Postscripts

The Book Market in Dobie Mall is closing on June 30; everything in the store is 50% off until that date... Sunday, June 25, is the date of the 12th annual Austin Book Arts Fair,

1-5pm, at Laguna Gloria (3809 W. 35th). Sponsored by the Austin Book Workers and the Art School of the Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria, the free event will feature a Children's Book Hospital, where book-doctoring professional bookbinders will repair ill texts; more than a dozen of Austin's wealth of book artists will perform a variety of tasks, like printing from letterpresses and demonstrating the art of book sewing... Michael Zadoorian will be at BookPeople on Thursday, June 29, at 7pm to read from and sign his first novel Second Hand (Norton, 270 pp., $23.95), a "sweet, junk-as-life etude on all things second-hand," as reviewer Marie Black wrote when she reviewed the book in May (auschron.com/issues/ dispatch/2000-05-12/books_ vsbr2.html). Those of you who are still coming of age in your 30s or frequently find yourself rummaging through other people's stuff at garage sales will want to pick up Second Hand and introduce yourselves to the author... Introducing yourself is the name of the game at the Austin Writers' League's energetically titled Agents! Agents! Agents! ... and Editors Too! Conference, July 21-23 at the Red Lion Hotel, but the deadline to register is Tuesday, July 6. Eleven literary agents and two editors will discuss such topics as how to write a book proposal, writing commercial nonfiction, publishing on the Internet, why publishers and agents are so concerned with genres, how to work with a literary agent, and how new technology is changing not only publishing but bookselling. If you want to know more about any of those subjects, call 499-8914 to register. Cost is $185 for AWL members and $220 for nonmembers. AWL's Web site is www.writersleague.org... Speaking of the Austin Writers' League, congratulations to Chronicle intern Eli Kooris for winning first place in the short story category of their Young Texas Writers 2000 contest... Authors who will be attending this year's Texas Book Festival (November 10-12) include Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams), whose new collection of stories, Light Action in the Caribbean, will be out in November, Stanley Marcus, Liz Smith, Whitley Streiber, Stephen Ambrose, Tony Hillerman, John Graves, Leslie Marmon Silko, and -- could it be otherwise? -- Kinky Friedman... John R. MacArthur is the grandson of billionaire John D. MacArthur, who set up the foundation famous for handing out "genius" grants. In 1980, John R. saved Harper's Magazine from certain extinction by persuading the foundation to bail the magazine out of what had become nearly two million dollars a year in losses. Since 1983, in fact, he's been the publisher of Harper's and he'll be at BookPeople on Tuesday, June 27, at 7pm with his new book The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy (Hill & Wang, 368 pp., $25) and An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (LPC, 752 pp., $50).