Earlier this week Bhamterminal ran an interview I did. It was with one of the more prolific online contributors here in Birmingham. Dystopos (as he’s known online) founded the Bhamwiki, started the all seeing Magic City Flickr Group and started the Deep South book discussion group on LibraryThing. While on his journey to chronicle all things Birmingham, he has quite naturally become a good book collector, with an ever expanding collection of Birmingham, Alabama centered books. All of which has afforded him a unique perspective on the Magic City and its history.
The article appears in its entirety, (with a book photo by Dystopos) after the jump.
Find your elbow pads… the annual second-floor gobbling Super Book Sale at the Vestavia Hills library kicks-off Friday, February 1st at 5pm and continues through Tuesday, February 5th.
No doubt the crowds will be there early, but it’s always fun to go on the last day when they say something like “give me $2 and go fill this grocery sack” or something like that. I think proceeds benefit the new library planned to replace the one on Highway 31.
I can’t imagine going through the trash here in Birmingham and finding enough discarded books of value to feed yourself. Which is about all the money the two guys featured in the article need, because they are homeless. What a quirky turn to the story. I’m not saying them being homeless is a good thing, I’m just saying that it made for an interesting news article.
It also tipped me off to Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk, which I had never heard of. But is now on my list, as the author uses these street salesmen to address the “Broken Windows” strategy/theory of cleaning up a neighborhood, which our new mayor has just begun to employ across Birmingham.
We have plugged the Birmingham’s 2008 Big Read Project Mockingbird a few times already. Now organziers are flexing the ir Web 2.0 muscles and asking for help from the immensley productive Magic City Flickr Group. Basically, the call went out for photos of events, people or anything that related to project Mockingbird or the book To Kill a Mockingbird.
So if you have any pics sitting around, just upload them to any Flickr account and tag them “projectmockingbird”, so the libraries can parse them to their sites via widgets.
