Satisfy your inner nerd 

The autumnal re-opening of school doors calls us back inside to the world of books. Summer paperbacks with sand trapped between the pages get shelved. The cooler season goes better with the sound of book spines cracking and of heavyweight paper turning; the squeak of highlighters against textbooks' lines; the smell of preserved paper trapped in library stacks; the well-appointed bookstore displays weighted with the literary harvest.

Local bookworms have made several very handsome books available to our thirsty eyes and minds. Why not strew one or more across your coffee table? Your guests will think you oh-so-smart.

You and Yours

Naomi Shihab Nye

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Rochester publishing house BOA Editions will publish its third volume of Naomi Shihab Nye's poems this fall. Nye has written over 20 volumes; You and Yours won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and her 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a National Book Award finalist in 2002.

Nye, a Palestinian-American who lives in Texas, wields the simplest language to craft extremely accessible and effective poems, and though she writes conversationally, her reverence for words is clear and her writing has a deliberate and powerful gait. Her open "Letter to Any Would-Be Terrorists," available widely on the web, offers an example of her grounded eloquence; she grabs at you without any looks in a thesaurus' direction. Her latest volume continues her contemplation of the everyday sacred.

BOA is publishing four other volumes this fall: Consideration of the Guitar by Ray Gonzalez, Off-Season in the Promised Land by Peter Makuck, The Hoopoe's Crown by Jacqueline Osherow, and Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women's Poems from Tang China. All are (or will be as soon as they publish) available at local bookstores and at boaeditions.org.

C(a[e{I}o]u)P: Autobiography #5

Scott McCarney

VSW Press

The VSW Press at Visual Studies Workshop helps artists complete books of pretty stunning artistry. In addition to offering courses in bookmaking, VSW also takes on artists for month-long bookmaking residencies. There was once a working press at VSW's Prince Street campus, but now the actual printing is done off-site at a Rochester printer. Some of the books are intricate, some are simpler; some involve words as much as art, some let the imagery and the design do the talking.

Scott McCarney's C(a[e{I}o]u)P: Autobiography #5, one example of the 2005 crop, uses a dos-a-dos cover to combine two booklets (they share a back cover). It's all about memory, and he combines images from his and his parents' collections: teacups with baseball caps, VHS tapes with to-do lists, both sides of postcards he sent to his parents and they kept. Together, with very little literal narrative, the images and lists and tape labels tell a portion of his life's story.

All VSW Press books are available for purchase through Visual Studies Workshop, either on the website, www.vsw.org/press, or in the bookstore, 31 Prince Street, which is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12 to 5 p.m. 442-8676

Cobblestone Quest: Road Tours of New York's Historic Buildings

Rich and Sue Freeman

Footprint Press Inc.

They don't build 'em like they used to. In the pre-Civil War era Western New York masons built approximately 700 cobblestone buildings, constructed with the small stones found in the region's soil (it could take several years to gather enough for one building). And because they were built so well, many of them still stand. It is an architectural form unique to the Rochester area. Rich and Sue Freeman, a husband and wife team that writes prolifically about the Western New York landscape, now take the reading public on a tour of these buildings. As the Freemans do so well, they've divided the book into 17 driving or biking tours illustrated by maps and photos and balanced them with chapters on history and architecture. Available at www.footprintpress.com, local bookstores, or at www.landmarksociety.org

The Hands That Feed Us: 100 Years at the Rochester Public Market

Nancy Rosin and Karen Burns

Few places capture the spirit of Rochester better than the Public Market --- one of only a handful of public markets that have been in continual operation for the last 100 years. 2005 is our market's 100th year, and the city is rightfully celebrating. It's still the place for the cheapest, freshest food, and it's a vital link between city residents and their farmer neighbors. Do you want to meet the people who grow and harvest your food? Do you want a bag of tube socks for pocket change? Then to market you must go. Nancy Rosin and Karen Burns researched the market's history and collected more than 175 photos, images, drawings, and newspaper clippings to make this visual tribute. Available at www.landmarksociety.org

Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church

Kevin J. Avery

Cornell University Press

Treasure from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church is the title of a new book published by the Olana Partnership and Cornell University Press. It is also the title of an accompanying exhibition that was on display at Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown through September 19, and which will also travel to, among other venues, the National Academy Museum in New York City in February 2006.

For those of us living in Upstate New York, the names Olana and Frederic Edwin Church should have a vaguely familiar ring to them --- or, at the very least, we should become familiar with them.

Olana is the former home of Church, a member of the Hudson River School, a group of landscape painters that focused on, and even encouraged, cultural myths about the future of the new American nation and the primeval vastness of its wilderness. For Church, that included South America as well, as seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's breathtaking, "The Heart of the Andes," painted in 1859.

His home, the "castle on a hill" with a view of the mid-Hudson valley, is in Hudson, New York. Today, it is a living document of the world travels, the objects collected, and the art produced --- including notebooks, drawings, and both oil sketches and paintings --- by this acclaimed 19th-century artist. The book and the exhibition detail a selection of paintings from the collection at Olana and places the work not only within the context of the artist's life and travels but also considers Church's influence on others and the public's reception of him.

Of course, visiting Olana is a great weekend destination, especially in the fall when the surrounding foliage begins to turn. Or, try to catch one of the upcoming venues of the exhibition. If all else fails, get the book: There are lots of good color reproductions and an informative essay.

Available through Cornell University Press, www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

--- Heidi Nickisher