AAMP!itude

in search of books (found Braille Playboy)

This past weekend I went to the Daedalus book outlet store in Columbia and bought some books to take advantage of their sale. One of them was a book titled Dvorak in America. I wanted it because this year is the centennial anniversary of his death and I'm thinking about visiting the Czech Republic sometime within a year's time.

At my local library, I borrowed some CD's of Dvorak and other Czech composers.

Also borrowed some books about music careers, so that I can better understand the business of music and the kind of music-related jobs. I don't, necessarily, want to work in the business or become a working musician, but I need to better understand this kind of stuff to improve the content and coverage of my primitive music website.

At the end of Sunday, I caught the end of the Baltimore Book Festival at Mt. Vernon. I haven't been to it in a couple years, but things hadn't changed that much. A difference I noticed, this time, was a number of authors selling self-published books (fiction & poetry). Actually, some of the books were probably published by small presses (but they looked as if they were self-published.) And it seemed that some of the authors were from out-of-state (e.g., Delaware and New York).

I didn't buy any books, there. But I did accept something handed to me that looked like a large manuscript. It turned out to be a copy of Playboy -- for the blind! It was part I of a three-part Braille "translation" of an issue of Playboy. I guess that blind readers are the only ones who can truly say that they read it just for the articles. Blind editions of magazines are published by the Library of Congress.

(Are our tax dollars being used to pander to blind lust?! For shame! Here's yet another example of a government program gone awry. I wonder if Michelle Malkin, or like-minded others, have exposed this perversion of our tax money by those liberal, pc subversives squirreled away in our government.) :-)