New Website

I’m kind of pleased about this.  Anyone who has been keeping up with this blog for any time knows I was involved with an organization called The Missouri Center for the Book.  To recap for the benefit of those who are just joining us, the MCB is the state affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, which is an organization that promotes and advocates for what we call The Community of the Book.  That includes authors, sure, but also bookstores, libraries, publishers, bookbinders, even illustrators.

The Center for the Book is not a remedial reading program.

There are plenty others that do that.  No, MCB and the other state Centers—and every state has one, plus the Territories—are about the culture of reading.  Now, if that sounds snobbish, then forgive me, but it’s anything but.  The door is open.  Anyone can be a reader.  In fact, in this country I’d have to say anyone who can’t read—no, let me be more specific—anyone who doesn’t read and undervalues reading, it’s on them.  There’s no excuse.  Books are everywhere and while it may be easier to see the movie or go to the mall or whatever else you might do to fill up the time you might spend discovering a great book, to not be part of the Community of the Book is both sad and no one’s fault but your own.  At least, that’s my opinion.

I served on the board of directors for nine years.  For five of those nine years I was president of the organization.  In that time, a lot of work got done and some new things came into being, not least of which is the office of Missouri State Poet Laureate—which MCB advocated for, lobbied, worked, and finally achieved, a program which MCB runs.

I retired from the board this year—last March, to be precise—and there was one thing I wanted to see accomplished that was still hanging fire when I left, something I believed to be vital to the continued health of the organization.  Whether we like to admit it or not, the 21st Century is The Future in more ways than I could have anticipated as a 14-year-old science fiction addict reading Asimov and Heinlein and Anderson and Bradbury.  The digital age is here and books are changing form if not content.  It is not possible to function effectively without participating in that reality.

MCB had a website.  We’d had for years and it needed upgrading.  We also needed a higher web presence, so the social networking so common today beckoned.

I’m pleased to inform you all that MCB now has a new website.  Right here.  It just went up in the last week or so.  I’d really like to thank Jarek Steele at Left Bank Books for constructing this and agreeing to be admin.  He did a spectacular job and as time goes on there will be other goodies.  Two regular blogs are projected for it, one for the Poet Laureate, the other of more diverse provenance.  You will note there’s a FaceBook link.

(I must also give considerable credit to Diana Botsford, who did an enormous amount of prep work on the previous site making it ready for transfer, found us a new ISP, worked hard to get it up to a point where the project was viable—and then due to the vagaries that life throws at us from time to time had to move on.  Diana is a great person.  Visit her site, buy her books.)

It’s not often you get to say that you accomplished everything you wanted to in a project, and certainly there are some things I didn’t get to do with the MCB, but I can honestly say I took it as far as I could and did the important stuff I wanted to get done.  The new board is going to do some very cool things in the next few years, so I would like to encourage you all to check it out, give it your support, friend the FaceBook page, and bookmark the new site.  They’re good people, it’s a worthwhile organization, a vital cause, and a cool thing.

I am going to write some more books.