paper over board

2011 best of's

2011-12-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

Lists help tidy up the year. I read, saw and heard a lot but these will be memorable and made me happy.

I'm giving paperoverboard a bit of a rest as I work on some other writing projects in 2012. But it will rise from the ashes as looming outrages merit.

Favorite books read 2011*

1. Open City/ Teju Cole

2. The Stranger’s Child/ Alan Hollinghurst

3. Light Lifting/ Alexander MacLeod

4. Greenbanks/Dorothy Whipple

5. Zoo Station/ David Downing

6. The British Book Trade/ Sue Bradley

7. One Fine Day/ Mollie Panter-Downes

8. The Warmth of Other Suns/ Isabel Wilkerson

9. A Sense of an Ending/ Julian Barnes

10. Believing is Seeing/ Errol Morris

11. Mordecai:The Life & Times/ Charles Foran

12. The Variations/ John Donatich

13. Cat’sTable/ Michael Ondaatje

14. Palladian/Elizabeth Taylor

15. At Last/Edward St. Aubyn

* non Harvard, MIT, Yale- see here for those.

Favorite films (seen) in 2011

1. Le Havre

2. Wah Dem Do

3. Weekend

4. Another Year

5. Certified Copies

6. Melancholia

7. Bridesmaids

8. The Arbor

9. Necessities of Life

10. Incendies

Favorite drama 2011

I saw one play. But itwould have been best of the year had I seen 100: Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalismand Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.

Favorite Tunes (heard andloved) in 2011

1. The Colorof Rain/ William Brittelle

2. DignifiedMan/ Songbird Sing

3. I NeverLearnt to Share/ James Blake

4. Powa/Tune-Yards

5. Scandalat the Parkade/ Owen Pallett

6. Stony& Cory/ Kid Creole & the Coconuts

7. JoséLarralde-Quimey Neuquén/ Chancha via Circuito

8. Excuse mebaby/ Dizzy K. Falola

9. Voice/Ani DiFranco

10. One Day wewill Pay/ Coati Mundi

unpack your library!

2011-12-06T06:09:00.001-08:00

Is the “books on books” genre experiencing its golden age? It seems as if there are more of them every year. Oris this just another sign of the printed book’s continued descent into artifactstatus?

Like foodies collecting cookbooks, bibliophiles havealways enjoyed books that salute and validate their passion. As a bookseller I loved stocking these books,and as a rep I love selling them.

This month a stunning little gem slipped into the world, conceivedby Michelle Komie at the Yale University Press Art Workshop:Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books. Modeled on last year’s Unpacking My Library:Architects and Their Books, this close-up peek inside the libraries of thirteencontemporary writers is completely addictive. It’s without question the affordable gift book of the year for the bookcrazed.

What makes UML so appealing?

- --The subjects are an imaginative roster of someof the more interesting writers working today- Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter,Junot Diaz, Rebecca Goldstein, Stephen Pinker, Lev Grossman, Sophie Gee, JonathanLethem, Claire Messud, James Wood, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart and EdmundWhite. (Three sets of these people arecouples! Who knew?)

- --The structure of the book is perfect- shortchapters, smart q&a, a top ten books list from each author a, with jacket illustrationsof their personal copies, many with gorgeous vintage covers. (Alison Bechdel's is hand drawn. Look twice!) These are followed by fouror five pages of luscious detailed photographs of the actual bookshelves.

- -- The sensation in flipping through the book andreading the comments is a bit like having an intimate conversation with these writers in their libraries. And they comeacross (on the whole) as people you’d like to know.

- -- The bookshelf shots are crisp and clean. No fuzzy middle distance images that make youguess what the books are. These are unmistakablylegible spines, and you are compelled to prowl them one by one. You may gasp or hoot when you come across abeloved title of your own on someone’s shelf.

- -- The book design (thanks to Pentagram) makes thisan object to covet. A horizontal,landscape trim does perfect justice to bookshelves. The paper over board format is always classy. Thelayout is gorgeous, the photographs eye-popping. Some of the top ten lists are captured withsuch loving attention that it’s like gazing at a fine still life. Or food porn.

- -- Leah Price introduces the whole thing with asuper smart essay, and her short author interviews hit just the rightnotes. “Gazing at the bookshelves of anovelist whose writings lie dog-eared on my own bookcase, I feel as lucky as arestaurant-goer granted a peek at the chef’s refrigerator,” she writes.

- -- Because this is an interesting collection ofwriters and a skilled interrogator, they land on a surprising number of thought-provoking tangents:

Towhat extent should and can a personal book collection be private?

Howto organize the shelves? Alphaauthor? Alpha subject? “By pub date” (Bechdel tried that one but gave up) Miscellaneous heaps? (see Edmund White)

Thepros and cons of marginalia are addressed. The consensus is pro.

Decidingwhat to keep and what to shed- how?

Whatare your rules for lending books?

Whatare the shelves made of and where did you get them?

Doyou have a stash of other books you don’t keep on your public bookshelves?

Whatwill your library look like in ten years?

Perhaps these are not the most urgentsocial questions for the end of 2011, but as a reader and a book hoarder Iloved hearing how these esteemed writers handle their collecting obsession.

Still, the primary pleasures here are visual and voyeuristic. If you are someone who can’t resist decoding a bookshelf- any bookshelf- UML is for you. I can’t even walk through the fake livingrooms at IKEA without studying the spines of the book props on theshelves. Interestingly, they use realbooks! Alas, they are in Swedish.

I’d love to see every bookshop in NorthAmerica invite their customers to “unpack your library.” Show us your shelves!

stacie vs. the algorithm: a hand-selling success

2011-11-26T06:51:00.001-08:00

A couple weeks ago my friend Anne Bunn mentioned that her two year old, Hayes, had broken his leg- an event seemingly more concerning for his parents than for Hayes. This made me a little sad, and my response was basically the same one I have to news of any life event: there must be a book for that.

My father died when I was 25, and I remember spending an entire day driving my eight-year old sister to every bookstore in Milwaukee, in search of a kids’ book about how to grieve the loss of a parent. We never found it, and for once I was probably overestimating the healing power of the written word anyway.

Sadly, the Milwaukee bookstore population has dramatically shrunk, and there was no driving around for hours to find a book for Hayes. But what we’ve lost in quantity we’ve made up for in quality- my local shop, Boswell Book Company, came through with flying colors.

“I need a book for a two year old with a broken leg,” I announced to the booksellers at the front desk. Within seconds, Stacie Williams, who was working on something else but overheard the request, looked over her shoulder and said “Oh, Mo Willems has the perfect book!”

I will stipulate that I am an ignoramus when it comes to children’s books. I have my personal favorites, but that section of the store just seems like a colorful but confounding phantasmagoria to me. (In truth, it even did when I was a bookseller when I should have known it better. What can I say? I don’t have kids.)

Despite the fact that Mr. Willems is a multiple Caldecott winner and a beloved favorite, I’d never heard of the man. So perhaps I seem overly awed by Stacie’s suggestion. But to all the knowledgeable booksellers and readers who will shrug and say “of course Mo Willems- duh,” I would only say I bet there are more of us- ignorant grown-up literary do-gooders- than there are of them. And we appreciate not being made to feel bad for our juvenile illiteracy.

Stacie walked me to the section and placed in my hands a copy of I Broke My Trunk. A very cute glasses-wearing elephant with a bandaged-up trunk adorned the cover. This was beyond perfect.

Within five minutes the book was gift-wrapped and on its way to Cambridge Massachusetts. It’s a small thing but it really made my day.

This “positive customer experience,” as biz lingo might have it, prompted two other thoughts.

One: independent booksellers get lots of credit for their quirky, personalized reading recommendations. They read a lot, and part of the added value they provide is sharing all this reading with customers. Turning somebody on to some author they haven’t read is a joy for both bookseller and customer.

But there’s another kind of recommending that doesn’t get as much glory: being able to access an encyclopedic knowledge of the store’s inventory on a dime when a customer requests a book, especially in an unfamiliar subject area. This happens so routinely in bookstores it’s almost a nonevent, but it’s really the daily bread and butter of most stores. Booksellers who have handled and shelved books on all sorts of topics are expert at retrieving them at the exact moment they’re needed. Or that’s the goal anyway. And accomplished more often than not.

Two: the internet retailers have a distinct competitive edge when it comes to sorting and displaying book data, as long as your request can be digested by their programs. I’ll confess that I actually began my quest for Hayes’ book online. But after entering every relevant search phrase I could think of (“kids broken leg,” “injured child funny” etc. etc.) nothing remotely appropriate came up. And certainly not I Broke My Trunk.

So my takeaway is that sometimes an actual human being, especially a bookseller who already knows you and has engaged you in conversation about topics other than just books, is a better book suggester than a smart algorithm. Put another way, being in a good bookstore reminds me that I’m more than the sum of the books I’ve bought in the past.

As if this story could get any happier, Hayes is on the mend, and Mom reported that “the book was a hit!” Coincidentally, she added that his grandfather has been sending him Mo Willems' Elephant & Piggie titles for awhile now. (Thankfully, not this one.) Which he learned about at his favorite neighborhood bookshop, Lake Forest Bookstore in Lake Forest IL.

my personal best from fall 2011

2011-11-09T12:12:00.000-08:00

Fall 2011 selling season is history! Long live Spring 2012!

After trying to give every one of the hundreds of new titles on the fall lists my best shot, I like to give one final nudge to my personal favorites.

Professionally, reps are agnostic. We see the value in every book the presses take on, and if we didn’t love the challenge of matching quirky books with idiosyncratic booksellers and readers we would have found other employment long ago. My colleagues and I move mountains- or try to- to make sure we do justice to our authors and to our booksellers, which means spending lots of time talking up lots of books in as many ways as we can think of.

But in the end, when there’s time to actually catch a breath and reflect on all the literary seeds we’ve been sowing, there's always a little collection of books that spoke to me personally at a slightly higher pitch. The kind of books that first made working for these three presses so attractive twelve years ago. Books I’d walk into a bookstore and buy if I weren’t lucky enough to represent them.

The usual caveat applies: loving ten titles doesn’t diminish my regard for the 300 others. And there was lots of competition. But I think I’ve worked hard enough this season to be entitled to play favorites, and to hope for a little extra viral enthusiasm. So herewith my personal top ten from the stellar fall offerings from Harvard, MIT and Yale University Press.

1) Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alastair Brotchie (MIT) If Jarry is not on your radar he should be. This is a sly, sympathetic portrait of the French novelist, playwright, essayist, surrealist, and all-around unclassifiable iconoclast. This man influenced everyone from Calvino to Eco to Paul McCartney, and the book is a visual feast. His obsessions were guns, bicycles and alcohol. He died in 1907 at 35, but his philosophical invention, Pataphysics- “the science of imaginary solutions”- lives on in more ways than one.

2) The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery by James Walvin (Yale) There have been so many books about slavery as a phenomenon but I’ve never read such a chilling story about a particular crossing. In 1781, the captain of the ship had 132 slaves thrown overboard because he feared there would not be enough drinking water and his “cargo” would thus be worthless. The news of this atrocity set fire to British abolitionist sentiment when it became widely known. Turner’s devastating small painting Slave Ship, which graces the cover of the book, hangs in the Boston MFA. On the day I made a pilgrimage to see it, the gallery was swarmed by school children with notebooks, studying it in great detail. There is hope!

3) Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture 1931-1941, by Katerina Clark (Harvard) Do not be dissuaded by the wordy title- this is a stylish piece of weird cultural nostalgia and is full of surprises. Hard to believe today, but there was a time (the thirties) when the international Left, intellectuals, and much of the world avant garde looked to the city of Moscow as a potential cultural and artistic headquarters. And for a time, Moscow really was one of the great European capitals, not just an imaginary one. But between the external threat of Hitler and the internal psychosis of Stalin the prospects for this dreamy cosmopolitanism came crashing down. A touch academic, but for Soviet culture buffs, it makes for absorbing reading.

4) Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen J. Gould (Harvard). I’m going to cheat here and use one slot to plug seven books. Some of the best writing Gould did during his brief life were these short essays on all sorts of problems of nature, science, sports and society. They’ve been unavailable for awhile and now Harvard has re-issued them in a gorgeous, uniform paperback set. A scientist who could and did speak to Everyman, no one has taken Gould’s place since he died in 2002. I’d give anything to read his take on the contemporary political circus in the New York Review of Books.

5) Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, by Hillel Schwartz (Zone/MIT) Let me fess up right off and say that I will probably never actually read this 900 page magnum opus on the history of unwanted sound. But I did read The Culture of the Copy, Schwartz’s 1996 book, which was a nimble, dazzlingly smart (and prescient) cultural history of likenesses and facsimiles. He’s an amazing writer, the kind who makes the reader feel smarter, and I’m really happy that this book exists.

6) Elizabeth & Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, by David Margolick (Yale) This doesn’t really qualify as an obscure, back of the catalog gem, since, happily, it’s a widely praised front of the catalog gem. I’ve been beating the drum for this wonderful book all season and it’s gratifying to hear from so many booksellers who were also moved by it. An incredible story of two women whose lives intersected and re-intersected on a public stage in a shocking way, it’s also a cautionary tale about declaring premature victory in the fight against racism.

7) The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936-1951 by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans (Jewish Museum/Yale) The Photo League was a school, a salon, a workshop, and a movement. It flourished during the heyday of the Communist Party, and was snuffed out in the anti-communist hysteria of late forties. But the photographers associated with it- Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, Paul Strand- went on to define modern social documentary art. Many of these black and white plates are familiar, but to see them all assembled in one place is fantastic.

8) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology & Politics in Allende’s Chile, by Eden Medina (MIT) Everyone knows (well, okay, fewer and fewer people seem to know) about one of Salvador Allende’s utopian socialist projects in the early seventies: bringing political democracy and economic justice to Chilean workers. But few know (I sure didn’t) that he had another utopian vision- Project Cybersyn. Thirty years before the internet, Allende imagined a computer system that ordinary, illiterate workers could operate. Sadly, this and everything else was interrupted by the Pinochet coup. But the jacket photo, which is real but resembles the deck of the Starship Enterprise, conveys something about that mad and wonderful dream better than the actual words. When Derek at Type Books in Toronto saw this he said “Oh. My. God. I don’t know who will want this but someone really will.” My reaction exactly, and one of my definitions of favorite book.

9) No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo (Harvard) This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner is serving an eleven year jail term in China for “incitement to subvert state power.” For the first time in English, these are the incitements. In fact, many of them are actually thoughtful essays, beautiful poems, and quiet, somewhat melancholy ruminations on how the country he loves has been changed beyond recognition by an uncritical rush to free market money-grubbing.

10) Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (MIT) This might be the best opening phrase in any publisher’s catalog this season: “As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, and man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist…” How could you not think “tell me more!” The early 2oth century performance artist- the “mama of dada” -counted among her fans Hemingway, Pound, Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, and William Carlos Williams. She is cited by both Patti Smith and Lady Gaga as inspiration. But she’s oddly obscure. Only 31 poems ever appeared in her lifetime, so this collection is something of an event with a long and devilishly complicated publishing history. Bonus: the book is crazy beautiful.

who needs editors? writers.

2011-10-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

What is it about the word “digital” that causes otherwise smartpeople to giddily disable their critical thinking ability?

Case in point: the October 17 New York Times front pagecelebration of Amazon’s decision to become a book publisher ("Amazon Signs Up Authors Writing Publishers out of Deal.”) Not content to hog an ever-growing slice ofthe sales and distribution pie, the company has brought in a couple publishingveterans to acquire a branded line of fiction and nonfiction, and to, as theTimes put it, “gnaw away at the services that publishers, critics and agentsused to provide.”

Whether the book industry is in desperate needof more concentration in the hands of one corporate giant is worth considering,but not today. What caught my eye anddropped my jaw today was this quote, cited in the Times story, from “a top Amazon executive:”

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process noware the writer and the reader.”

This stunningly ignorant observation does not bode well. As they surely know, many more hands and brains go into thecreation of most books, and all those cumbersome editing,marketing and agenting people actually result in added value- i.e. a betterbook. (And by "value" I mean intrinsic worth, not a cheap price.)

Perhaps because I’ve been able to observe the process thatconnects the writer and the reader at close hand for a decade at three stellaracademic presses, my standards are a bit high. But in my experience, a text which travels through the time-consuminglabyrinth of editors, copy editors, readers, syndics, designers, production people, lawyers, marketing experts,social media experts, sales departments and booksellers is in every case a bettertext than the one it was the day the author delivered the manuscript.

“Gatekeeper” is not a dirty word, or shouldn’t be. True, the publishing process with its many checksalong the way keep many books from ever getting published. Too bad. The chronically rejected author now has unprecedented optionsto print and promote his or her work directly and to call it a book. But these creations are not“published” books in the way we’ve understood the term for a couplecenturies.

There’s nothing sodepressing, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious, as reading the pages ofads for vanity presses in reputable book media like The New York Times Book Review and the New YorkReview of Books. Even with just a couplesentences of boilerplate about each title- small samples, presumably, of the author's style- the contrast between these blasts ofself-expression and real books, vetted by a real publisher, couldn’t be plainer.

I fear that centralizing the editorial process in the name of streamlining andabolishing gatekeepers will simply drag the book industry toward a more sophisticatedform of vanity publishing.

It’s sad and frustrating that some good books don’t findpublishers willing to take them on. Butas a reader, I’m more interested in rooting for a literary culture built around producing the bestbooks, not around a writer’s right to be published.

That dismissive comment from the executive about the reader andwriter being the only necessary people in the process nagged at me, and reminded me of something,and I finally realized what: ElizabethWarren’s recent cri de coeur against market fundamentalism and the myth of the individual achiever:

"There isnobody in this country who got rich on his own…You moved your goods to marketon the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid toeducate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forcesthat the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bandswould come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protectagainst this, because of the work the rest of us did."

To this I would add: nobody- orprecious few anyway- has written a book worth reading on their own. Someone taught you to write, someone took care of the kids and the bills whileyou wrote, perhaps someone even gave you ideas. And once an editorrecognized quality and meaning in your work, and persuaded her house to take achance on you, a complicated publishing apparatus improved on your creation.

That’snot always how it works. And one solution might be more publishers, notfewer. But as a reader, I’ll continue to buy books that have been broughtto market by experienced professionals with a publishing legacy, and will bewary of books that make a virtue out of scorning them.

Canadian v. US bookselling: ten generalizations

2011-10-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

As of July 1, I’ve added Canada east of British Columbia to my Midwest US territory. Logistically this sounds ridiculous, I know, but the sad truth is that all reps are travelling more miles these days to see the last North American bookstores standing. The good news is that these survivors- on both sides of the border- are really great stores.

I’ve been a Canada fan since childhood and have visited bookstores all across the country on my own for years. But the prospect of representing our books to them gave me pause. I study Quill & Quire diligently every issue, and I keep up with new Canadian books and retail news; I subscribe to and read Canadian media, from Brick to Spacing to L’Actualité; I follow Canadian politics- not just national but provincial! (True, the bar is set pretty low when it comes to US citizens knowing anything about Canadian politics. If you asked passersby on State & Wacker in Chicago to name the Canadian Prime Minister you’d be standing there a long time to find ten who do.)

The point is- no matter how well-versed I may fancy myself about the Canadian book business, I’m an outsider looking in. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, I know what I know and what I don’t know, but it’s the things I don’t know I don’t know that I feared might trip me up. Still, after spending the bulk of the summer calling on booksellers in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City, Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and a few other places, I’m ready to offer a few tentative generalizations.

One thing I learned pretty promptly is that “Canadian bookselling” is itself a tricky concept. Having repped for ten years from Seattle to Syracuse, I’m acutely conscious of the power of regional and local differences. True, there are common business practices and challenges that could collectively be called “US bookselling,” but it makes no sense to stay stuck at that conceptual level.

The same is is true of “Canadian bookselling.” As in the US book market, I encountered an enormous variety of bookselling styles, genres, and local quirks in Canada. Kingston does well with military books, Calgary with energy, Toronto with urban studies. Which leads to my first generalization about the biggest regional difference of all.

1) The Canadian book industry is really two parallel industries, one English, one French. The logistics and sometimes politics of stocking both English and French editions of many titles is a bilingual challenge that very few US stores- even in areas with huge Spanish-speaking populations- have taken on. It was fascinating to visit shops like Librairie Olivieri in Montreal, where the gorgeous design aesthetic of French language publishing (largely paperback) is so striking, and efforts are made to represent the most important titles in English too. Booksellers there gave me a mini-seminar on the origin of Quebec retail practices, which are more closely modeled on the French book business than on US or English Canadian.

2) Provincial governments can and do mandate that public libraries buy their stock from independent booksellers, not from chains, wholesalers, or publishers. This simple rule, which in effect directs tax dollars to support the existence of a domestic retail book trade, has been an incredibly powerful financial cushion for many independent stores. Needless to say, under the current reign of market-worship ideology, such a requirement is inconceivable in the US.

3) “American” in a title or subtitle can be the kiss of death at some Canadian stores. This is not to say there isn’t a huge interest in US history and politics. The University of Saskatchewan bookstore has a more robust US history section than many US college stores- a pathetic state of affairs. And try finding serious Canadian history and politics in a US bookstore. I’ve been made aware of how often and how superfluously the adjective “American” is dropped into a title as if it means “world.” We are not the world! We are not even Canada! An important new book on the US health care debate was skipped by most Canadian buyers, for whom this is a happily irrelevant subject. One bookseller asked me to explain what “pre-existing condition” meant exactly. Sigh.

4) The fact that Canada is a part of the British Commonwealth is reflected on its bookstore shelves. Yale has a stellar British history list, acquired by a team of whip-smart editors in London. These titles sell well in US stores, but they sell extremely well at Canadian shops. Since one of my visits to Ontario coincided with the visit of Prince and Mrs. William, I thought perhaps I was just reaping some Royals afterglow. But the strong advances continued throughout the summer, and more than made up for the tepid reception for the “American this, American that” books.

5) Canadian book media, and book coverage in mainstream media, is distinct. There’s a parallel universe of interesting Canadian books which get no attention in the US market, while the coverage of US books in Canada is surprisingly generous. I was stunned to hear Michael Enright devote an entire hour to a leisurely interview with Nicholas Frankel, the editor of Harvard’s annotated edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray one Sunday morning.

6) E-books? Digital? Not so much. This is a topic that is absolutely pre-occupying many US booksellers, but I was surprised to find a kind of sanguine, “out of our hands” attitude among many Canadian stores. This is not to say people aren’t worried, but the focus seems to be on doing what they know how to do (sell physical books) without madly throwing resources at e-book schemes in the hope that consumers will buy from their sites rather than Amazon. Then again, perhaps Canadians are just better at maintaining a state of denial. One bookseller told me to "give it time, everything that hits you hits us later.”

7) Used books? Not so much. Over the past decade I’ve seen loads of US new book retailers get into the used book game, with varying degrees of success. Some maintain separate used book sections, and others interlace second-hand books with new. I may be mistaken, but the wall between new and used doesn’t seem to have been breached as widely in Canada. Very few new stores do second-hand, nor do the excellent and quirky used dealers (like Monkey’s Paw) show any interest in new titles.

8) "The Canadian nice" stereotype? It’s true! There’s a herding cats quality to working out an itinerary each selling season, and the idea of scheduling 12 weeks of Canadian appointments with people I’d never met, who adored my (real Canadian) predecessor, was daunting. But with possibly one exception, my new buyers have been a collective dream. I’m reminded of a remark the late, great Texas iconoclast Molly Ivins once made during a CBC interview: “You Canadians are the nicest people, and it must be like living next door to the Simpsons!”

9) Obstacles to selling our books in Canada? Many. Freight is a nightmare. Rights restrictions and competing editions are a frustration. Customs is a hassle. And your inventory investment and accounts payable is hostage to an increasingly fickle exchange rate. I take the fact that booksellers across Canada eagerly stock our books despite all that as a real vote of confidence in the ideas they contain.

10) The classic, serendipitous bookselling career path is very similar on both sides of the border. When I had “getting to know you” conversations with Canadian booksellers, I often heard an instantly familiar autobiography with two variations: “I had a plan, but 25 years ago I started working in the bookstore and somehow I never left”; alternatively, “I had no plan whatsoever, but 25 years ago I started working in the bookstore and somehow I never left.” Our profession is loaded with smart, over-qualified book-lovers who rejected a life of chasing dollars for something more honorable. That’s one big and gratifying similarity.

Rep Night 2011

2011-09-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite fall events is Rep Night at Boswell Books, and this year’s version was especially sweet.

The New York Times can’t seem to let a week go by without another breathless article extolling our digital book future. Every new device is an excuse to rehash the supposedly inevitable: e-books up, print books down, professional booksellers, editors and publishers- who needs them, really?

But then you talk to a big group of smart, motivated retailers who have gathered to hear about new titles on a rainy Sunday night, some of them from forty miles away, and it’s hard to imagine these cultural gatekeepers disappearing just because there’s a new delivery system for books. Oops, I mean content.

The independent booksellers of southeastern Wisconsin are an ecumenical lot, and the forty who turned out to share dinner (Beans & Barley, yum) and to hear four reps pitch their wares Sunday night came from three stores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, Next Chapter Bookshop in Mequon, and Books & Company in Oconomowoc.

I’ve attended dozens of rep nights, first as a bookseller at Harry W Schwartz Bookshops, then, for the past decade or so, as a rep. The Schwartz version, which initially convened in David & Carol's living room, was somewhat more confrontational than the current model. David loved to put reps on the hot seat, and if he thought they hadn’t properly explained or defended a book, they’d be subject to a socratic inquisition- sometimes while the rest of the booksellers squirmed in their seats.

Luckily (for the reps), we had no challenges from Daniel, Lanora and Lisa about conglomerate takeovers or other publishing issues beyond our humble control the other night.But the old Schwartz events were lovely, comradely, wine-soaked evenings where younger booksellers got a glimpse of what devoting a life to books might look like. The presentations ran the gamut, from an evening where we gathered (literally) at the feet of the legendary editor Elizabeth Sifton, to an upbeat screening of something called Max Headroom (for which Random House was doing a book) projected on something called “video.” We’re talking mid-eighties. Does that make rep night a tradition?

By this point in the season I could present the fall list in my sleep. I’ve mostly overcome an incapacitating shyness before groups, and I know many of these booksellers personally (these are my neighborhood stores!), so no need for angst. Still, prepping for rep night is always nerve-wracking.

There’s the challenge of picking the right books to pitch. One Schwartzian rule that is still in force: don’t talk about the obvious, the best-sellers, the big commercial books. Though this is sadly not a huge problem for my presses, the point is to highlight the quirky gems, the giftworthy, and the quietly compelling titles that might otherwise get lost.

Added to that challenge this time is the mix of stores represented. Though best-seller lists are depressingly uniform from region to region, there really are different demographics for each unique bookshop. I wanted to make sure I included something for everyone.

My rep colleagues for the evening, pros all, are from HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Fuji, a commission group with loads of smart books. I’m sometimes a little jealous that they have such a range of fiction, kids’ books, cookbooks and other popular genres to choose from. But I have the evening’s market cornered on brainy history, biography, and politics.

The other constraint which ratchets up the pressure a bit: though there’s time for socializing, we each have just 20 minutes to speak. Our presses and editors are so good at preparing us that I could rattle on for 20 minutes about one title. But the limit is a useful reminder that floor booksellers don’t have that luxury with customers, so if a book can’t be captured in a few sentences, a handsell is unlikely. I try to be brief. Less is more, less is more.

Ultimately I winnow my list to about ten titles. These are a combination of my personal cream of the crop mixed with solid books I think they can sell. I have a personal rule that I won’t pitch a book that I can’t hold and show, so I reluctantly skip over some late season goodies.

I lead with the new illustrated edition of Ernst Gombrich’s incredibly successful (and charming) A Little History of the World. Everyone knows this book. But I immediately feel as if I’ve used too much time on it. But a perfect segue into Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy (violating my own rule- my copies arrived the next day.)

I can't say enough about David Margolick’s profound Elizabeth & Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. I loved this and notice heads nodding. I’m connecting! I meld into Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen, even though this will likely be a book mainly for the urban store. But wait a minute- I sold this in Saskatoon! And a white male bookseller friend of mine read it while on jury duty and loved it. So this is for you too Oconomowoc and Mequon!

The Snowy Day & the Art of Ezra Jack Keats was a quiet, back of catalog sort of book but so sweet that I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk about something both arty and kid-themed.

Harvard outdoes itself with each new edition in its Annotated series and people sold Pride & Prejudice well, so Persuasion took very little, um, persuasion. But there are so many Dickens books, the trick in presenting Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens was distinguishing it from the pack. This is where being able to vouch for smooth writing counts.

I wasn’t going to mention Denise Gigante’s The Keats Brothers except that when I saw the finished product it was too beautiful to let it pass without comment. I edge out on the limb a bit further and say I think this will be the intellectual, big idea, literary biography of the season.

Two wonderful, playful, impulsey titles from MIT get smiles in the front row: 101 Things to Learn in Art School, and Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City. I noted the latter’s many book arts virtues- printed in Germany, cloth ribbon, irresistible heft. This is an audience that appreciates production values.

It’s getting late. I notice one bookseller who is usually a Harvard/MIT/Yale fan yawning, so I need to pick up the pace. Perhaps channeling David Schwartz, I throw in one last mention- Eric Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World. True, it’s not exactly a stocking stuffer. But that very morning the Times ran a review of a new biography of Marx and his wife Jenny, and the reviewer lamented that what we really need is a good book on the history of his ideas. People, this is that book! Will it sell at Next Chapter and Books & Co, which are located in the two most conservative counties in the state? Won’t it be fun to try?

There are three more rep nights ahead, but since I'm no longer a bookseller I don't get to go. I get a little dewy-eyed about our profession when I see all these young and old booksellers coming out on their own time just to get some good handselling ideas from my colleagues and me.

I don’t know what we’ll be holding and showing at these events when and if books become electronic blips on a screen; but I’m pretty sure these passionate booksellers will still be turning out to hear us.

elizabeth, hazel, and the help

2011-09-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

I guess it’s time to see The Help. It was and is such a buzz book in the stores. People I know who normally disdain pop culture have told me, in a kind of confidential whisper, “You really should see it.” And now my 84 year old mother, who never goes to movies, saw it with my sisters and exited the theater in tears.

I was intrigued by my friend Sue Zumberge’s description of conversations she’d had about the book with African-American and white customers in her St Paul store, Common Good Books. While some black readers and viewers have loved the book, others have been bothered by the idea of a white woman writing and owning this story. This seems to me a dead end argument that, carried to its logical conclusion, would make our literary landscape even more ghettoized than it already is.

But the more interesting critique is the suspicion that, as one black viewer put it, “this is a feel good movie for white people.” Reading this, I could almost hear defensive hackles bristling across the land, as well-meaning white New York Times readers encountered and dismissed the idea. But I think it's a profound idea, and it gets to the heart of our stubborn contemporary perceptual divide when it comes to race.

For many whites, slavery and Jim Crow are long lost historical artifacts, and no need to dwell on them. Nasty and embarrassing, sure, but we can't feel personally responsible for social atrocities committed by our great-grandparents generation. (And of course, our particular relatives are never implicated anyway.)

The self-evident truth that racism continues to operate in every area of our lives is met with indignant skepticism. Indeed, there’s a ludicrous but increasingly confident movement asserting that white people are the new oppressed minority.

Meanwhile, for African-Americans, racism and oppression are not just a piece of unpleasant history, swept aside in 2008 by an enlightened electorate. The most repugnant, institutionalized practices were routine until not that long ago. The legacy of racism has never been honestly confronted in the manner of, say, the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission. And by any of hundreds of statistical measurements, not to mention one’s own eyes and ears, racial bias continues to undermine aspirations in Black communities across the land, the Obamas in the White House notwithstanding.

The premature rush to pronounce racism dead, the declarations that we don’t need affirmative action programs anymore, the puzzled frustration on the part of some whites with blacks who won’t just forgive, forget and move on- these attitudes understandably elicit skepticism among black people about the sincerity and degree of true acceptance behind them.

One great way to help understand the debate can be found in David Margolick’s excellent new book Elizabeth & Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, just released from Yale.

If you don’t recognize the names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery, you’re forgiven. But if you don’t know their story, you should.

When Little Rock Central High School was desegregated in 1957, with the help of court orders and the National Guard, the nine brave fifteen-year old black students who attempted to attend were surrounded each day by screaming, hateful mobs of whites. In one shocking photo that quickly became iconic, a stoic young black woman calmly carries a notebook as she walks to the building; directly behind her, wearing a face contorted by rage and hate, a young white woman spits epithets.

Elizabeth and Hazel.

As I’ve sold this book for the past three months, I’ve been surprised at how fuzzy memories have become about this episode. Booksellers of a certain age recognized it immediately, but younger booksellers often listened to this story as if hearing it for the first time. (This alone speaks volumes about how well we’re teaching this history.)

Margolick is a master journalist, and the book works as a refresher course on the early days of the civil rights movement through the lens of the Little Rock events. But what makes it keenly relevant to the discussion sparked by The Help is the evolving, unlikely personal relationship between the two women.

Incredibly, both grew up and continued to live in Little Rock, unknown to each other. But after 30 years, Hazel Bryant picked up the phone and called Elizabeth Eckford, and asked for her forgiveness. A twenty-plus year adult relationship ensues, a friendship that veers from kumbaya to fracture and back again. One of the main fault lines in their personal story, as in our current national conversation, has to do with trust and sincerity.

Despite Hazel’s heartfelt and seemingly genuine atonement, Elizabeth begins to suspect that she doesn’t grasp the enormity of the injustice of which she’s been a part. Initially, Hazel clings to the notion that she really didn’t know why she was part of the mob, she was just following along, she was only fifteen and, indeed, racism may not have even been her motive. Elizabeth doubts this conveniently naïve narrative, and begins to withhold the easy forgiveness she’s being asked to confer.

When I first approached this manuscript, I expected and wanted a story that would build to an Oprah-like finale. If these two women could find peace and friendship, why can’t we all? That is, a feel good moment for white people.

Instead, Margolick has given us much more- a richly textured, profoundly personal historical snapshot, complete with all the ambiguities and loose ends that inform our continuing racial divide. The photo may be from 1957, but, as the skewed reactions to stories like Kathryn Stockett’s book and film make clear, the image still resonates in 2011.

Harvard/MIT/Yale meet the Canadian Prairies

2011-08-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

When people at parties launch into bad travel stories, it’s usually time to mingle. A travel nightmare is always more salient to the person involved than it will ever be to an audience that wasn't. And we know the punch line- they lived to bore you with it, right? But this is my blog so I get to talk about mine.

With all the new and challenging logistics this summer- sales calls in six new provinces, along with my usual trips to Minneapolis, Chicago, Iowa City and elsewhere in the American Midwest- it’s been a surprisingly glitch-free ride. Until Calgary.

But let me back up. I decided to tackle the Prairies head on last month by following one of David Stimpson’s previous itineraries to the letter. If it worked for him, why not me? But even with only three publishers as opposed to the seven he and Laurel Oakes represented, it seemed impossible. Could you really sell Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg in one week? Though it left precious little time for idle urban meandering, the answer is yes.

I flew into Edmonton on Sunday. It’s a surprisingly gorgeous river city, with, of all things, a shiny new light rail system. (Sorry, I live in a place where the governor thinks trains are a socialist ponzi scheme, so I’m always impressed and surprised by good urban transit.)

All I’d really known about Edmonton was that it’s the provincial capital, and that it’s k.d. lang’s home town. I visited the lovely, old-school downtown bookstore, Audrey’s, and had my main appointment on Monday with the excellent University of Alberta bookstore.

Later in the afternoon, I took the fast and luxurious Red Arrow bus to Calgary- comfy seats, wi-fi, and a help yourself snack galley in the back.

I arrived early evening in a Calgary that seemed much bigger than the one I remember from ten years ago. The energy industry I guess. (Note to self: learn more about the tar sands debate.) Calgary seemed the least “Canadian” city I’ve visited all summer, and reminded me a lot more of Denver than, say, Toronto. I’d been warned by Canadian friends that it’s full of right-wingers, though Canadian political lunatics always seem more benign than our US ones. Luckily, I had just missed both the Stampede and the visit of Prince and Princess. My cab driver complained lustily about both events (no fares!), and about a lot of other things. ("We have the first Muslim mayor in Canada but nothing has changed!")

My main complaint: just try to find a New York Times in Calgary. Or, rather, don’t bother trying. Even the “Out of Town Newspapers” store downtown only gets it on Sundays. A stroll over to Pages Bookstore on Kensington- alas, closed for the day.

Tuesday morning, and it’s on to another great store and excellent buyer at the University of Calgary. Like most Canadian universities I’ve encountered this summer, the campus is nearly devoid of “You Are Here” type signage. It’s completely mystifying to a visitor. Buildings tend to have cryptic names so I had to use my best student union way-finding skills to locate the shop. (Look for a lot of parked bicycles). Like the Londoners who took down all the street signs during the Blitz to thwart occupying Germans, Canadian universities will be well positioned to confuse an invading US army.

It was pouring rain as we ended our appointment, and Brad, my buyer, led me through a maze of underground passageways, magically emerging ten minutes later at the LRT station.

The day rapidly deteriorated after that. The weather turned increasingly cold, ugly and stormy. My cab driver was exceptionally cranky. My flight to Saskatoon was delayed, and delayed again. Finally we boarded but a “red alert” was declared, meaning no one could set foot on the tarmac. So we sat and watched a lightning storm break around us for another hour.

Finally, the sun came out and we were allowed to take off- straight into the storm, which we were apparently going to follow to Saskatoon. Perhaps to take our minds off the roller-coaster turbulence, the chipper pilot came on to advise us to “pay no attention to that whistling sound, it’s just a small hole in the back door and means nothing.”

I hadn’t noticed any whistling sound but now you couldn’t ignore it. I wondered why he hadn’t made the announcement in French as well. A news story that morning reported on a French-speaking passenger who was awarded $12,000 from Air Canada for not being served a 7-up en francais. (Just the sort of culture wars red meat that would have the US crazies up in rhetorical arms for months. Here it’s a three day head-shaker.)

To cut a too long story short, we eventually landed. We taxied to within a few meters of the gate when the plane stopped because another red alert had been declared, thanks to lightning in the area. So we sat motionless for another half hour as I watched a line-up at Tim’s through the terminal window. We were close enough to see what people ordered, yet so far away!

I am a big admirer of these protections won by the Canadian labor movement, and if unloading my bag means risking a lightning strike, I can be patient. But if I'd run into one more alert, I was ready to cross over to union-buster.

The evening held one more surprise. I caught a cab to take me to my hotel, the Sandman, which I expected to be downtown. It is in fact less than a mile from the airport, on one of those hateful, anonymous, edge of city commercial highways. To add to the fun, the place was packed with NASCAR fans (and their bikes, and their parties.) Really, my kind of place. Hadn't eaten all day and I had dinner at the adjacent Denny’s. Risking suicide to cross six lanes of traffic for a dubious looking “Number One Chinese” didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Morning broke. After a long cab ride to the University of Saskatchewan (too long?), I found yet another beautiful store on a beautiful campus, with superb inventory tended by an excellent buyer. After our meeting, I walked to the airport for my late afternoon flight- a sunny day, and a great way to see the city.

The trip to Winnipeg was mercifully uneventful, and the city looked stunning from the air in the evening sunshine. I’m a great Guy Maddin fan, and I couldn’t help but be excited to be on his turf. To my mind, Winnipeg has a Midwestern look and feel, yet with its own distinctive Manitoba flavor. I picked up a copy of the Winnipeg Free Press, which was by far the best newspaper I’d seen all week. The day’s news included a story on a local scandal: Marshall McLuhan was born here, yet there is no street, park or building named after him!

I had the luxury of two nights in downtown Winnipeg, the centerpiece being several hours at the impressive McNally Robinson Bookstore. Top notch independent store, excellent thoughtful buyer, really wonderful place. This is the kind of smart book retailing that makes me wonder why such stores don’t exist in every Winnipeg-sized community.

Onward to the (far-flung) University of Manitoba Bookstore, where the buyer is doing a heroic job of keeping a solid academic inventory alive while fending off the viral spread of sweatshirts and trinkets. And a quick visit to the wonderful Winnipeg Art Gallery, where I found a charming book I’d never seen about one of my favorite Canadian artists, David Milne.

A very early Friday morning flight had me back in Milwaukee by noon, with time for a couple phone appointments. But next summer I will build in a few extra days to take in the Icefields. And, certainly, Gimli.

Invisible Romans & Invisible North Americans

2011-08-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, as I was driving to an appointment, I was half listening to an NPR interview with an economist. I didn’t catch his name but he sounded like one of those right-wing think tank types whose ideology swims in a warm bath of soothing, reasonable verbiage. The David Brooks approach.

He was asked about the idea of raising the retirement age as a way to reduce so-called entitlement spending. He told the interviewer that this was a great idea, because- and I confess that I paraphrase but this was the gist- “most people today have jobs like we do, sitting in an office, talking into a microphone. People don’t work as hard as they used to, like in factories.” Thus, workers should be obliged to carry on with this leisurely pace to age 68 or 70.

What was this man talking about? How could someone brought on to NPR as an authority be so utterly clueless about the actual working world? It almost sounded like a joke, but he was dead serious.

Let’s stipulate that, in one sense, he’s correct: fewer people are “working hard” because fewer people are working period. Particularly in factories. But as I traveled across the Canadian prairies last week, and spend a couple days in Milwaukee and Chicago this week, I see people working their butts off everywhere I look, even in offices.

The invisible working class is not a new phenomenon. And in contemporary North America, “invisible” is the wrong word anyway. It’s more precisely a willful refusal to see lives as lived by the vast majority.

Our media and culture are completely synched to the corporate fairy tale which controls our politics. Labor, when mentioned at all, is a parasite, a greedy extortionist or a union boss. We almost never get to see images of the actual people who keep the social and physical infrastructure standing and the economy running.

I’m reminded of Invisible Romans, one of my favorite books on the fall 2011 Harvard list. In it, Classics scholar Robert Knapp makes the surprising observation that everything we think of as “ancient Roman history” comes from the doings of the Roman elite- .01% of the population. How the ordinary laboring classes, housewives, slaves, soldiers and others lived, and the kind of cultural artifacts they created, has been lost or all but ignored. He does a wonderful job in this book of re-imagining real daily life in Rome, as opposed to the well-documented stories of Romans with microphones.

How will the history of the 21st century read a millennium hence? Will it include the taxi drivers, the hotel maids, the Tim Horton’s servers, the baggage handlers, the road repair workers, the bus drivers, the postal workers, the teachers, the ordinary North American workers plying thousands of trades?

If we are to avoid the narrative fate of the invisible Romans, we need more books about these people. It’s been a long time since Studs Terkel’s path-breaking Working, the quintessential oral history, though that book can always bear a re-reading.

And we need fiction that celebrates workers. We need a social democratic version of Ayn Rand, where wealth is created by the people who work, not the people who own.

I’m actually pretty optimistic that this sort of literary revival is already quietly underway. This summer I’ve been reading lots of Canadian fiction, and I just finished an extraordinary short story collection- Light Lifting, by Alexander MacLeod. Son of Alistair MacLeod, one of Canada’s premier writers, the stories are intelligent, gripping, and funny. They feature people and kids who haul bricks, make bike deliveries, build cars.

These are not didactic, socialist realist cardboard characters created to argue a position. On the contrary, they are sweetly intimate snapshots of lives we all know and recognize. Bonus: it's published by Biblioasis, one of the most interesting literary publishers around.

As they have so often in the past, books can lead the way out of this depressing ideological corner we’ve been backed into. If we have our eyes, our hearts, and our minds open, the millions of ordinary people who are keeping the whole show going will prove to be not so invisible after all.

Montreal

2011-07-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

[Cote-Vertu station]

Its 7:45 and I’m grabbing a coffee in the Faubourg on rue Ste-Catherine. The man beside me is studying a musical score for “Adieu, cher camarade.” I spent days in this space seventeen years ago, long before it was a Second Cup, writing in notebooks and trying to decipher Quebecois novels. It was a pre-I, pre-E time, and all of Montreal seemed to be reading books and magazines.

In the winter of 1993, after working for more than thirteen years at Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, I was desperate for a change. David Schwartz suggested a short sabbatical. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do but I knew immediately where I wanted to do it.

In short order I concocted a plan whereby I would spend three months in Montreal working on a long-term writing project, perfecting my French, and exploring a city I loved at a more leisurely pace. The third goal was accomplished, but mainly at the expense of the first two.

My partner Randy was amazingly supportive of my junket, far more than I would have been. He loaned me his VW and I loaded it with an absurd quantity of books and drove north. Oh yes, goal four was to read every important novel I hadn’t gotten around to, a plan quashed by the wealth of new Quebec literature I happily discovered once here.

I arrived on a February evening in a blizzard which was quickly followed by three days of arctic winds. Why had I left Milwaukee? The winter weather began to break a bit by the end of April. But I dug in to the challenge.

I sublet an apartment on Summerhill just off Cote-des-Neiges. It belonged to an old English woman whose annual trip home corresponded exactly with my dates, so it was a perfect match. (The eccentricities of Lady Putnam and her apartment can be saved for another time.)

Over the next three months, I think I walked every neighborhood on the island. I spent lots of time in bookstores and coffee houses, lived on cheap groceries from the ubiquitous depanneurs, and went to movies, sometimes twice a day. I stuck to myself, leaving Montreal without a single new friend, or even acquaintance. Yet for the rest of the decade I continued to long for the city itself as for a far away lover.

I never dreamed I’d return one day with a more purposeful mission, and the museum and bookshop buyers I’ve been calling on and meeting for the first time this week have been a joy. There are a great many similarities with US bookshops but also some significant differences.

As I come from the land of free market religion, it was a shock to learn that the Quebec government requires libraries to purchase books from booksellers, not from wholesalers, publishers, or chains. And not just one bookseller, but a minimum of three! Since this is a province with a large system of healthy, publicly-funded libraries, this is a significant help to small stores.

Memory is strange. My mental picture of the three month odyssey is vivid but incomplete, missing many details like street names, and certain landmarks. But memory unfolds as I proceed, and suddenly arriving at one metro station brings back the sequence of all the others, a list I never could have generated from scratch. It’s more like way-finding than recall, the way my dog Blake finds a path back to an exact spot on a street we once passed long before where he once found a tasty morsel.

One of my favorite titles on our lists this upcoming season is a sweet little MIT book called Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City. A short primer on urban literacy, each page offers illustrated maxims about city behavior- people prefer the sunny side of the street, tourists stand still quite often, people are afraid of the dark.

All this week I’ve imagined doing my own Montreal version of such a book as a way to bridge my 1993 memories with 2011 observations.

Are there more ruins and crumbling infrastructure than I remember?

Are there more annoying and intoxicated people? And do they prefer the sunny or shady side of St Laurent?

Is urban bi-lingualism a strength rather than a liability? The language bending and blending in Montreal public spaces is striking. There’s something deeply nurturing about being in a place where everyone is consciously working to make sense of each other. People listen more carefully, and speak more slowly. Often interactions begin in French and switch to English, but there’s the first tentative sizing up of who has more proficiency and how to proceed most efficiently.

It helps that everyone here is a linguistic minority, French speakers in an English speaking country and English speakers in a French speaking province (or pre-country, depending on your politics.)

How does the strange geographical angle of Montreal Island affect urban life? When you feel as if you’re moving east or west down Sherbrooke you’re actually facing (almost) north or south.

Traffic is so much crazier than in other Canadian cities, and yet the signals change simultaneously- how is it that this works? When Chicago lights turn red there’s a three or four second gap before the cross street turns green. In Chicago red is a suggestion meaning “two more cars.” I don't want to think about Chicago drivers on Montreal streets.

The city is bixi crazy, and a major two-way bike lane has been created across de Maisonneuve. Is it true that this is the first instance of bikes being responsible for bringing back a dying street, as was suggested in the Montreal Gazette?

The “Toronto or Montreal” comparison comes up in so many ways and seems to demand a choice. Can I love both places for different reasons?

Rubber tires on the subway trains, why such a difference? They sound softer, they smell better, and the ride is smoother.

The recorded woman who announces upcoming metro stations on the trains (“Prochaine station: Place-Saint-Henri”) seems more cheerless and weary than the 1993 one. She always made each anticipated stop sound like a place you really needed to get off and check out. And too often I did.

toronto, week one

2011-06-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

I began my first week of appointments in Toronto with more than a bit of trepidation. Though everyone has been extremely cooperative in accommodating my proposed dates, I haven’t met and worked with this many new customers since the day I started this job in 1998.

There were some logistical challenges. Canada Post has gone on strike, but it means my obsession with sending catalogs early paid off. Then Air Canada agents called a strike, but neither of my flights was inconvenienced. Anyway, a country that has a labor movement with gumption, what a great concept!

I took the bus down to O’Hare on Sunday morning. The driver was a trainee- tentative, learning the ropes, a little awkward. But he had an experienced handler hovering over his shoulder, explaining the shortcuts and schedule tricks. “Never skip a stop no matter how far behind you get! You never know when somebody might be waiting.” I thought of this man as his David Stimpson, and took it as a good omen.

Continuing the theme of repping by public transportation, I took the Rocket from Pearson to the Kipling subway station. It was a smooth ride but “the rocket”- really? Still, I was downtown in an hour for $3.00. The train passed through far-flung stations on the Bloor line I’d never been in, and I saw beautiful institutional pastels on the walls- mauve, sea green, and a kind of pale butterscotch- that I hadn’t seen since elementary school.

I daydreamed about my first visit to Toronto in the early eighties. I spent a weekend at the decrepit Selby Hotel on Sherbourne, in the room in which (supposedly) Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote for the Toronto Star. Feeling the literary vibe made it a little easier to ignore the roaches and the thumping cheesy disco in the basement.

There are precious few North American cities anymore where one might take a “book vacation,” but Toronto remains one of them. True, when bookselling and publishing elders gather, as they did at David’s happy, bittersweet retirement party at his beloved Pilot Monday night, the inescapable theme is “the good old days.” Stipulating that there were once many more bookstores selling many more interesting books, I’m still skeptical. Moms Mabley used to make fun of people who dwell on the good old days. “What good old days? When? I was there, where were they at?”

Be that as it may, I just spent a wonderful week visiting diverse and wonderful bookstores in a truly wonderful city. It’s the kind of trip I’d gladly make for fun, and I’m being paid for it! I’d been to many of these shops before as a customer, but it’s an entirely different thing to sit down with buyers to sell them the lists.

What were some of these places and personalities?

York University Bookstore, which features the kind of deeply scholarly trade inventory that was once routine in college stores before the sweatshirts took over;

The University of Toronto Bookstore, which is housed in one of the most beautiful rooms in book retailing;

Books for Business, a tidy, bright, smartly selective business specialty store in the financial district;

Marc Glassman, owner of the widely mourned Page’s Bookstore, is now juggling about a dozen book balls, including the Toronto International Film Festival shop and a clever reading series called This is Not a Reading Series. (Toronto is book event crazy. Like film festivals, there seem to be reading festivals of one kind or another every week.)

The wonderfully quirky and old-school charming Book City stores, a collection of local neighborhood shops which reminded me of Milwaukee’s legendary Harry W Schwartz chain, where I learned bookselling;

Ben McNally Books, a showcase store on Bay Street is another spectacular aesthetic feast. Ben is a true bookman who lights up when he comes to “my kind of book” in the catalog;

Don Lake, whose book and art emporium on King Street- D&E Lake Books & Art Ltd- demands a visit since there’s no adequate way to convey the experience in words. A booklover’s dream;

Any excuse to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario is a good one, but to sell them books is a real privilege. As so many other art museum bookshops are swamped by cheap promotional inventory and branded merchandise, books here still seem like part of the mission;

Type Books on Queen West (sister store in the Forest Hill neighborhood) is one of my favorite kinds of stores, where a deeply quirky and personal selection is supported by the neighborhood, whose quirks and personalities seem a perfect match. It’s another must stop for visitors on Toronto book holiday;

Another Story on Roncesvalles- the neighborhood is fantastic, would be worth the visit even without the great bookstore- is a cheerful blend of politics, social conscience, feminism, fiction and community. And on top of that, it has one of the best and most interestingly subdivided kids’ book sections I’ve ever seen;

With a couple other stops to round out the week- the Bata Shoe Museum shop (that Yale has a cool book called 100 Shoes on the fall list and Toronto has a whole museum devoted to shoes excited me way more than it should have), and Glad Day, one of the last remaining LGBT bookstores in North America- it was a busy week.

My weekly TTC pass made it easy to navigate the city with ease, though I do wish it started on Sunday rather than Monday. I know people like to complain about the transit system, and I did begin to dread the words “Attention TTC passengers…” But I’ve been on urban transport all over the continent and I have to say it’s pretty great.

I have another week in Toronto to look forward to, and then a mad dash to as many bookstores as I can cover between Edmonton and Halifax over the next two months.

But after one week on duty, I will venture one generalization on Toronto bookselling: the variety of venues, the idiosyncratic bookseller personalities, and the accumulated wealth of experience gives me hope.

There’s been so much dread and gallows humor lately about the future of US bookstores. The Canadian booksellers I’ve met so far are refreshingly optimistic. Even the pessimistic ones exhibit a kind of informed resignation- no panic, no drama.

I’ve been reading an essay collection called What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, so perhaps my urban glasses are a bit rose-colored. Nonetheless, a week in Toronto has transformed my muted dread about meeting all these new people into happy anticipation to see them again. I may even be able to cross-pollinate some good merchandising ideas when I see them. With Customs permission of course.

ethel wilson and me

2011-06-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

For my bookselling swan song, I managed the last Harry W Schwartz Bookshop to open in 1997- coincidentally, in the site of the store’s original 1927 shop on the east side of Milwaukee. (Boswell Book Company, a wonderful bookshop operated by my friend and fellow Schwartzian Daniel Goldin now thrives in the same location.)

With what now seems like a ridiculous degree of indulgence, David Schwartz allowed me to stock the entire store with an opening inventory of my choosing. We had four other stores and I’d been a buyer for five years, so I mainly knew what I was doing, but still.

I spent way more time than I should have on the idiosyncrasies. One of them was my determination to make our store the best source for Canadian fiction in the United States.

This was actually setting a pretty modest bar. It was (and is) relatively easy to find the Margaret Atwoods, Michael Ondaatjes, and the Mordecai Richlers on the shelves of US bookstores. These literary superstars have American publishers and, viewed through the usual US-centric prism, seemed to have transcended their “Canadian-ness.”

But I was interested in offering a more authentic inventory of Canadian writing. I’d been to Canadian bookshops and seen the wealth of literature that was essentially invisible and unavailable to US readers. With our shop on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee, we would change that.

While on a camping trip in Jasper, Alberta I’d discovered and fell in love with a writer I’d never heard of: Ethel Wilson. A small Jasper bookseller had five titles. I bought them all and devoured them. Later, a Canadian friend told me that “every high school student has to read Swamp Angel,” and I had the feeling that my Wilson obsession might be a touch odd even in Canada.

The other intriguing thing about the Wilson books was the format- they were New Canadian Library paperbacks, a portal through which I went on to discover Gabrielle Roy, Hugh LacLennan, Stephen Leacock, Marie-Claire Blais, and a half dozen other authors whose work I’d never read. NCL paperbacks were cheap, attractive, and were precisely what was needed to distinguish our literature selection at the new store.

After a complicated ordering process, six boxes of assorted NCL titles showed up one day a couple weeks before we opened. We signed the section “Canadian Fiction.” I had never seen that designation in any US bookshop and have never seen it since.

In retrospect, the gesture was a brave and pioneering one, but it ultimately floundered. David Schwartz wanted to know when “your Canadians” might appear on the weekly sales reports he studied. I began to cut a wide swath around the section as I moved through the store- with sales so tepid, there was no chance to freshen it up with reorders, and it was sad to see them unbrowsed.

Eventually the section was dismantled and parceled out to the general fiction section. When the store closed, some of the NCL’s turned up on sidewalk carts for fifty cents. I bought out the Ethel Wilsons, and keep a small stash of extra copies to send out to potential fans when I get to swapping “favorite obscure writer” stories.

I still don’t really understand why Can Lit- as its known north of the border- is such a tough sell south of it. But part of the blame rests with me, not the authors, or even American literary myopia.

Although I was an experienced bookseller, I’d forgotten bookselling truism number one: books don’t sell themselves. There are still many believers in the idea that books just call out to customers as they pass by (or flick by), but it takes a live bookseller to match up a reader with a book- especially something as exotic and unfamiliar as Can Lit.

Daniel and his booksellers at Boswell get that. They and all the other hand-selling dynamos in the nation’s successful bookstores are now in the relationship business as much as the book business.

Though the Schwartz store has been reincarnated, maybe I could ask for a re-do. Would a day on the floor to buttonhole patrons about all the Canadian literary goodness missing from their US-centric lives redeem me?

book expo 2011

2011-05-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

I attended my first ABA (when ABA actually ran the convention) in San Francisco in the mid-eighties. I was a somewhat green bookseller and was a little overwhelmed by the over-stimulation. I remember being surprised at how hard it was to find actual books at the show.

This year, as I have before, I worked the Harvard, MIT and Yale University Press booths, and instead of being a part of the swarming literati, stood witness to it as it flowed past.

An endless, somewhat surreal parade, with every corner of the book industry on display, it reminded me a bit of the old anti-war marches. We were all there for a common purpose, yet every individual sect wanted to walk behind its own banner.

But here, all the niches and interests were intermingled. One minute you’re discussing titles that might work for the St Louis Jewish Book Fair with an extremely organized group of women, and the next you’re fending off eccentric self-published authors of dystopic sci fi novels.

BEA 2011 for me was book-ended by two lovely, humbling and satisfying events in honor of our “PW Rep of the Year” award.

On Monday night, the three presses threw a cocktail party at Hudson Yards Café, a Hell's Kitchen bar which was scouted out by Yale sales director (and walking music wiki) Jay Cosgrove. I loved it because it felt exactly like the kind of neighborhood place I’d frequent at home in Milwaukee. The mix of booksellers, press folk and rep colleagues from other presses was a treat, and though I fight limelight every step of the way, I’m still basking in the love.

On Thursday morning, the more formal presentation of Rep of the Year and Bookstore of the Year Awards (for the irrepressible Anderson’s outside Chicago) took place at the Book & Author Breakfast.

I shared the Green Room with Anne Enright, Roger Ebert, Erik Larson and Jim Lehrer. (Note to booksellers: as Lehrer and I strolled out to the dais he reminisced about the many bookstore events he’s done, and wondered why some bookstores put out too many chairs. “It’s better to have fewer chairs and then have to put out more than to have empty ones.” So true.)

I have never been in a Green Room, nor spoken before a thousand people, nor received a plaque for anything. I’d prepared a somewhat lengthy list of people to acknowledge- beginning with my rep team, Adena Siegel and Patricia Nelson- but when they told me I’d have “two minutes, tops,” I became flustered and extemporized. I guess it went well but see below for the remarks I’d prepared to give, and sort of did.

Between these two personal highlights, there were three days of the usual book convention business.

When I hear people talk about how the shows have changed, I don’t really know what they mean. I’ve attended a dozen or more over the past twenty-five years, both as bookseller and rep, and the predictable far outweighs the surprising.

Everyone who attends the convention becomes an instant amateur convention planner, and the roster of logistical complaints is long: not enough this, too much that, too hot, too cold. The horrible food is always horrible and too expensive.

When we get done critiquing the mechanics it’s on to calling out our fellow attendees: the greedy hoarders, the wheelies, the clueless.

And don't forget the publishers. There are never enough galleys, or the right galleys. The personnel you really need to speak with are never at the show, or at the booth.

Some of the larger publishers have stands where it’s impossible to find anyone to talk with. (“There’s no there there” I heard a bookseller remark about one huge booth that was filled with suits conferring at little tables but no-one who looked approachable.)

Then there are other stands where the desperation is startling. I learned to cut a wide swath around the American Express booth after a man screamed “John, are you a business owner?!” in my face one too many times.

I think and hope that our booths walked a middle ground- accessible, anxious to answer questions, usually facing outward rather than inward. What I know is that an astounding amount of work got done in three tiny spaces, much of it in meetings set up by my colleague Adena with her customers.

Yes, some surface things have changed over the years. There were no phones and personal devices for people to check at inconvenient moments back then. And the 1986 scientologists were dressed in different silly costumes than the 2011 ones, though the underlying idea- Bridge masquerading as an ordinary publisher- remains the same.

But what really puzzled me this year was the gap between the way the show was reported in book and business media, and the way I experienced it at the floor level. If you read the Times and listened to NPR, you’d think that Ebooks and the digital renaissance were universal preoccupations.

But on the rare occasions that I heard booksellers bring the subject up themselves, it was to make a meta-complaint about how loud the digital conversation has become, and how it was drowning out other conversations.

One of the things I enjoy best about working the booth is facilitating serendipitous meet-ups between booksellers who don’t know each other but should. There were countless impromptu conversations among booksellers at our booths all week, and what they mainly wanted to talk about was what they’ve talked about at conventions for twenty-five years- the books.

Before viral meant something that happens on a screen, and before novels and texts became Content, the main point of the show was talking with publishers about their fall lists. And exchanging individual takes on books and authors with colleagues. Why else make the trip?

As for Ebooks, a bookseller friend told me last week that “the publishers are always asking us about it, but the books themselves are more interesting to talk about than delivery systems.”

That’s a reality that will come back to bite publishers who are overly dazzled by the shift in potential platforms at the expense of paying attention to the quality of their publishing program. No worries on that front with Harvard, MIT and Yale.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Remarks below were prepared and (mainly) delivered at Book & Author Breakfast May 26, 2011:

Thanks Publishers Weekly, and the nominating booksellers. It’s great to see University Presses get this recognition.

Book repping today is not about sales but about repping in the hip-hop sense- as The Anthology of Rap puts it, “to represent is to stand for something you are convinced of and feel related to.” In that sense we are all book reps.

While it’s an honor to be recognized for individual achievement, this is a profoundly collective endeavor, and a shared labor of love.

Above all, I share the work with my colleagues, comrades and friends, Adena Siegel and Patricia Nelson. Between us we have over a century of bookselling and repping experience.

But there are others who deserve to share the credit, beginning with everyone at Harvard, MIT and Yale. I’ve sold thousands of titles in the past decade and they’ve never given me one to be embarrassed about representing. (well, maybe one…)

Authors, editors, book designers, and sales and marketing geniuses collaborate every day to get our beautiful books to readers.

And every rep knows that our reputation depends on how well our fulfillment operation works. Our team at TriLiteral is world class.

Two other key pieces of social scaffolding are crucial to doing a good rep job:

First, there’s the community of field reps, who share information, frustrations, and gossip, and make the road a less lonely place.

And a salute to the often unacknowledged friends and families of book reps. It’s not easy living with a rep. I asked my partner Randy to finish this sentence: “Living with a book rep is like……..” Without missing a beat he said “...like living in the UPS warehouse.”

But the key to it all is the bookstore. The booksellers who are practicing this craft today with heart, brains and love are heroes.

I started working at Harry W Schwartz Bookshop in Milwaukee in the seventies. But long before that, as a nerdy, self-conscious, introverted twelve year old, I spent hours hanging out in that store, discovering a way to be myself.

Like libraries, bookstores are safe places for kids who are too smart, too gay, or too different. There are a lot of reasons to hope that the doors of bookstores stay open. But a big one is the quietly life-changing space they give those self-conscious adolescent bookworms every day.

On their behalf- and my own- thank you!

manhattan bookstore melancholy

2011-05-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

With BEA coming up fast next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about New York City, and how my love for Manhattan has always been tangled with my love for books.

Nobody I knew growing up in Milwaukee traveled there, save an aunt and uncle who went to shows and brought back photos of themselves at Sardi’s, and bags of hotel matches.

My first visit happened in 1967 when I was a high school student. No, it wasn’t a class trip to perform with the band or to visit museums. My father had improbably given in to my pleading to fork over parental permission and $30 for a bus ticket to the first big anti Vietnam war march on the United Nations.

Though the trip- including the march, rally and eighteen hour ride- lasted all of three days, I broke off from friends whose priority was finding a “head shop” to go to Eighth Street Bookshop instead. I'd read about it in the Village Voice. It was a revelation.

In subsequent years, I visited the city often for radical political meetings of various sorts, and I always found time for the bookshops.

The New Yorker on West 89th street- a cramped closet with an equally minute mezzanine- was a favorite, as well as the nearby Bookforum at Columbia. I had a mad crush on Laura Nyro at the time and stalked her West End Avenue apartment building, so both stores were handy.

Farther downtown, I loved the radical bookshops, the more sectarian the better. Every Trotskyist and Maoist grouplet seemed to have its own book operation. This was at a time when “China Books & Periodicals” was an insurgent enterprise.

But I mainly patronized the various Communist Party outposts, which exuded a kind of haunting authenticity (even though already a shadow of the glory days): the Jefferson Bookshop off Union Square, which felt like living history; the Universal Bookstore, a strange storefront on West 13th operated by an unpleasant ogre who buzzed you in only after sizing you up; and the spiffy Four Continents on Fifth Avenue, a stagy advertisement for the Soviet government with books in English of all kinds.

These small niche bookshops were intoxicating. And when you factored in all the larger new and used bookshops, a book lover could easily spend a week browsing through Manhattan, even well into the eighties.

In 1986, my sister Barb, who was living in Connecticut at the time, gave me a copy of the NYNEX Manhattan Yellow Pages for my birthday. (Yes, a bit weird. I was thrilled.) As I peruse this piece of faded glory 25 years later, I’m amazed and sad to re-discover the richness of the New York bookstore landscape.

The “Book Dealers-New” section has nearly 400 alphabetical listings, among them a couple dozen art and architecture stores. And the big footprint chains were Doubleday and B. Dalton.

All is not lost. There were several familiar contemporary retailers on that twenty-five year old roster, including Three Lives, Strand, and Saint Mark’s Bookshop, where I bought my first ever full price hardcover in 1980 (Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach).

But the ghosts are more numerous: Brentano’s, Scribner, Coliseum, Endicott, Gotham Book Mart, Hacker Art Books, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop- all fond memories.

I haven’t seen a 2011 Yellow Pages, but Yelp lists 327 Manhattan booksellers, new and used. That’s better than I expected. And there are still lots of wonderful stores in New York (and brave booksellers who keep opening them.)

But though I get to the city more often these days, the bookstore spell that Manhattan once cast over this Milwaukee kid is also just a hazy memory. Kind of like socialism.

close call in new haven; saved by collaboration

2011-05-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

During the last meeting at the end of a week of sales conferences in Cambridge and New Haven last Friday, I was nearly killed by a screen. There’s a not funny digital joke in there somewhere.

The Yale sales department brain trust was having a final walk through the fall list when the big projection screen on which we’d earlier watched skyped presentations by our London editors came down on me from behind on a gust of spring wind. I was saved by my colleague Adena Siegel. This was not the first time.

Once again, the three back to back sales conferences- beginning with The MIT Press, Harvard University Press in the middle, and ending with Yale University Press - were exercises in intellectual stimulation and humility. Each press has such a distinct voice, producing books that are more than the sum of the parts. I leave the meetings feeling both energized and muddled, but trusting that all the incoming information streams will eventually sort themselves into coherent presentations to booksellers, as they have for (yikes) 23 seasons.

As the grateful recipient of some recognition from colleagues for my work recently, the idea of individual achievement has been on my mind. And at the risk of beating a dead horse, I have to reiterate my belief that- in books and publishing anyway, but also in the world- true self-creation is a rare thing. In work as intensely collaborative as the writing and dissemination of books, every individual achievement is also a social one.

You can’t deny that a writer who creates a book that wins acclaim is entitled to the bulk of the glory. But even at the level of authorship, it’s often clear that the final product usually rests on a complicated collaborative infrastructure. Pick up any worthy book and check the lengthy acknowledgements pages, or the roster of interviewees, or even the librarians consulted and thanked for confirmation that great ideas don’t always spring sui generis from great minds. (With some exceptions, many of them on our lists.)

Though individual merit counts, so does family, education, and economic status. Writers who are lucky or connected enough to be dealt winning hands in those three categories have all the more reason to thank a multitude.

And when we celebrate the publication of a deeply researched magnum opus which took decades to produce, I often wonder who was paying the bills and doing the laundry and tending to the minutia of the author’s daily life, allowing him or her to be devoted to writing. Someone, I’d guess.

This collaborative ethic carries on through the process of bringing the finished book to market. Some authors (not ours, of course) seem to be so hypnotized by the promise of internet retailing that they think getting their book listed and ranked on Amazon is itself a marketing plan. Mission accomplished, I see my book on the screen!

But in my experience over the past week and years, the collective thinking brought to bear by the presses to make sure every book finds its customer is profound.

With some titles this week, we spent a lot of time clarifying the intention of the author to make sure we understand exactly what we’re selling; in other cases, the meaning seemed self-evident, but identifying likely audiences was the challenge. Where to find reviews, where to find special niche markets, how to use social media effectively- it’s a never-ending collaborative process. And in general, the more collaboration, the better the chance of success.

The myth of individual achievement and the self-made man is so inescapable that it’s sometimes hard to find ways to recognize collective achievement- in the sense of honoring it, but even in the sense of simply seeing it.

Making the case will get easier this fall when Yale brings out Richard Sennett’s wonderful forthcoming book (January 2012) Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. A follow-up to his earlier work The Craftsman, a bookseller favorite which celebrated the joys of work for the sake of work, he turns his attention now to the need for a more cooperative ethos. Or, as he might put it, collaboration as a form of craftsmanship.

Every achievement worth noting in bookselling and publishing is to some degree a social one. That’s something to celebrate collectively.

value added

2011-04-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

What‘s the most important question facing traditional booksellers today?

To judge by the rising level of hysteria over the digital tsunami, the answer seems obvious: E-books. One colleague of mine at a trade house returned from a sales conference recently with his head spinning- “its E this, E that, it’s all anyone wants to talk about.”

And there’s a parallel world of fright going on in the bookstores, although the booksellers seem comparatively sanguine.

It’s a big problem. But a very clever blog post I saw last week got me thinking about another issue that, in my opinion, supersedes the question of how publishers and booksellers are going to sell digital books profitably.

A group of soon-to-be ex-Borders booksellers put together a stunning collection of guerilla signage from their closing stores. Calling it “justified bitterness manifested in the form of some awesome passive aggression,” the website BuzzFeed compiles the best of this sad but pointed gallows humor here.

Best of show: “No Restrooms, Try Amazon.”

Hilarious, yes. But think about it. A restroom is just one of the social amenities a bookstore provides that an internet entity can’t. (Though I wonder what a virtual toilet on a book retailing web site would look like or mean.) The “try Amazon” joke, and the more comprehensive barb behind it, gets to what I think is the really big question facing storefront booksellers:

How to convince customers that the added value delivered over online retailers is something worth paying for? And how much is the added value worth?

Most of the booksellers we reps call on are keenly aware of the price competition they face from internet sellers. One buyer who shall go nameless (oh hell, why not, hi Matt!) marches me through screens showing the absurdly discounted prices he’ll be competing with (and can’t match) on the new titles I’m trying to sell him.

This is also not news to most book customers. Being asked to match a price that turns up on a smart phone is now an everyday occurrence for booksellers.

But that customer needs a cogent, convincing, and short explanation beyond just “I can’t match it.”

There are two parts of the problem: actually providing the added value, and getting the customer to see that it’s worth paying for.

As to adding value, there’s no question that bookstores do it in spades.

- Bookstores offer a carefully constructed inventory built around strong categories, rather than trying to be everything to everybody. Booksellers meet with reps, pore over catalogs, talk to other booksellers and in general work overtime to make sure they have the right books in the right quantities. What is this worth? It’s not a cost that’s immediately apparent to the customer who walks in the door, but it’s worth a lot;

- Bookstores are a venue for informed opinions about books from live people who actually read, as opposed to robotic “customers like you also liked” algorithms, or canned, easily manipulated rating codes. In a recent Atlantic magazine column, publishing wise man Peter Osnos called this hand-selling “the spiritual core” of publishing ;

- Bookstores are a place for a book lover to offer informed opinions back to the professional booklovers behind the counter. People like to talk about what they’ve read, and who better than their local booksellers? Another customer overhears the conversation and joins in, and the next thing you know you’re learning about books you didn’t know you wanted. This is what used to be called social interaction before the phrase came to mean checking into chat rooms;

- A quality bookstore becomes a priceless but hard to quantify community asset for a street or neighborhood. Along with grocery, drug store, bakery, liquor store, and hardware store, my local bookstore is part of my regular shopping routine. I value that routine. I never think about buying products those stores sell from online vendors, nor would I online comparison shop the helpful people at Downer Hardware over the price of a box of screws;

- Every bookseller in North America has been forced to think about interior ambience and customer comfort in a way that prior generations never did, and contemporary internet retailers still don’t need to. (A slick, pretty home page will never match a comfy chair in which to test drive a new novel.) A bookstore is part showroom, part community center. True, you can “congregate,” if that’s the word, on some online sites, but good lighting, coffee, and all the other amenities of 21st century book retailing are added value, and have to be paid for;

- Bookstores support the community. When I got into bookselling we’d occasionally, and sometimes grudgingly, co-sponsor an event with some other organization. Contemporary booksellers have kicked the notion of community partnerships onto another plane. As I perused this month’s events on the Boswell Book Company calendar, there were activities inside and outside the store with two public libraries, a restaurant, a caterer, a local newspaper, a local college, a local opera company, the LGBT Community Center, the Jewish Community Center, Alliance Francaise, the Italian Film Festival, and the Tool Shed, a sex toy shop run by feminists. And that’s just this month!

This mutual support by community organizations is partly driven by the Buy Local movement, of which booksellers have been an important instigator. Some stores even have loyalty programs with customer directed donations to community organizations. And, needless to say, taxes paid on books bought in bookstores stay local.

Many of these bookstore events are imaginative and surprising- indoor farmers markets, violin concerts, wine tastings, cupcake competitions. While attendance can be unpredictable, when they work it can feel like date night. It’s the bookstore as a center of what we used to call social networking, before that came to mean checking status updates regularly. Bookstores are now so eventful that they have a regular subsection in urban entertainment listings;

- And the most often cited competitive edge is the incredible roster of author events, readings, book clubs, and literary groups of every sort that bookstores offer. A chance to meet the author of a beloved book is worth…how much?

Often the cost of staging these events is not recouped with book sales, so in a sense all customers are subsidizing author event programs with their purchases, much like a contribution to NPR supports overall programming rather than particular favorites.

When someone buys a book from a real bookstore, they are in a sense being asked to also support all this activity, as well as staff, overhead, insurance, and the untold other expenses that go into street retailing. But it’s not even a surcharge- it’s just the retail book price. Or less! Even after providing all these extras, most stores still offer generous discounts of 20% or more on select titles.

It’s beyond dispute that physical book retailing offers value added to the simple cost of the book. (Quality college bookstores and art museum shops do the same.) And there are probably dozens of other examples of added value I’ve overlooked.

But the second part of the problem remains: how to convince the customer, or enough customers, to incorporate that fact into their shopping consciousness and to happily pay for what they're getting.

Progress has been made. Every store has a core of loyal customers who are vociferous about their support. We’ve seen stores brought back from near death when communities learned that a cherished local shop was in trouble. And surely the unthinkable demise of some bookselling giants has been a consumer wake-up call.

Some stores have asked, in a straightforward way, for customers to commit to, say, buying one additional book a month. My local food Coop asked members for a 10% increase in purchases a couple years ago and it worked on me.

But the very air we breathe is saturated with price-ist propaganda. To many people, the idea of buying a product at anything but the highest possible discount seems lunatic.

We- publishers and booksellers- have to do a better job of making the case for the true value of bookstores, and their true cost, and for why they wouldn’t exist if they had to sell everything at 43% off.

telling our story

2011-03-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

When legendary Washington DC bookseller Carla Cohen died last fall, I remember thinking that I hope someone got to her with a tape recorder.

Aside from the personal loss felt by family, friends and customers, the passing of a great bookseller too often means the passing of a unique institutional memory. For a profession founded on peddling the printed words of others, we do a very bad job of documenting our own.

There are notable exceptions, especially on the publishing side. Bennett Cerf’s memoir At Random made books seem simultaneously commercial, sexy and important. And anyone who wants to sample old-school, cranky, carriage trade bookselling should check out Stuart Brent’s memoir chronicling his early bookselling days, The Seven Stairs. (Philip Roth called him “a cross between a Chicago intellectual and a Persian rug dealer.”) There are others, but not enough.

Whether or not we are facing the end of bookselling and publishing as we have known them, what we badly need is an archive through which future generations can have a taste of this maddening but deeply satisfying calling.

Like a combination of Studs Terkel’s oral histories and Robert Darnton’s universal digital library, such a project would document the memories, experiences and wisdom of the unsung heroes of the book industry: ordinary, Main Street families who have devoted their working lives to bookselling; underpaid receivers who have packed and unpacked millions of books and dealt with all manner of invoice and shipping craziness; exhibitions assistants, rights managers, wholesalers, buyers, accountants, publicists.

Luckily, we wouldn’t have to invent the wheel. I’ve just finished reading a fantastic book that accomplishes for the UK book market just what I had in mind for our own- The British Book Trade: An Oral History.

The collection, deftly edited by former bookseller Sue Bradley, is essentially a compendium of excerpts from oral interviews she conducted over the course of a decade for “Book Trade Lives,” one of a whole series of archives about 20th century British working lives stored at the British Library Sound Archive. (More available here) Other categories include oral histories of everything from the post office to the wine trade, a really wonderful, forward-looking celebration of labor of every sort.

What was it like to be a rep in 1950? Or a secretary at a publishing house in the twenties? Or a lowly bookstore clerk in the forties? The testimonies are authentic, surprising and completely mesmerizing (at least to anyone who has spent a lifetime in books.) The ways that bookselling and publishing have changed (and stayed the same) over the century speak eloquently to our 21st century fears of a bookless future.

The actual recordings, the result of hours and days spent with dozens of individual subjects, are only available via the British Library, and some of the interviewees have put an embargo on access so that only future generations will be able to listen. (The long-term, civic-minded reach of this project is awe-inspiring in itself. I can hear some US politician asking where is the profit in it, and if "the market" wanted such a thing someone would create it.)

The Library issued an audio CD compilation with excerpts, and the live voices are thrilling, if frustratingly brief. At their best, they are tantalizing and remind me a bit of Alan Bennett’s wonderful “Talking Heads” monologs.

But we have the next best thing in Sue Bradley’s transcript, which throbs with wit, history, and rich cultural detail. Though these interviews were conducted separately, they are woven together so skillfully that it seems as if the reader is eavesdropping on a conversation among friends.

One brief sample among many choice ones, which can be heard under "media files" here:

“You would have your duster or your brush, and every morning you would start on the shelf where you had stopped the day before. As you worked your way along, you would pick up a book, look at the title and publisher, and if you were sensible you would open it and read a couple of pages, then say ‘Right, that’s it, back on the shelf.’ So when someone came in and asked for a book, you could say ‘I saw that yesterday,’ and you could stretch out your hand and have that book. It’s not done nowadays- there isn’t the discipline of learning about the inside of books. I don’t want to denigrate present book staff, but I don’t think there’s the depth of knowledge that existed in the great old bookshops like Thin’s. Blackwell’s and Heffer’s were the same- full of people who were wrapped up in books and knew nothing else but books.”

John Milne trained at James Thin, the Edinburgh bookseller, before taking over his father’s Aberdeen shop, Bisset’s, where he was managing director from 1954 until 1987.

rep geography

2011-03-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

When people find out the size of my territory they sometimes gasp. “Seattle to Syracuse? You’ve got to be kidding.” Twenty years ago, most book reps traveled 300 miles, tops.

But for better or worse we are in an environment where we have to travel farther, longer and harder to visit the booksellers in our portfolio.

To the extent that this is a result of attrition, with fewer and fewer sufficiently robust stores to warrant visits, it’s a sad thing. The old standard whereby it was meaningful for a rep to live in the region he or she sold has become obsolete. I know LA based reps who sell in Denver and Chicago reps who sell in New Orleans.

The retail book world has shrunk, and a local booksellers' competition is no longer down the street but all over the world. (Happily, so are their potential sales.) In many ways having reps with a less provincial perspective is a plus, or I hope so anyway.

But there’s another reason territories have become bigger: to some extent reps are able to handle ludicrous-sounding geography because of the improvements in technology that make both booksellers and publishers smarter and more efficient.

When I was a bookseller in the eighties and early nineties, I remember reps coming to town for a week. There were more stores to see, but there was also more work to do. A Tuesday appointment often really began on Monday, when a rep could spend the whole day “taking inventory”- a phrase now so archaic that younger booksellers might not even know what it means.

Even by 1998, when I started repping for Harvard, MIT and Yale, there were a few stores where my appointments included combing the shelves spine by spine and noting what they had in stock before we got to haggling over the new titles. (How thankful I was for the beautiful, instantly recognizable MIT Press colophon, designed by the legendary Muriel Cooper in the sixties. Those books jumped off the shelf, and still do.) The point was to find out what was missing, so even after entering the on hand quantities on the often baroque backlist order forms, some intelligence had to be applied to deciding which missing titles were urgently needed.

The process could be time-consuming and a little maddening, but the tactile sensation of actually handling the physical book really enhanced the mental picture of the store’s inventory in a way blips on a screen never could. Not to mention the prospect of turning up anomalies, like mis-shelved, outdated or damaged books which no artificial intelligence (yet) could recognize.

As computerized inventory systems became the norm- and hard to believe that only a decade ago they were brand new and full of bugs- taking inventory came to seem like an expendable task. But it was surprising (and still is) to find out how unreliable computerized on-hand quantities can be. You think you have a copy of that book, but it was stolen six months ago! Which explains why it isn’t selling.

Before I get too misty-eyed for the good old days of inventory-taking, I’ll acknowledge that the trade-off was worth it. A hand count may have been more precise, but the computer is mainly right. Similarly, I’ve often romanticized the days when booksellers carried their inventories in their heads and could go straight to the shelf to retrieve a requested title. I conveniently forget all the times we drew a blank and were saved by the computer.

The digital database may not be 100% reliable, but acting as if it’s accurate allows us to spend quality time on other things, like discussing how to sell the new books. (The ascendence of this type of thinking, i.e. Bayesian reasoning, is the subject of an excellent new book from Yale University Press -The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy)

The digitization of the rep world over the past decade has manifested itself in lots of other ways. When I started, I spent endless hours on logistics: calling for hotel reservations, car rentals and plane tickets- not to mention phone tag with buyers. One afternoon in 1999 I set up shop in a hallway of the Boulder County Courthouse and ran through a couple rolls of quarters, making long distance calls on a public phone to nail down appointments. When I started using the neighboring phone as a call back number they asked me to leave.

I now spend vastly less time on arrangements and manage to lock down 90% of my commitments online and by email, though there are always a few old school stragglers who need the personal touch.

But going digital can be bittersweet. I’m a newspaper fanatic, and the first thing I used to do upon arriving in Columbus or Minneapolis was to pick up the local paper. Now I can read it online the week before my visit, I can follow the reviews and book publicity from my laptop, and can even listen to local radio (KPLU!) as I answer emails and type up notes.

Yelping, map questing, facebooking, smart phones, nimble publisher websites- all that technology and more have made it possible for reps to cover these bigger regions efficiently and cost-effectively. We’re racking up more miles but accomplishing exponentially more.

Not to say being a book traveler isn’t sometimes a challenge. A few weeks ago I was in St Louis, feeling exhausted from my 393 mile drive. Kris Kleindienst, owner of Left Bank Books, mentioned that her whiz bang Random House rep, Bridget Piekarz, had visited earlier that week on a whirlwind day that had her leaving Chicago at dawn and ending up in Kansas City late in the evening. With or without technology, that’s a long day.

The technological innovation is welcome and useful up to a point. And that point is the powerful intersection between two human beings, communicating face to face, surrounded by the actual bookstore and its customers.

The day is coming when teleconferencing will be so glitch-free that we may be seeing some far-flung accounts remotely. Better than no visit at all I suppose. But just as I’d rather be examined by a doctor using five senses rather than just sight and sound, the personal bookstore-rep encounter still seems irreplaceable. At least in places where books are still sold through personal encounters with customers.

waiting for my cornell bookstore appointment

2011-03-03T12:25:00.001-08:00

At around 7:30 this morning, as I sat in the window of Collegetown Bagels in Ithaca, New York, listening to the guy next to me explain Marcus Aurelius to his companion, the Ithaca Bakery delivery truck pulled up.

I watched the driver expertly unload and maneuver a precarious-looking trolley loaded with dozens of trays of perfectly formed, unbaked bagels. As he navigated the treacherous sidewalk, the wheels kept jamming: broken concrete, month old, salt-caked urban ice, and college town debris.

At one especially tricky bump- I held my breath- the top stories tipped and slid ominously. But some third eye apparently registered this, and with a quick, polished gesture he kept the rolling bagel tower intact. A simple, everyday man doing an ordinary task in an everyday job. Nobody seemed to notice.

But the small near calamity left a tiny dramatic postscript. As the trays shifted in that final jolt, a powdery dusting of cornmeal rose from the baking sheets and settled in a jagged rectangular shape on the frozen sidewalk. Almost instantly, two hungry sparrows descended, and began furiously pecking at the microscopic yellow dots.

A few seconds later, a third sparrow joined the group. But this one was more interested in prohibiting the other two from enjoying this surprise buffet than in feasting on it himself. He harassed one bird until it stopped eating, and then went to work on the other. For awhile, the first two took turns being diner and victim, one nibbling while the other endured an attack. But eventually both seemed to think the cornmeal wasn’t worth the bother, and flew off.

The bully bird, having won the prize, had no interest in actually consuming it, and also left. The grains of cornmeal slowly dispersed up Oak Avenue on the frigid Cayuga Lake wind.

my two cents on borders

2011-02-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

I was struck by the generous tone taken by most independent booksellers this month as they reflected on the excruciating demise of the great and powerful Borders. For the past couple decades, this chain set up shop close to and undersold many a fine neighborhood bookstore. When the victims caved, the response was “business is business!”

Dick Noyes, one of the titans of twentieth-century bookselling, operated the wonderful Chinook Bookstore in Colorado Springs until Borders (among other things) drove him out of business ten years ago. He was an exception to the group hug. His “spare me the crocodile tears, what goes around comes around” remark about Borders troubles was probably a truer representation of how many booksellers feel in their hearts. But we are an astoundingly nice profession and it would be mean to say it.

I vividly remember my first visit to Borders original store in Ann Arbor in the early eighties. I was a bookseller at Harry W Schwartz in Milwaukee, and we were both afraid and excited by the idea that a bookstore could be so big and carry so much. Their state of the art inventory system was years ahead of its time, and was actually a boon to many independents for awhile. But once Wall Street took notice it was all over, and the cascade of changing owners was farcical and devastating. Corporate America never seems to learn that 20% profit margins and books don’t mix.

Other more knowledgeable observers have written convincing Borders post-mortems, exploring all the various angles and could haves and should haves. I won’t presume to add anything.

Except this: I think the writing was on the wall when Borders dis-empowered their managers and individual stores around 2002, forcing local inventories, merchandising and community outreach to conform more closely to national display packages that could be sold (if that’s the word) to publishers.

For short term gain and the illusion of cost control, they sacrificed the competitive edge that always made them seem hipper and cooler than their bland competitor, Barnes & Noble. Many Borders stores seemed more like nimble, quirky, interesting indies than cookie-cutter chain shops.

Exhibit A: the excellent Madison, Wisconsin University Avenue store, which I was dumbfounded to see on the chopping block. In its heyday this store was the intellectual hub of one of the top university communities in the US. The “official” University Bookstore had thrown in the towel, collapsing its once stellar trade book department into a tiny corner room on the sweatshirt floor. The University Avenue Borders took up the slack.

Manager Michael Chaim, one of the smartest people in the book industry, remade his front of store to perfectly follow (and make) the reading tastes of this brainy neighborhood. For instance, I’ve never seen a better, more thoughtful “New University Press” section in any big bookstore. (Yes, I’m biased. But how well a store represents the university presses is a quality control issue to me.)

Eventually, local display and merchandising decisions became mandates, and the power to create the face the store would show to the community moved from someone who lived there to some suit in Ann Arbor who was able to score a few extra co-op dollars with national marketing campaigns.

Surely Michael wasn’t the only clever manager with the commitment and talent to customize his store. I wonder how many of them met the same fate.

In short order, mandates to merchandise were succeeded by mandates to reduce inventory. Like a farmer eating his seed, a bookseller who cuts stock too deeply inevitably reaps fewer sales. Core backlist was once the crown jewel of the Borders idea, but in recent years these books came roaring back to publisher warehouses for credit that would help pay the bills on new books.

Perhaps internet booksellers have killed the “we have everything” business model for physical stores. But the across the board inventory reductions seemed more like the slashing republican approach to budget cuts than a thought out plan to cut some sections while investing more strongly in other, more promising ones. If this happened, I missed it.

After all the havoc unleashed by the rise and fall of this chain on smaller booksellers who have invested their working lives in the profession, it’s hard to feel completely generous. There’s a little Dick Noyes in me saying “good riddance!”

But the net effect of the Borders implosion is bad for anyone who cares about books.

For one thing, there will be nearly 20,000 booksellers unemployed.

For another, it will leave many major cities and smaller communities without a single bookstore.

And it will concentrate power more strongly in the hands of the last chain standing.

There are some grounds for hope. The Canadian bookselling landscape has been dominated for over a decade by one retailer, which eats up a sizeable chunk of the book market. Yet there is a surprisingly robust array of interesting, wily independents across Canada who continue to survive and surprise.

Who knows what the next five years will look like? But I’m guessing booklovers will have three big choices:

- The internet retailers, increasingly linked to social networking buzz and digital media, will get better and better, offering more choices in more convenient formats. Fighting this is pointless.
- The remaining chain will decide to either re-commit to a physical book inventory, or will become a device salon with a few physical books as decorative backdrop.
- Independent, free-thinking booksellers will persevere in their calling as they always have: tailoring their stores to their communities; being responsive to but a step ahead of the market; hosting authors and events with love and imagination; and staffing the stores with smart booksellers who can answer a simple question like “what do you recommend?” with confidence and enthusiasm.

I’m betting on window three.

Elizabeth Bishop birthday love in Iowa City

2011-02-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

It’s been a snowy, frigid Midwest winter, and February 8th was one of its coldest days. As I walked down Dubuque Street toward Prairie Lights Bookstore, I had a revelation: the phrase “bitter cold” is literal, not metaphoric. The shards of ice on my breath left a tangible, stinging taste in the back of my throat: bitter!

For once, my appointment coincided with one of the excellent Prairie Lights events, so I was on my way back to the store for a reading “in tribute to Elizabeth Bishop on her 100th Birthday.” A dozen poets and readers were each to present a favorite Bishop poem. It sounded lovely. And it also sounded like the sort of event that could use a warm body to help fill the chairs.

It was lovely. And I needn’t have worried about attendance. I got there ten minutes early and nearly every seat was taken. By the time Jan Weissmiller welcomed everyone at 7:00, even floor space was at a premium. Granted, some of the attendees had that unmistakable look of some English class being assigned to come. But halfway into the recitations, even these reluctant young poets- and I may very well have misread the whole scene, since Iowa City is such a creative writing epicenter and perhaps every one of them is keen on Bishop- even they were locked in a kind of quiet trance.

As reader was succeeded by reader, the stately minimalist tribute took on a kind of intimate solemnity. A wonderful, moving, unexpected surprise on a frigid Iowa Tuesday night!

And, as if it needs repeating- though apparently it does- a tribute as well to the essential, irreplaceable cultural contribution that clever independent booksellers make to our communities, day in day out, season upon season.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

from Poems

Egypt: a select reading list

2011-02-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

Yet another international development that supposedly erupted out of nowhere. What a crazy, unpredictable world!

I don’t think the “out of nowhere” standard applies when traditional broadcast media haven’t done elementary reporting on a country for a decade or more. It only seems "out of nowhere" to us ignorant Americans, protected as we are from the dangerous journalism of Al Jazeera as we luxuriate in the freedom to watch Skins.

For some reason I turned on the NBC Nightly News yesterday, thinking I might get the latest on what’s happening in Egypt. Instead, it was the usual self-centered, US-centric blather: a screaming, cheesy slogan (Rage and Revolution!); a focus on one particular American woman who is afraid to leave her apartment; endless looping visuals of people clashing in the street with no context to really understand what’s happening; and, inevitably, the heroic anchormen, Brian and Lester.

The fact that journalists are apparently being targeted by the regime and these two empty media suits might be rattled becomes the focal point of the whole story. Forget Mubarak, will the anchormen and the old woman get out of Cairo alive? Yes, it might seem to be about the Egyptians but really, as always, it's about us! Would it be too much to ask for an interview with an Egyptian political scientist or two, who might actually give American viewers some informed background?

Thankfully, we still have books for that job. Even with the vast resources of the internet, books are still the undisputed go-to source when seemingly inexplicable world events pop up. There have been many worthy titles on the subject of Egypt and the region, the Islamic renaissance, and Middle East politics published over the past decade.

Here are a dozen from our presses that I heartily recommend. There are many more, so please check with your local bookseller for their recommendations. Spend thirty minutes with any of these and I guarantee more enlightenment than you’ll get from long hours enduring Brian Williams & Co.

A History of the Arab Peoples
Albert Hourani and Malise Ruthven
9780674058194 $18.95 paper (Harvard)

Hailed in 1991 as the definitive history of Arab civilization, this panoramic masterpiece has been brought up to date with a new Afterword.

Cairo: Histories of a City
Nezar AlSayyad
9780674047860 $29.95 (May 2011 Harvard)

This loving forthcoming homage to Cairo as an urban space, and a history of the built environment- by a working Egyptian architect- now takes on added significance.

The Mind of Egypt: History & Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs
Jan Assman
9780674012110 $25.50 paper (Harvard)

This sweeping 2003 history by the noted scholar is excellent deep background.

Beyond Terror & Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East
Gilles Kepel
9780674057319 $17.95 paper (Harvard)

The competing dominant narratives about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism are both exhausted and bankrupt, according to the renowned French Mideast scholar.

Cairo
Andre Raymond
9780674009967 $25.50 paper (Harvard)

A deeply observed, nuanced study by the leading social historian of the Arab world.

Awakening Islam: Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia
Stephane LaCroix
9780674049642 $29.95 (April 2011 Harvard)

Political dynamics in one of the most opaque Muslim countries, based on rarely seen documents and the author’s extensive travel to the region.

Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest
Hamid Dabashi
9780674049451 $29.95 (Harvard)

Shi’ism, perhaps surprisingly, as a faith based fundamentally on protest- history, culture, religion, literature, art.

Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak
Tarek Osman
9780300162752 $20.00 paper (Yale)

There couldn’t be a timelier introduction to contemporary events in Egypt.

Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes
Victoria Clark
9780300117011 $20.00 paper (Yale)

This former correspondent for The Observer was born in Yemen, the poorest state in the Arab world, and knows it inside out.

Sudan: Darfur & the Failure of an African State
Richard Cockett
9780300162738 $22.00 paper (Yale)

The Africa editor of The Economist chronicles the descent of Sudan into failure- sad, but well worth knowing.

A Quiet Revolution: the Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America
Leila Ahmed
9780300170955 $30 (March 2011 Yale)

An excellent history of the Muslim Brotherhood, and how a younger generation- in Cairo and across the world- has appropriated one of its key symbols- the veil- for progressive ends.

Levant: Splendor and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean
Philip Mansel
9780300172645 $35 (April 2011 Yale)

A celebration of cosmopolitan crossroad cities, this lovely excavation of Smyrna, Beirut and Alexandria blends historical sweep (think Adrian Goldsworthy) with an armchair travel vibe (think Jan Morris.)

Dateline Minneapolis St Paul

2011-01-29T06:29:00.000-08:00

When the New York Times and NPR both take note of Winter Institute, the annual brain-storming session for independent booksellers that met in DC this week, I guess that’s a hopeful sign. But the relentless stream of quirky ideas flowing from the sessions sometimes sounded a little forced.

“What’s wrong with just trying harder to sell books? That’s what we know how to do.” That comment from a Twin Cities bookseller who is loaded with book marketing ideas and tests many of them. None involve bringing in merchandise she doesn’t really care about, or requiring her to learn a whole new set of business skills.

Best idea of the week is a new bookstore called Boneshaker Books, which opened in an excellent old theater space in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis a couple weeks ago. Unapologetically political, this is what we used to call a “movement store,” but updated for the 21st century with cooking, parenting, and a robust fiction section in addition to anarchism, dada and labor history. Run by a young(ish) collective, there’s a refreshingly idealistic vibe here, and I found a couple things that appealed to me which I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

Another great idea came by way of a post on the website of Micawber’s Bookstore in St Paul. (Mr. Micawber Enters the Internets.) It was a simple two line entry called “First/Last,” and noted the title of the last book the store sold in 2010, and the first book sold in 2011. (Go here to find out the answers.) Granted, dates are arbitrary, but I thought it was a fascinating piece of trivia, and immediately wondered what such a list from hundreds of bookstores would look like, and whether the aggregate list might say anything important.

This reminded me of another good idea I heard last week. The irrepressible Lisa Baudoin, owner of Books & Company in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, wondered in an email blast to friends and customers “What is the first book you’ve read in the New Year?”

This simple question made me think about how I decide to read what I read. I wanted to finish the book I was reading and to report it. (Yes, three weeks into the month and I hadn’t actually finished a book. It’s selling season!) But I realized that, while I was enjoying this book, there was nothing about it that would rise to the occasion of “first book.” It would have been great for the “random” standard, but somehow failed the sense of occasion test.

So I put that one aside for now and took on something else I’ve been intending to read- Mark Harmon’s new translation of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Harvard March 2011). I read this book in my early twenties and remember being intensely moved by it, but I wondered whether it would be as meaningful thirty years later.

It was beautiful. Short and sweet, Rilke’s tender literary relationship with a young fan who struggled with whether he had it in him to be a writer still spoke eloquently to my own neuroses on the subject. In a nutshell, Rilke advises would-be writers to have patience, avoid irony, and to check your heart.

So my first book of the year, thanks to Lisa, is a satisfying one, and seems like a good omen. But it made me question my scattered reading style. Reps are in and out of bookstores so constantly, and the booksellers we meet with are usually so filled with good recommendations. I tend to accumulate stacks of books that I impulsively tackle without any real plan. Sometimes when I’ve just puzzled through some piece of experimental fiction I follow up with a simple, realist story. Or, let's follow-up the depressing political manifesto with Ian Rankin. But beyond that, no real plan.

When I hear that a friend is “reading Dante,” or is on a personal quest to understand a certain period of Italian history this year, or that my colleague Patricia has spent the last year reading Proust (and much else), I’m impressed. And wonder whether I should replace my scattershot approach with more focus. With a goal. Book groups, of course, are made for this type of planned reading, but I can’t stand sitting around a room trading opinions about what I’ve read. I could use that time reading.

One powerful advocate of having a reading plan is Harold Bloom. His new book The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (Yale March 2011) is a celebration of the writers and poets who have most influenced him, but also works as a “how to read" manual. One could do worse than following Bloom’s path through classical literature, emerging in 2012 a much better person.

Friends who have seen my book collection are sometimes surprised that I have no shelving system. Complete disorganization reigns. I blame a life in the book business. If I added up all the time I’ve spent discussing “where to shelve it” – both as a rep and as a bookseller- this problem has probably cost me months of my life. So allowing myself random shelving in my own house feels liberating, even if it means accidentally buying a book I already own, or not being able to find one.

So I think I will just let the tension between planned reading and random continue on in 2011, but am grateful to the booksellers of the Midwest for having ideas that made me reflect on it. Deciding on some self-improvement reading program would necessarily mean passing on all the great serendipitous books that find their way into my path. But is this freedom to read worth sacrificing the chance of ever becoming Harold Bloom by concentrated reading with a purpose?

Two great Portland bookstores. Neither named Powell's!

2011-01-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Every season there are a couple appointments I especially look forward to, and one of them is my meeting with Karin Anna at Looking Glass Books in Portland. Karin bought the store about a decade ago when it was on Taylor Street downtown, and moved it a couple years ago to the Sellwood neighborhood in southeast Portland.

She’s the kind of passionate bookseller whose store seems more mission than business. Long before the current mini-craze for literature in translation, Karin was an evangelist for international fiction. Every time I visited the store I’d leave with some surprise treasure by an author I’d never heard of. Her reading tastes are sophisticated but there’s never the hint of snootiness in her recommendations.

The Looking Glass physical space is too charming for words. A bright red train caboose is all you see from the street, but the store opens onto a lower level encompassing a couple cozy rooms, complete with fireplace and an interior outdoor courtyard that lets in bright light (or Portland bright anyway.) Charlie, resident canine and squirrel watcher, stands guard at the window and greets customers.

But alas, instead of poring over Harvard, MIT and Yale catalogs, I spent my appointment time with Karin this week proof-reading her letter to customers announcing that the store will close next month if she can’t find a buyer.

I’m no urban sociologist, but my impression of the surrounding Sellwood neighborhood is that it’s a community of readers, and should be a demographic dream for a good bookstore.

Events were well-attended but too often people left without purchasing a book. Like many booksellers these days, Karin has had people waving devices in her face showing where they can find her books elsewhere, cheaper. As if the value of the uniquely humanist experience of spending an hour at Looking Glass is interchangeable with a few mouse clicks on a laptop.

But no use crying about it. There are customers who love the store, but not enough. Portland is a city that practically invented local sustainability and brags about it at every turn. But even here, the simple truth that if you cherish a local business or institution you have to support it financially has apparently failed. People love the idea of the bookstore on 13th Avenue, but apparently think that, because it’s a labor of love, it doesn’t need everyone to buy a book a week. Or even a book a month. It does.

I kept my sadness at bay until I took a closer look at the parting gift Karin gave me, The House of Paper by Carlos Maria Dominguez. Unfamiliar, enchanting, and exactly the kind of book that needs a real, book-loving human being to bring it to life. Her inscription- “We tried!”- was never truer of any bookseller I’ve ever met. The store may be forced to close, but by any meaningful measure, "you succeeded!"

* * * * * *

Sometime last year I received an email from a man who had just opened an art and design store in northeast Portland. We exchanged information, some quirky, thoughtful orders ensued, and this week I stopped by for the first time to see what Monograph Bookwerks was all about.

The shop is fantastic. Every square inch seems curated, from the eccentric objets, to the clever display spaces, to the stellar art, architecture and design book inventory. I stopped by on a rainy Saturday afternoon with my partner and his brother, and I was almost embarrassed by our giddy behavior. Look at this! But wait, did you see this? There’s no place to rest the eyes, everything calls out for investigation.

I quickly learned that Blair Saxon-Hill, who had been stoking our enthusiasm by showing us all sorts of irresistible things, is also an artist and co-oversees the shop. The other partner, who I met on a subsequent visit, is John Brodie. He is also a painter, and runs a successful restaurant beloved by hip Portland night owls (le Happy), and is former manager for the Portland music phenom Pink Martini (their lovely website front page is reminiscent of the Monograph vibe, though perhaps I’m imagining it.)

The Alberta neighborhood is an unfamiliar one to me, though in some ways it looks like the younger, hipper, broker stepchild of Sellwood. I hope that the community appreciates this gem in its midst and supports it.

Ironically enough, given that they are both in Portland, whose retail literary world is dominated by a book behemoth, Looking Glass Books and Monograph Bookwerks convincingly show that you don’t need acres of space to be interesting. With taste and discrimination, quality can trump quantity.

On the rep road 2011: Seattle

2011-01-15T08:30:00.000-08:00

Arrive in Seattle Tuesday, the Tucson shootings in the news and on the mind. Are people becoming meaner in general?

On the drive in from the airport, I wonder whatever happened to Seattle Nice. When I started selling here ten years ago, the civilized traffic always took some getting used to. On Chicago freeways, a ruthless ethos prevails. The confusing “you first, no you first” generosity of Seattle drivers, who couldn’t seem to work out the idea of an on-ramp merge, was charming and disorienting. People drove at or below the speed limit, something that would be considered insane or suicidal on interstates of the Midwest and east. But today I notice a kind of passive aggressive ruthlessness on I-5 that’s familiar and a little sad. It’s still not the Edens Expressway, which is a form of cutthroat, high stakes bumper cars. But it’s also not the sane, friendly, Seattle traffic my friends back east used to joke about and marvel over.

Four Pho places on one block of University Way. I pick Than Brothers because it’s packed. Delicious.

Alarmist predictions of a snowstorm on the way. In the event, a couple inches of slush. Feelings of Midwest winter weather arrogance rise up, though it’s all relative. The mid-fifties temperatures seem balmy.

I’ve always loved staying at the University Inn, for the great location, friendly staff, and charming, somewhat shabby rooms (in the cheap section.) The lobby was often filled with chattering international scientists or engineers, in Seattle for one of the frequent academic conferences. But now, my fellow guests are mainly here to visit the hospital across the street, and morning conversation revolves around tumors and prognoses rather than research.

So many people in public spaces and on public transportation reading books. Hopeful.

Catching up with a backlog of email messages. What do I think about a proposed book about a renowned porn director? How dirty can the pictures be? What do I think about the word “socks” in a working title for an important forthcoming work of post-fordist theory? And why are sales of one press so much better at a prominent academic store than sales of another press? I try to compose thoughtful responses to each of these interesting queries.

In light of Arizona, I decide to concoct a recommended reading list, but the whole thing is too depressing. (Though this is a good place to start). As I visit bookstores this week I don’t see any of the instant “issue” display tables that normally pop up around a news event.

I’m reading Mathias Enard’s Zone. Hallucinatory and a little addicting.

I’m listening to Matty Goldberg’s excellent “Best of 2010” mix CD, also a little addicting.

I wrote a fan letter to Nicola Beauman, founder and brains behind Persephone Press in London and the author of a biography of the British author Elizabeth Taylor (The Other Elizabeth Taylor), which I read a few months back. I got a lovely message in response.

Bought a copy of an old E.F. Benson book and a Molly Panter-Downs anthology at Twice Told Tales.

University Bookstore has a “Conspiracy” section. Someone complained that it was on the bottom shelf.

Unexpectedly, I teared up a little after my final meeting with the buyer at Third Place Books.

My only moving traffic violation in years occurred at the crazy intersection of 45th Street and I-5. I think about it every time I exit there, and still don’t exactly understand what I’m supposed to do.

I walked to my appointment at Elliott Bay Books, in the rain, in the early morning darkness, a couple miles. Climbed what has to be one of the longest staircases in the world from Eastlake up to Tenth Avenue. Near the foot of the stairs, under the freeway, there's a lone palm tree. Oddly, floodlit.

The New York Times reports that China has bulldozed the studio of artist Ai Wei Wei, whose collection of blog posts MIT is publishing in March (Ai Wei Wei’s Blog:Writings, Interviews and Digital rants 2006-2009).

Elliott Bay Books, Everyday Music, and Oddfellows café: is there a more satisfying trio of businesses on any urban block in America?

While presenting Cricket Radio: Tuning in the Night-Singing Insects to Rick at Elliott Bay, he remarks that “we don’t have crickets in the Northwest.” Still so many things to learn.

2010 Lists

2011-01-01T07:38:00.000-08:00

As a follow-up to my roster of favorite Harvard, MIT and Yale titles of 2010, herewith my round-up of personal favorites among the other books I read last year.

Book of the year, hands down: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art & Loss, Edmund de Waal’s inventive, charming, endlessly surprising true chronicle of, well, an awful lot. A descendant of a formerly rich and powerful European banking family, de Waal has ended up in possession of a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese porcelain figurines. In tracing the circuitous path this collection took to reach him over the course of 300 years, he excavates his family, its incredible possessions, the loss of them, and the shifting meanings.

There are so many entry portals to this improbable story it’s a little hard to know where to start. A better meditation on collecting and letting go has never been written, as far as I know. And I’ve never read a more horrific and concise description of evil than the twenty pages on the entry of the Nazis into Vienna in 1938. It’s a chilling reminder of how recently those events took place, and how quickly they unfolded.

De Waal is a ceramicist and this is his first book. He writes like a dream:

“How objects are handed down is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy.”

This stunningly accomplished piece of writing will change forever the way you think about your life and the objects you fill it with.

David Mitchell’s justly praised The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was my favorite novel of the year. It’s everything you want in a book when you want to lose yourself: unfamiliar landscapes and personalities rendered intimately knowable, an authentic story rooted in real history, and beautiful sentences on every page. It was one of the first books I read in 2010 and spoke in surprising ways to the de Waal book, which was the last.

Also strongly resonating with de Waal was the latest translation from the Hans Fallada oeuvre, Wolf Among Wolves. Melville House has been dribbling these out, and this wasn’t as compelling as Every Man Dies Alone. But Fallada is an early twentieth century writer well worth reading, with, I hope, more translations to come.

On a completely different note, I was blown away (like half the world) by Patti Smith’s excellent memoir Just Kids. She’s as much a literary stylist as a musical one.

My favorite quirky “find” of the season was a book that was hand sold to me by Jennifer White, the proprietress of the eccentric and improbably located Paper Moon in Macgregor, Iowa. Her inventory is a slightly mad selection of a little bit of everything (as long as it’s unique and unlikely to be found within 500 miles). One focus of her smart book selection features under-appreciated British women novelists, and Jen’s passion last winter was a once popular mid-century find: Tortoise & the Hare (another hare! Everything comes back to deWaal) by Elizabeth Jenkins. My friend Daniel at Boswell Books in Milwaukee picked up the baton on this one and I hope to see the Jenkins wave continue to swell across North America in 2011.

Another addictive diversion this year: the whole publication program of the consistently excellent Persephone Books from London, also devoted to resurrecting British women writers. (There was no new Anita Brookner this year, alas.) Among the half dozen Persephone titles I managed to procure (not all available here), my favorite was Good Evening Mrs. Craven, a collection of wartime short stories by Molly Panter-Downes. Incredibly vivid, smartly written, I don’t know why she’s not more widely known and read these days. That needs to change.

My friend and colleague Adena Siegel gave me a copy of Robert Walser’s Microscripts this year. Boy does she know me, I loved it. Short, obsessive missives scrawled in pencil on scraps of paper from a sanitorium, they are a little crazy. But in the end much more than just a curiosity for confirmed fans only. The New Directions physical book is among the most beautiful published this year.

Role Models by John Waters made me laugh harder than anything I’ve read in a long time.

Christopher Isherwood’s The Sixties, the diary segment released this year, was a bit of a slog in places but fascinating. If the film version of his novel A Single Man whet your appetite for mid-century gay life in Los Angeles, there's more than enough here to sate it.

And a book I really loved this year that a lot of the contemporary novel reading world also enjoyed (no, not Freedom. I’m a dissenter on that): Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. If you fret on a daily basis like I do about the demise of the newspaper business, Rachman’s fictional celebration thereof will make you hopeful.

Movies

Is it just me or was it a ho-hum film year? I used to catch way more art house flicks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and other on the road venues. But I seem to have gone off movies, or they’ve gone off me. My Netflix selections tend to sit around for a month or more before I get around to watching them, and then they tend to be shruggable. So my top ten list of the year is a little soft, and none of the movies was remotely as compelling as any of my ten favorite books.

1. A Prophet
2. Inside Job
3. The Last Train Home
4. Mother
5. Ghost Writer
6. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
7. Amereeka
8. An Education
9. No One Knows About Persian Cats
10. Howl

Music

The ten tunes in most frequent personal rotation in 2010.

1. Missed the Train/Factor feat. Gregory Pepper
2. Kazimierz/Nigel Kennedy & the Kroke Band (thanks Natalie)
3. Tornado/Jónsi
4. Soldier of Love/Sade
5. Turn me Away (Get MuNNY)/Erykah Badu
6. Better Things/Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
7. Lorca & the Orange Tree/Mummers (thanks Gerry)
8. Back it up/Caro Emerald
9. What did he say/Nite Jewel
10. Say la la/Keegan DeWitt

Ten Harvard/MIT/Yale 2010 favorites

2010-12-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

As I rode the train back from Chicago the other day, I began to notice how very many of the cell conversations around me had to do with helping someone on the other end fix technology. Go to this screen, push that button, okay just try turning it on and off. Palpable frustration on both ends.

I realized with smug satisfaction that nobody has ever had such a conversation about a printed book- how do I turn it on, how do I turn it off, how do I make it do what I want it to do. This will be my last comment on e-books for 2010.

Harvard, Yale, and MIT together published just over one thousand titles in 2010. Among this bounty were so many wonderful books, and though I'm paid to promote them all, personal favorites are unavoidable. I’d recommend every one of these with confidence, and would be thrilled to receive them as gifts myself.

The Naïve & the Sentimental Novelist
Orhan Pamuk (Harvard)

Short and sweet, this homage to the craft is both a defense of novel writing and a celebration of novel reading. A bonus: one of the best jackets of the season (says Huffington Post).

Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition
Jane Austen (Harvard)

I’ve about run out of superlatives to describe the production values on this one. Just pick it up and see for yourself. The scholarship is also top notch. Every Austen reader will covet this, and it will make those who haven’t read her dedicated fans.

Age of Fracture
Daniel T. Rodgers (Harvard)

Though maybe not a “gift book” strictly speaking, I was so impressed with this big picture idea book I want to give it to all my political friends. An argument against the obsession with individual desire, and for a more robust sense of social obligation, I can’t think of a more timely book with which to start the new year.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?
Robin Dunbar (Harvard)

For the Malcolm Gladwell fans, an eclectic collection of essays by a quirky, smart but funny British writer. You should be suspicious of anyone who has more than 150 Facebook friends, and the reason is rooted in our evolutionary psychology!

Designing Media
Bill Moggridge (MIT)

On the surface, the subject of this collection seems specialized: how has mass media morphed into personal media right under our noses? But as I browsed through these interviews with some of the smartest brains in contemporary design, I found something of interest to print lovers on nearly every page. The book design is beyond lavish, and it includes a DVD, making it one of the bargains of the season.

FASHIONEAST: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism
Djurdja Bartlett (MIT)

Did you realize that clothing was one of the first revolutionary media? This colorful and often hilarious tour through “communist chic” is informative and an eye-opener. And prompts the question: could we erase our class differences by adopting an egalitarian fashion aesthetic?

A Little Book of Language
David Crystal (Yale)

A light history of language written for a young audience, the book and package definitely takes its lead from Ernst Gombrich’s wonderful Little History of the World. Other things they have in common: a charming voice that speaks to readers of any age, gorgeous illustrations and book design, and a compelling, universally interesting subject. Oh, and a great price.

The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960
Richard Longstreth (Yale)

Though this was a somewhat “back of the catalog” book last spring, it’s one of my favorites of the year. Fifteen years in the works, the author brings a clear passion for these old lost monuments to the work. It’s a sad story, but the mesmerizing graphics and ephemera will appeal to anyone who longs for the days of Gimbels, Marshall Field’s and Frederick & Nelson.

Houdini: Art and Magic
Brooke Kamin Rapaport (Yale)

This was one of those books I sold for a season and thought I knew well, only to gasp in awe when I saw the final product. Wow. Produced by the Jewish Museum (everything they do looks great, I should have known), this visually rich trip through Houdini-land is the best biography yet. One of my bookseller friends who is selling it like crazy pointed out that there’s a quiet but passionate Houdini cult who “have to have everything.”

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
Isabel Schulz (Yale)

This under-published German artist, one of the most important figures in the international avant-garde, is a personal favorite. Every art student I know seems to be obsessed with pastiche and found objects, but Schwitters was the original. Train tickets, pieces of wire, newspaper fragments- quotidian detritus of every sort got smooshed into his gorgeous abstract creations. Produced by the Menil Collection, the book is a stunner.

Adonis: Selected Poems
Translated by Khaled Mattawa (Yale)
This recent installment in Yale’s remarkable Margellos World Republic of Letters translation series is a must have for every poetry lover. It’s hard to believe this collection by one of the most celebrated poets in the Arab-speaking world has not been widely available in English. He’s short-listed for the Nobel nearly every year. See why here.

the book of the year

2010-11-29T07:27:00.001-08:00

A university press publishes a memoir that was written over one hundred years ago, containing material that has already been published in many other incarnations over the past century. The book is a heavy slab in a diabolically uncomfortable trim size. The prose is fragmentary, confusing, and is composed in a tiny, dense typeface. Though there is a small and mainly uninteresting black and white photo gallery, the vast bulk of the book has no graphic interest whatsoever. And over a third of it is scholarly apparatus.

In short, it would seem that everything has been done to make this book unappealing to the so-called general reader.

And yet, in many places, the Autobiography of Mark Twain is out-selling George W. Bush and most other nonfiction practitioners this year, and is the improbable must-have literary sensation of the season.

What gives? I’ll leave the deconstruction of the book, the man, and the zeitgeist to the cultural theorists. But two things about Twain mania make me very happy:

1) There is apparently a vastly underestimated population of sophisticated readers capable of dethroning the latest trendy, empty-headed zombie celebrities from the best seller lists.

2) If there is any remaining doubt about why this country desperately needs its university presses, with their commitment to big thinking, long-term publishing and scholarly excellence without regard to instant profitability, the University of California Press has proven it beyond a doubt. Every book-lover owes them hearty thanks.

The Autobiography itself is wonderful, and this can’t hurt. Twain’s obsessive interest in the commercial aspects of the writing life has a particular contemporary resonance, and there is indeed a laugh on every page. But many smart, wonderful, worthy books flow from serious presses every year and head straight to the remainder bin.

And it doesn’t hurt that the book has a to-die- for back-story: it’s like unearthing a time capsule.

And it hurts even less that the New York Times and all the major media who take their cue from it elevated the book to front page status. But the reporting was after the fact, so appearing on the bestseller list can’t just be put down to Times buzz.

Speaking of buzz, and in the spirit of the book, which is nothing if not a 400-page collection of digressions, I will digress.

I remember from bookselling days the “second wave” customers who clamored for particular titles once the buzz had achieved a certain threshold. These customers were often odd ducks, since the intensity of their need for the book (“What do you mean you’re out of it? How is that possible?”) seemed disproportionate to their apparent interest in the actual content.

We can assume that once the natural Twain audience has been satisfied, this secondary market will kick in. They are perhaps not so interested in Mark Twain per se, as in the chance to give or own a big important book that has been anointed by leading cultural gatekeepers.

One key element of this secondary buzz economy is scarcity. While sales are certainly lost when a book like this is out of stock, it’s important to also factor in the elusive but potentially added sales generated by the die-hards who will not rest until they find a copy. The more bookstores they go to, the more determined they are to get it. Every bookseller who has ever worked a holiday season is familiar with this phenomenon. It’s nice to see such a deserving title be the beneficiary of it this year.

Having seen the presses I work for chase demand and struggle with print run decisions on successful titles, I have great sympathy for California’s dilemma. It’s no consolation to the frontline booksellers, who have to deal with disappointed customers who may end up buying online. But risk and guesswork are involved in every stock decision a bookstore makes. When we actually have a bona fide, authentic, grassroots success, it pains me to hear people lambasting the damn publisher for not keeping up with demand. Then again, come to think of it, how Mark Twain of them!

Anyway, there’s an obvious solution to this scarcity problem but it’s one I don’t think my bookseller friends would like too much: e-books. One of the many unremarked upon implications of an increasingly digital book world is that “out of stock” would essentially be a quaint, antique, bad old days memory. On the one hand, hooray! On the other hand, careful what you wish for. What would a book world without scarcity-fueled secondary buzz be like?

As I wrestled my copy of the autobiography into some tolerable physical position the other evening- don’t even try holding it open with one hand- I finally surrendered to the idea that reading Twain’s memoir was not going to be physically easy. From time to time- horrors!- I even wondered if it might be easier to read on a gadget.

But there were so many passages of transcendent beauty, so many chapters during which I lost track of time and stopped paying attention to the brick on my chest, I began to not notice my reading platform. I was too lost in the prose.

This seems like an argument for the printed book in spite of it all. But it also seems like the sort of experience the reader of the digital edition of the book might be having. I can imagine her saying “Twain is so good I stopped noticing that I’m staring at a screen.”

know your grapes

2010-11-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

During a recent visit to New York, I found myself craving a classic diner breakfast one Saturday morning. I ducked into the Chelsea Square Restaurant on 23rd and 9th avenue, but there were dozens of other choices as I walked from Grand Central to the West Village.

I thought to myself, how is it that while food options in the city have exploded since I first visited NYC thirty years ago, I can still have essentially the same delicious, greasy urban family-owned Manhattan breakfast experience I enjoyed back then? Indeed, except for a few unconvincing menu nods to vegetarians and a couple non-Greek ethnic offerings, it could have been 1974 at the Chelsea Square Restaurant. (It’s been there since 1965, according to a newspaper clipping on the wall.)

As usual, I immediately translated this puzzlement to my ongoing worry over the state of bookselling. How is it that this sector of independent food retailing survives? Like booksellers, they are selling a product that is widely available in cheaper incarnations, has a short shelf life, and is subject to the fickle whims of popular taste. What is the secret of their resilience?

Also as usual, I’m not afraid to generalize even though I may not know what I’m talking about. (What really is the state of the NYC diner business? Maybe it’s on the verge of collapse.) But I noticed a few things the diners do that can’t hurt:

- Food quality is consistent and good, portions are big, prices are reasonable. People know what to expect and they get it;
- It’s a space that’s welcoming to all comers and classes;
- There’s always a very hands-on management;
- There’s no apparent skimping on staff and service;
- Regulars are greeted by name;
- There are gestures toward change but nothing dramatic. The fried potatoes will always have that distinctly orange NYC diner glow.

Of course, real estate and myriad other issues make running a small business in Manhattan a nightmare. But I’m always struck by how much neighborhood retail and services seem to thrive there, benefiting from high population density and low car use. Those conditions aren’t necessarily extant where most indie booksellers ply their trade. (I think of my own charming neighborhood shopping street and its bookstore, cleaners, drug and grocery- and relative dearth of pedestrian traffic.) But I do think there are some universal survival lessons to be found in the resilient greasy spoons of Manhattan.

About a week later, I returned to Milwaukee and took my mother out to breakfast. Though she is a woman who thinks that if you’ve paid more than five dollars for a meal you’ve probably been robbed, I wanted to try out a new breakfast place that’s gotten rave reviews.

Blue's Egg is the anti-Chelsea Square. The menu is elaborate, trendy, and chef-driven. There is a mission statement. Some of your bill goes to worthy causes. It is a comfortable space that turns into a sophisticated bar/bistro at night.

Mom was not that impressed with the fancy menu and wordy descriptions. “Eggs are eggs,” she observed. But Blue’s Egg improbably won her over with the smallest gesture, something that I hadn’t even noticed but which she couldn’t stop talking about: they served a small bowl of grapes before they’d even taken our order.

And, once again, I couldn’t help thinking about bookselling applications.

I wonder if building a competitive edge on a foundation of big abstractions is enough anymore. Concepts like “we have a big inventory” or “we have a knowledgeable staff” sound good, but as a customer I’m more apt to get the itch to visit my favorite bookstore because of particulars: I want to see what's on that one really smart display table that changes every week, not because the store stocks a lot of books in general. Or because it’s Saturday and I know Bev will be working, not because of the smart staff in general.

And, to get back to the grapes, as much as I’m drawn to stores that will predictably satisfy my specific book urges, I also like places that will find ways to surprise me with small gestures. You can’t really say in advance what the gesture should be – that’s the point- but anything that makes a customer leave the store smiling probably counts. (A water bowl for dogs outside the door, corny as it sounds, always makes me feel better about a business.)

Many of my retail choices are based on convenience. But beyond that, where more discretionary retail loyalties come into play, my affection tends to go to places that satisfy some small, idiosyncratic preferences. And to those who have mastered the art of the gesture.

For years before it was swallowed and stripped of any hint of personality, Midwest Airlines baked and served chocolate chip cookies on board their planes. Incredible. Milwaukee people still talk about that, wistfully.

Than Brothers Vietnamese restaurant on University Way in Seattle follows up your pho with a complimentary plate of delicious little cream puffs. The place is always packed.

Almost before you sit down at Ann Sather’s Swedish restaurants in Chicago you’re presented with a delicious basket of cinnamon rolls and limpa bread. New customers are dazzled and old ones keep coming back for it.

And my local food co-op, Outpost Natural Foods, which I support for many reasons, wouldn’t get a fraction of my business were it not for Little Oaties, the most delicious cookies on the planet. It’s one item among thousands, but addicting enough to get me there regularly.

The challenges of running a viable business are so immense, and it must be annoying to hear kibitzing from the sidelines. But speaking as one book-lover and former bookseller, I’d advise my colleagues to step back and ask themselves- keeping in mind Mrs. Eklund’s breakfast reaction- “What are my grapes?”

another round of sales conferences finished: 25 tips for reps

2010-11-03T07:32:00.001-07:00

1. You always think everything will fit into one bag this time. You will always have to resort to two at the last minute.

2. There will always be a loud talker on the phone in the gate area. At the Milwaukee airport, a woman was complaining about Lucifer and the bad things he’d done lately. Yes, it turned out to be that Lucifer.

3. Travelling on Sunday means the pleasure of two hours with the Times. But not so pleasurable when it’s the week before a triumph of the lunatics election and the news is all depressing.

4. Scudding over the clouds and descending into Logan airport, always stunning.

5. The Silver Line bus will always be pulling away from the curb just as you get outside.

6. You’ve never quite arrived in Cambridge until you’ve spent an hour at Harvard Book Store.

7. The chance to pick up international newspapers in Harvard Square used to be exciting; now I don’t even bother to buy the Boston Globe.

8. With some editorial presentations, you can’t write fast enough to keep up; after others, I barely have a coherent phrase in my notes.

9. Some old books are as exciting to publish and sell as new ones. New editions of Oscar Wilde and Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance.

10. Covers, covers, covers. We never get tired of critiquing and over-thinking them but in the end it’s my taste against yours, right? Anyway, our jackets are generally magnifico.

11. After calling en editor you’ve known for ten years by the wrong name and realizing it ten minutes later, is it better to revisit the situation, or to just let it go?

12. The worst place to be seated at sales conference dinners is in the center of a long narrow table. You end up being on the margins of two conversations, and you run out of things to say to the person directly across from you.

13. When twenty people are dining at one very long table, texting is apparently now the preferred way to communicate.

14. Sales conference dinners are NOT all about the books. Conversational topics this week included marriages and divorces (number of), what it's like to hike the trail of the Lewis & Clark expedition, and the puzzling aggressiveness of Minneapolis drivers.

15. You will always hear at least one good unfamiliar quip from a British colleague. Up this week: “Well, she already has one cheek on the throne…” Anxious to find a context in which to use this.

16. A press that allows a dog to hang out in a basement office all day is a press I’m proud to work for. Hi Tabasco!

17. When we reps are asked constantly for honest feedback from the field, how honest can you be? Can I really say that some of my buyers fall asleep when they hear the word “digital?”

18. You dress for sales conferences in a more formal way than in real life. Sales conference colleagues have rarely seen me without a jacket and tie; most booksellers have never seen me in one.

19. Sureness, confidence, thinking on one’s feet: I have such smart colleagues! How to finally attain these things?

20. When driving from Cambridge to New Haven, dinner at Rein’s in Vernon, Connecticut is a must. Bliss.

21. US Postal service flat rate boxes: one of the most wonderful government inventions ever. My stuff gets home before I do.

22. Never leave sales conference thinking you have anticipated everything a bookseller might conceivably ask about a book. Within the first week out someone will stump you.

23. Befriend the sales assistants. They are interesting people, you will need them and they have great taste in music.

24. The secret of a successful meeting is a tray of cookies at 3:00.

25. If you can avoid flying home from LaGuardia on a plane full of Green Bay Packer fans after they’ve just beaten the NY Jets, by all means do so.

David Stimpson, book traveler

2010-10-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Our three sales conferences for the spring 2011 books begin next week. I always look forward to these meetings, but this time my anticipation is muted by the knowledge that it will be the last time I sit across the table from my colleague David Stimpson, who is retiring next year after a lifetime in the book business.

David began his career at the excellent University of Toronto Bookstore in 1964, where he worked for twenty years. Then as now, he was impatient with business practices that didn’t make sense, and under his direction the store was one of the first in North America that dared to blend paperback and cloth titles on the same shelves. Under David, U of T was one of the first bookstores to institute a marketing department, now a mainstay of every good bookshop.

Thirty years ago, he started University Press Group, which quickly assembled a marquis roster of university presses and a solid reputation for quality. David and his colleague Laurel Oakes, who retired last year, (above left) represented these lines to booksellers, museums, wholesalers and libraries across Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

David is the consummate book rep, always conscious of our sometimes conflicting obligations to publisher, bookseller, author, reader, and the book itself. Like most good book reps, he got into the profession for love of the product and respect for the people in it. It’s hard to imagine David selling anything else. (Maybe jazz to record stores. When there were record stores.)

Booksellers have finely honed bullshit detectors, and one thing they’ve always loved about David is his authenticity and intolerance for BS of any kind. He’s a stickler for details and abhors time-wasting and grand-standing. Should he ever publish a memoir (please David!), “Let’s Get on With It” would make a good chapter heading.

Book repping involves a special kind of tolerance for enjoying one’s own company, while still being able to turn on the charm when there’s an appointment or social engagement at hand. There are hours and sometimes days spent alone in travel, punctuated by intensely communal reunions with buyers- friends, really- last seen six months earlier. The duality puts me in mind of Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes, the classic novel about the dance of approach and avoidance between Quebec and the rest of Canada.

What makes solitary book traveling tolerable is having personal passions, and David has some good ones.

Books, of course. He reads widely, is a collector and connoisseur in subjects of interest. He handles a beautiful book with the same tactile appreciation my old boss and mentor David Schwartz used to exhibit- turning it over in his hand, inspecting the spine, noticing details that escape the rest of us.

Jazz, without doubt. His vast knowledge of it, enthusiasm for it, and generous support of it marks him as a genuine aficionado. I remember many sales conference nights when David would try to recruit exhausted reps to take in some late night performance in Harvard Square. When John Norris, Toronto jazz enthusiast and manager of the Jazz section of Sam the Record Man died last year, the Globe and Mail ran a touching remembrance by David.

He loves Toronto, and its wonderful art. When the newly remodeled Art Gallery of Ontario opened, David showed me through the exhibitions one Saturday morning with such enthusiastic pride he said he might become a docent. He’d be an excellent one.

And never underestimate love and family. The pleasures and challenges of the domestic life are never far from David’s mind- even on the road, maybe especially on the road.

Perhaps I should wrap this up lest it start to sound like a eulogy. It is definitely not that. After two successful careers, in bookselling and running a world class rep group, David’s friends and fans anxiously await his third act.

On a personal note, I have to admit that David scared me a bit at first. When I joined the team as rookie rep and started attending sales conferences in 1998, his inimitable reactions to what he was hearing (or not hearing) seemed a little harsh. Now I know he’s a puppy dog underneath the occasional bluster, and we’ve shared many hearty laughs.

Having come to sales repping from bookselling, I spent the first couple years nearly paralyzed by feelings of inadequacy. I felt like a fraud for not being a genius, I was humbled to learn how much money it took to actually keep a rep on the road, and I felt guilty every time I checked into a hotel that cost over $100. I was afraid to speak up at meetings and to fully commit to being the rep I now was.

More than anyone, David taught me to have respect for the job itself by insisting that we leave sales conferences armed with the tools we need to do our jobs properly. I came to realize that being a good rep meant adding “self-respect” to that list of obligations due. Every time he demands a detail or puts someone on the spot at a meeting, it's an expression of how seriously he takes being a rep and the responsibilities it entails.

Though the book traveling profession as we know it seems to be fading into the sunset, David inspires those of us still doing it to treat our work life with dignity. It’s not always an easy job, but there’s nothing we'd rather be doing.

When I look across the table during next week’s meetings, surreptitiously monitoring David’s raised eyebrow, or suppressed chuckle, or poised pencil as he awaits a useful sales handle that may or may not come, I will be more than a little sad. Because I know there will be an awfully empty gap in that space at the next round of meetings.

Ten Fall 2010 Biography Gems

2010-10-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

This has been an exceptionally rich season for biographies. It’s one of my mainstays as I make my way through a bookstore, though stocking a biography section is not without its challenges.

- Do you include all biographies in one big section, or do you subdivide? As a bookseller I couldn’t stand to see some tacky pop biography touch spines with some accomplished, bigger than life personality (think Barry Manilow beside Nelson Mandela), so we broke out celebrity bios, literary bios, political memoirs and so on. The problem with this approach is that there are always a scattering of leftovers that really go nowhere.

- Do you alphabetize by subject? That seems obvious, but I’ve seen all kinds of alternative shelving strategies.

- Or do you bypass having a Biography section at all? Most people worthy of a biography have achieved something in some field or another- arts, sciences, literature, sports. So why not shelve these books in their appropriate area? With historical figures it’s often tricky separating the life from the times, so why not history? And with literary lives, isn’t the fan most likely to find the book when shelved with the author’s fiction?

Sticking to the “shelve books where the most interested customer is most apt to find them” rule is not always easy.

Over the years I’ve gotten past my snobby disdain for unworthy Biography section climbers, and now I actually enjoy the chaotic mishmash. So many other sections of the bookstore are carved up into specific niche areas. Just as I stroll past the country western section of the CD store (when there used to be CD stores), I walk right by whole sections of the bookstore because I've made some snap decisions about which subjects I'm supposedly interested in, and which not.

The Biography section is one of the few areas where a customer can be exposed to something unintended, and can genuinely be taken by surprise. When my friend Daniel opened Boswell Book Company last year, his mother's one piece of advice was to be sure to have a good Biography section. Lillian Goldin was right.

Yale University Press has a stellar line-up of biographies this year. The highlights:

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt by Robert Gottlieb (Yale $25 September 9780300141276)
The greatest actress who ever lived, a woman who nearly invented celebrity culture more than a century before Lady Gaga, is brought to life in this short, sweet, lovely little book. It was clearly a labor of love for Gottlieb. Inaugurates Yale’s clever new Jewish Lives series.

A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him by Michael Takiff (Yale $32.50 October 9780300121308)
This absorbing portrait of the president is composed of taped recollections and observations by people who surround the Clintons, woven with artful skill into a kind of chronological tapestry. If you think there’s nothing new to learn, or worth learning about the man, just start reading.

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nick Phillipson (Yale $32.50 October 9780300169270)
Twenty years in the making, the publication of this comprehensive, accessible “life and times” of the revered Scottish scholar is a real event. I know I'll never get the Ayn Rand fanatics to read Marx, but they should at least familiarize themselves with Adam Smith.

Joe Louis: Hard Times Man by Randy Roberts (Yale $30 October 9780300122220)
Surprisingly, Joe Louis has never been the subject of a serious biography. Here, a top notch historian explains how he was not just an American icon, but a hero to African-Americans. Excellent jacket.

Houdini: Art & Magic by Brooke Kamin Rapaport (Yale $39.95 October 9780300146844)
The life and career of the prototypical immigrant achiever and celebrated conjurer, with exquisite and quirky design elements.

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies by David Wootton (Yale October $35 9780300125368)
There have been surprisingly few full-blown scholarly biographies of the original Renaissance Man. At the center of Wootton’s highly original rendition is the telescope.

Moses Mendelssohn by Shmuel Feiner (Yale $25 November 9780300161755)
The most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth century, and a pioneer of religious tolerance, Mendelssohn is often referred to as “the German Socrates.”

Antony & Cleopatra by Adrian Goldsworthy (Yale $35 September 9780300165340)
Goldsworthy’s stature as the preeminent popular historian of the ancient world just keeps growing, and this portrait of the iconic lovers (one bookseller called them “the original power couple”) is richly laced with military and political context.

The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb by Allen M. Hornblum (Yale $32.50 September 9780300156768)
On the 60th anniversary of what came to be called “the Red Scare,” a gripping account of an accomplished industrial and military espionage agent who was said to have given the USSR the plans for the atom bomb. I’ve never read anything better about how and why ordinary people become spies.

Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life by Lev Loseff (Yale $35 January 9780300141191)
When this biography of Brodsky, one of the greatest modern poets, was first published in Russian, it was so acclaimed that it even got reviews in the US media. Literary, philosophical, and deeply personal, Loseff was a personal friend of the poet, and is the perfect biographer.

rep nite in milwaukee

2010-09-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

I don’t know whether David Schwartz was the first bookstore owner to come up with the idea of having publisher reps come in to pitch their books to frontline booksellers, but it seemed like a fresh and brilliant concept in the mid-eighties. Since then, many stores have adopted variations of them, and they’ve become a fixture of the regional book shows.

One of the tenuous links in the sales chain that moves a book from publisher warehouse to bookstore customer comes at the very last step. Authors get their editors excited, editors get the house excited, the house gets the reps excited, and the reps get the book buyer excited. But sometimes transferring all this excitement to the front-end bookseller who actually exchanges real money with a customer is lacking. As overworked and overbooked as buyers are, it’s the rare store that is able to make sure his or her every enthusiasm is transferred to the booksellers. As every rep knows, a buyer’s excitement about a title doesn’t necessarily trickle down by itself.

Enter rep nights. In the Schwartz version, David and Carol invited booksellers to their home for an evening to hear a couple willing sales reps pitch their favorite new titles. Occasionally, editors like Elizabeth Sifton attended these events, opening an even richer channel of interaction. David could sometimes grandstand a bit, asking pointed Socratic questions about the content of some political book, or challenging a rep about some finer point of book production. But the goal was always tooling up the booksellers for the fall, and while the Schwartz stores were ultimately unsuccessful, rep night is one of the many legacies that live on.

The rep night I attended Sunday at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee- the first of four this season that ecumenically include booksellers from Next Chapter Bookstore and Books & Company- was not challenging in that sense. But it’s still a humbling experience to stand before forty smart booksellers who can make or break a title, trying to convince them the unique merits of your particular list.

There’s a built-in time constraint- twenty minutes per rep, though Daniel Goldin was kind about not giving us the hook if we ran over. Representing three publishers with hundreds of worthy new fall books, I drove myself a little batty deciding which dozen to present. (My colleague John Mesjak of Abraham Associates had thousands to cull through). One criterion I imposed was to only talk about books that were finished, though this meant skipping over some big worthy titles due out in the next couple months.

It’s frustrating, but there’s a logic to keeping it short. For one thing, booksellers attend these meetings on their own time. And even with the lovely Beans & Barley dinner and a raft of reading copies as an enticement, they had worked a very long week. Brevity is a virtue.

I could probably talk for twenty minutes about one book if I love it, so I struggled with how to abbreviate my comments into meaningful two minute bites. But then I had an insight: for most bookseller-customer interactions, even two minutes would be a luxury. An on the spot bookseller has a couple moments to retrieve a title from memory and to pitch its merits to a potential book buyer.

My job, as I saw it, was to give them the gist of a title, how it fits into the range of other literature on the subject, who the most likely customer would be with as much specificity as possible, and to leave them with a short, sweet, memorable handle. I’ll leave it to the Milwaukee booksellers to decide how we did.

The books I selected?

Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds, by John Bevis- a playful, charming curiosity about why bird songs are so compelling, and the maddening challenge of transcribing them. For birders, nature people, writers and poets, and appreciators of fine, impulsey, paper over board book production.

Dominic Couzens’ Atlas of Rare Birds, a smart, colorful, eco-friendly survey of the rarest birds in existence and where to find them. What seems most impressive about this is the value for the price.

Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know by Katy Borner is a lushly illustrated guide to one of the hottest fields in science, a lavish collection of maps and charts that’s perfect for the science geeks, map geeks, and graphic design aficionados. Dave Mallman, the Next Chapter buyer, is jazzed enough about this to give it a coveted slot in their holiday catalog!

The Fifty Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System by David Baker and Todd Ratcliff is the rare, truly self-explanatory title. This is another finely illustrated book for people who think they are science phobic. And maybe for Ripley’s Believe it or Not types. And maybe even YA level budding astronomers. The stinkiest place in the solar system? Jupiter’s moon Ios- it reeks of rotten eggs.

In Pride & Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, Patricia Meyer Spacks has produced a stunning edition of Austen’s most popular (and favorite) work. She wittily explains unfamiliar terms (so many different types of horse drawn carriages!) as well as sneaky words that we think we know but which had a different connotation in Austen’s time (like “liberal”). Next Chapter bookseller and serious friend of Jane, Jane Glaser, called it “perfect,” and she's trying to recruit me to the Jane Austen Society.

In Dickinson, another elegant, literary gift book, acclaimed close reader of poetry Helen Vendler selects and dissects 150 of Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson is so widely read yet little understood. The perfect match.

Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire & Germany’s Bid for World Power by British historian and ace story teller Sean McMeekin is one of those quirky micro-histories about a heretofore unexplored corner of World War I conniving by Germany. You’ve got the train line itself, a technological marvel; you’ve got eccentric characters like Baron von Oppenheim; and you’ve got the first recorded call to global jihad. A Boswell Books favorite.

In Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress who ever lived is celebrated by one of our greatest writers, editors and critics, Robert Gottlieb. She invented celebrity culture, image management and self-promotion, and had an amazing thirty year career. This fascinating, compact bio is the first in Yale’s new Jewish Lives series, which promises clever match-ups of interesting subjects with equally interesting writers.

A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those who Know Him by Michael Takiff assembles over 150 interviews with people who know the man (from all political persuasions) and stitches them back together in a compulsively readable tapestry. A timely reminder of a recent successful presidency.

Adrian Goldsworthy’s latest opus, Antony & Cleopatra, (“the original power couple” noted Jason Kennedy, Boswell buyer), combines love, power and ambition with a grand tour of the ancient world. A real story-teller, and probably the best popular historian working that patch today.

The Best Technology Writing 2010, edited by Julian Dibbell, assembles some of the finest and most surprising creative nonfiction to appear in print this year. From the Wired magazine editor who deliberately (and unsuccessfully) tried to lose his identity and get off the grid, to Javier Marias on his fear of flying, to the first tweet from outer space (oddly, about Sting), this is a superb and stylish collection. Reminds me of a great mix CD.

The Anthology of Rap, by Adam Bradley, will finally confer academic cred on the most widely disseminated poetry genre in the history of the world. From Grandmaster Flash to M.I.A., this combination fan guide, music reference and poetics handbook hits every audience from adolescent hip-hoppers to hip academics to aging suburban dads

juggling the books

2010-09-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

Our new, Spring 2011 Readers are landing, giving reps our first taste of the forthcoming offerings we’ll be pitching all winter. “Have you read the Umberto Eco excerpt yet?” my colleague Adena asked the other day. (from his forthcoming Confessions of a Young Novelist) “You have to, it’s great!” I did, and it is.

When friends peruse our seasonal catalogs, I’m often asked “Do you read all this stuff?” Actually, no. No one could possibly read it all, and as every good bookseller knows, the point is to understand the book and who its surest customer is, not necessarily to wrestle intellectually with the author.

Every season there are back of the catalog books that make me sigh, “Someday I really must tackle one of these important linguistics monographs.” Then I realize that, while I know the meaning of each individual word in it, I don’t really even understand the title. But I know how it fits into the current professional literature (thank you editors), and who it's for, and how to help the bookseller figure out whether they have that customer.

The truth is, reps read a lot of the books we sell. Every good rep I know is constantly hyping books they’ve read and genuinely believe in. I try to read at least a couple full manuscripts or galleys from each of the three presses every season- some because we have high expectations and I want to know what I’m talking about when I’m asking booksellers to commit, and some because there are always books that genuinely interest me. Every season there are more than a handful that I’d buy myself if I weren’t already selling them. Loving the product really does make the job easier.

Aside from reading the whole book, the Readers are another way we break the ice with the new titles. With fifty page excerpts thoughtfully culled from each of the new trade titles, the phone book size readers are an efficient way to get a sense of the writing style, the author’s approach to the subject, and to identify the ones that might have legs, to use an overworked cliché.

If the selling season is a process of making friends with these new books, the Reader is a sort of Meet and Greet. By sales conference in six weeks we’ve moved on to dating. In a few lucky cases, we'll move on to heavy petting. And after selling a seasonal list for a couple months, getting familiar with each title's virtues and tics, we come to know each other very well. Though there are some books with which I’d like a long-term domestic partnership, there are a few others which I’m happy to leave at “See ya.”

Publishers perform a permanent, complicated juggling act. At this moment, there are authors considering writing topics and acquisition editors considering signing them. There are other writers under contract, busily working on their manuscripts, and copy editors shadowing them. Some of these titles might marinate for decades before seeing print (or e-ink.)

While most of the energy is directed at the most immediate, newly minted titles, there’s an immense amount of internal pre- and post- activity that supports the whole publishing mission.

A press inventory ranges from deep backlist titles that sell a couple copies a year but are important, so must be kept alive, to active backlist titles that sell well and predictably.

It encompasses recent titles that may just be getting press attention, and newly released ones that are streaming out to stores. Stock levels on all these books have to be modulated with a lot of skill and smart guesswork. Sales directors who make these reprint calls daily rarely get enough credit for the good ones.

Simultaneously, planning for production on forthcoming titles that won’t exist for two or more years chugs along, entailing hundreds of individual decisions and negotiations.

All of which is to say that while booksellers and reps will be poring over the new spring catalogs over the coming months, the publishers who brought these books to life will be keeping lots of other balls in the air.

Maybe that’s not so unusual. I suppose that while Widget International reps are out hawking the latest gadgets, the home office is making sure that the really cool one from twenty years ago that the old-timers want is still available. And that someone is thinking ahead to future widget trends (digital, most likely) and signing up designers to produce them.

Me, all I know are books. And the juggling act that is contemporary publishing and bookselling is a thing of beauty.

your book is here. oh joy!

2010-09-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

They seemed downright giddy at my neighborhood bookstore this week. Book people crave a steady stream of new books, and in that sense summer in the bookshop seems endless. There hasn’t been a big new title in months. The spring books have been re-displayed in every conceivable way to make them seem fresh. And the Recent Releases section is a ghost town. But with the end of August comes the trickle of new titles that will become a flood by October. Yee Ha!

Though I’m bored to death with the subject of e-books, I keep stumbling on unpleasant little reminders of what our digital book future might be like. So many of the implications of a book world where e-books are the norm and printed editions a quaint artifact are strangely unexamined, though I guess new technologies are only ever really evaluated in retrospect.

I had stopped by Boswell Book Company to pick up my copy of the Jonathan Franzen novel Freedom, which, according to bookseller Jason Kennedy, case quantities of other customers had also put on advance hold. Call me old school, but being notified by the bookstore that something I’d ordered has arrived makes me want to drop everything and run. It is not a chore. I do not think to myself, “too bad I couldn’t just have the book itself on my phone rather than a message from Bev.”

In particular, I love the sense of occasion that surrounds release of a book people care about. The enthusiasm is a little contagious, starting in the receiving room where the books are unpacked and matched with holds, to the front desk where they’re stacked for pick-up, to the individual customers, who might be pleased to see their great taste confirmed by the many reserves. (Or not. If you pride yourself on your supposedly distinctive reading choices it may be a little depressing.)

At any rate, a new literary novel or smart biography with excellent advance buzz is cause for a party atmosphere. And it happens fairly frequently in bookstores. I’m not referring to the Harry Potter level spectacle, with midnight openings and cameras and children in pajamas. I'm talking about the modest, everyday excitement that comes with new books. The displaying of which and the picking up of which are something like social events.

And to return to the dreaded topic, this is yet another aspect of e-books that just sounds so joyless to me. Forget the argument about paper vs. e-ink. I’m just wondering how and whether the satisfying little social ritual of collecting a book you’ve been anxiously awaiting at your bookstore can ever be replaced by sitting alone at home on the sofa, downloading text onto a slab of plastic.

market mania and collective purpose: three great fall books

2010-08-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

One reason I love university presses is that, at their best, they serve as a kind of coal mine canary for big ideas. They combine extraordinary reserves of editorial patience with an exceptional level of academic brainpower. This makes the university press publishing process an incubation period for ideas that can later make their way into public discourse in a splashier way.

Hundreds of popular books on evolution over the past couple decades owe their existence to the transformational research of E.O. Wilson and his book Sociobiology.

Steven Pinker’s crisp, cogent arguments about cognition rely mightily on dozens of books nurtured over many years by the cognitive science masters at The MIT Press and other academic publishers.

And the John Gray “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” industry rests on a foundation of academic scholarship, much of which originated with university press publishing. Interestingly, this fall Harvard will publish Rebecca Jordan-Young’s book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (September 2010), which calls into question twenty years of received wisdom on the alleged mars/venus gender divide.

My point is that books published by university presses often signal trends. And this season I’m thrilled to see a cluster of fascinating titles examining our collective hallucination about the so-called free market system coming from Harvard University Press. If history is repeated, these books should presage a broader popular discussion about the system we live under and take for granted.

In a most straight-forward way, eminent Chicago scholar Bernard E. Harcourt takes on what he calls one of the most pernicious myths of the modern era- the idea that the market is self-regulating if left alone. In his sweeping new book The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment & the Myth of Natural Order (January 2011), Harcourt brilliantly links our irrational notions about punishment with our fantasies about the supposedly natural system of market organization. It’s a deeply subversive book in the best sense of the word.

Ten years ago, Harcourt launched a critique of the “broken windows” philosophy of urban law enforcement (the idea that if you harshly punish small property crimes, it will stop the big crimes) with his book Illusion of Order. That strategy had hypnotized policy-makers, and Harcourt’s thoughtful challenge opened a discussion. I’m hopeful that his new book will inspire a similar rethinking of our faith in the market metaphor.

In Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics (January 2011) Lance Taylor shows how little relevance mainstream macroeconomic theories have for the everyday real world. This is a very technical book aimed at economists, thus way above my pay or brain grade, but the gist of the argument is clear. The emperor has no clothes! This is the sort of big, important book that will hopefully percolate through to the pop economists and the general educated public.

Finally, in another big idea book with a more philosophical bent, historian Daniel T. Rodgers, in Age of Fracture (January 2011) writes about the ways in which the decade of the eighties really transformed us in ways we still don’t completely understand or acknowledge. Longstanding shared commitments to social obligation and collective social institutions were replaced by an obsession with the private self and its individual desires. Our politics turn so much on a supposed left/right divide, but Rodgers posits that the more important split is the private/collective one.

As I read this book I was struck by how much the market obsession Taylor and Harcourt write about relies on this devaluing of what we owe to each other. It’s the sort of wonderful, beautifully written book that feels powerful, as if it could actually prompt a mass attitude shift if enough people read it.

It’s hard to imagine reading this cluster of books without shedding a few illusions about the capitalist system. That’s a long overdue national discussion that will need both university presses and trade publishers to move it along.

The critique is getting sharper and sharper, aided by the daily headlines and real life unemployment lines. Unfortunately, there’s often a yawning gap between the comprehensiveness of the indictment and the scope of the proposed remedies. Tweaks won’t do. What we desperately need now are big idea alternative social and economic arrangements, and some daring 21st century socialist thinkers to dream them up. That’s a publishing trend I’m anxious to see.

In defense of expertise; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art shop

2010-08-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve racked up about 5,000 miles this summer in my Mazda and have been listening to lots of great new music (thank you Everyday Music in Seattle, Twist & Shout in Denver, and B-Side in Madison). Laurie Anderson has always been a favorite so I was keen to hear her new opus, Homeland.

At first, my favorite tune was “Only an Expert.” Catchy beat, interesting narrative. Not surprisingly, it’s a sarcastic takedown of the experts.

But after a dozen listens it started to grate on me. For one thing, “experts” are sitting ducks; we don’t have many politically charged performers of Laurie Anderson’s stature and it seems a waste to squander eight minutes on such an obvious target.

Then her argument began to annoy me. I realized that I actually like the idea of experts! I think training people in specialties that interest them so the rest of us can benefit from their accumulated wisdom is actually a smart idea. The problem isn’t expertise per se; it’s the ends to which it’s put. To rail against mastery seems, well, stupid coming from a woman who is a certified expert in musical performance.

I’ve been a bit cranky on this whole subject lately since so much of new media seems predicated on the idea that we’re all experts, or that the experts aren’t really experts, or that expertise doesn’t really matter anyway. One opinion is as good as another, one fact is as good as another, and everything is “just a theory” anyway.

If Laurie Anderson wants to see the positive fruits of expertise she should visit the Nelson Atkins Museum shop in Kansas City. I’ve been calling on this store for ten years now, and it’s still a great surprise every season to see what book people who know what they are doing can accomplish. (There are other excellent museum shops of course- she should also pay a visit to the Boston MFA shop to see experience and taste in full flower.)

Over the past decade, so many fantastic art museum shops have become hollow shells when it comes to book inventory. Many seem more like high end jewelry and scarf emporia than bookshops. Where maintaining a solid selection of art books was once simply part of the mission of an art museum, the shops have now become centers for chasing cash. If books aren’t pulling their weight and the margin on play-doh and ugly knickknacks is better, books have to go. The market has spoken!

This downward spiral, where “watching” the book inventory level quickly becomes a purge, and the book section of every shop begins to look like a Taschen kiosk, is a depressing spectacle. But then there are the inexplicable exceptions, like the fantastic Nelson Atkins shop.

What makes this store so special?

It’s a bookshop with related merchandise, not a gadget shop with a few books.

The book inventory is attractively arranged and fresh.

Subject areas are wide and deep. All of art history is represented, not just a scattering of tie-in’s to current exhibitions.

There’s a sense of mission that reminds me of some of the excellent bookshops in European museums. The goal of exposing visitors to a great selection of art books seems like an extension of exposure to a selection of great art. And- surprise! - once committed to a significant book selection, the books sell quite well.

Kansas City is the quintessential Middle American city, and the museum is supported in a robust way by the corporate community. Indeed, admission is free, which is no small factor when trying to figure out why they do so well with books. A family that has paid $100 just to get in might not be so willing to part with $65 for a monograph.

But there’s a more important factor: the staff expertise. Many of the booksellers have been there for years. John Hamann, who has been the brains behind the store and inventory as long as I’ve called on them, has both a vast institutional knowledge of art books, and an intuitive sense of what his visitors might find interesting or quirky. He’s a walking argument for the idea that knowing something well is related to doing it well.

I don’t want to see any more museum shops turned over to consultants and number crunchers and window dressers. If art book sales have a future in our great art museums, it will be because administrators invested in staff expertise.

Sometimes, “only an expert CAN deal with the problem.”

the middleman

2010-07-31T10:54:00.000-07:00

There have been some incredibly uninformed, provocative, and rude comments coming from the self-styled digital book visionaries lately.

Two pieces of Amazon news- a cheap new kindle, and agent Andrew Wylie’s announcement that he will sell some of his clients’ digital books exclusively through Amazon- were popular topics of conversation around the bookselling water-cooler this week.

Wylie describes his plan as a way to “eliminate the middleman,” meaning the booksellers and publishers who have patiently and often unprofitably nurtured audiences for his previously unknown authors for years. As if the complicated task of bringing a book to market successfully is just a matter of shuffling it along an assembly line, where greedy and unnecessary booksellers wait to grab the money as it passes by. Why don’t these authors follow their own logic and dump the agent, the ultimate middleman?

Another longtime insider big mouth remarked this week that “What publishers do is get books on the bookstore shelves,” and if bookstores cease to be the main places where texts are sold, publishers will necessarily become superfluous.

Granted, there seem to be a lot of otherwise smart people around the book industry these days who are desperate to sound like forward-thinking futurists. But the arrogant, ignorant dismissal of the value added by booksellers and publishers is insulting and wrong.

Unfortunately, we have done an awful job explaining the publishing process to the public at large. A misconception has been allowed to fester and take root- the idea that the main cost of publishing a book is the printing and delivery of it. Reputable journalists will blithely talk about how cheap e-books are to produce, ignoring two giant aspects of the investment: the editors who coax a good book into existence, sometimes over the course of decades; and the marketing specialists, who work like hell to make sure the author’s works get noticed.

And let’s not forget the role of those other pesky middlemen, the booksellers. I’m anxious to see how authors so enamored of digital books will fare without the heroic efforts of the bookstores and their events staff to promote them. My neighborhood bookstore hosts author events almost every day, and works like crazy to build audiences. I hope authors are thinking clearly about all the implications of the rush to digital. Goodbye bookstore events. Royalties may be the least of it.

The curatorial, gate-keeping function will become even more decisive in the days ahead, and smart marketing will become even more crucial. When any old file can be deemed a “book,” I will cherish my favorite stores and publishers even more for culling through the dross and offering me a discriminating inventory.

It’s easy to get a little unhinged as we transition to the new book reality, but like a lot of aspects of our lovely capitalist system, much is out of our hands. We can fret all we want, and we can and should make noise about principles that seem most worth defending (fairness, access to books for everyone). But ultimately, market, technological and cultural forces bigger than little us will be making the decisions.

Back in the 80’s, I chaired an ABA committee called the “Industry Standardization Committee.” This was a working group charged with getting publishers to do things like print ISBN’s on the backs of books, sort their invoices in some comprehensible order, and use non-lethal packing materials.

We issued manifestos, spoke at meetings, lobbied publishers and in general made a loud fuss for a couple years. But it wasn’t until a mega-chain and a mega-wholesaler decided they needed some of this consistency for their rapidly expanding systems that anything really changed. And then it changed with amazing speed. We got to enjoy the fruits, and can even claim a little credit for getting the issues on the table, but the big boys made the decisions.

In some ways it’s easier to talk about the bigger problems than the little, more immediate ones. It can be harder to figure out how to sell a particular book to a particular customer tomorrow than it is to speculate about a future where half or more of all book sales are digitized.

But I think our best strategy is to keep the focus on that small, daily battle for book sales, and let the future take care of itself.

One thing is certain: the coolest people in the book industry are all of us middlemen, and there won’t be many books worth having in any format without us.

where do I shelve this?

2010-07-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

When reps and booksellers sit down to hash over forthcoming books, there are lots of angles to consider. While I see a few buyers who make snap judgments based on instinct and experience, most carefully pore over the metrics about each title that appear in the catalog: price, format, book dimensions, page count, and number of illustrations. I have been asked about paper weight. I have been asked about font and typography. But no topic comes close to eating up the appointment time consumed by discussions over category. That is, where do I shelve this book?

It’s a great annoyance to storefront booksellers that internet retailers don’t have this problem. Or, more accurately, can get around it by slicing and dicing subject lists so that a book comes up in infinite possible subject searches. Even when a title is floridly interdisciplinary, few stores can afford to take a physical copy for every section in which a customer might look for it.

I’ve presented dozens of titles from our new Fall 2010 lists that required some hard thinking about placement.

Yale’s fascinating new biography of Joe Louis (Joe Louis: Hard Times Man by Randy Roberts) could be shelved in biography, or sports, or even African-American Studies, since the focus is on meaning of Louis’ success to the Black community.

MIT’s excavation of Freud’s obsession with Mexico (Ruben Gallo’s Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis) has prompted the logical shelving question “Freud, or Mexico?” Our catalog heading suggests “psychoanalysis/Latin America,” a combination I don’t see too often. (For what it’s worth, my advice has been that this is of greater interest to the Freud customer than the Mexican history and culture customer, but what do I know?)

And Harvard’s new book from innovation guru David Edwards (The Lab: Creativity and Culture), investigates what art has to learn from science, and vice-versa. “Art, or science?” (Just to make it even more interesting, I try to remind buyers that the book has business applications.)

These discussions can be either enlightening or frustrating. Sometimes they start out enlightening and get frustrating. The “where to shelve it” conversation is really a stand in for the “who is this book for and do I have that customer” conversation. After a lengthy chat on this subject about a title last week, the bookseller sighed and said “the longer these talks go on, the smaller the order, right?’ And then she decided to skip.

Stores that are still organized on some variation of a Dewey decimal model- which is to say, nearly all- will inevitably have to ask and answer this question about every complex title. It’s not necessarily unreasonable. Some buyers interpret many possible categories as “publisher doesn’t really know what the book is,” though I think that’s rarely the case. And as long as the average bookstore customer expects to see these familiar categories in their neighborhood stores, figuring out the best home for a book is time well spent.

But last week I dropped in on a charming bookstore following a different model in the St Louis suburb of Webster Groves- Pudd'n Head Books. This shop seems to have subverted the whole category premise, and is reinventing mainstay bookstore sections in really interesting ways.

For instance, the Biography section, while not particularly large, is subdivided into more than a dozen sub-headings, some with only a few books in each. These include:

- Rising Above
- War Torn Children
- General bons vivants
- Remarkable Friendships
- Culture Clash
- Revolutionaries
- Eccentric Scientists
- Explorers
- Politicians
- Ordinary Citizens
- Dysfunctional Families
- Exceptionally Cool People

I can hear the immediate objections from traditionalists:

- How do you find anything? (Yes, booksellers are really forced to know their inventory and it helps to be small and selective ;)
- How do you decide if a book fits in more than one sub-category? What if it doesn’t fit any quirky sub-category? (This is marketing, not shelving books in a library, so there’s lots of leeway for creative license ;)
- Won’t a lot of small shelves make the sections seem incomplete? (On the contrary, my impression of that biography section was that it was huge, and I was shocked to realize how few actual books it contained.)

I’ve seen a few other stores take this approach, and as a bookstore browser I find it really appealing. A more selective and playful presentation begins to seem more like curating than traditional bookselling.

Every book on display at the Wexner Center Bookstore in Columbus Ohio looks as if it’s been hand-chosen.

Looking Glass Books in Portland Oregon has an appealingly offbeat inventory sensibility.

And though it’s mainly a used store, no bookstore is more compulsively eccentric than Monkey's Paw in Toronto. You are guaranteed to leave that store with books on subjects you never knew you cared about, in part because the bizarre organization exposes you to them.

As usual when I’m giving advice like this, the caveat is “easy for me to say.” But I’m an addicted bookshop patron as well as a rep, and increasingly, the stores I feel drawn to spend time in are the stores that surprise me.

And isn’t this the message we’ve been hearing from the experts? If physical bookstores are to survive they need to truly be destination spots, great good places where book people love to hang out, offering something the internet giants can’t. I’m not sure the same old tired, library style category headings and inventory organization fit that vision.

wearing bookstore love

2010-07-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been a sucker for a good bookstore T-shirt, and a couple times this season I’ve worn my “Betty’s Bookshop” shirt to my appointment with Betty at her bookshop.

In the past I’ve avoided this because it felt a little tacky. Not tacky, desperate. Even though Michael Boggs at Carmichael’s in Louisville assured me that “we LOVE shameless pandering” when I apologized for practicing same by wearing the store’s shirt the day of our appointment, I worried that my enthusiasm might be interpreted as fishing for better orders. (As if booksellers could be bought so cheaply!)

But Carmichael’s quickly put me at ease on that score. And as a bonus I was offered the Carmichael’s staff discount at Heine Brothers coffee next door when they noticed my attire!

But after getting reassurance on wearing store shirts in-store, I began to fret about the trickier issue of wearing one store’s T-shirt while visiting another store. (You’re thinking the book business can’t be in such dire straits if this is what sales reps have time to worry about.)

One day in the Twin Cities last month, I wore my Common Good Books shirt (a nice, black, long-sleeve number) to my meeting with Sue Zumberge at the St. Paul store in the morning. Without thinking, I still had it on when I visited Magers & Quinn, a fine Minneapolis bookseller and a competitor, in the afternoon.

I was momentarily mortified, but I should have remembered what a collegial bunch independent booksellers are. I wouldn’t recommend wearing an Amazon.com shirt (if such exist) to a neighborhood bookshop, but at M&Q the Common Good shirt just got generous compliments.

Mary Magers said she was thinking about shirts for the store and we chatted about what makes for a good bookshop T-shirt. What are the design elements that would make me actually buy a shirt?

- Good, strong graphics that emphasize the store as a place.

- Good, strong colors. Black always works.

- The store location, a crucial detail! In the past it seems as if people have downplayed that aspect, but with localmania in full swing I’m happy to see names of actual towns on bookstore shirts and logos.

A short slogan or tagline is fine if it's part of the store brand. But please no goofy sayings. I’m sure I’m not the only potential buyer to get excited about the front of a T-shirt only to notice- just in time- some absurd slogan or saying across the back of it. I would not be caught dead in a “Reading is sexy” shirt no matter how much I loved the store.

back to the bookstore future in seattle

2010-06-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

I have a suggestion for all my friends and colleagues who are losing sleep over the future of the book: get out here to Seattle and pay a visit to Elliott Bay Book Company’s new store in Capitol Hill.

Reluctantly forced to move by real estate issues from the literary outpost it staked out in Pioneer Square decades ago, there was plenty of consternation over whether such an idiosyncratic shrine to independent bookselling could re-invent itself in a new location.

The funky, historic old downtown quarter, with its interesting mix of international tourists, baseball fans, and homegrown winos, seemed an organic part of the bookstore’s identity. How would it fare in an actual neighborhood- a lively mix of students, professionals, and young families, with a thriving gay and lesbian vibe?

The physical character of Elliott Bay seemed unique, essential, and irreproducible. How on earth could the antique wood floors, which sounded like creeping through your grandmother’s attic, ever be replicated? Or the signature weathered bookshelves, which had literally supported thirty-five years of changing Pioneer Square reading tastes? And even if recreating these essential features two miles away were possible, was it desirable? Wouldn’t the small business consultant gurus advise seizing the opportunity to change and modernize?

But friends of the store can put the nail-biting on pause and move on to other things to worry about.

“Jaw-dropping” is one of those overused phrases- really, how often does your jaw actually drop even when seeing something great? But mine did when I walked through the doors of the Tenth Avenue store for the first time last week. I felt as if I were seeing the perfect bookstore. And after a few hours and a few visits, I believe by so rigorously honoring its own history it may be creating a prototype for the bookstore of the future.

I jotted down ten things that really worked for me. You may find others.

1. The book inventory is top drawer. It will tweak and evolve (it always does in good bookstores!) but the essential core strengths we always loved about the Pioneer Square location are still here. And showcased in a way that wasn’t possible there.

2. The staff are still great. I overheard one somewhat dotty customer being led with infinite patience through the labyrinth of what to read after Stieg Larsson. There’s a tag team approach- if one bookseller can’t answer, someone else can. And everyone who works there seems, I don’t know, interesting- like they probably spent their day off performing, creating, writing or working for social justice.

3. The layout, which sprawls across the floor of an old Ford Motor repair facility, is wonderfully airy and spacious. No more constantly having people brush past your butt when you’re trying to read the Staff Recommends cards.

4. Wood is everywhere, and yes, the floors creak in a really satisfying way.

5. The gorgeous high ceilings, wood beams and skylights are lovely.

6. Those front windows, a wall of them- amazing, and what a surprise. They look great from the outside but from inside, flush with gray Seattle morning light, they are dazzling. They give the whole space a sort of Bauhaus feel that seems perfect. Bookstore as 21st century creative workshop!

7. The immediate neighbors couldn’t be better and are definitely worth a visit (or two) - the northwest music chain Everyday Music is adjacent to the store, and one door down is my favorite restaurant/bar in all of Seattle, Oddfellows. I’m not sure who or what the Oddfellows were, but I guess it was something like the Masons. They left these gorgeous old buildings, and this one has been restored with great charm. And the food is tasty from breakfast through late at night.

8. The broader neighborhood, as mentioned above, is a fascinating mix, and only minutes from downtown.

9. And the even broader community- Seattle- is of course a bewitching place. It’s especially satisfying to find a store like Elliott Bay situated in the belly of the online beast which has wreaked so much havoc in the book community.

10. Rick Simonson, book buyer, events originator, passionate lover of international fiction, and overall sage, is the glue that holds it all together. He’s a walking testament to the power of an institutional memory in bookselling, though he’s never a slave to track. (selecting new titles based on sales history of similar old ones.) He’s a taste-maker in the best sense, trusting his own instincts and reading interests while knowing how to interpret the notoriously cryptic tea leaves left by customers. Nobody I can think of in bookselling has a stronger commitment to all of the working parts that make up a successful book- the publisher, the author, the store, the reader- and is more adept at stitching them together.

Understandably, general booksellers across the country are in a panic about what the future holds for our business. (So are publishers!). I can’t really fault a bookseller for rushing to embrace new technologies before they understand them, or for demanding a slice of the e-book pie, or for giving up valuable floor space in their stores for Rube Goldberg-like printing contraptions. We have to try everything.

But when I see a successful re-invention like the new Elliott Bay, I feel more confident that the great bookstore of the next 20 or 30 years may look a lot like the great bookstore of today and yesterday. Sticking to publishing and selling printed books in “great good places” as a business plan is not necessarily a form of denial.

End of love letter.

But check it out.

business books & the last laugh part 2

2010-06-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

To David Schwartz, the success with Winning Through Intimidation suggested that a big, untapped book retail niche was germinating under our noses. Though there were a handful of business and technical specialist booksellers in the country, very few general trade stores showed much interest in the business book market in the late seventies.

Enter Jack Covert. Jack and his wife Ann were proprietors of “Jack’s Record Rack,” the legendary music store on the east side of Milwaukee. Anticipating the demise of vinyl, Jack closed up shop and brought his savvy and enthusiasm to the book business by signing on with Schwartz to find and develop a clientele for business books.

The focus on professional books was not entirely new at the store. For years, David’s father Harry had built and maintained a significant medical book specialty, and we sourced textbooks for the Medical College, Marquette University and other schools and hospitals. But this was a very small operation and not terribly proactive compared with the business book program envisioned by Jack and David.

My memory of the details may be a bit hazy, but I recall three things pretty clearly:

First, though they had a reasonably firm idea of where they wanted to end up, the road map to get there was pretty sketchy. I don’t think Jack or David really knew for sure that the idea of selling big quantities of books to corporations would ever really bear fruit, nor how long the experiment to find out would have to last. But there was a willingness to commit resources and tweak the program until it got traction. I suspect there were many moments when both of them were tempted to pack it in.

Secondly, I remember Jack’s enthusiasm. He brought an old school sales evangelism to his outreach attempts that we hadn’t seen much in the staid world of the bookshop. Even by 1980, when the threats of chain competition were alarming (we were worried about Walden and B. Dalton! Can you imagine?), the genteel bookshop philosophy was to do your best and keep a tidy store with the right books and hope that the customers would come to you. Meanwhile Jack loaded up his trunk with business books and drove to remote parts of the state to make cold calls on small and medium businesses.

Which leads to my third recollection: the rest of the staff thought the whole thing deeply weird. The rest of the booksellers were not unlike current bookseller demographics- youngish fiction readers, sometimes with specific interests in history or the arts. We had been drawn to working in the store by the Schwartz sensibility, a somewhat nebulous vibe but one that definitely did not include hawking capitalist apologetics to The Man.

We watched the growing business section in the store and the huge claims on David’s attention as a kind of internal threat, despite the fact that Jack was the only dedicated staffer working on it. In the same way that I sometimes feel guilty now about how contemptuous I could be toward my younger sister decades ago, I sometimes feel a pang of remorse when I think about how unpleasant we booksellers behaved toward our new, entrepreneurial colleague. But Jack seemed to let it all slide by, and kept his focus on the mission.

And in some ways, Jack has had the last laugh. In 2010, the Harry W Schwartz Bookshop is no more. But its direct descendent, 800CEOREAD, is the most impressive and profitable business book retailer in the country.

More on them and how they do what they do to come.

business books and the last laugh, part 1

2010-06-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

In the bookselling mists of time, i.e. the seventies, I began working at the Harry W Schwartz Bookshop in downtown Milwaukee. Part of what drew me to the store was the counter-cultural, somewhat hip political vibe. Though Harry had taken some brave stands on the right to sell erotica in the forties and against attempts to suppress books in the McCarthyite fifties, the store he sold to his son David in the seventies was in fact a pretty mainstream, successful business.

Nevertheless, the anti-establishment signals were easily discernable. David had returned to the store after much soul-searching about whether being a business-person of any sort was an honorable way to make a living. Much of this questing had been done at a commune in Maine. His personal inclinations were decidedly left.

The people who worked at the shop tended to have secondary occupations such as art or political activism. One of the three references I used to get my job was the local Communist Party organizer, and I think that was the one that did the trick.

As for the inventory, Schwartz was a comprehensive old-school general trade store of a sort we don’t see as much lately. It seemed vast when vast was 100,000 titles. But books of social critique were showcased, and were always among the strongest sellers in the store. The measly Business section seemed like an afterthought.

Then one day a man called Robert Ringer changed all that. He had written a book called Winning Through Intimidation, a work of business psychology that pretty much taught what the title said. Today, the marketplace is awash in this kind of in your face self-help for budding capitalists, with big print, bullet points and lots of white space. But in the mid-seventies this book felt like a grenade launched into the bookshops.

Even more strangely, Ringer’s technique for marketing his book was completely new. He crossed the country, visiting bookshops in major cities, and offered them a cash incentive to take an insane number of copies of his book and to display them prominently. If memory serves, this number was 500 copies, which is a somewhat routine number for high profile commercial books these days. (I’m not sure about the cash but it may have been $500.)

Ringer met with David, who was never afraid to try a new idea, and the result was that the giant display window at the corner of 5th and Wisconsin was transformed one morning into a wall to wall shrine for the ominously black-jacketed Winning Through Intimidation.

Staff and many customers were shocked. Though few of us had actually read the book, it seemed self-evident that this was an unworthy piece of pro-business garbage. Urgent meetings were convened. Words like “sellout” and worse were muttered. We just couldn’t believe that David would agree to promoting such an odious piece of work- and for money!

There are several things to say about this affair several decades on.

First and foremost, it worked! This was probably the first time Schwartz had “made” a book by an unknown author simply by getting behind it in a crassly commercial way.

Heretofore, in-store marketing of a single book consisted of a stack of ten copies, or a few face-outs on a pillar. The valuable front windows had never been dedicated to a single title.

This approach was a harbinger of the co-op advertising system we take for granted today, by which publishers help pay for bookseller ads and promotions.

The energetic Mr. Ringer, who was tireless in thinking up ways to promote his book and was keen to enlist the booksellers directly, was a precursor of the successful self-published authors of today.

And probably most significantly, the Ringer phenomenon was but an advance droplet in the flood of business books that was to come as the century closed. Thousands of sometimes formulaic but often extremely profitable how-to books have been bread and butter for many booksellers and publishers.

As the age of Reagan settled upon us and young people stopped saying the word “business” with a snicker, business books colonized bookstore shelves like a virus. When I started working at the store, you wouldn’t be caught dead reading a business book in public; by the mid-eighties, there was always some kid on the Number 30 bus absorbed in Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich.

And how did the progressive-minded booksellers at Harry W Schwartz follow up their success with Robert Ringer? Stay tuned.

and another reason to love your local bookstore

2010-06-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

I love bookstores that commit to stocking interesting small journals and magazines, and this week I picked up the latest editions of three of the best in three different stores.

N+1, the brilliant, twice per year notebook/manifesto issued by a collective of young geniuses in Brooklyn, offers some of the most penetrating and original social criticism to be found anywhere. Issue 9, dedicated to the theme “Bad Money,” is no exception. The anonymous introductory essays, linked under the heading “The Intellectual Situation,” are alone worth the price of an issue, and cleverly limn the links between internet history, the future of printed books and newspapers, and the twisted market metaphors driving online gaming, i.e. “nerd crack.”

After a too-long hiatus, Tom Frank’s original Chicago-based journal The Baffler is back. One of the earliest, most rigorous, and funniest takedowns of the creeping marketization of every aspect of our lives, the current issue is loaded with tasty food for iconoclastic thought. The standout is Walter Benn Michaels’ The Un-Usable Past, wherein he dissects what the ideological triumph of the so-called free market has wrought for literature and culture. The whole issue is a keeper.

Last year I stumbled upon a beautiful and profound short essay by Amy Leach called “Sail On, My Little Honey Bee” in a wonderful small magazine called A Public Space. Like the previous two journals, A Public Space has a distinctive aesthetic, a quirky appealing design, and a solid mission, though the reader is never beaten unconscious with it. Less polemical than N+1 and The Baffler, A Public Space consistently features some of the most interesting fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction you can find anywhere. Every piece punches above its weight.

We focus so much on the other media on the endangered print species list- books, newspapers, commercial magazines. Let’s not forget to do some nail-biting for these wonderful hybrids. And to support them and the stores that stock them.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

2010-05-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

A brief time out from obsessing over all the exciting new forthcoming books to shine a light on a deserving backlist title.

In 2001, Yale published a devastatingly brilliant work of social history by Jonathan Rose called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. (This is the old edition jacket image.) This year we're bringing out a new, larger format second edition.

If there’s such a thing as a community of readers, this book should be among our founding documents. It’s as much a “people’s history” as Howard Zinn or Studs Terkel might have done with the same material. It’s practically an oral history.

Lurking beneath the bland, academic sounding title is one of the wisest, slyest, wittiest pieces of writing on books and readers I’ve ever encountered.

Rose’s guiding proposition is that historically, in Britain anyway, books and reading were NOT actually the exclusive purview of elites, but were appropriated by working people to further themselves in truly original and astonishing ways. We owe not only books as we know them to those 18th century reading obsessives, but also much of our politics.

This is absolutely a first-rate scholarly book, but it’s not a boring, demanding one. Rose relies heavily on the power of individual anecdote and oddball incident to make his case. For anyone interested in books, reading, labor history, radical history, and eccentric characters, this is a cornucopia of rich, hilarious stories.

Like many booksellers, I had a somewhat unsettled relationship with my own higher education, and largely taught myself what seemed important to know through the books I haphazardly read. Rose is out to redeem the reputation of the autodidact.

The British working masses were the original autodidacts! And the Bible was the original autodidactic text! (Not, alas, for me. “How can you know anything about art if you don’t know anything about the Bible?” my friend and colleague Uwe once correctly challenged me.)

I’m as excited about this new paperback edition as I am about anything we’ve published this year.

Yes, there are a few obstacles. The title makes it seem like something you’d be forced to read in a required history course. Flip through it and you’ll see lots of charts, graphs, and unfamiliar names. And at $33, the price may scare off a few casual readers. Though I defy you to find a more rewarding reading experience for six cents a page.

A brief sampling of his subjects:

- The flourishing of autodidactic culture among Scottish weavers in the 18th century resulted in one of the highest literacy levels in the world. Weavers as a group were “legendary readers,” noted for their habit of “reading at the loom.”

- Intellectual proclivities among tradesmen were intolerable to 18th century gentlemen. In 1812, radical tailor Francis Place lamented that “to accumulate books, and to be supposed to know something of their contents…was an abominable offense in a tailor, if not a crime; had it been known to all my customers that I accumulated a considerable library in which I spent all the leisure time I could spare…half of them at the least would have left me.”

- Autodidactic workers who taught themselves to read were markedly less deferential to power. Ferment was linked directly to print. After the First World War, historian Robert Roberts pointed out that “many more books, periodicals and newspapers were to be seen in ordinary homes. My mother recalled the plaint of our burial club collector. ‘Some of ‘em are reading mad!’ he grumbled. ‘They buy paper after paper, but won’t pay the weekly penny these days to bury their dead!”

- In the mid- 19th Century, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe had a greater working-class readership than any book save the Bible.

- Rose describes the flowering of the “Mutual Improvement Societies” in early 20th century working class Britain- self-organized groups of a dozen to upwards of 100 people who met regularly in their own homes or churches. A member would typically deliver a paper on politics, religion, ethics, literature, or other “useful knowledge”, followed by discussion. “The aim was to develop verbal and intellectual skills among people who had never been encouraged to speak or think.”

- “In the first years of the 19th Century, shepherds in the Cheviot Hills maintained a kind of circulating library, leaving books they had read in designated nooks and crannies in boundary walls. The next shepherd who came that way could borrow it and leave another in its place, so that each volume was gradually carried through a circuit of 30 to 40 miles, on which the shepherds only occasionally met.”

- In 1854, Samuel Taylor, a passionate literacy advocate and a clay worker, began to read aloud from Crimean War dispatches published in The Times in a market square in Hanley. These readings attracted 8-10,000 people. The authorities welcomed them as “a way of keeping the lower orders out of pubs and music halls” and offered use of the town hall. Initially free, he began charging a penny, and by 1858 the movement had swept Staffordshire towns, attracting 60-70,000 people for selected readings from the works of popular writers. (In a district containing 100,000 people!)

- And yet… any kind of serious sustained writing by working-class people often ran against the grain of working-class culture, and was considered selfish and unneighborly. Reading was acceptable providing it was a collective activity, but solitary writing was suspect. Novelist Margaret Thomson Davis recalls her mother scolding “There’s a lot more important things you could be doing than sitting there scribbling. Give that floor a good scrub, for instance.”

There are so many quiet backlist treasures passively sitting on warehouse shelves, waiting for discovery by booksellers and readers. The reappearance of this one is cause for celebration.

IBGYBG

2010-05-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

It was sort of a tough week to begin selling the fall lists. One Chicago appointment I had with a chain buyer was truncated because the buyer had just been let go. The same afternoon, I showed up for my appointment with one of the smartest art museum buying teams in the country only to learn that one of them had been laid off this week.

To top it off, I ducked into a doorway on Wabash to make a couple phone calls and found that I was standing across the street from the empty shell that was once the spectacular Prairie Avenue Bookshop, one of the saddest of the many sad closings last year.

But then I ended the week with a full day with the Seminary Coop/57th Street Bookstore bibliophiles in Hyde Park, followed by a morning with the irrepressible Roberta Rubin at the Book Stall in Winnetka. Both of these encounters left me optimistic again.

There are not many apparent similarities between these two bookselling dynamos on opposite sides of what is irritatingly called “Chicagoland.” But one big similarity is that they are both in books for the long haul, and see a future in the printed word.

Last week I came across an offhand reference in a news article that instantly clarified what I loathe about the corporate world. In a story that aimed to explain who knew what when amongst the derivative traders who brought on the meltdown, some anonymous broker acknowledged that everybody knew what they were doing was dangerous and not sustainable. But he said the widespread attitude was IBGYBG, i.e. “I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone” before the piper need be paid.

Of course, I’ve heard variations of this cynical sentiment fairly often among my colleagues in the book business. I’ve said something like it myself. It often takes a form like “I’d love to get another five years out of books but after that, I don’t care if they disappear. IBGYBG.”

But when a couple bitter reps exchange this sentiment over beers, we don’t have the power to bring down the entire economy with our cynicism.

The more I think of it, IBGYBG explains a lot. Global warming? It’s so complicated and hard, and anyway, IBGYBG. The national debt? Same thing. It’s a kind of necrophilic libertarianism, and once you realize the attitude is widespread enough to have its own acronym, you notice it everywhere.

Bookselling and publishing is the antithesis of this thinking. We have many terrifying unknowns in our future, but the book (in whatever format) has long-term staying power.

Unlike the gangsters making millions trading commodities they neither understand nor care about, we sell a product we actually love.

Publishers routinely spend years (sometimes decades) bringing a book project to fruition. (See Harvard’s exciting resurrection of the 1960 series Image of the Black in Western Art this year, among other examples).

People under thirty- even apparently sane ones- still contemplate and plan for a future in bookstores.

Bookstore patrons react with alarm and consternation when their favorite shops are in jeopardy, as did the flood of Hyde Park fans of Seminary Coop when word leaked out that the store’s building is being converted to (speaking of retrograde economic attitudes) the Milton Friedman Institute. (Not to worry, the Coop is safe!)

And not to get too anecdotal about it, but I was struck by how many people on the rush hour red line up to Addison the other day were deeply engrossed in books printed on paper.

There are many unknowns in the book future. In the face of the widespread misconception that except for the cost of paper and shipping a book should be free, how can sale of digital content be monetized? Will Google’s muscle-flexing in the book industry ultimately be a force for good or evil? And will there eventually be a gadget so alluring that we will forsake everything for its pleasures, including books?

But the book industry ethos seems to be WBHYBH- we’ll be here, you’ll be here. We’re not sure how, we’re working out the details, but the resilience of booksellers and their products is the perfect antidote to the hateful cynicism of the corporate death wish.

Sequels, Knock-offs, Look-alikes: sorting authentic from wannabe

2010-05-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

One of the keenest pleasures for reps and booksellers alike is seeing a worthy book with modest expectations get traction and work. Even better when it’s not just a shooting star but develops staying power.

Case in point: a couple years ago, The MIT Press published a little book by Matthew Frederick called 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. It quickly generated the much coveted “in-house buzz,” and the reps quickly got a positive reaction from booksellers. Those who trusted their instincts and displayed the book got the same reaction from their customers, over 100,000 of whom had purchased a copy by last month.

The book had what all of us say we’re always looking for, i.e. there was nothing else really like it. Essentially a series of inspirational drawings matched with smart, witty maxims about making a successful life in the creative arts, the package was irresistible- small landscape format, paper over board, and a great price. It appealed to people well beyond the field.

Of course the paradox is that as soon as a publisher has a bona fide success story, the hunt is on to duplicate it. And how, by definition, can the sequel be anything but a pale, inauthentic imitation of the original?

It’s a quandary. MIT Press prides itself on originality and editors are passionate about the integrity of their books. Though there were moments when I thought to myself “this is such a great idea, why don’t we do “101 Things I Learned in X, Y, and Z” school,” it was hard to imagine that these could truly replicate the charm and sense of discovery surrounding the original.

Now, thanks to one of the corporate publishing giants, we’ll have a good case study in whether this particular great idea can be successfully cookie-cuttered.

The four copy cat books in their series- “101 Things I Learned in Culinary, Business, Film and Fashion School,” are impressive knock-offs. At first glance, they mimic every design element of the original. And in theory anyway, the concept might be transferable to the other subjects.

But when I perused the collection at a bookstore the other day, the bookseller was anxious point out the deficiencies. The covers are vastly inferior to the original, the binding is shoddy, the whole approach seemed more top-down than bottom-up.

This is a store that took delight in having sold dozens of copies of the original by keeping it on the front counter, and it was always on the booksellers’ hand-selling radar. The store, along with publisher, rep, author and customer, got to share in the feeling of having found something unique.

This bookseller greeted the arrival of the knock-offs with a sigh. “This just diminishes the original,” he thought. He didn’t say it this way, but I imagine his deflated feeling as something akin to the way I used to feel when some piece of political iconography or social critique turns up in a jeans ad or an army recruitment campaign. Can’t we have anything authentic anymore without it being co-opted and transformed into a cheap commodity, or twisted to sell someone else’s idea?

We’ll see how the sales go. Perhaps I’ll be wrong and the public will eat up the concept and the 101’s will proliferate like the Idiot Guides that once colonized bookstores like a bad virus. But meanwhile, my bookseller friend is responding to the challenge by upping his order on 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School and making sure it’s on display upfront.

To end this rant on a happier note, let me suggest a more elegant way to solve the “how can we duplicate this success” dilemma.

One of the most successful books published by Yale University Press in the past decade was Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World. Like the Frederick book, it was adopted with love by booksellers and readers everywhere and has become a backlist staple. And like the Frederick, a big part of the appeal was the unique voice and gorgeous design.

But instead of rushing to the obvious and pumping out carbon copies of the book- little histories of X, Y and Z narrated in charming grandfatherly voices- Yale waited until the right book came along to make the comparison. This book should have some of the qualities of the Gombrich and should appeal to readers in the same way, but must be absolutely original. Would it exist had there been no Ernst Gombrich? The answer must be yes. (Would Fashion, Business, Culinary and Film exist without Architecture? Doubtful.)

This book, just published, is David Crystal’s A Little Book of Language. The design, tone and concept have much in common with A Little History of the World. And there’s a hope, of course, that it will have some of the same readership. But this is an attempt to make lightning strike again by offering up another authentic, original book- not a set of mix and match imposters.

Again, I may be proved wrong, but I think this wonderful book will succeed both on its own merits and on its tip of the design hat to Little History. It’s the best, most organic, most interesting kind of sequel publishing.

Living with Mailing Labels

2010-05-06T13:49:00.001-07:00

Around ten years ago, we reps were issued our first computers. Dial-up, aol accounts, little orange screens- they left much to be desired when set beside our current flashy Dell Vostros.

But I remember one thing the customer database program on those little machines did quite well: when you wanted to print a batch of mailing labels, you hit a button called “print labels.”

Sorry, this is going to be one of those whiny, insider, why should anyone else care posts. But I spent the better part of a morning doing battle with Mail Merge in an effort to print a batch of mailing labels, and I need to vent.

Labels are not an insignificant part of our job. For all the hype in publishing media about digital catalogs, our customers prefer the traditional, printed versions by a landslide.

We send out copies of these new fall catalogs to hundreds of booksellers, sometimes heavily annotated for their particular stores. And each season I groan when I think about the bookends of the process: at the start, figuring out once again how to print address labels; at the end, hauling 200-plus two pound priority mail envelopes to the post office.

A couple seasons ago, defeated by the cumbersome semi-annual ritual of label-wrangling, I switched over to the US Post Office label printing program. Though arcane and bizarre in many ways, it got the job done.

Alas, in the switchover to our new laptops my beloved Shipping Assistant has disappeared, and my 265 saved addresses with it. I briefly considered just bearing down and re-entering everything, but the USPS website was so hostile it seemed like I’d have to hack my way back in to use it. And these days you don’t want to even think about that.

So I reverted to Outlook’s label printing procedure. Maybe it’s smoother than it was in earlier incarnations, I stupidly told myself.

Though it’s a business-oriented contact database designed for organizing interactions with customers, the designers apparently don't consider label printing an important enough function to warrant its own button. Indeed, the first counter-intuitive thing you have to do to make labels happen is to leave the program entirely and switch to a Word document.

I could kill my modest blog readership entirely right now by marching you through the fifteen tedious and confusing steps I had to download and print to accomplish my goal. But I can’t bear to revisit them. Suffice it to say that labels miraculously appeared just at the moment when I’d reached the breaking point, poised to pick up that ancient technology- a pen- to begin writing out my addresses.

But not so fast. Try getting them to align properly! I switched my animosity to the printer, which inflexibly refused to allow me to adjust the feed so three lines of address could actually appear coherently on the same label.

This too was eventually mastered, and, eureka, I had a pristine set of mailing labels. I suppose I could have called my colleagues, Adena and Patricia, both of whom are savvier on this than I am. But I am a man, in this respect anyway. Unfortunately, I had to spoil about two dozen sheets of blank labels to get six usable ones. Still, a victory over technology is a victory, and I will savor it.

But what am I saying? Why am I at war with my technology when it’s supposed to be my friend?

I think maybe Don Norman has the answer. He’s been writing about the sometimes mystifying design quirks of everyday objects for years. This fall he has a new book, Living with Complexity, in which he defends the idea of complexity against the allure of oversimplification. It’s not complexity that’s the problem, Norman insists, its bad design!

Exhibit A: the Microsoft Outlook label making circus.

Coming this fall- more questions than answers

2010-04-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

The fall 2010 sales conferences have ended. There are hundreds of new titles on the way, about which much more to come.

The range of subjects on offer is dazzling, but these are not mainly books insisting on the right answers. They are books about asking the right questions. (Indeed, six of the new titles on the Harvard list are phrased as questions.) In a season when it seems as if every voice in public life is shrieking with certainty, I don’t remember a better assortment of books on how to acknowledge, honor, and use uncertainty.

Here’s a little quiz to whet your appetite. (answers below)

1) A brilliant legal philosopher warns that the world of values needs saving. What from?

2) Which of Jane Austen’s books was most popular in her lifetime, was her personal favorite, and is most widely read today?

3) A prize-winning historian says it’s not the right-left divide we have to worry about, but the growing chasm between the what and the what?

4) How many Facebook friends do you really need (and probably actually have)?

5) What does a leading political thinker call “one of the most pernicious myths of the modern era?”

6) What did Shelley describe as “profuse strains of unpremeditated art?”

7) “Complexity is not the problem.” So what is the problem?

8) What may finally save newspaper journalism?

9) What do Helen Mirren, Jane Tennison, Zane, Kara Walker and the Toxic Titties have in common?

10) With what country was Sigmund Freud obsessed?

11) What is the only animal that points?

12) Who is the most important (but largely unknown to English speaking audiences) poet writing in Arabic today?

13) What important speech will register an anniversary on Jan 17 1961?

14) What was the most effective civic propaganda spectacle of the thirties?

15) Who was the greatest actress who ever lived?

Answers

1) Science! (Ronald Dworkin/Justice for Hedgehogs/Harvard January 2011)

2) Pride and Prejudice (An Annotated Edition, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks/Harvard October 2010)

3) The private obsession with individual desires vs. tending to our social obligations. (Daniel T. Rodgers/Age of Fracture/Harvard January 2011)

4) Around 150. (Robin Dunbar/How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Harvard/November 2010)

5) The free market as a model for everything. (Bernard E. Harcourt/The Illusion of Free Markets/Harvard/January 2011)

6) Bird song. (John Bevis/AAAAW to ZZZZZD: The Words of Birds/ MIT September 2010)

7) Poor design. (Donald A. Norman/Living with Complexity/ MIT October 2010)

8) Video games! (Ian Bogost et al/Newsgames/MIT October 2010)

9) They are aggressive women, and they are celebrated by contemporary culture. (Maud Lavin/Push Comes to Shove/ MIT September 2010)

10) Mexico. (Ruben Gallo/Freud’s Mexico/MIT September 2010)

11) Humans. (Raymond Tallis/Michelangelo’s Finger/ Yale September 2010)

12) Adonis. (No, not that one!) (Adonis/Selected Poems/ Yale Margellos October 2010)

13) Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the alarming, creeping power of the “military industrial complex” (James Ledbetter/Unwarranted Influence/ Yale January 2011)

14) The World’s Fairs in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, Cleveland, New York and San Francisco. (Robert W. Rydell et al/Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the Thirties/ Yale October 2010)

15) Sarah Bernhardt! (Robert Gottlieb/Sarah:The Life of Sarah Bernhardt/Yale September 2010)

Luddite reps get smartphones, love them

2010-04-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

My friend Daniel Goldin, proprietor of Boswell Books in Milwaukee, reads while he walks. It’s not something you see many people doing in our city, and I once heard a stranger say to him “Hey I know you, you’re that guy I always see reading and walking.”

I’ve done a fair bit of book-walking myself, and it’s easier than you might think. Peripheral vision is a powerful thing, and you can pretty much count on people to get out of your way when they see you coming. Still, it’s a rare thing to see, at least in my neighborhood.

Judging by the last eight days I spent in Cambridge, New Haven and New York, the world has caught up with Daniel. Except that, alas, instead of being immersed in books, walkers are staring down at their devices. It seems a miracle that the crowds of pedestrians on West 23rd street can avoid constant collisions with other people who are also not paying the slightest attention to where they are going, but they do avoid it! I am taking this as an argument for more reading-while-walking.

We do seem to have reached some sort of tipping point when it comes to smart phones. When people my age and above are obsessively poking away at their little screens in public, the transition to a computer in every pocket seems well underway.

The smart phone wave has even hit the Harvard/MIT/Yale rep force. Three weeks into going from mere phones to devices, every sales meeting break prompted iphones and blackberries being whipped out around the table. In past seasons, a ten minute break announcement sparked a run to the restroom and the coffee urn; as of this week, checking incoming email and texts seems to have supplanted creature comforts on the sales conference break priority list.

There's no denying it's a powerful tool. Minor questions and disputes- "Is this really the first book on this subject? What about that one by whatshisname that so and so published? What was it called?" - can be resolved instantly. There are subtle little contests to see who can wiki faster and come up with useful factoids.

Me, I have mixed feelings about it. So far I’m loving my droid. It's an undeniable rush to be able to triage incoming messages and deal with the important ones (orders!) on the spot.

I like having one hub where people can reach me, instead of a roster of alternative phone numbers and email addresses, all of which needed periodic checking. This has already “easied my life” as Andrey, our ace tech support guy, promised it would.

Some of the other bells and apps look intriguing, and some look ridiculous. I haven’t had much time to explore those possibilities yet, though I downloaded the “hypnotic spiral” for mesmerizing booksellers into taking vast copies of one new fall title, as I promised the author I would do.

Then there are the worrisome aspects: the constant tracking of our whereabouts, the comprehensive mapping of every inch of our geography, and the increasingly narrow-casting of advertising.

Smart phone enthusiasts seem relatively blasé about this dark side of the technology. And the concerns that get expressed seem way more about potential big government surveillance than about the creeping corporate choreography of our economic behavior.

Personally, I’m more alarmed about the little phone in my pocket being the leading edge of our transformation into robotic little uber-consumers than I am about nefarious Orwellian government. It’s a little disturbing to see how much privacy we’re willing to give away for fun and convenience.

When my colleague Adena and I drove from Cambridge to New Haven- a route she knows very well- we let the lady from the google navigation system direct us just for fun. Her crisp instructions were correct in every detail, and she seemed absolutely certain and confident. We felt like daring outlaws when we pulled off the designated GPS route in Vernon, Connecticut to stop at our favorite delicatessen. “Turn around!” the lady warned us.

No doubt future iterations of the device will co-opt the possibility of even this mild rebellion. “I see you’re getting off at Exit 65. How about a nice bowl of matzo ball soup at Rein’s,” she will purr. It will seem perfect, her knowing exactly what we want even before we do. But instead of being our idea it will be hers.

next up: sales conference 25

2010-04-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

(Erika Valenti and Laurel Oakes enjoy a moment at MIT sales conference dinner Oct 2009)

I’m about to head to Cambridge and New Haven for my 25th round of sales conferences. How is this possible?

How can it be nearly twelve years since I was lured from bookselling to “the other side?” My status as new kid around the table expired long ago, though let it be said I have colleagues who have been at it far longer. I’m reminded of a remark wise man Rick Simonson made at a Book Expo a couple years ago as a group of once idealistic young book people stood around chatting: “How did the young turks get to be the old farts so fast?”

Still, I look forward to the 25th sales conferences as eagerly as I awaited the first. These rituals are maybe the closest thing the secular publishing world has to a sacrament, the launch of a new season’s offerings upon the world. A twice a year (three times for some presses) gathering of the tribe, it’s a chance to reconnect with colleagues and make friends with the fresh titles on the new lists. (With luck only a few of these young turks will seem like old farts by the time the selling season is over).

As a bookseller, I had an intense curiosity about the sales conferences my reps attended. Even though some of them complained about them as if they were a chore, there was no missing the fact that it was sacrosanct. You had to be there.

And when I pressed a little for details about what went on, it sometimes sounded more like a vacation than work. The major publishers would often gather at nice resorts in sunny places, and the food and entertainment always sounded pretty lavish.

Convinced that these meetings involved some secret, extra special information about the books my rep was trying to sell me on, I pestered them about every detail, trying to crack the code. When longtime Random House rep Jim Masiakowski once mentioned that they had videotaped their meeting (this was in the digital dark ages, i.e. late 80’s), I badgered him about sharing it. “Not for booksellers, it wouldn’t be helpful,” he said. I took this to mean that it probably contained too many devious plans for how to get us to take stacks of his books.

Though my experience with sales conferences is limited to three presses- Harvard, MIT and Yale- the mystique I created around them as a bookseller has long worn off. These are working meetings with barely a moment to take a breath. The scheduling and running of them is a logistical nightmare, as doing justice to both book and clock is a thankless challenge for sales managers.

Fabulous dinners, yes I’ll concede that. Later this summer, when I’m munching the chips, sub sandwich and diet coke I’ve purchased at a KwikTrip on I-80, the memory of sales conference dinners will keep me going.

Our presses hold their meetings in their offices on the university campuses, not in Boca. The gist of the meeting involves each of the editors making a short pitch for each of their books. By this time, we’ve had an early look at the catalog and supplemental title information sheets; we’ve seen jackets and sometimes interior art; we’ve read through massive bound binders of book excerpts, and usually one or two complete manuscripts. So it’s not like we’re completely unfamiliar with the new titles.

But we reps are really always looking for that one additional angle from the editor. For me it’s usually “what made you to want to publish this book in the first place?” If we’re lucky, an editor will let slip an authentic, disarming, clear cut, witty, conversational phrase that we can make use of throughout the season. You can’t force it, but it’s great when it happens.

In some ways, this reminds me of meeting with booksellers. By the time I see them, the buyers have often read the catalog copy, checked their sales on comparable titles, and are looking at the supplemental material and galleys I’m throwing at them. But what they need from a rep is a concise, cogent, perfect synopsis that will make them say “oh, I get it.” And that they can then use with their customers.

This process works the other way as well. Despite the volumes of notes we take from our sales meetings, the really great lines on books often don’t turn up until we begin selling. Sometimes one booksellers’ clever comment will get incorporated into my shtick on a book for the rest of the season.

The other thing I love about the sales meetings is the academic environment. These editors are sometimes actual or potential intellectual superstars in their own right. To sit in a room with them discussing dozens of erudite new books is like atwo-day graduate seminar. On occasion, authors themselves join us for lunch presentations. Imagine sharing pizza with the likes of Harold Bloom, William Mitchell and Stephen J. Gould.

It was a surprise to me to find out how much these meetings revolve around the content of the books, around making sure we understand the ideas, and around how the book’s argument fits in with others on the same topic. There is actually very little (some might say too little) time devoted to marketing strategies. There’s room for input from reps on prices, discounts, print runs, and sometimes bigger issues like book title. We spend lots of time on jackets and it’s probably the area where bookseller feedback has made itself heard most directly.

MIT starts Monday, followed by Harvard and then Yale at the end of the week. Now back to packing. Did I mention that we dress up for sales conferences? I have a whole world of colleagues in Cambridge and New Haven who have almost never seen me out of a jacket and tie. And then there’s everyone else in my world who have never seen me in one.

obama @ prairie lights; and saying yes or no to political books

2010-04-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

When President Obama dropped in on Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City last week, he was amused to find the memoirs of Karl Rove and Mitt Romney on the shelves. Co-owner Jan Weismiller, quite properly, told him “we believe in freedom of expression so we have to carry" the books.

That inclusive sentiment about inventory is nearly universal and almost second nature in the bookselling community. It’s a foundational argument for why we need independent bookselling. But assuming the obligation to stock every book, which is to say not censoring for political or other text-based reasons, is a strategy loaded with paradoxical pitfalls.

At one extreme, a bookstore could take the position that it will stock everything, though of course in practice this is impossible. An online retailer can claim to “have” every book in print, but in truth only a tiny fraction of these titles are ever actually in their possession before someone orders them.

At the other extreme, a bookstore may be adamant about bringing in only what it wants to stock and believes in, hoping that there will be enough customers who share its brilliant interests to keep it in business.

But let’s say a bookstore with somehow unlimited shelf space commits to an absolutist position, and swears off denying books a place on its shelves for reasons of ideological incorrectness. Every book welcome here!

This strikes me as not much different than the argument the giant social networking sites are using to deny any responsibility for what’s posted under their name. Wouldn’t the bookseller with infinite space and a total “open access” philosophy also be walking away from responsibility and discrimination (in the good sense of the word)?

Bookselling is an odd form of retailing. When you buy almost any other commodity, the retailer stands behind it in toto. The bookseller stands behind the physical integrity of the product (if it’s misbound, or pages are missing, it’s returnable) but doesn’t vouch for the editorial contents. And it couldn’t be any other way.

A bookseller is actually exercising his or her right to freedom of expression by deciding what books to stock- including, implicitly, what not to stock. A bookstore is not a library supported by public funds. Because attempts to get bookstores to stop carrying this or that title are so common, it’s easy to forget that a decision to not sell a book is not censorship. This is especially true today, when every book is easily available. One outlet deciding a title is not for them doesn’t make it unavailable to an entire community.

Some booksellers handle the dilemma by making a distinction between displaying a book and stocking it. Or they’ll order it only when asked, though that strikes me as a little defensive.

When I meet with bookbuyers and we peruse the new lists, the most important consideration is “do I have the customer for this book?” But I hear dozens of reasons to say no to books. The price is too high, I can’t sell hardcovers over $30, I don’t like the jacket, the last one didn’t work so well, not enough illustrations, I don’t get the argument, that author photo is horrible, and on and on.

But buyers, who are extremely busy people and are skilled at making decisions on gut instinct, are also known to skip books for skimpy reasons, or no reason at all. “I just don’t think so” is a frequent comment, and I usually don’t argue. When I was a buyer I said that constantly.

All of these reasons and many more are perfectly valid. But, curiously, the one reason general booksellers often feel uncomfortable passing on a book is if their objections are political. Something about saying “I just don’t want his (or her) book in my store” seems wrong.

I guess the question is “what kind of bookseller am I?” Nobody would really expect to find some hateful misogynist screed on the shelves of a feminist bookstore (unless put there for “know your enemy” reasons, which opens another whole can of worms: who can really know the uses to which a book will be put?)

But a general bookstore really does have to constantly calibrate, paying close attention to the diverse needs of its community. And these are sometimes in conflict with the ethics of the store owner or staff. The choice is to interpret “free expression” as an obligation to stock books you don’t believe in but some of your customers might want, or to see it as a right that belongs to you.

When it comes to some polarizing titles, it can mean trying to placate one group that’s pissed because you’re stocking a book and another that’s angry because you are not.

This nest of complications is far from clear cut, and I suspect most of us handle it by trying to hold to a consistent overall philosophy, while calling the messy shots on a case by case basis.

David Schwartz, who taught me a lot about bookselling, was the most radical general bookseller I’ve ever met. His idea of the most important book in the store was E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and his personal critique of some of the books he sold could be scathing.

But he absolutely relished stocking the most odious, right-wing polemics. He thought of them as insurance for the recurring dust-ups over whether he was running a “communist bookstore.”

So in the end, despite my ambiguous feelings, I would probably do exactly as Prairie Lights did with the Romneys and Roves. People expect booksellers to be gatekeepers, but they also expect a bookstore to be one place where the book, just by virtue of its being a book, is honored. And where no book is taboo.

In praise of the paperback original

2010-03-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

If you've ever spent any time in a European bookshop, you’ve probably noticed that the default book format is paperback. And the European paperback original is usually a sleeker, prettier, altogether more satisfying visual and tactile experience than our domestic trade paperbacks.

I’ve been waiting eons for that long promised ascendancy of the paperback original in the US book market. When did Bright Lights Big City first appear? 1984? At the time, we thought those genius Vintage Contemporaries might finally put a nail in the hardcover coffin. But in 2010, the conviction that every new fiction and nonfiction book has to appear sandwiched between clunky, unappealing cardboard slabs is more entrenched than ever.

If we’re lucky, the ebook threat might finally dislodge the dictatorship of the hardcover once and for all.

For years, publishers have resorted to the same collection of reasons why original books must be issued in hardcover.

Reviewers will not touch paperbacks.

Hardcovers are more durable and will last longer.

Americans just prefer hardcovers, it’s a cultural thing.

The economics of original paperback publishing won’t work.

But over the years, book reviewers have been much more willing to feature books in non-hardcover formats. (And in any case, better to worry about the continued existence of book reviewers themselves than about their format preferences.)

The deterioration in physical quality of some hardcover publishing has been depressing, and not unnoticed by bookbuyers. In the eighties, I remember joking about how many Doubleday Books you could stack up and carry (the old Doubleday, which used the same cheap paper as Book Club editions) because they weighed nothing. (One of the great things about working for university presses is that the physical and design standards are rigorous.)

Undistinguished blandness is often the physical book norm today. I groaned when I picked up Robert Darnton’s interesting defense of printed books published last year, The Case for Books. The book itself, which would have made a lovely paperback original, is a cheap, shoddily done hardcover with no aesthetic appeal whatsoever. The irony! Talk about undercutting an argument.

Like so many of the claims thrown around about what Americans “prefer,” the deck is heavily stacked in favor of what they’re being given. Are we American readers really so different from readers the world over, who overwhelmingly get their new books in paperback?

The economic question is the most compelling one, and most resistant to resolution. The simple truth is that a hardcover book carries a steeper price, and will, if successful, earn more money for publisher, author and bookseller. If issued as a paperback original with a necessarily lower price, more units would have to be sold. Projecting profit and loss based on conversion of a year’s worth of new books from mainly cloth to mainly paper is not a trivial exercise.

Yet one of the most constant refrains I hear from booksellers is that “this should have been paperback” when I’m trying to sell them on a new cloth title.

Publishing seems to be an industry inordinately obsessed with the Joneses. We do original books in cloth because the Joneses do them that way. If the Joneses started to do paperback originals, we’d do it too.

I’m hopeful that the challenges posed by digital media and ebooks will lead to some rethinking of the physical book as object. In fact, the ebook threat may not be to printed books per se, but to the dominant trade book model- clothbound, relatively expensive physical books.

If the standard price of a new trade ebook ends up being $12-15, wouldn’t an $18-20 beautiful trade paper edition be more competitive than a $30 cloth edition?

Except for art and heavily illustrated titles, for which hardcover can more often be justified, couldn’t we look to the European model for producing sensual, cleverly designed, durable paperback editions?

If somebody would start doing it, everybody would do it. Short runs of hardcover editions for libraries and collectors would still be possible. And cheap, minimalist editions in the $10 range (see semiotext(e)’s inventive and controversial Intervention series) should also have a future.

It seems logical to me. I’m not holding my breath. But even if we’re destined to live with our current two-step publishing norm- cloth edition, followed by paperback reprint one year later- there are some things we might do to breathe more life into the paperback.

Booksellers often hew a little slavishly (in my humble opinion) to the cloth track record when it comes to deciding on paperback reprints. It’s easy to see why- there is so little solid useful data around that when you see that you sold X number of units of the hardcover edition, you can make an informed bet on the paperback. It’s kind of exciting.

Some people bump the paper number a bit, expecting it to do better because it’s cheaper. Some people have a strict “sold three, buy three” approach, expecting the paper to perform just like the cloth. Some- and I won’t name names but this does happen- will look the book up and say “I didn’t sell any in cloth so I’ll pass” when a year earlier they said “This is too expensive, I’ll wait for paper.”

The point is, all of these approaches share a kind of routine thinking. Sometimes a paperback really does have a second life and might potentially reach a whole new audience, but not if it’s treated with a "cloth edition redux" shrug.

This was nicely argued in one of my friend Daniel Goldin’s recent blog posts about one of his favorite books last year, Chris Cleave’s Little Bee. The paperback is doing significantly better than the cloth did; you can read why here. (Hint: it’s finding its second life!)

With the proliferation of book clubs, it may be easier to imagine a second life for fiction than non-fiction. But the right non-fiction book, with the right package and the right story (see A Little History of the World) can spread exponentially in paperback.

In fairness, booksellers are not really to blame for not imagining reprint potential when publishers aren’t doing a very good job of it either. Too often we have a ho hum approach to paperbacks, and the result is ho hum sales.

I’d rather see, and I think we will see, a migration toward original paperback publishing over the next decade. Physical books as objects will get more beautiful, and riffs on the paperback format will proliferate. Or maybe American exceptionalism will carry the day again?

Books in the News

2010-03-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

The vast scope of the product we sell- so many millions of titles- can sometimes seem like a disadvantage when compared to retailers offering a more finite menu of items. But in at least one respect the variety at our disposal is a huge advantage: there’s not a passing trend, piece of gossip or one day news item that can’t be readily addressed with a book.

Lots of people my age got into bookselling to begin with as an extension of their social and political commitments. Books can be weapons in the struggle, and all that. Plus, we couldn’t ever imagine functioning in the tainted corporate world.

No bookseller had more political convictions than my late mentor David Schwartz, but he used to confound the younger booksellers with his rule against wearing political buttons or T-shirts while on duty. “That’s what the books are for, use the books,” he’d always say.

So the concept that books are ideas and ideas change the world is not so original, but what’s sometimes over-looked is the competitive advantage we have over other enterprises when it comes to responding to ephemeral news events.

From a merchandising standpoint, you can think of a store’s book inventory in three ways:

1) There are the permanent, ironclad categories that have stood the test of time, like History, Science, Biography and so on. These may get a tidy-up or some new face-outs as books come in but for the most part they seem eternal;

2) There are some contemporary sections that are more responsive to political and social events. I’m thinking of Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, or the sections on Communities or Sustainability popping up in so many stores. Because you wouldn’t have found these in bookstores fifty years ago, they are more fluid than the old stand-bys. But as they become fixtures they quickly begin to seem like permanent categories;

3) Then there are the rotating displays and promotions around predictable events and occasions, such as Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day, Gardening and Graduation, Poetry Month and Beach Reading.

I’d propose a fourth category that seems underutilized: the instant, short-lived displays assembled on the fly based on news events.

Booksellers have such an advantage in responding to events and trends with their merchandise. The clothing and lifestyle retailers, chronically behind the cutting edge, must feel jealous.

A bookseller can read a celebrity obituary at 7:00am and have a nice display of relevant books up by 9:00. She can see a list of literature in translation awards on a website and throw together a lovely table featuring the winning titles. Some contemporary political tussles (health care anyone?) go on for so long that they will soon belong in category one above. But there are always books on the shelf to back up a display on the headline of the day.

I remember seeing photos of how they used to post issues of each days newspaper in the old Soviet Union. Moscow readers would queue up and crane their necks to study these poster-like bulletins. (Why? They only cost a kopeck.)

Similarly, I sometimes imagine dedicating a part of the front window in my dream bookstore to books drawn from the news of the day- a permanent display that would change every 24 hours based on what the media were exercised about and/or people were thinking about. (Of course I also imagine big crowds coming in to buy them. “Yes, I saw that front page Times story and come to think of it, I should know more about Greece. Or Fess Parker.”)

I guess this is on my mind because when I heard about the suicide epidemic at Cornell the other day, my first thought was “we have the perfect book on suicide!” I know, it sounds a little crass, but it really is the perfect book. And it’s an example of what I have in mind for my daily “in the news” bookstore display.

I immediately reminded the Cornell Store book buyer about Thomas Joiner’s Myths About Suicide, being published by Harvard this month. Of course he’s a pro so he’d already begun to think about how books could be brought to bear on the situation.

Every season there are titles that weren’t anticipated as major books that rise up out of circumstances and strike a chord. Ten years ago when the unpleasantness with the Taliban first commenced, Yale happened to have a small print run book called Taliban by Ahmed Rashid, one of the most knowledgeable journalists on earth. It went to number one on the New York Times list because booksellers said “we have a book on that!” and displayed it. (Shameless plug: a new edition appears this month)

Perhaps the strangest recent out of nowhere, media-driven book happening involves The Coming Insurrection, the short, incendiary tract from a French collective called “The Invisible Committee.”

Published by semiotext(e) last fall and distributed by MIT, the somewhat dense, theoretical, utopian manifesto was initially picked up by a few stores who do well with polemical texts by intellectual agitators. (You know who you are.) But suddenly Glenn Beck discovered it and pronounced it “the most evil book” he’s ever read. Every time the hoopla dies down a bit he brings it back out, waves it around on his show, and his minions pour into bookstores looking for it. It’s a somewhat surreal exercise trying to imagine what a Beck fan would actually make of the book. But hey, a sale is a sale.

Lots of imaginative booksellers are already doing this type of drive-by display thinking, and I smile whenever I see it. But I’d love to see more of it. Bookstores have always been the go-to source for serious readers looking for deep, big picture background. But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a slice of the public with the attention span of a gnat, and a media cycle measured in hours rather than days.

I would wager that any random daily newspaper would yield a dozen related display-worthy titles that simply have to be plucked from the shelves.

If I had a bookstore you could see them every morning in my window, right next to Pravda.

Books in series: smash Dewey Decimal thinking!

2010-03-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

One of the undeniable advantages internet book retailers enjoy over bricks and mortar stores is the ability to sort and categorize their inventories in seemingly infinite ways.

The presses I represent- to their credit- publish many books that can be considered inter-disciplinary. As an aid to booksellers, librarians and catalogers, we assign subject categories to every book, but these are not necessarily obvious and can even be contentious.

The new titles on our spring lists had many straightforward category designations like “art,” “science,” and “literature.” But we also had some combinations like these:

- Design/Urban Studies/Transportation
- Photography/Environment
- History of Science/Women’s Studies
- Education/Computer Science/Race Studies
- Literature/History of Science

That scholarship ranges across disciplines is a great thing, but here’s the problem: whereas an online bookseller can present a book simultaneously to the photography buff and the environmental activist, the storefront retailer has to shelve the book in a physical location. Thus, reps and booksellers spend a great deal of our time hashing out, book by book, the best place to shelve it.

This can be a useful, clarifying discussion. Sometimes a book genuinely has multiple possible audiences. But sometimes the more we talk about it, the more apparent it becomes that the message is muddled, and perhaps the multiple categories is a sign that the author doesn’t exactly have a reader in mind. There’s a big difference between having too many distinct potential customer profiles, and having one vague, jumbled one.

When expectations for a book run high, it’s always possible to place the book in multiple locations in the bookstore. But typically every book still requires a primary section assignment, and the default unit of commitment these days is one copy.

I once saw a buyer at the University of Minnesota Bookstore (now retired) who was so obsessed with subject categories that he would simply take as many copies of a title as it took to keep one on every relevant shelf. (Needless to say, he was chronically over-inventoried.)

One related problem of the multiple categories dilemma is the “books in series on slightly different subjects” conundrum.

Like many publishers, we have a great collection of books in series. These are not like the numbered Young Adult sequels, which are actually pretty easy to get into the hands of the right customers. Ours tend to cross subject categories, yet are united by a uniform editorial approach, or a unique physical design, or some other characteristic that extends one good book idea to another. (See below for some examples)

But bookstores face a conceptual challenge: do we maximize the design impact (and sales) by displaying them together, or do we protect the sanctity of the category by using Dewey decimal thinking and shelving them where they technically belong.

I’m familiar with several series now that have enough critical title mass to see the results of different approaches, and I have to say the boundary-busting, shelve them together approach seems to yield better results. It requires some willingness to look past the apparent subject matter, which is hard to do. But over the past year I’ve heard and seen more booksellers experiment with breaking out of category thinking.

Like so many seemingly new ideas in bookselling, this is actually an old one. I fondly recall the late Great Expectations Bookstore near the Northwestern campus in Evanston. Books there were shelved by publisher (!) Crazy as it sounds, the store looked great, and customers tended to develop a loyalty to certain areas of the store just as they do in places that sort by subject. (Plus, as proprietor Jeff Rice would tell you, it made pulling returns a heck of a lot easier)

I visit a couple stores where the travel section is arranged by publisher and series. I’m a big fan of this approach. We tried it for awhile in the store I once managed, but I think it was defeated by the hassle of explaining to a customer who asked for books on France that they are here, and here, and here. It’s a legitimate issue.

So maybe not the whole travel section. But the point is that books in series often look fantastic together, and they lose that impact when each one is spined, by author, across various store sections. There’s lots of evidence that people who pick up one will pick up another, but they won’t see them, or even realize it’s a series, when they are distributed across the store.

Just to cite a few examples, here are a half dozen of my favorite books in series from Harvard, MIT and Yale. Any brave booksellers willing to experiment with anti-Dewey marketing could start here.

The Loeb Classical Library

The granddaddy of all book series, the familiar little green (Greek) and red (Latin) volumes sell surprisingly well in stores that dedicate a section to them. They range across subjects- epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, oratory, religion, medicine and math- but it seems unnatural to split them up. Next year we’ll celebrate the centennial of this noble endeavor, so start thinking about section space now!

Wonders of the World

Classics scholar Mary Beard, who edits this wonderful series about the world’s key cultural and historical monuments, describes it this way:

I suppose there are three intentions. The first is that I want these books to open up culture and history, as well as dissent about culture and history, through the contested life stories of individual monuments and wonders – real or imaginary.

Number two – and these are not meant to be hierarchical – is quite a simple one, and it’s to show that bricks and mortar, or concrete and marble, are always more than that.

And I think the third intention is that you want to help people to enjoy looking at monuments, and at the complexity of monuments – and to see that the complexity and the arguments are what’s fun about this. Sometimes, when people write for what they think of as a popular market, they think that they should make it simple, whereas I think that what you should be doing is helping people to enjoy how complicated it all really is.

This is an excellent little series of small, elegantly designed hardcover books (though they’ll be released in paper beginning this season with The Parthenon) which straddle several potential readerships: history buffs, architects, well-endowed travelers. Where they’ve been treated individually and shelved in isolation, they’ve not done so well; where they’ve been displayed en masse, much better.

Documents of Contemporary Art

This lovely series, done by London’s Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, features stunningly beautiful anthologies by artists and writers addressing key subjects in contemporary visual culture from quirky perspectives. The roster of contributors is top-notch, the pieces are short and punchy, and the very titles in the series ( The Everyday, The Sublime, Chance) demonstrate how refreshing it can be to break out of conceptual categories. These books have lavish jacket art and hip design at an affordable price. They cry out for display treatment.

Boston Review

A couple years ago, MIT began distributing small, chapbook-like contemporary issues books for Boston Review magazine. These appealing little hardcover books- short, accessible, challenging conventional preconceptions- look great together but are completely lost when dispersed and consigned to their technically correct subject areas. More than any other series we publish, this one ranges across vast terrain, but the eighteen titles so far have a distinct approach to public discourse and look fantastic together.

Margellos World Republic of Letters

Literature in translation is on fire these days, and this bold series is dedicated to: works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers, canonical works of literature and philosophy needing new translations, as well as important contemporary authors whose work has not yet been translated into English. It’s designed to bring to the English-speaking world leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

This is the sort of publishing for the long haul that I’m really proud to represent and booksellers can be proud to sell. With six titles to date and more in the pipeline (Romain Gary’s zany Hocus Bogus, just published, has never been in English), these elegant volumes have already earned acclaim. The unique design element here is tactile- it’s subtle, but the trim size and heft of the volumes are as appealing as the excellent jacket illustrations.

If you’ve read this far, I’m a broken record by now. But they would look terrific shelved together.