Coordinator for the Downers Grove Public Library
• Kaite Mediatore Stover, Booklist columnist and Head of Readers’ Services for Kansas City Public Library
• Misha Stone, Readers’ Advisory Librarian at Seattle Public Library
• Nick DiMartino, author, playwright, blogger, and bookseller extraordinaire

We’re just getting started, so please pardon our sawdust. But the bloggers have already been busy with posts about biographies, book groups, and more. Please read, comment, and help spread the word. We welcome both your feedback and participation–with your help, we can make Book Group Buzz the place to go for book-group tips, reading guides, news, and helpful links.

I’m on my way over right now.

While the googolplexes of articles about Google Book Search often make me goggly-eyed, occasionally I read one in spite of myself. And in Jonathan V. Last’s “Google and Its Enemies” (The Weekly Standard), which is for the most part a reasonable explanation of the brouhaha surrounding Google Book Search, I was rewarded with this gem:

Google has, as they say, all the right enemies. Anytime the ALA, Microsoft, France, a trade guild, and a bunch of trial lawyers are lined up on one side of an argument, the other side is going to look extremely attractive.

I can deal with France and trade guilds–but trial lawyers? Microsoft?!

Fortunately, Last goes on to reject the temptation to choose his position based on the company he’d keep (the enemy of my enemy is now my friend?), but you can tell he was tempted.

From the summation:

In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view. And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you’re selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google’s actions. Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers.

Do little-read books matter as much as much-read books? What about unread books? Discuss.

I got a press release today from Paperspine, a new Netflix-modeled book-rental service that “enables members to read more books without the high cost of purchase or the inconvenience of numerous trips to the library.”

“We believe we can revolutionize the book industry by offering the convenience of the Internet with the borrowing system long used by local libraries,” said Paperspine co-founder Dustin Hubbard. “As a Netflix customer and avid reader, I thought the same model could work for books.”

Hmm…where have I heard this before?

Inside the London Library (”The Insider,” by Frances Wilson, the Telegraph):

The real pleasure of the place, however, is that walking up the steps and pushing open the door is like entering the wardrobe into Narnia. Behind the rational 18th-century exterior is a vortex that spreads, sprawls and expands, rising up into the clouds, spiralling down into the bowels, edging back to the beyond.

Readers are sucked down the 15 miles of cool iron corridor and swallowed by layer upon layer of shelving. You breathe in leather and dust, you blink as fluorescent lights flicker. You could be lost for a week and as happy as a skylark.

…

This, and other sections, are housed on metal grids which allow you to look upwards and downwards to other floors. For the critic Raymond Mortimer, gazing through ‘the half-transparent floors of the book-stack, I feel inside the brain of mankind’.

I Love Libraries has an article from Virginia Libraries (”Text, Image, and Form: The Altered Book Project“) featuring even more altered books. I’m so uptight about my own books that I won’t even dog-ear them, but I love this stuff:

Books with pages missing. Torn books. Books with writing, underlining, and drawing in them. These are usually a librarian’s nightmare, but in a recent collaboration with art faculty and students, they have become the basis of a highly successful class project and library exhibit.

From the Guardian (”Libraries to be ‘new channel’ for direct marketing,” by Richard Lea):

A scheme to put thousands of advertisements into library books will find borrowers taking home a little more than they had bargained for.

Up to 500,000 inserts a month are due to be handed out by libraries in Essex, Somerset, Bromley, Leeds and Southend.

The plan is being run by the direct marketing company Howse Jackson, whose business development director Mark Jackson said the company was “very proud” of what he described as “a brand new channel” for direct marketing.

“In this day and age you have to work hard to come up with new ideas,” he said.

Sure, it’s in England. But bad ideas like this have a way of catching on.