InBerkeley

I’m regularly struck by how many times our little city of only 100,000 people appears in other media. It seems to be a rule, for example, at The New York Times, that Berkeley’s Alice Waters has to be mentioned at least once a week. So I thought it might be fun to track these sightings from time to time on InBerkeley.

Here’s Bookride looking at character types in the book business:

The polymath. A few are to be found in the trade. Ridiculously over educated, versed in several languages with the ability (usually) to decipher titles in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and even Japanese. Their natural home is Berkeley California. Often of unkempt appearance; their books, too, are sometimes a little scruffy. Colleagues in the trade, some barely literate, urge them to go on ‘Who Wants to be Millionaire’ but their trash knowledge (or lack of it) would let them down.

Sounds fairly accurate on a certain class of Berkeleyites, but I suspect the steady disappearance of bookstores in Berkeley hasn’t yet reached the London-based bookseller who writes Bookride.

Lance Knobel In the wild