a literarian is a person that dedicates life to enjoyment of literature.word that went out of fashion until it was revived by the national book award to start the literarian award. i consider myself a literarian in the old style and the old style because dedicating myself to literature has been one of the great pleasures of my life and i want to thank the board of the national book foundation for giving neglect opportunity to work with you, i want to thank the staff of the national book foundation because none of the things we have done in the past ten years, would not have been possible with creativity or imagination and without their energy, and so really they deserve a lot of the credit of anything that's happened. [applause] >> and the last thing i would like to say is thank everybody here in the book industry and out there to anybody that's watching, when you're a book person, that's really one thing you can do, work, live in the life of books and you really don't want to do anything else. the fact that i've been doing that for the past years, it's be