Katy Tahja here Friday, May 14

At Northtown Books on Friday, May 14 at 7 pm, Katy M. Tahja will sign and talk about her new book Humboldt State University, a photographic essay on the history of HSU from Arcadia Publishing.

Covering almost 100 years, the book shares the growth of the college through the years. Tahja hand-picked more than 200 vintage images, many from the HSU library's Humboldt Room archive, to depict a century of changes. The book is arranged with chapters featuring the six presidents who guided Humboldt over the decades, areas of study, professors, social life on campus, sports, and the physical beauty of the area.

Katy M. Tahja is also the author of Rails Across the Noyo: A Rider's Guide to the Skunk Train and All Roads Lead to Comptche, and she has been a librarian and local historian on the Mendocino Coast for 35 years. Katy, husband David, and daughter Fern all graduated from Humboldt State University of a 37-year span.

RAY RAPHAEL AND JAIMAL YOGIS

This weekend brings two author events to Northtown Books.

Ray Raphael will present his new book, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation, at Northtown Books on Friday, June 12 at 7 pm.

Founders is Raphael’s largest and most ambitious book, a daring attempt to recreate an “honest history” of our nation’s founding by skipping over nineteenth century distortions and returning to primary sources from Revolutionary times. It’s a sweeping narrative, starting with the beginnings of unrest in 1761 and ending with the ratification of the Bill of Rights thirty years later. To keep his rendition intimate, Raphael focuses of seven lead characters — not the usual cast, but a far more diverse lot. For the first time, Raphael interweaves the new bottom-up approach, the favorite of social historians in recent years, with traditional top-down history, moving back and forth between leading figures inside chambers and the people “out-of-doors.”

Ray Raphael has written many books, several of which are about local Humboldt history. His first book, An Everyday History of Somewhere, won the Commonwealth Club award for the best book of the year about California. He recently collaborated with Freeman House on the first part of a projected multi-volume history of Humboldt County, Two Peoples, One Place.

For more info on Ray Raphael, go here.

On the very next night, author Jaimal Yogis presents his new book, Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea, Saturday, June 13th at 7:30 at Northtown Books.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:

A journalist, photographer, surfer and Zen Master, Yogis began the life of a roving seeker his junior year of high school, when he ran away from his Sacramento, Calif. home to learn how to surf in Hawaii. His subsequent travels include a handful of prime surfing spots, but Yogis’s more arresting journey is spiritual, taking him to monasteries in France and Berkley, Calif., and deep into the living tradition of Zen Buddhism. Captured here in short chapters and wonderful, visual prose, Yogis’s coming-of-age odyssey also takes readers into the culture of indigenous Hawaiians, who believe the gods were surfers. Yogis’s long-time surfing mentor Rom provides insight into the science of surfing, ocean swells, the bathymetry of the continental shelf, deep water canyons and sea mounts. Even land lovers will find Yogis’s lessons resonant and entertaining, but surfers will find this a quick, surprisingly deep tribute to the quest for surf and serenity.

Here's a short film on Jaimal and the book:

A Strange Breed of Folks

This Friday former Humboldt Times journalist Mel Lavine comes to Northtown to share stories from his recently published memoir, A Strange Breed of Folks: Tales from the World's Second Oldest Profession.

Lavine met and inteviewed many notables who passed through the area during his time in Humboldt in the fifties and early sixties - a down and out Billie Holliday, playing a week of shows in Eureka near the end of her life, Joe Louis (refereeing a wrestling match at the Eureka Muni), and Richard Nixon on a 1962 campaign stop here (seen on the cover of the book). He also was a pioneer in local network news here. The second part of Lavine's book deals with his later decades in network news in New York where he worked with Barbara Walters, Charles Kuralt and Walter Cronkite.

Help us welcome Mr. Lavine back to Humboldt this Friday, September 5th, from 7 to 9 pm.