value added

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)