We began our special look with local author don faber and learn about the youngest governor in michigans history. Ann arbor michigan. We visited the area with the help of our local cable partner comcast to bring you some of the citys rich literary culture and history. Former Ann Arbor News editor said down with us to discuss his book a boy governor. The youngest chief executive in any state history. A very young age, appointed territorial secretary at 19 which is a record that will probably never be broken. Another record was in 1835. And in time people in michigan and the people of detroit came to trust them even though a young person, very skilled and dedicated leader. Regarded first of all as by the people in his own territory as a bit of coming in from kentucky. The logical thing for him to do would have been to appoint a michigan person. Because mason had made such an impression on jackson himself, they had met. Jackson of this cement has a lot of confidence and vision. I will appoint him. The strip of land that was disputed between michigan and ohio at st. Their back to the northwest the soon to be state michigan would be a Straight Line. No one knew for sure where the southern end of Lake Michigan is when ohio became a state they slipped into their constitution a provision calling for of a slightly angled line, the Northern Boundary so that it would include the future port of toledo which was going to be the northern terminus of a series of canals that elmira was building. All of its investors were ohio people. The governor of ohio had to protect its investment. They made sure that the Northern Boundary concluded toledo. After two surveys were taken, one by michigan and won by ohio, the one by michigan determine that toledo was in michigan. The one that was in ohio determined it was in a while. Things settle down and missing people moved into a strip of contested land, organized into townships, collected taxes. Then in 1835 things all came to a head when governor lucas said im going to protect that land. Governor mason said, im going to protect that land. In the organized the ohio militia and the territorial militia and actually got into a shooting war over 470 square miles of basically swamp and farmland that machine claimed legally it around. The war then proceeded in a series of skirmishes the route 1835. No one was killed. It ended up being brokered by congress in 1836. As compensation we will give you the entire western twothirds of the Upper Peninsula of michigan. That is some michigan ended up with the Upper Peninsula. And it was not until 1837 finally that michigan was officially welcomed as a state. When mason was elected governor he had already participated in helping tow right michigans first constitution. That constitution called for a superintendent of public instruction to oversee the schools. This had never been done in any state in it union up to that time. Prohibition in slavery which was pretty progressive at that time, considering that the civil war was still roughly 30 years down the road. Mason was so far ahead of his time to meet call for an appropriation to build this to locks. For that he got laughed at by no less a statesman and henry clay, the great in the clay of kentucky said, in effect among why dont we just build something in the face of the moon. All those many years later when michigan in detroit became known as the arsenal of democracy michigan had mason to thank for that vision of building those locks which could then get those ships bringing all that iron ore and minerals down to the downstate steel mills where they could make the plans and the tanks and Everything Else to help defeat germany in world war two. We had mason to thank for that. The unfortunate thing is his timing because as san as mason became governor the National Financial panic of 1837 hit, in michigan was one of its chief victims. Because mason had outlined all of these expensive plans for development, hoping that he could find it with good money, but then the banks failed, in part because of president jacksons policies, in part because of Economic Conditions at that time. In so mason was left the bank. And he soon developed quite a coherent set of enemys who attacked him for bringing michigan. When mason ran for reelection he just barely won, and by that time his opponents and the whigs were really on his case and accused him of being a demagogue and taking the state. That in effect roy and mason in the eyes of michigan people who in their shortsightedness forgot all the things that mason had done prior to that which was setting into place all of our institutions, the educational institutions. The democrats stated, that sort of thing. They forgot. Mason eventually had to leave michigan in virtual disgrace. Now, mason was elegant. He had a wonderful viejo kentucky demeanor about him which, at first, may have set him off to michigan frontiers and as some kind of very lofty individual, but he understood michigan politics and how it worked. He became a man of the people. They left him so much that by the time he had died already at age 31, by the time they brought him back to end of year several by so that mason was regarded as a great statesman and a person who has said michigan off on the right path by from the start. On our recent visit to ann arbor, mich. , book tv stopped in to talk with honors hillary in Mike Christensen on book selling in the digital age. And independent bookstore selling new titles. We focus on literary fiction and social sciences, poetry. Just means educate people are interested in books. I worked for simon and schuster for about five years. My job was to pick out the titles that i thought were appropriate for independent bookstores. Hillary introduced people to bookstores and books to me. When we were living in brooklyn we visited bookstores. And we saw how they were successful. They were just part of the livelihood. Always have conversations a lot will about what makes bookstores work. Kind of washed with what was happening, watch that evolving. When the other independent bookstore in march and closed and borders announced they were closing, we were like, how is there no downtown bookstore selling new titles . A college town, a huge, you know, literary culture your. So what if we did that. What if we hillary grew up in and robert. She grew up on the north side. She grew up going the bookstores here. I have family here. We always wanted to move back to michigan and to ann arbor and start a bookstore. Ago is always scary because that was the time the borders was closing. Bookstores said, some much was changing within the publishing landscape. But from what i could see from the bookstores and i visited, a round of local shops. But the curator inventory. In nine think that also ties in to the local movement thats been happening for a few years. All of our book shows up from borders. Number one is what they called it because it was the one based here in ann arbor where border started. And we bought the shelves actually before we even signed the lease here. Reelect, we are going to open a bookstore. We dont know where, but it will happen. We really wanted the shows from borders. And so we bought them and store them until we were ready to move in here. It is really, really great. I mean, have part of borders be part of who we are because it is part of an arbor. People that come in and say, ive seen the book shows before. They say in an emotional way because they had a solid connection. Were just really lucky to have these in the store as sort of a piece of ann arbor that we can keep going. And i think providing a space where people can meet and discuss ideas in an open setting and bring people together that otherwise would not come together is the importance of a brick and mortar store where customers will come in and buy a book and say, im buying this because i dont you close. They have seen borders closed,. They shop at our store because they want to see a bookstore be part of their downtown. So much emphasis these days a algorithms providing people with Companies Using algorithms to provide customers with what they think they want. And it loses some of the whimsical nature when you rely on those of rhythms. I think a bookstore can offer those types of surprise is. Some independent bookstores to sell thebooks. We just chose chose not to because we want to focus on the printed book and the written word. The Community Center instead of just a store that sells a product. And i think that is what differentiates us from the online retailers or ebooks in general. They each have a place within the market. Print books and thebooks. And i think there always will be a place for both. And reading books is an individual process, a solitary process, and isolated process, but it is also a collaborative process. That is why book clubs are so successful, and writing groups are so successful. In bookstores because we see people come here all the time, strangers will be looking at a book. Some will say, oh, that booking year and is a great book. You should read that. It is really fun to see those people who otherwise would not be chatting with each other kind of come together around an idea for an offer for a kind of writing. Other customers will come in and say, i have digital burnout. I steered a computer all day long. The last thing a lot to do before i give asleep is look at a tablet or look another screen. I just want a soft feel of a paper book purchase to my local independent bookstore. There is a throw, i think, about having something that exists in a world that cannot be deleted, changed. It is is there. And we have tried to embrace that with our typewriter logo and offering out a public typewriter for people to type on. Whenever they want. Some people come and tight really positive messages or quotes were just general salutations. Other people, and on a saturday night in type really dark stuff. That is the point of allowing someone to come in and take something that is not going to go into the black hole of twitter with internet. Sort of the reason we chose a typewriter is a love of the media, with the typewriter. On the page. There is no the lead. Yet to be really tough follow whats your riding which is the kind of writing that we want to support, very thoughtful, engaged wedding that you dont find all the time. I think the future of bookselling is independent bookstores. They really are the place where, you know, incubators of ideas and places where riders can practice their craft as well because the book sellers, independent bookstores are reading some much and injecting with writers and providing space for new ideas to come across. I think that really is of feature the teacher a bookselling. On our recent visit to an art, mich. , book tv talked to librarian and curator peggy dollops who recounted the creation of the power books and showed us letters dating from 280. And michigan, papyrus manuscripts of the letters of st. Paul it be from paul the apostle, not by man, by jesus christ and got a father who raced in from the dead and all of the brothers with me to the assemblies at galicia. Greetings to you and peace from god the father and our Lord Jesus Christ and gave himself for his sins in order to save us from the present legal age according to the role of god, our father, to him to uribe for ever and ever. This manuscript is famous because it is the earliest known copy of this part of the bottle. Now, there are many interesting things about this. Will start with the fact that it was produced as well we think of as a book form, codex form rather than a piraeus scroll. These would have been next to each other and share that. By the way that the damage is needed by these two pages were part of the same book form. And they were written on papyrus. Made from the papyrus plant that grows along the banks of the nile. In so what you find is come from egypt, not all, because the did exports to other parts of the ancient world as well. And so created as a book. We originally believe that it had 104 leaves. The university of michigan holds 30 of these, which in dublin, ireland holds 56 of the lease. Eightysix of the 104 still exist. The reason that they can estimate how many leaves there were to begin with is because each leaf has the pace never at the top. And these were created by just taking leaves of papyrus and folding them together. Would be like having a stack of 52 pieces of papyrus in folding them in treating a book of that. And so because i know, some of the leaves are actually still attached to each other. And so they know the numbering of one in one part of the book and one in the other part of the book. From that they could estimate how far from the beginning the first will was. They knew how far from the and the bottom almost. 1846 contained most of pauls letters to the early churches. So part of the need to estimate that is documentary in a way because it is not telling the story of jesus life, but it is factual correspondence from paul to these early churches. Is the earliest known copy. There is no sensational new book of the bible there, like the dead sea scrolls, for instance. And so it is actually interesting that the text was pretty stable. The text we find in this copy, the oldest known, still pretty much coming down to us today. A few rearrangement of things, but it is not sensationalistic, which really speaks to the care with which it was copied and the stability that the text had for all of those hundreds and hundreds of years. The papyrus is written in greek. And unlike modern greek, ancient greek was written with no spaces between words. No distinction between capital and lowercase letters. We dont know the exact date because it is not dated. We do have things like tax rolls or case reports, and they carefully have dates written on them, but this is not. War in the category of literature. So the way they tried to guess what date it is probably from is from the nature of the object itself and especially from its handwriting. Based upon its handwriting, and guess can be made of the time that it came from. The guesses boat somewhere between 180 adn 2150d. So it is not from the lifetime of paul itself, but it is as close as we can get to pauls life time and a copy of the letters he wrote. This was not found as a result of archaeological digs. We dont know who actually found it. It came on the market. So it is affected by the fact that it has no context in archaeology. We dont know what layer of strata it came from, what other objects or books might have been near it that would help the state in place it into that historical context. Unfortunately it was found by someone who was not a scholar or interested in preserving that kind of skull of the evidence. It is really interesting. It was sold in pieces over years. And even believes that we have, we got some of them by 1931 and in the rest of them two years later. The library collected some over years until they finally at 56. I think by then people kept thinking, well, the whole codex is eventually going to be bound, but it never was. So another interesting thing, and this is much more to do with the production and mild correction, the scribe who wrote it was professional. When they came to the end of the book commute they are finishing up one buchan beginning to do a book in hebrew, they wrote here how many lines their britain in the previous book. That had to do with how much the material might be sold for or how much they might be paid for rather than the text itself. And they do it here. This is another example where you come to the end and you are starting galatians. Again, there is a little side note under the text that gives the number of lines it is very interesting. It was clearly a battle. There really went to collect important pyorrhea the time. These leaves were first being published there were three publications and wrote. A first one was michigan publishing the ten leaves the end of the time. And then we have some. And so another edition of published with the leaves them at the time. And then a third edition was published with michigan saying, oh, we have more leaves, 30 now. And so that was published again commit each of the income is being included. It was after that that chester said, well, we have 20 more. So there seems to be some kind of competition between the two. But it is actually very nice because now some of the leaves on this side, some on the other. People can see them those. Of course, people can see them. The papyrus or one of the first parts of the Library Collection to be digitized. They are readily available. As part of book tv visit to ann arbor, mich. , we stopped at the university of michigan to learn about the universitys joseph a live body collection, the oldest Research Collection of radical history in the country. Curator julie brown and show us around. A labor organizer and an anarchist from michigan, born in 1850. He got involved in anarchism by reading a newspaper called liberty which was published a boston my name to of a man named benjamin tucker. Very influential newspaper at that time in the 1870s and 80s. He wrote a letter to the publisher asking and talking about his ideals on anarchism and what that meant to him. The letter was published in the newspaper. They became lifelong friends after that. His views on energy or that more like individualism, you mind your business. Nobody would be coerced into doing anything as long as in not having anything else. A unique collection that represents a radical and special protest history of the united states. An international collection. So we dont stop at any boards for collecting. We collect materials going back from the 19th century until the present. And it is heavily used in a very popular thing in growing all the time. So i have up portrait of jussive taken in detroit when he was around 30 years old. This is a sample of one of his book was that he bound himself. He did his own selling in binary and the solyndra machine that he created. He did his own printing in his own shop. This is a sample of one of the pamphlets, many of the templates to me were bound with scraps of paper that he had lain around because it could not afford to give binding for them. So here i have some sheet music from the various time periods. This is the international which is a very famous radicals on that is known throughout the world and published in many, many languages. This is one of the additions of that she music. And we have different many different kinds of sheet music. So this is an earlier one about unions. Much of our earlier collections are about live reunions. So he was not a member of the iww. The very first curator of the collection was a member. She became the first curator in the early 1920s. Because of her work we have one of the best collections of literature in the world. We have this poster which