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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Dancing Lawn Mowers …Third Ring Rage … and Scouting For Capitalists
Minnesotans wait hard for Spring.
Whereas in other parts of the country good weather begins to dribble through the windows in mid-February, we in Minnesota practice patience, because until the snow melts and the grass greens up we can’t practice anything else—like baseball.
But the waiting eventually pays off.
This is never more evident than on that first, glorious, sunshiny weekend when shoes are scattered across front lawns, the sidewalk chalk mobilizes, baseball bats crack, the lawnmowers do their first synchronized dance of the season up and down the street, dirt first begins to migrate under the fingernails, some sweet smell (forsythia?) permeates the neighborhoods, and the mosquitoes are still hibernating— or whatever they do when they’re not test-drilling the rest of us.
That was the weekend of May 2 and 3.
Halley, my border collie, and I took a five-mile walk around town, and it was wonderful, like somebody threw the switch that said “It’s Spring: be outside.”
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Did anybody catch the article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press entitled “What ‘Minnesota Nice’? This is Suburban Politics” that appeared on Monday?
The League of Minnesota Cities, a resource group for cities, may develop a “code of conduct” for city officials, many of whom have recently distinguished themselves by displaying rude behavior in public meetings.
LMC Director Jim Miller came up with a term, “Third Ring Rage,” to describe the anger phenomenon in suburban city halls, anger that he attributes to the bitter divides caused by development pressure.
Rochester Mayor Ardell Brede suggested that budgets are a factor in these rude outbreaks.
He was quoted as saying, “Many small towns with tiny budgets don’t have the level of professionalism that well-paid city staffs and elected officials bring to larger cities.”
What cities? Like Chicago? Maybe, just maybe, the people we elect are reflections of ourselves. An angry candidate may just make an angry mayor.
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My husband and I own a lot of books, many of which we purchased when we were DINKS—“Double Income, No Kids.”
Once the kids started eating a pork chop apiece, all the money went to groceries and we tended to use our library a lot more often.
We do, however, indulge in the occasional library book sale, traditionally a great place to look for used copies of books we’ve enjoyed over the years.
That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on the evolution of book scouts [May 9, “Digging for Treasure at Book Sales”].
I first learned about book scouts from reading John Dunning’s excellent mystery, “Booked To Die,” followed rapidly by “The Bookman’s Wake.” (There are a few more after that.)
Traditionally, book scouts have hunted for valuable books to collect or resell them.
A valuable book is generally a first-edition copy: that is, a book from the very first run to come off the printing line.
As any book scout worth his salt can tell you, there’s good money to be made by knowing how to tell first-edition copies from second-edition copies (a serious book scout memorizes the typographical errors in the first editions—they’ve generally been corrected by the time the second edition comes around).
First-edition Steinbecks, for instance, are worth a lot of grapes. And a first-edition Steinbeck signed by the author is worth some really serious money.
The STrib article recounts how modern book scouts armed with high-tech hardware are causing a ruckus at local “Friends of the Library” sales across the Twin Cities.
Their $200 scanners detect literary gems hidden in the stacks of donated books or library discards. And that makes some of the regulars who frequent book sales crabby.
But these new book scouts aren’t really interested in rare books, they’re simply trying to turn a profit by reselling the books on the internet at a price higher than the one they paid at the book sale.
The scanner reads the book’s bar code and gives the resale price for the item.
Whether or not this is “sporting” behavior appears to depend on your point of view.
In deference to shoppers, some Friends groups are making the folks armed with scanners wait an hour or two before they’re admitted to the sale.
I liked the approach taken by the Friends group in Eden Prairie. The group bought its own scanner and now prices its more valuable books at a higher rate.
Thank goodness, capitalism is alive and well at the local library.