Bookish Iphone Apps

I recently overcame my Macrophobia (what’s stronger than that? Mac-Hate….opposite of Macrophilia?) and bought an Ipod touch (or iTouch as I’ve creepily contracted it). I wanted a video walkman and I could no longer resist the torrent of seductive apps that friends were constantly showing off.

Also the app store–with its hundreds of cheap or free goodies fighting for your attention by being the most useful or cool–feels like the arena that has always given birth to the best PC programs rather than the standard Apple way where Jobs on high deliverith the new testament…

oh forget it, I’m only justifying my compromised principles.

Anyway here are some apps that I’ve found useful for bookhunting, selling, listing and reading.

Google Mobile App [FREE]
A somewhat reduced and mobile-optimized set of the standard Google utilities. So far I like these:

  • Google Docs allows me to upload all of my bookscouting lists and keep them in sync with my desktop.
  • Translate helps with foreign language buying decisions.
  • Reader keeps me up-to-date with blogs on the go (though you’ll want a secondary RSS app to sync with Google reader because the Google installed font is painfully small and non-adjustable–I use NetNewsWire)
  • Book Reader gives access to Google Book scans. It displays 10-12 pages per long scroll–but between all of the scan artifacts, typographical ugliness and constant scrolling I wouldn’t use it for more than fact-checking.

Read It Later [FREE lite version or $4.99 pro]
My favorite new web-tool. You know when you come across a really rich and text-heavy site that you know will be a rewarding read but you don’t have the time now? You toss it in a bookmark folder and never look at it again, right? This app will cure you of this. Read it Later is a bookmarklet that you can install on your iphone and desktop. When you find one of those time-consuming sites, you click the “Read it Later” icon and forget about it. Then when you have some spare time (on the train, in the post office line, in the bathroom, etc) open the read it later app and you’ll find the full web-page (no connection necessary if you’ve synced the Iphone) just when you want something meaty to read. I have the free version. Not sure what the pay version adds.

Ebay App [FREE]
I was out of town this past weekend when I had some high-dollar items listed and this app was a good way to obsess over them and keep track of questions and activity. I haven’t used it very deeply but the interface is nice (pleasantly cleaner the the desktop My Ebay page) and it did what I wanted.

RoboForm Mobile [FREE]
After an emailing piracy scare a while back I started using Roboform to create and store my passwords. Now instead of being–slight–variations on a theme, my passwords are complete Greek salad that even I couldn’t tell you on pain of torture. Problem is when logging in on another terminal I’m SOL unless I’m carrying a printed record of my passwords (the loss of which is a greater risk than hacking). The roboform Iphone app solves this. I can enter a protected site either by opening roboform and clicking on the login I want or I can view the password (PIN and masterpassword protected) and type it into another terminal.

Dragon Dictation [FREE]
This is a mobile version of the Dragon Naturally Speaking software (which I used to have on my PC but must have lost after a crash). It’s terribly useful for transcribing long passages of book description when you’re trying to hold open an antique tome with one hand. The desktop version had a training mode where it would learn your voice by having you read passages of Alice in Wonderland and such. While the mobile version doesn’t have this, it was fairly accurate out of the box (using a cheapo mic) and there’s a built-in option to email the text so you can clean up and edit on a real keyboard. I would pay for an upgraded version of this app.

Wikipanion [FREE]
Dedicated Wikipedia search

BookzeeNYC [FREE]
From the NYC BiggApps competition to find creative ways to use city databases. Search a book title and it will tell you libraries that have it.

Kindle App [FREE]
Nice way to test the first few chapters in a book. Much easier on the eyes than the Google Book Reader presentation.

Paypal App [FREE]
Send and receive paypal on the go. Installed but haven’t tried it yet.

Alright, running out of steam but I’ll add more as I discover them. Are there other booksellers who’ve found useful apps (or painfully addictive games)? Please let me know. I’d love to compare notes.

And just for the record, I still hate Itunes. I won’t let the f%$ker within 2 drive partitions of my music…but the iTouch has won me over.

Bookselling Tools: Google Voice as Business Line

I don’t have an open shop and I conduct 99% of my business through email, so it doesn’t make sense for me to pay for a dedicated business line.

Unfortunately this means that for the few customers who NEED to call–and for a pricey book or ambiguous description, I can’t blame them–I either screen the unknown number and forget to play the message for days or I answer with my fuck-you-telemarketer voice, neither of which puts me on the best footing for a potential sale.

So when I heard about Google Voice I thought this could be a solution to my problem.

GVoice gives you a new Google-generated number (potentially matching your area code) which will forward calls to as many telephones as you choose to associate with it. It will also record voicemail as mp3, transcribe it to text (with hilarious results), and forward the message to your email.

In the settings you can tell GVoice to either display the number calling you (or the caller’s name if they’re in your phonebook) or your Google # for all incoming GVoice calls. I chose this second option and I added the number to my cell ID as “Hang Fire Books.”

Now I know when a call is business and I can use my confidence inspiring, tweed-jacket, aged-whiskey voice rather than my paranoid shut-in voice.

There are many interesting setting and customizations–including the ability to filter phone calls like spam!–and I’m just beginning to experiment with it but I’ve gone ahead and added/made visible the number on all the bookselling platforms I use.

GVoice is still in the limited, invite only stage (Thanks Shawn!) but I’m sure it will soon spread like kudzu. If you try using it as a biz line, let me know of any tricks or kinks you find.

One is a Lonely Number by Bruce Elliott

It was stinking hot, Chicago hot, tenement hot, whorehouse hot. The dribble of sweat combining on both their bodies was slimy. He rolled away from her, not that he thought it would be any cooler because the whole bed was steaming, but because he needed a cigaret desperately afterwards….Looking down at her, not feeling anything, seeing but not thinking about her blobby mouth, black-rimmed eyes, black from the life she led, black from the eye make-up which had smeared and run, his gaze ran down along her naked body to her too full breasts that slopped over on each side of her rib cage. He should have remembered when he picked her up on Division Street that the ones who looks so good in clothes, that stuck out like a bureau drawer, were the ones that fell to pieces when the brassiere came off. But there were so many things he was going to have to remember.

With such a lyrically rank opening–and character descriptions that sound like they were written by an undertaker–how could I avoid reading this 1952 PBO (Lion 100, Earl Bergey cover)?

Larry Camonille was the mastermind behind a mass prison break of 10 convicts out of Joliet. He needed to get out because tuberculosis and the dank prison air have left him with only a single half-rotten lung and he knows that even another year of jail time would be a death sentence.

After procuring the above quoted sickening end to his prison dry-spell, he robs a “tea pad” and makes for the hobo jungle to hop a train to a drier climate.

Circumstance lands him as a dishwasher in a nowhere town where he’s stuck between an overripe alcoholic widow, and a 14-year-old nymphet (who covers herself in pancake makeup to appear older). Both of these women discover Larry’s criminal past and attempt a combination of blackmail and ill-advised seduction to force him to eliminate something/someone that is interfering with their happiness.

Larry wants to drop them both and go but he has no cash and a barrage of newspaper and radio reports–ticking of his fellow escapees one by one–tells him that the noose is tightening.

For most of its length this book runs at a solid B-grade Cain level but a few scenes–like the one in which TB afflicted transient thinks his inexperienced lover is finally developing some bedroom technique when in fact it’s just the beginning of a grand mal epileptic seizure–invoke a level of misanthropy and disgust with the flesh that makes this a memorable and worthy read.

The first edition PB is a bit pricey (which means I’ll try to keep it in stock) but there’s a 1968 reprint that can be had for $10-12.

Doing research for this review I experienced one of those bizarre synchronicities that the book trade is prone to. The author, Bruce Elliot, was apparently more prolific in science fiction and the pulps than he was in mystery and I wasn’t able to find out much about his other hard-boiled titles. But his (minimal) Wikipedia page mentions that he was a practicing stage magician…and what do I have sitting next to my desk but a pile of JUST arrived magic ephemera (to be listed in a few days) containing 20-30 mimeo’d magic/sf ‘zines entitled “The Phoenix”, edited by none other than Bruce Elliott…and these were “thrown in” by a seller as a bonus!

(click image for full page)

How’s that for magic.

What’ll You Have, Mac?

This great Times Square period piece–and tour of the Village Bookstore on Christopher Street–is part of a 1972 “documentary” entitled Pornography in New York that I turned up on a torrent site.

[Clip not work safe] [or Youtube safe apparently. Crap and I didn’t keep my edit…]

Back in the day you needed to frame your smut with cautionary or educational warning to get past the obscenity laws…which I guess is what I’m doing here.

Anyway it’s worth tracking down the full 65 minute doc, which features early footage of Cynthia Plaster Caster (I think, or at least someone following in her–ahem–footprints), a tour of the original Pleasure Chest (when it just had bondage gear tacked to wooden shingles), a body-painting studio, and some innocent interviews with Times Square denizens about their sex-lives and attitudes towards pornography.

New Pulp

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My Flesh is Sweet (Lion 68) 1951 AUTHOR: Day Keene ARTIST: (unknown), originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

Just added 40+ new covers in the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery (including a doozie for my “Artists with Issues” tag). I also created a–broadly defined–“Sports” category since I’ve never had a good place to put them. There are a lot of great prize-fighting, noir covers that will eventually end up in there.

Enjoy!

Surreal + Erotic Marionettes (NWS)

Like Hans Bellmer and George Grosz drawings come to life! Not sure if these are technically marionettes, automata, or both. Damn cool though

Los Grumildos are automated puppets, miniature beings that skulk about a world somewhere between Victorian dollhouse and red light district. The brainchildren of Peruvian artist Ety Fefer…. this voyeuristic experience was inspired by the characters that inhabit the shady areas of downtown Lima, Peru. Fefer creates a kind of magical world that serves as a home for these marginal creatures that tend to be rejected and despised by society. The hyperrealist details of each plasticine puppet bring out their most intimate feelings, but the narrative is left to the viewers.

This was in New York at the beginning of August. Can’t believe I missed it. That’s what I get for letting my RSS reader grow wild.

(link via Daily Burlesque)

Model/Actress in Afrikaans photo-novels

A reader recently left a link and comment–on one of most unexpectedly popular posts: Die Swart Luiperd–about her experience working as a model and actress in the Afrikaans photo-novels.

Dianne (above, right) was featured in the “Tessa” books (among others) about a bikini clad…spy? PI? enforcer? These bikini-babe titles (particularly the Tessa books) were derogatorily referred to as “Poes Boekies” (which translates exactly as you’d guess) by the readers.

She gives this account of a typical shoot:

Most of the filming was done at Republican Press in Mobeni, Durban. They had a separate section which was used for photo stories and they had various “sets” arranged. We had a jail, operating theatre, doctors office etc.

On the whole, it only took a morning to shoot the entire book. We used to get there by 08h30 and were finished between 12h00 and 14h00 depending on your part in the book. [We would] bring 3 day outfits, 1 evening outfit and a bikini [and] all of us were quite adept at changing in the back of the Combi!…. It was a good laugh to go through the books when they were published and see all the mistakes that were made!

Visit Dianne’s page. She also mentions an intriguing sounding documentary entitled “The Glow of White Women”:

which looks at white women in the Dark Continent and focuses on the forbidden sexual desires of blacks and whites under Apartheid…. The film is put together using images from vintage magazines, the covers of pulp novels, anatomical drawings and family photographs, as well as archive news footage, South African tourism promotional films and commercials for skin whitening creams.

I’d be curious to see this if anyone can point me at a torrent.

Thanks for the info and pics Dianne!

Eaton Awful Food Jigsaw Puzzles

I was going through my game closet the other day–trying to make some room–and I pulled out my collection of Eaton puzzles. I hadn’t looked at these in a while so I thought I’d share.

I found my first Eaton at a yard sale (“Good Morning!“). This was a jigsaw puzzle featuring fantastically bad photography of dangerously unrefrigerated food so, of course, I bought it immediately.

Putting it together I asked myself questions like “Is this part of the gristle near to that gluey milk puddle?” or “Should I sort out all of the mushy cereal pieces and work on those first?”. I have a fairly weak stomach so this was a race between my gag reflex and compulsion to finish.

After “Good Morning!” I was hooked and tracked down 9-10 more on eBay (6 of which were classics).

There’s “ethnic” food via 1980s mall food court (“Oriental Chow“, “Chili Today-Hot Tamale!“), quaintly obscene melted pastel confections (“Oh Fudge!“), venereal potatoes (“Stuffed Spuds“), and train wrecks of meat (“Deli Fare“).


(“Deli Fair” even features a handy diagram on the reverse so you can tell that the block of…what looks like the stuff they cleaned out of the wood-chipper at the end of Fargo, is actually head cheese.)

Last night Alice and I sat down with “Oh Fudge!”. We choose to do it with dinner for some reason and as always it was Eatonic. I was reminded that these are actually really well-crafted puzzles, lots of texture and color variety, thick board stock, and bizarrely-shaped pieces that break up the standard grid layout.

Anyway they’re great fall weather fun and (now that I have all I want) any jigsaw and/or kitsch fans out there should track them down.

Artists with Issues

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Richard Blade: Undying World #8 (Pinnacle Heroic Fantasy Series) 1973 AUTHOR: Jeffrey Lord ARTIST: Tony Destefano, originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

Numerous new items in the Pulp Fiction Cover Gallery, including this gem in the “Ugly and Bizarre” category labeled with my newly minted “Artists With Issues” tag.