Notes: Fake Steve; Bookseller Reminiscences
Yesterday's New York Times uncovered the man behind the Fake Steve blog,
who pretended to be Apple's CEO and, as the Times put it, aimed "to
lampoon Mr. Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical
leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech
journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and
Silicon Valley's overall aura of excess." Some might say that's too
easy, but Fake Steve has been so popular that he snagged a contract
with Da Capo Press, which in October is publishing his novel Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody ($22.95, 9780306815843/0306815842), one of the publisher's fall lead titles.
In real life, Fake Steve is Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who writes and edits technology articles.
Concerning his invention of Fake Steve last year, Lyons told the Times, "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it."
He added that he tried to give up the blog twice, "but started again
after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had
disappeared."
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On the occasion of his 90th birthday tomorrow, George Browning, former
longtime bookseller at Capitol Book & News, the Montgomery, Ala.,
bookstore owned by Cheryl and Thomas Upchurch, tells the Montgomery Advertiser
about his days as a POW in World War II. Bizarrely when he was
interrogated by a German officer after being captured when his B-17
crashed in the Netherlands, the officer stopped his questioning
and asked, "Haven't we met before?"
The answer to that interrogatory was ja. It turned out that the two had
been at a frat party following a Virginia Military Institute-University
of South Carolina football game in 1936. Browning had been a student at USC; the German was studying at VMI.
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Frances Steloff, "a raggedy little girl" who peddled
flowers at fancy hotels in her native Saratoga Springs, N.Y.,
eventually became the prescient businesswoman who, in 1920 and with
only $100, started Manhattan's legendary--and recently closed--Gotham
Book Mart (then called Gotham Book and Art).
The Glens Falls Post Star
reminisced about the woman who "befriended and supported some of the
most celebrated figures of the twentieth century--Martha Graham, Anais
Nin, Henry Miller, and many more. As owner of the Gotham Book Mart in
New York City, hailed by one book reviewer as being as important to the
culture as the Museum of Modern Art, she became a minor celebrity in
her own right."
Despite her
notoriety and having left Saratoga at age 12, Steloff "kept
strong ties to the city throughout her life," the Post Star continued. "In 1968, the year after
Skidmore College awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters,
Steloff endowed an annual lecture series and poetry prize there. She
later donated a collection of rare books, many first editions inscribed
to her by the authors. In December 1987, on her 100th birthday,
then-mayor of Saratoga Springs Ellsworth Jones gave her the key to the
city. When she died at 101, she was buried at the Shaara T'fille
cemetery on Weibel Avenue, in a tree-shaded plot she had chosen a month
earlier. With $100 and a few books."
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The Oak Ridge Bookshop and Café has opened in Oak Ridge, N.C. The Stokesdale News
reported that owner Minaxi Patel "has been very pleased with the reception the bookstore has
received in the community. . . . Minaxi said she started the bookstore
because there was no close-by bookstore for her children to get books."
The nearest bookshop is a Barnes & Noble in Greensboro.
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I've been on a mystery-reading binge. July and August are the perfect
months for it (as is any month, let's be real), and I have read a slew
of them (including the fine The Face of Death by Cory McFadyen). I
inadvertently picked a lot of books with beatings, missing body parts
and the unnerving phrase "bled out," so when The Cutting Season was
next on the pile, with a knife on the cover, I thought it might be time
for a British cozy. But a cat was asleep on my lap, and the Brits were
in another room, so blades and mayhem it was. I read it in one sitting
(with several changes of cats). More bleeding out, more severed limbs,
but nonetheless, an intriguing page-turner with a startling opening in
an operating room: