To find it, just head to the Extras page and follow the link.

While I’ve certainly done that on occasion, it’s not the way I normally operate, nor is it the way most of the people I know use the Internet. I’m more of a Web wanderer. I go snooping and poking and following link after link until I’m in so deep I can’t remember what I started looking for in the first place. You too? I thought so. I fact, that’s probably how you ended up here.

When I’m exploring the Web that way, I sometimes do it on my own and sometimes with the help of the well-known and extremely popular service called Stumble Upon, which lets you open an account, designate your various interests from a very lengthy list, and then just hit a “Stumble” button to take you from site to site to site. Along the way, you can give thumbs up or thumbs down to the places you visit, save your favorites, or e-mail the links to a friend. When I’m in one of those lazy, random, can’t-really-be-bothered-to-go-digging-around-on-my-own moods, it’s the perfect solution. Plus, it’s great fun.

As an example of how this works, and a really long way around to pointing you toward a fascinating book that I discovered, consider this:

The other day, I clicked my “Stumble” button and was taken to this site, a really quirky but fascinating blog that was apparently retired last year but whose owner is leaving everything in place in perpetuity to preserve the material and the links, like this one, that point there.

While browsing around The Nonist, I found this post , which naturally got me quite excited and had me drooling over the gorgeous photographs for the next twenty minutes or so.

Then, as you might expect, I wanted to know more about the person who took those marvelous pictures and put them into this book

so I went here and here and here and here, and a few other places, as well.

And then, of course, I found out that you can purchase this extremely expensive but utterly beautiful book (which, by the way, has an introduction by Umberto Eco) at many independent booksellers … and, naturally, at Amazon and Borders and Barnes and Noble and other retailers, too.

I don’t know about you, but I consider that a good day’s work, especially when you consider that all it took to get started was a single click of a single button — an inauspicious start for a very entertaining trip.

Clearly, the answer to that must be yes. Dictionaries are still published and still stocked in bookstores. Sales must be strong enough, or at least steady enough, to cling to a niche of the ink-and-paper-brick-and-mortar bookselling industry. But just as clearly, sales of dictionaries aren’t what they used to be.

Without doing anything that might actually constitute real research, I did a little poking around the Internet and came up with a lot of different answers. Depending on which articles I trusted and how I interpreted them, the bottom line seemed to be that dictionary sales have certainly declined, though perhaps not as much as you might expect. A drop of ten to fifteen percent was cited by more than one source, which sounds bad until you consider how much worse it could be in this day and age of Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster Online and dozens of other free, keyboard-accessible dictionaries, including my own online favorite, The Free Dictionary. And let’s not even talk about the true evil in our midst, that bane of an educated, literate society — built-in spellcheck functions, which millions of people consider a reliable tool but which help only about a third of the time, the other two-thirds leading to silly, needless, confusing, embarrassing mistakes. As a matter of fact, the only thing worse than built-in spellcheck is built-in grammar checking, which … well, I can’t even tell you what I really think of that, except that I’d like to find the person who invented it, strap him in a chair, and feed him ground up pages of The Elements of Style until he admitted his wickedness.

It seems inevitable that real printed dictionaries will vanish some day, just as it now seems likely that the entire concept of books printed on paper and bound between covers will also eventually disappear, fading into the mists of history and existing only on the shadowy shelves of seldom-visited museum-libraries. I doubt we’ll reach that place in our lifetimes, but we’ve certainly started down the long path that will take our children’s children there. In the meantime, I’m happy that dictionaries and other “old-fashioned” reference books are still with us.

When I was a kid (or what I often call a “little, little kid,” meaning somewhere under the age of twelve or so), I used to love reading the dictionary. Encyclopedias, too. I was blessed to grow up in a family that had no shortage of either. In fact, we had two complete sets of encyclopedias, a Britannica and a Compton’s. I would sit for hours in the room my parents called the den, grazing random encyclopedia articles, browsing the dictionary from letter to letter, dog-earing the pages that had cool words on them. That might explain my knack for winning classroom spelling bees, but come to think of it, it probably also explains my propensity for awkward, run-on sentences and my talent for blurting out random, useless facts at the drop of a hat. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to cozy up to reference books as a kid, I’d probably be a less obnoxious person — but I would almost surely be a poorer one, as well.

If I had grown up thirty or thirty-five years later, it’s doubtful I would have spent hours online at The Free Dictionary, stuffing my head with letters and words. Although I did learn something neat there just this morning (their homepage “Article of the Day” on tesselations), it’s just not the same.

I don’t often have morals in the things I write, but today I find, much to my surprise, that I actually do. Here it is: If you’ve got a kid, particularly one under the age of twelve, buy him or her a dictionary, a real one, an honest to God, genuine book full of words, preferably one with hard covers. You’ll get a strange look, as if you’d just presented a box of socks and underwear on Christmas morning, and the volume will probably spend a fair amount of time tossed in the corner or lost under the bed. But you never know. Someday you might be cleaning their room and find the book and pick it up and discover a handful of highlighted words, underlined definitions or dogeared pages.

Wouldn’t that be a great feeling?

I also enjoy trailers and commercials for books, like this one for Douglas Clegg’s The Attraction:

Part of my enjoyment comes from the trailers themselves, part from the little thrill of seeing books elevated, however briefly, to the status of films, TV programs and laundry detergent. When you see one of these little gems, or flip on the TV and catch a commercial for the latest paperback bestseller, it almost makes you feel that reading has once again become a mainstream activity. Sure, it may be just an illusion, but it’s fun while it lasts.

While you can find lots of book trailers on sites like YouTube, and scattered around other places on the Web, I wish someone would create a central repository. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of places to find movie trailers, sites like this one and this one and even this one. But I’ve never seen anything similar for clips and commercials and trailers based on books. Is there one? Have I missed it? If you know of something, please let me know.

Oh, and if the Doug Clegg trailer caught your interest, be sure to check out the book itself. Also, you can find more information about Doug and his work, sign up for his newsletter, and find free goodies and other fun stuff at his very cool Web site.

Just for starters, there is Kim Stanley Robinson’s amazing alternate history, The Years of Rice and Salt, which I waited far too many years before reading.

Then there’s Gregory Frost’s brand new novel, Shadowbridge, a thing of beauty that also happens to be the first of a two-book series.

And I haven’t even gotten to Duma Key yet — although even now it is staring at me from across the room, crying to me, taunting me, urging me to pick it up and dive in.

It’s an embarrassment of literary riches, really. I am a lucky reader indeed. I feel blessed.

Read the review, if you’re so inclined. More important, read the book.

This is only a partial list, but it’s more than enough to get you started. Some of these sites are independent, some commercial, some very information-and-detail oriented, some rather casual, some quite witty, some just weird. But all of them help feed my addiction for reading about reading. They help me keep up with new releases, old favorites, industry trends, new and established writers, and different ideas.

Undoubtedly, not all of these will be your cup of tea. Like me, you might find a few that you only want to visit once a month or so (or never again), but there may be others that will make it to your daily surfing list or your RSS feeds. Best of all, most of them offer their own lists of links, so that you can drop in on one site, find a few good suggestions, and head off for hours of fascinating blog visits.

In no particular order:

Literary Saloon

Bookslut

Omnivoracious

Bookninja

The Shifted Librarian

Booksquare

Arts Journal — Publishing

Emerging Writers Network

Bookdaddy

Book World

The Olive Reader

LitPark

And if you still need something else, I must once again recommend Neil Gaiman’s Journal, which is still the one blog I absolutely can’t live without, as I discussed in considerable detail earlier.

Some day, I might plow deeper into my bookmarks file and list even more blogs, but this should be enough for now. In the meantime, feel free to share your own literary blogroll by e-mail or in the comments.

We had the grand tour, ate some wonderful food and saw a football game that was … well, not a good game, not precisely. In all honesty, Notre Dame looked as if they’d struggle to beat a decent high school football team. But after U of M’s rocky start, a win was a win.

On Tuesday, back home and back at work, I was very envious that the girls had the chance to attend a reading and signing with Gregory Maguire, who ranks right near the top of my personal “favorite writers” list. The author of Wicked, Son of a Witch, Lost, Mirror Mirror, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and a passel of children’s books, Maguire was visiting Borders’ flagship store in Ann Arbor to promote his newest, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy.

I would have happily let a fairy, rogue or otherwise, take away a few of my own teeth for the chance to attend this event, but I’m so pleased that my daughters now have such great opportunities available to them, just moments away. A signed book is a marvelous keepsake, no doubt, but an evening spent listening to a world-class writer discuss his work is truly a lifetime gift.

I was lucky enough to attend quite a few of the earlier WFCs, starting with the fifth, which was the first one to return to Providence, Rhode Island, the convention’s birthplace. One of the best things about those gatherings, besides the giddy enthusiasm they always instilled, the contact high that didn’t wear off for weeks afterwards, was the opportunity to rub shoulders, even just briefly, with some of the old pulp masters.

I remember chatting with Manly, getting autographs from the likes of Frank Belknap Long and J. Vernon Shea, and having a pleasant conversation with Robert Bloch while he patiently signed my inordinately large stack of books. I also had things signed by Hugh B. Cave, who years later subscribed to my magazine and years after that became a Hellnotes reader — how cool was that?

One day our group found itself in the buffet line with H. Warner Munn, who ended up sharing our table and regaling us with tales of writing “The Werewolf of Ponkert,” his memories of Lovecraft and his vast knowledge of the Roman Empire, the subject of his then-new historical novel, The Lost Legion.

One of the best memories of all was riding in an uncomfortable yellow school bus with 60 or 70 fans and one very special guest to the site of Poe’s grave, where the guest — the great Fritz Leiber — laid a wreath and provided a stunning, chill-inducing midnight reading of “The Conqueror Worm.” That trip was the subject of another early Hellnotes essay, which I would reprint here … except I can’t find it at the moment.

Those were good times, rare opportunities to meet a generation that even then was slipping away from us. For a few short moments, we actually got to mingle with the same giants whose shoulders we were trying so hard to stand upon.

They’re gone now, of course, but their ghosts linger and their books and stories remain a constant source of joy.

The other day, I stumbled across this old essay of mine — one of the first pieces I did for Hellnotes, back in the earliest days, when Dave and I were still trying to figure out exactly what the newsletter was going to be. I hadn’t yet started writing weekly editorials. Instead, I was putting together semi-regular pieces like “The Roots of Horror,” trying to say a lot in a very few words, which has never been especially easy for me.

I remember writing the piece on Wellman and giving permission for it to be reused. I even remember seeing it not long after it had been posted. But I was a little bit startled to discover that it’s still out there, all these years later.

Re-reading the piece now makes me wish I’d said a few more things, or at least said these particular things a little better. But Manly Wade Wellman was a nice guy and a great writer, and I suppose nothing you say about people like that is ever really enough.

As for the Wellman tribute site itself, it seems to be in a “lingering” phase, without any recent updates. I hope it sticks around. Manly deserves all the ink — virtual and real — that he can get.