Massachusetts Center for the Book, Chapter One
This is the first of what I hope will become regular posts
to the Public Humanist. I'm writing from
the new offices of the Massachusetts Center
for the Book, which will officially open its doors this fall on the campus
of Historic Northampton.
The office was purpose built, so I've been told, to be the
gift shop for the Historic Northampton campus, and was for some time- in a
happy coincidence - used byNorthampton book
binder, Bill Streeter. It juts out from a wonderful white barn that sits at
the back of the property and features barn-wood paneling and exposed rustic
beams. It's large enough for us and for our books & or it will be once we get
in some more shelves! An added bonus,
of course, is that we are now neighbors both with Historic Northampton, with
which we have begun to collaborate on cultural tourism, and with the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities,
which has been one of our supporters since the Center was founded in January of
2000.
Yes, January of 2000.
We are approaching our 9th anniversary. Yet, even as we contemplate entering into organizational
double digits, many dont quite know that (a) Massachusetts has a Center for
the Book or (b) what a Center for the Book is anyway. Perhaps I can use the rest of this blog to
amend that sorry state with readers of the Public Humanist.
The Massachusetts Center for the Book is one of 50 state
centers for the book affiliated with the Center for the Book in the Library of
Congress. That Center was
established in 1977, when
Daniel Boorstin was Librarian of Congress, with a
broad mission to promote books, reading, literacy, and libraries in our
nation. State centers for the book join
the national center in that mission and, in addition, develop programs that
promote the particular book cultures of their states.
On the national stage, our Center cooperates with the
state center network and the Library of Congress on an annual school-age
reading and writing promotion program, Letters About Literature.
This is a great project that asks students in Grades 4 through 12 to write
letters to authors about 
books that have changed their lives. Each year, we receive thousands of letters,
and we honor the best of them during a spring awards ceremony at the State
House. It's always a joyous day. And it's made possible by a generous grant
from the Calderwood Writing
Initiative at the Boston Athenaeum, which has funded our state program for
the past four years. Student letters,
as well as photos from the event, are posted at our web site, and I hope you
will take a look at what students are saying about the many important
connections they are making with books in the 21st century.
We also co-host the Massachusetts table in the Pavilion of
the States at the National Book Festival,
working with our state library agency, the Massachusetts Board of Library
Commissioners, on this event. Now in
its 8th year, the National Book Festival will be held on September
27th, 2008, on the National Mall, in Washington, DC. Each year, we bring to our table recommended
Massachusetts books, examples of commonwealth reading and book promotion
programs, and publicity materials that highlight our current year of
Massachusetts book award winners. You
can read more about the festival - and see which Massachusetts authors will
participate this year -- at the Library
of Congress and Center web
sites. This year's festival poster was
created by Massachusetts author/illustrator, Jan Brett.
The
Massachusetts Book Awards are the first 
state-specific program we
established, and we have named award winners for each of the years the Center
has been in existence. These awards are
meant not merely to honor important Massachusetts works of fiction, nonfiction,
poetry, and children's/young adult literature but also to promote their reading
in the Commonwealth. Each year,
volunteers from across the state create reading and discussion and/or activity
guides to encourage adoption of our award and honors titles by reading groups
and story times in Massachusetts. We
also produce high-quality posters and bookmarks that we offer to libraries and
bookstores for promotional displays, and we facilitate connections between
authors and libraries to schedule readings and book-signings throughout the
award year. In all of these ways, we
hope the MassBooks, as we call them, connect writers and readers in our commonwealth. This years award winners will be announced
just after Labor Day, and well hold an awards event at the State House on
November 20th. Stay tuned
for details.
The second state-specific initiative we have undertaken
may well come to be our Center's lifework, for it is a continually evolving and
ever-expanding project: the Literary
Map of Massachusetts. This
cultural tourism guide to more than 250 literary heritage sites in our Commonwealth
was originally funded by the Massachusetts
Foundation for the Humanities and developed in cooperation with the English
Department at UMass Amherst and with a statewide editorial board. During
the course of the development we found many surprises that we were able to
capture on our first map, and more than a few sites that are not yet
marked. Thus we have begun to develop a
related project to mark new literary landmarks in Massachusetts, the first of
which will be in Northampton. But this
is a topic worthy of its own entry & and so I'll leave off the particulars for
now and hope to be invited back again, soon, to say more about cultural tourism
and Massachusetts book culture with a blog entry that focuses on literary
mapping.
The
Massachusetts Center for the Book is funded by the Boston Athenaeum, Boston
Public Library, Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, Massachusetts
Cultural Council, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and Simmons
College Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, with campuses in
Boston and South Hadley. We also enjoy
support from readers like you, and I hope you will read more about us, and stop
by in the Fall when we open our Northampton office for book business.