Just Heat and Stuhr: Eleventh Nebraska Book Festival Set for September 13-14
by Charles Peek,
University of Nebraska at Kearney
Photo courtesy of Stuhr Museum
rand Island's Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (and associated facilities) will be the site of the next Nebraska Book Festival. Scheduled for September 13-14, this is the first festival under the new title of "book" festival, emphasizing the original goal of holding a public celebration of all varieties of books and book enterprises.
The Stuhr, with its connections to history and its exhibit structure, gives added emphasis to that larger purpose. Under the leadership of Pam Snow, a planning committee is considering how best to use the Stuhr's facilities (and those nearby) and how to create a significant site-centered celebration. Snow brings years of experience with the Nebraska Humanities Council and recent experience with Chautauqua, as well as familiarity with Grand Island as a long time small business owner.
The theme, Sense of Time, Sense of Place, will feature programs for adults, children, and youth. Plans currently call for a Friday program focused on middle and high school students and a Friday evening celebration including a festive meal, program, and the presentation of the Nebraska Center for the Book's (NCB) Mildred Bennet Award and NCB Book Awards. Saturday will be devoted to book displays from publishers and literary centers, readings by various writers, and a wide variety of programs, many of them hands-on experiences taking place in the most appropriate museum venue. Some of these will be devoted to adult interests, others to small children, and still others to students. Weather permitting, many displays and events will be outside. However, indoor alternatives will be ready.
The Stuhr has the capacity to handle up to four hundred people in a single location or 850 throughout the facility. The planning committee is currently developing initial publicity and designing the program for the Friday evening event. The program committee hopes to attract demonstrations and live broadcasts, in addition to the usual panels and readers.
Charles Peek serves as liaison between the local committee and the Nebraska Center for the Book. In addition to Snow, the local planning committee consists of Stuhr representatives Pam Price, Russ Czaplewski, Liana Steele, Warren Rodgers, and Stephanie King; retired teacher and Nebraska Literature Festival veteran Martha McGahan; Grand Island librarian Steve Fosselman; Nancy Johnson, also a Festival veteran; Ron and Betty Kort of Hastings High School; and community volunteers Nancy Kelly, Kay Fowles, Renee Goble, Dee Hanson, Cathie Cure, Marge Woodman, and Kim Dinsdale. Diane Haney will serve as Festival coordinator. These planners are still recruiting additional individuals from the Grand Island area to serve on the Festival's various planning committees: program, food, Friday evening, site coordination, finance, public relations and publicity, and book vendors.
The Festival is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, with assistance from the Nebraska Humanities Council and numerous local sponsors. Grand Island-area readers, book-lovers, members of book groups, writers, etc. who would like to be involved should contact Pam Snow, 308-381-8681, e-mail: phsnow@kdsi.net, Diane Haney, 308-384-6209, e-mail: greenacre@charter.net, or Charles Peek, 308-865-8289, e-mail: peek@unk.edu.
his year looks to be one of growth and innovation for the Nebraska Center for the Book and the Board invites you to take part in some of the activities in 2002. 
On March 20, Governor Mike Johanns signed a proclamation declaring April 14-20 as National Library Week in Nebraska. National Library Week is celebrated this year with recognition of the "Letters about Literature" State Award Winners. 
The second collection of short fiction by Sidney native Dan Chaon, Among the Missing, is by turns spare and lyrical, with regular nods to the surreal, an impressive follow-up to his stunning first collection, Fitting Ends (Northwestern University Press, 1996).
For those of us addicted to books, bookstores, and reading, Raabe tells us how to know whether or not we are, in fact, a "biblioholic." His test helped me to find out that I am not one yet, but am veering in that direction (e.g., I had to answer "yes" to the question, "Have you ever bought the same book twice without knowing it?"). Raabe points out the problems of "over-book-buying" as seen in the case of the eighteenth century French collector Boulard, pointing out that upon his death he had amassed between 600,000 and 800,000 volumes. The sale of the collection, Raabe reports, took five years.
or the last couple of years I wanted to take off on Fourth of July weekend and drive to McConnelsville (between Zanesville and Marietta) in southern Ohio. I lived there, ages nine to eleven, 1953-1955. My wife, not keen on the idea, resisted. BAM! WHAM! WOW! for our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary Karen surprised me with a Memorial Day weekend trip via TWA to Columbus, Ohio and by rental car to McConnelsville.
My family emigrated from England to America in November 1952. The English schoolboy looking like a refugee wearing short pants in cold New York was soon garbed in Levis. We moved to McConnelsville because my Holocaust survivor physician grandfather, Felix Bachmann, worked at Rocky Glenn, a tuberculosis sanitarium on the hill above the town. We lived at 169 North Fifth Street. The house is still there, inhabited for the past thirty-four years by Ernest "Ike" Knox, an 81-year-old who worked at the same factory (The Cleveland Graphite Bronze Company) as my father, though at a later date.
ne thing leads to another. While looking something up about Grand Island at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Library, I found Finding List of the Grand Island Public Library, edition of 1899, wedged between the catalogues of the Boston Athenaeum and Harvard Library. 
The Free Press Book and Job Printing House in Grand Island printed this 188-page volume. According to a rubber stamp on page 3, it was "Acquired December 23, 1940, from The Grand Island College Library, 1892-1931," a library that Omaha University had purchased. Another rubber stamp on the end paper states, "Reconditioned by Library Service Project Work Projects Administration Nebraska 8-29-41." I apparently was the first person to check out this 102-year-old book that had been sitting on the library shelf for sixty years.
Like the land he loves, he has come to own a poem's terrain as much as it owns him..."
