sow the thought seeds

<book worm>

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<briefing: >

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<thematic>

how to identify themes at the edition

Just like a regular bookstore, the edition online bookstore contains 'aisles' with categories to help you find your book.  In addition to this, the edition uses buzzwords which you can place into the search windows to find groups of similar books.

For example,  if you are trying to find Naomi Klein's No Logo, go to the online bookstore, take a virtual stroll down the Philosophy & Theory aisle until you get to Social Theory, and there it should be, if it's in stock.  Or, if you want similar books, type Viewpoint into the eBay or Auctiva search window, and you will get a list of stock relevant to that cue word.

Change the cue word to Resolutions, you get books on lifestyle change (exercise, inspiration, spirituality etc).  Type cult and you get a list of the edition fiction stock.  And so on.

Here is a full list of these buzzwords.  For an alternative way of searching books, type one into an eBay window now and see what comes up.

→books in the cult fiction theme are fictional books.  The edition fiction stock comprises mainly cult, contemporary, world and genres like science fiction.  Vintage books are stocked separately (see below).  To  have a look at the fiction menu, type the word CULT! into your eBay window

→books in the Past Master theme focus on history, geography and travel.  Type PASTmaster into your search window to view this stock

→books in the Resolutions theme focus on self-help and self health - spiritual and mental as well as bodily.  For new ways of thinking and being, have a look at the Resolutions theme

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<S*O*S book rescue>

<When your library has a flood, who ya gonna call?>

It's hard to visualise the unglamorous world of document salvage when you're brunching with Georgine Thorburn at a glamorous Kings Road cafe. Instead of a raging North Sea inferno, there's the mere blue trail of next table’s Gitanes snaking along the terrace. A bottle of mineral water too, but no sign of drenched paperwork. Then there’s Georgie girl herself, part of the Chelsea furniture, every bit as comfortable in Sloane Square as she is at disaster sites.

‘We're currently working with a civil engineering firm,’ she tells me. ‘They had a major fire gutting one third of their office and leaving the rest heavily smoke damaged. We got the call out two days ago, held a crisis meeting with the management, then went into a frantic pace to get the rescue team together and fitted out with all the right health and safety equipment.’

The right safety gear means masks, hard hats and white overalls marked Document SOS, the name of Georgie’s company, while her team includes leading paper conservationists and art specialists. Chalk and cheese, you’d think. ‘But when you have a big fire like this’, Georgie points out, ‘it’s all hands on deck.’

‘One day we could be called to a sixteenth century archive, restoring irreplaceable antiquarian books. Then it could be a merchant bank. We’ve been involved in all three City bombs. Our work is varied. The other day we were called to a nuclear power station to sort out a mould problem in their ultra sensitive record store. None of the documentation could come out, of course, so we had to do everything on site.’

With water damage, the books swell, the sewing starts to split and before you know it there’s no book

The clients needs vary too, and aside from books the range of restorable artefacts includes videotapes, artwork, magazines, scripts, and audio­spools. ‘We're working on a copy of a mustering roll from the American Civil War and a letter with John Lennon’s signature on.’

‘Everything has to be handled according to what it is, and labelled as to where it came from. People rarely have a floor plan, so we have to do that, detailing where each desk and filing cabinet was. Clients will often request specific legal documents because they need them very quickly. We need to know exactly where everything is.’

‘The criterion for a job depends on its content. For a public library, it is imperative that the books are back as clean as new. We remove all the smoke, smell and acidic residue. One librarian said to me, I want my books back in a condition I can go to bed with.’

The Document SOS, portfolio makes impressive viewing. ‘Before’ shots of arson damaged books are compared with seemingly impossible mint condition ‘after’ shots. Paper work glued together by water ends up in better order than my in-tray.  

‘With legal business documentation, the criterion is usually to have it in a readable and useable order. But you have to he careful. You can’t use chemicals that will deteriorate the paper if the document has to last the lifespan of the company.’

Business continuity planning for hard copy is currently an in-topic but Georgie is incredulous about much of the misinformation. ‘There are booklets that recommend human chains to retrieve historic material. I mean, that just doesn’t happen. You can’t remove a book the size of a table this way. Try to and it causes more damage.’

‘The practical world is very different,’ she says. 'If you have a fire, you contact your insurance company, they contact the loss adjuster and the salvage work waits while the money is counted. But it's important that the adjuster has the means to say “Do it: start the salvage”.  It’s a bit like Countdown. We’re against the clock. When there’s water damage, the books swell, the sewing starts to split and before you know it there’s no book. We need to get there quickly and freeze the material to halt the damage and prevent mould growth. Then you can buy as much time as you want for insurance queries.

Document SOS has virtually unlimited frozen and chill storage, as well as an enormous dry fast chamber based on select air-drying methods that can accommodate 70 crates a week. Georgie, and two fellow students from London’s Camberwell College of Arts, started pioneering these techniques in 1987, adapting it from  art restoration.

99% of material can be restored to how it was before the incident

‘A lot of it was trial and error. The field is so new – it really only started in the 1970s. Occasionally I wonder how to approach a situation so I still consult with my old tutor, Bill Topping. I also keep in contact with fellow students who have all ended up in very interesting places. We have reunions and swap advice on salvage. There’s a liberal exchange of information, which is very important for progress in this field.’

‘I fell into the Conservation course by fluke,’ she recalls, laughing. ‘At school, I'd always managed to limbo dance under the fence of physics, chemistry and biology. Suddenly, a third of my course was chemistry. I didn’t even know the difference between an atom and a molecule. It wasn't so much a learning curve as a learning vertical.’

‘At the end of four years, disaster planning was becoming a buzzword. I had submitted my thesis on a small brewery museum in Hertford. Then Camberwell College got a call from a flooded picture library. Eight of us jumped into cabs --Ghostbusters to the rescue! We stemmed the water, took out photographs... and I was bitten. Clearly I didn't really see myself growing cobwebs in a museum basement, but actually I’d spent the last four years preparing for just that. As it was, the salvage team who followed us in closed down shortly afterwards, and this huge niche opened up before me.’

‘The work is all consuming, it takes all of my life,’ Georgie says, ‘but it gives me huge satisfaction to see distressed clients, who think their living has gone out of the window, realise that 99% of the material can be restored to how it was before the incident. I guess that makes me the Mother Theresa of the document world.

<fiver: hairpiece>

Berg has just released the book Hair, Styling Culture and Fashion which I contributed a chapter to.  To celebrate - and this might be a hair's breadth away from puffery - I commisioned my (now) expert opinion on body hair in literature.  Having combed through my bookshelves, I present to you five books with great hairy themes.

5 Hairy Hyde

The Darwinian association between face hair and animal ancestry took root in the Victorian popular imagination.  The link between civilization and hairless faces was underlined by the cultural obsession with the myth of Homo ferus, which cautions against the beast within.  The myth subsisted in popular fiction with abandoned children-turned-feral as the key motif.  Hairiness as a key characteristic of the myth may have survived partly due to the promotional activities of travelling carnivals that drew on folklore in faking their freaks.  Krao of Indonesia, who appeared in the 1880s and was accepted as Darwin’s missing link, and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, each relied mainly on hirsute, prognathic faces to give their acts credibility.

4  Tress

In A Tress of Hair, the Guy de Maupassant story, hair has a stubborn materiality.  Finding the locket in an old piece of furniture, the protagonist is moved almost to weep: ‘Was it not strange that this tress should have remained as it was in life, when not an atom of the body on which it grew was in existence?’  In 2008, the Dominic Winter Auction House sold a locket of hair said to have been cut by Cassandra Austin at the funeral of her sister in 1817.  Jane Austen’s supposed strands sold for £4,800, some way short of the £30,000 for a first edition of Sense and Sensibility at the same sale.

3  Hair Raising

Comic horror writer Junji Ito is obsessed with beautiful girls who typically become beautiful dead girls.  As with a lot of Japanese horror, hair in Ito’s work has a stubborn materiality: witness The Long Hair in the Attic, for instance, or the stories of Tomie, where hair gets a mind of its own, strangling rivals, or running away with its owner’s decapitated head.  In the movie Ringu, based on the books of Koji Suzuki, the hair of a dead spirit continues to grow, thereby keeping the audience guessing the fearsome face hidden beneath.

2  Shaggy

Heinrich-Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845) describes Shaggy Peter, a boy whose lack of grooming leads to his social exclusion.  Since hair styling and trimming has been a reliable historical indicator of conformity, could it be that Peter acted out his social rebellion by refusing to tame his locks?  Meanwhile, the Second World War propaganda version, Struwwelhitler, surely relies partly on an inverse of this logic: that prim and still despised moustache.

1  Shakesbeard

As the prime signifier of the phallus, the beard is an obvious target for both physical and verbal attacks. Beard pulling was a great insult. Spenser talks about causing ‘beard affront’ (Faerie Queen, YEAR) and Shakespeare of ‘beard[ing] thee to thy face’ (King Henry IV Act 1, Scene 1). Such emasculation could be more than symbolic: Alexander ordered his soldiers to shave in case the enemy caught them by their beards during face-to-face combat.

<quantum physician: deepak chopra>

According to Time, Deepak Chopra is ‘A renowned physician and author’, ‘undoubtedly one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time’ and one of the top icons of the Twentieth century. But the great man appears modest about all these accolades. ‘It's just a magazine,’ he says. ‘Ignore it’.

One would, yet there is such a lot to ignore. Chopra is the prolific author of 42 books, as well as audio-books and videos, all translated into 35 languages and with total sales in excess of 20 million. In 1995 he set up the impressive Chopra Center for Well Being in California, and he has many awards to his name. These include the Quill award for Peace Is the Way (2005) and the Nautilus award for The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (2004).

Chopra has written extensively on mind-body health and spirituality, having been influenced by the teachings of Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta, as well as theory in quantum physics. The themes of his books are outlined in his debut book Creating Health (1986) where he establishes his advocacy of the mind-body connection, focusing on transcendental meditation and self-awareness as contributary factors in illness and healing.

In Quantum Healing (1989), quantum physics was used as a means of elaborating on his belief that consciousness is the foundation of all nature. Lately he has deployed these ideas to call for a ‘critical mass’ to engage in environmental healing and to defeat the current ‘addiction to war’ (see Peace Is the Way).

If he could use one word to describe the world of conventional medicine it would be ‘unhappy’. ‘The relatives of patients, with whom physicians deal, are demanding, litigious, intimidating. Most of my fellow colleagues were very stressed; a lot of them were addicts’. It’s a case of Physician heal thyself, since doctors are in the same boat as everyone else. ‘The experience of alienation, fragmentation, isolation ultimately leads to all of the problems, like contamination of our environment, hostility towards each other, poor nutrition, and hard work, too much work’.

Chopra sees his techniques in fighting anxiety as an antidote to the age of the tranquillizer. ‘Quantum Healing looks past all the wonder drugs and modern technology to a natural way of healing which speaks to an integration of mind and body,’ he says. The body converts our experiences into natural drugs at the molecular level. ‘The body is the end product of intelligence and how that intelligence shapes your reality will shape the reality of the body. The body is a field of ideas and it is a field of interpretations and when you change your experience of your own identity to a spiritual being, the body expresses the physical manifestation of that spiritual reality’.

And we can deploy the same powers to heal the world, so Chopra reckons. ‘We're moving towards a more healing world, more loving and compassionate. I just happen to be part of the tide’. Indeed, Chopra is optimistic about how technology will benefit humanity in spreading the word. ‘Technology makes it easy for everyone to share information. And when there are no secrets left, it's very difficult to create separation’.

Deepak Chopra's many titles are currently on sale at the edition bookstore.

Deepak Chopra's Book Choice:

I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj

<post+pack tariff>

the edition operates a fair share domestic postage+ packing policy

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<gift wrap>

Your book can be gift-wrapped (gift paper and ribbon), together with your message in a card.

Simply request the service when paying, indicating the recipient, recipient address and 'your message'.

Your book will then be gift-wrapped, placed in bubble-wrap and secured in a thick, corrugated card sleeve before being sent to the recipient address.

The cost is £1.50. Please add this to the p&p box on your invoice.

<bespoke packaging>

To protect your purchase, first edition and collectable hardback books are secured in thick bespoke corrugated card sleeve and a bubblewrap inner to stop the book bouncing in the card packet.  Standard paperbacks are shipped in a bespoke envelope (trimmed to fit the book snugly), bubblewrap and corrugated card stiffener.

<book search>

¶ the edition has an enormous stock of thousands of books

¶ there simply is not enough time to list them all on eBay

¶ are you looking for a book that may already be in stock?

¶ please email with your wants lists

¶ in return you will get the following:

the edition a description of the item in stock

the edition a photograph

the edition a quote for the price of the actual book

¶ there is no fee for the search

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