Mary's Bookshop

Sunday Worker delivery, CP Bookstore 1936

My first job in a bookstore paid five dollars a day and got me an FBI file.

It was the summer of 1967 and I’d just finished my sophomore year at Riverside High School in Milwaukee.  I was smitten with radical politics, and had become obsessed with the anti-Vietnam war movement.   The more I studied it, the more I thought the war couldn’t be a one-off mistake on the part of an otherwise benevolent nation.  Nor, I came to learn, did the movement against it arise out of whole cloth.  Both were connected to a complicated historical timeline.   Imperialism had a history, and so did the opposition to it.

The peace and civil rights movements were on fire that summer, and there were already local counterculture institutions sprouting up.  Our local radical bookstore, called Rhubarb, was an ecumenical place that took all comers.  It was a one-stop for periodicals from every conceivable strain of Left activism, from Catholic Worker to Sparticist League.  It was a place to which students gravitated, and I should have too.  But I was seduced by another bookshop.

On a derelict stretch of West Juneau Avenue just north of downtown, a small storefront announced itself with quiet signage: Mary’s Bookshop.   It was a bizarrely innocuous-sounding name given the ambitious inventory.  This was the Communist Party bookstore.

I don’t remember how I discovered the place, but once I did I made regular visits beginning in the spring.  If I skipped gym class it gave me just enough time to bus down at lunch time, pick up a few Workers and whatever else they’d give me.   (I had a paper route but never any money.)  I took a perverse delight in flamboyantly reading the Worker in study hall, though in retrospect I doubt that anyone noticed or cared.

 

Usually, there were no other customers in the shop so I had the undivided attention of Fred Bassett Blair, the proprietor.  Fred was Wisconsin state chairman of the CP, son of a coal miner and former longshoreman.  He had run for governor and other offices, and been hounded out of jobs all over the Midwest.  He and his wife Mary (yes, that Mary) lived underground using assumed names for three years in the fifties.  That was one of the many addictive stories he told as I got to know him better.

Fifty-something, bald, a slight limp, Fred was a poet (The Ashes of Six Million Jews), a master story-teller but also a sly elicitor of information.  At sixteen, it was flattering to be asked so many questions about my own background and ideas by this veteran political warhorse.  Wearing suspenders and a blue denim work shirt, pockets bulging with pens and index cards, Fred seemed more a clever uncle than threat to national security.  He chewed tobacco compulsively and lobbed gobs of it into a spittoon behind the desk.

This tiny outpost of international communism hardly looked the part.  The lighting was bad, the wooden floors sloped and creaked, and dust covered the plants and books in the front windows.  A nasty sour odor pervaded the place (Mice? Spittoon?)  I sometimes wondered whether this was all a clever front, and that a hidden trap door would reveal a bright, efficient subterranean office staffed with busy communists organizing the revolution.

 

Yet this ramshackle little business was a magnet for harassment and animosity.  It was denounced in sworn testimony before congressional committees; rocks were heaved through the front windows; a pipe bomb was left in the doorway but didn’t go off.  Mary worried about Fred’s safety.  The idea that someone could walk into the store and shoot him was not far-fetched.  He kept a baseball bat for protection.

There were posted hours but he never kept to them.  On a wall just inside the door, he kept an array of faded taped notes to use when le temporarily left- “Back in 30 Minutes,” “Back in One Hour,” “Back in Ten Minutes.”  These bore no relation to the actual duration he was missing.  He’d walk to the Milwaukee Journal building to pick up the early afternoon edition of the paper, only to be waylaid by a seedy bar on State Street.  Several glasses of Rhine wine later, he’d be back in business.  And his stories would get even more animated.  The time the Nazis had a rally at the downtown Milwaukee auditorium in 1938 and the Communists broke it up and beat them back was a particular favorite, of his and mine.

One day at the end of July, Fred had a proposition for me: he and Mary would be doing their annual visit to "comrades in the north"  for two weeks, and if I’d be interested, they’d pay me to watch the store.  I jumped for joy.  “Playing store” was one of my all-time favorite childhood games.  And the chance to get even closer to the mysterious CPUSA was irresistible.

My mother had been telling me to get off my ass and get a job all summer.  I already had a morning paper route, but she didn’t like me lounging in the backyard all day with my comic books and Workers.  I could not tell my parents that I’d found a gig in the communist bookstore.  But the Wisconsin State Fair was running for the two weeks the Blair’s would be gone, and working in a pancake stand there proved to be a very handy lie.

Though it was my first time working in a bookstore, I was left with no real instructions.  When books came in, just put them on the shelf.  If a customer came in, write down what he bought and put the cash in a cigar box.  Any problems, three numbers to call.  He said there’s no need to be open all day, just a few hours late morning and early afternoon.  Regular hours on my watch, I said to myself.

Opening the door with my key on the first day was thrilling.  I wandered around, tidied up, and moved the spittoon to the back room.  

There were very few customers, a handful each day.  Sometimes people would come in and ask for Fred.  They’d leave ten dollars, or five.  No name, no explanation, “a donation for the movement.”  One day a creepy guy spent a long time browsing and left without saying a word.  Later I found swastika-laden flyers he’d stuck in some of the books.

 

My low point, customer-service wise, occurred when a neighborhood drunk came in and I couldn’t get him to leave.  He was borderline menacing, and I’d had no experience with managing the inebriated except for those in my own family.  I called the woman in the apartment upstairs to ask what to do- one of my emergency numbers- but she called the police, who came and escorted him out.  They knew him, and chuckled.  I was mortified.  What kind of communist could I hope to be if I called in the cops at the first sign of lumpen proletariat?

I had lots of time to read, and made friends with the books.  Much of the inventory came from the CP publishing houses- International Publishers, Progress, and Imported Publications.  Pamphlets and periodicals were nearly all CP productions.   But there were lots of books from other sources too, especially in history and literature.  With so much time on my hands, it was like having a two week reading holiday.  

I read African-American writers I’d barely heard of- Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston.  I read Communist writers like Mike Gold and John Reed.   I read Herbert Aptheker’s sweeping alternative history of the US, and Labor’s Untold Story, still one of the best celebrations of US worker militancy in print.

 

The day before the Blair’s were due back, I embarked on one final project.  The bland front window display seemed so out of step with the excitement I felt about the books inside.  It was as if they’d found the dozen least political and least interesting titles in the shop to feature.  As if books about Lincoln and Jefferson in the front window would fool anybody!

This I changed.  Soviet Life magazine, World Marxist Review, the Little Lenin Library- all of these took center stage in my surprise front window display.  Predictably, Fred was not amused, and the dreary old stand-bys quickly returned to share the spotlight with dying cacti.

I was reminded of Mary’s Bookshop this week when I had a conversation with a friend on the perennial subject of when and when not to carry a book.  Though it's not a question of political censorship, independent booksellers are now facing the a decision over whether to stock titles from so-called “Amazon Publishing,” an entity that hopes to drive a final nail in their coffins.  

It would be easier, in some ways, to have a bookshop that only stocks the books you want and of which you approve.  Mary’s Bookshop wouldn’t have wasted a minute agonizing over carrying a book that didn’t advance the cause.  But for general booksellers who aren’t (mainly) interested in changing the world, it’s a tricky decision.

The stubborn power of the ideas in books has also been on my mind as I’ve been immersed in Salman Rushdie’s beautiful memoir about living with the fatwa, Joseph Anton.  Though they weren't sentenced to death for reading and writing, plenty of Communists spent years in jail for thought crimes in the fifties.  How potent and dangerous books were and are.

The Milwaukee Public Museum has a popular exhibit called “the Streets of Old Milwaukee.”  You can stroll past an old butcher shop, a bakery, a drug store.  The re-creations are vivid.  In some ways, even in 1967, Mary’s Bookshop seemed like a cabinet of curiosities.  But in 2012 those books and ideas have been so thoroughly marginalized that I can imagine Mary’s Bookshop on those museum streets, complete with a stuffed Fred and his spittoon.

 

Contemporary Marxist publishing is alive here and there.  But Mid-twentieth century communist books and periodicals are best found today at institutions like the Tamiment Library and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which both have excellent collections.  And old comrades and their offspring seem to be selling off their political inheritance for a song on eBay.

But who knows?  If Marx is right- and I still think he was about a lot of things- the laws of history have a way of re-asserting themselves regardless of the prevailing ideology.  And I bet the commie bookstores of the future will be a lot more inviting.

my college bookstore r.i.p.

The other day I called on my friend Sandi Torkildson at Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison.  They’ve just moved into a gorgeous new space, proving that successful independent booksellers still know how to be nimble and to think big.  Sandi and her staff are re-inventing the iconic feminist bookshop as a general new and used trade store serving the downtown community.  (Without, she is quick to add, losing the concentration on feminist books.)

Would that another Madison icon just down the street, the University of Wisconsin Bookstore, could muster a scrap of such imagination.  A decade ago, the entire general trade book department was reduced to a tiny fraction of its former glory and moved to a pathetic corner room on the supplies floor.  The buyer- one of the smartest retail booksellers on the continent- was let go.  And last week I noticed that, like the punch line of a very bad joke, even this tiny book space has been colonized by cards and sidelines and assorted crap and the few remaining books are being crowded out.  Why not just give in and say you're a bookstore in name only?

This sequence of events is playing out in college bookstores across the continent, but the transformation of UW Madison into a zombie store is a personal heartbreak.  I spent a couple years pursuing a journalism grad degree at UW in the seventies.   While I can barely recall some of the classes, and the assigned books come dimly into focus only after some effort, I vividly recall the happy hours spent on the four huge floors of the University Bookstore.

The building was a shrine to knowledge.   The textbook department in the basement was massive, and relatively uninteresting.  The goal was to get out as quickly and cheaply as possible.  But the trade book department on two upper floors was inviting, expansive, and packed with books on every conceivable subject.  The store and the books were there to encourage elective, non-assigned reading.  The hope was that students would voluntarily expose themselves to ideas, and a stellar bookstore was the obvious way to efficiently facilitate this.  When groups of incoming freshmen with their parents in tow toured campus every August, the bookstore was showcased as a key space.  Access to it was part of what coming to university got you.

I spent hours and days in that store.  I stumbled upon books and subjects that have continued to fascinate me years later.  I made trips to the bank for $8 withdrawals from my meager savings account to buy books I couldn’t afford.  That bookstore taught me how to search out ideas in a way that actual classes often didn’t.  (With the exception of Mary Ann Yodelis Smith’s rigorous “Law of Mass Communication” course, which was the intellectual challenge of a lifetime.)  The Bookstore in fact functioned like an academic department in some ways, and was accorded a stature commensurate with that role.  So when I walk into the claustrophobic afterthought that now comprises the trade department, I get a little choked up.  And a little mad.

Why it’s all come to this is a subject too big for my blog and my brain, but it has to do with the shift toward the almighty market model as the sole valid measure of social worth.  The bean counters would surely be quick to point out that my beloved trade books were probably not carrying their weight on P&L statements for many years before space was reduced.  And they were probably not profitable in the seventies when they had miles of inventory.  

But what about mission?   Is it really possible that encouraging students to read outside of assigned texts is no longer a goal at universities?   Can administrators be so foolish as to assume the internet has replaced this resource?

The argument that “we’d like to have big bookstores but they’ve proved unsustainable” is unconvincing. What about all the very high ticket and debt-laden investments in sports?  Universities are big institutions.  Is every department expected to show profitability?  If too few students enroll in Literature courses is the English Department downsized and eliminated because “the market has spoken?”  (Sadly, this probably is sometimes the case.)  Bookstores are a different breed of retail, and college bookstores are even more different.  But it can be done.

Potentially, university bookstores have some exceptional competitive advantages: large spaces with cheap or no rent, access to endlessly desirable inventory, excellent booksellers and buyers, and a guaranteed audience of intellectually sophisticated students and faculty.  There’s a concentration of the greatest working minds in fields like economics and business on many campuses. Is it really impossible to summon the skill and imagination from within the university to make a viable bookstore work?  Mission!

The University of Wisconsin Bookstore may be a lost cause, but students there will have access to books via Room of One’s Own and Rainbow Bookstore Coop.  They can look to their lucky counterparts at University of Minnesota, where a wonderful university bookstore thrives, and south to the University of Chicago, where the one of a kind Seminary Coop Bookstore enters its 51^st year in new expanded space.  The question of why such a brilliant model of academic bookselling can survive and thrive in Chicago when so many other powerhouse universities have downsized their bookstores into glorified Seven Eleven's is mystifying.

I’m worried about the heretofore stellar McGill University Bookstore, which seems to be in a general books death spiral.  This was another encyclopedic trade department, a browser’s paradise.  Should it be eliminated the loss would be felt across Quebec, where they are the primary source for English language academic books.  If a store with the caliber of McGill goes down, maybe it’s too late for college bookstores.  The market has spoken and it wants toy and T-shirt shops.

But just when I’m feeling despondent I call on the University of Calgary Bookstore.  It’s a cheerful, well- stocked trade store, a throwback to the way college bookstores used to feel.  Though it has plenty of non-book product, just about every subject taught at the university is represented by a trade book section.  Displays and promotions make me feel like I’m in a real bookstore, with a clever nod to their market- 20% off on all classics in September, a university-supported gesture to get students reading classics recreationally.

I asked the excellent buyer how he manages to maintain a real trade bookstore when so many college stores are collapsing under pressure.  He said that the higher-ups just really support having a strong trade inventory because they think it’s important.  And that the clothes sell so well that they let the books take care of themselves.

This was a revelation.   Clothes and sweatshirts with better margin and faster turn than books is traditionally the rationale used to replace books with more clothes and sweatshirts.  (Or, for that matter, jewelry and souvenirs in museum shops.)  But here the same data were interpreted to cut book sales some slack.

In the admittedly thankless project of finding a way to make college bookselling sustainable, I’m rooting for the Calgary strategy.

Saving Indie Bookstores. That's all you've got?

When I see a headline like “How to Save an Indie Bookstore” I tend to drop everything and get excited.  

In this case, the Washington Post article described an extraordinary retreat convened by the new owner of Kepler’s legendary bookstore in Palo Alto.   Like dozens of great but troubled bookstores, Kepler’s is thinking big about how to re-invent itself.   But inviting eighty smart people from around the country to spend three days brainstorming a future for the store has to be the most ambitious and promising approach yet.

So why did the fruits of their deliberations- at least as reported by the Post- seem so dispiriting?  Conducted by consultants wielding their usual tools- magic markers, easel paper, and jargon (“confusion is functional!”)- the fourteen hours of discussion brought forth eight “foundational principles” upon which a reborn, successful independent bookstore can be built.  They are:

1. Be financially sustainable.

2. Have a clearly defined mission.

3. Be dedicated to community outreach.

4. Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events.

5. Support life-long learning and literary education.

6. Sell books in any form, on any platform.

7. Maintain a virtual presence, with technology fully integrated into the store.

            8. Provide a carefully curated selection of books

My initial reaction was that the order seems backward.  Surely a carefully crafted selection of books is the most important ingredient in a quality bookstore, not the end result.  And surely the end result of doing all the right things is financial sustainability, not the starting point.  If it were so easy to “be financially sustainable” I suspect some of the very smart booksellers who have gone dark in the past decade would have just tried that.

 

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the ordering of the principles.  So let’s say that the list is actually random.  And let’s further stipulate that a job I love depends on people figuring out an answer to the question of how to keep and grow independent bookselling.   I will even concede that they are all good ideas.

 

But my question remains: Is this the best we can do?  A list of bland nostrums and generalities that just about any book lover in the country could have generated with a little thought?

It’s a profoundly tough problem and most of the arguments for bookstores are of the cheerleading locavore variety- impassioned pleas to patronize your local shop lest it disappear.  (Here’s this week’s earnest example.)  These are well-meaning and true, and perhaps they are effective somewhere.  But I don’t think there are enough potential book buyers left to be convinced by this argument who haven’t been already.   A business plan built on hoping customers stick with you out of guilt, or because they just like the idea of a neighborhood bookstore, is not enough.

Two words that don't appear on the Kepler’s focus group list: authenticity and love.  Every bookstore I relish is stamped by both, and they aren’t things that can be imposed or conjured up. 

An authentic bookstore is a cool bookstore, regardless of its particular inventory slant or personality. 

Back in the eighties, I used to do a lot of camping trips.  My boyfriend preferred the wilderness, but if we were within fifty miles of a city I’d never been to I’d usually persuade him to spend a couple hours there.  Downtowns, an obvious starting point in an unfamiliar city, had already lost their interest as department stores and shops disappeared.  So where exactly to invest an afternoon was an urgent issue.

But I knew that if you could find the cool, local, independent bookstore, you would probably also stumble upon a cool and interesting neighborhood (meaning it had a pre-Starbucks coffee shop and stores selling quirky gadgets.)   I remember once looking up bookstores in the Cincinnati Yellow Pages, and guessing on the basis of the ads that Drew’s would be the cool shop, and indeed it was a fantastic store (alas, long gone) in a great neighborhood (Hyde Park.)

Being a “locus of cool” is definitely a tangible social asset, but it would look ridiculous on a bookstore survival to-do list.  (Number one: “Be cool!”)  

If I can say so without taking any credit for it, the Harry W Schwartz Bookshop, where I learned bookselling, was about the coolest spot in Milwaukee in the late eighties and early nineties.  Interesting out-of-towners would regularly drop by asking for recommendations on where to eat, where to hear music, which neighborhoods to visit, how to spend a couple free hours.  People moving to town would come in to ask us where the cool place to look for an apartment would be.  And visiting celebrities who had time to kill were drawn to the bookshop.  (There was something really intimate about selling poetry books to three of the Manhattan Transfer.)

Where do out of town hipsters go now that so many major cities don’t have a general indie bookstore to help with urban navigation?  I guess the local indie coffee shop has taken over that job, though baristas seem too busy to be an avant-garde information desk.  And there's google.  And perhaps my idealized authentically cool neighborhoods don’t even exist like they used to anyway.

 

I don’t have a plan for reinvigorating bookstores but I do know that the authentic ones have a better shot at keeping my business.  What’s authentic?  You know it when you see it.  But it probably didn't grow from a focus group check list.

Last week I was in Winnipeg, and as I passed through Canada Customs I had the usual initial round of questions from a dour, no-nonsense agent:  What’s your business in Canada?  Are you bringing anything in?  What’s your relationship with guns?

But when I told her that I was a book rep and would be seeing McNally Robinson the next day, a surprise smile cracked her bureaucratic mask and she gushed “I love that store!”

Somehow, the survival of independent bookselling depends on creating that moment, over and over and over.

everyday bookselling vexations in search of a lexicon

One of the brainstorms that I will never actually get around to executing is inventing a glossary of terms for common bookselling phenomena which have no shared vocabulary.

I’ve had this idea since my own bookselling days, but a recent piece by New Yorker economics columnist James Surowiecki, about the alleged qualifications gap between workers needed and workers available, brought it to mind again. The skills mismatch so loudly complained about by corporations is actually very limited in scope, he explains. Agreed. But his evidence? “When you look at the list of slots that businesses say are among the toughest to fill, you find jobs like sales rep and office support- hardly specialized occupations.”

Excuse me. I will concede that the excellent carpenter who built a lovely screen porch on our cabin last week would have an easier time stepping into my occupational shoes that I would into his. My porch would look like Lucy and Ethel’s barbecue. (Sorry, you will miss the reference if you are under 75). This reminds me too much of the attitude I sometimes hear from the well-meaning but uninformed, who think anyone could run a bookstore. “Hey, I love to read!” (Or publish a book worth reading without a publisher. But that’s another post.)

When it comes to anything to do with the book industry, from publishing to bookselling, there’s an elaborate, arcane, and essentially non-transferable set of skills and wisdom that many of us have absorbed over the years. I know plenty of very smart book people of a certain age who will readily admit that one reason they will never do anything else is that they couldn’t. What they know doesn’t travel. Mastering 500 publisher isbn prefixes and 500 irrational discount schedules is a vital skill for bookstore efficiency. In the rest of the world, not so much.

But back to the glossary. I was calling on a bookseller last week who made reference to “orphans.” That term probably has all kinds of appropriated meanings. But in a bookselling context, I hadn’t heard it since David Schwartz taught me that it refers to the stray leftover remainders that you never can seem to get rid of. Nine out of ten copies in your stack sell, but that last one might as well be a collection of turkey recipes the day after Thanksgiving.

Attend any national or regional meeting of booksellers, or eavesdrop on their conversation, and you’ll hear a fluid exchange of professional banter. If someone says “the publisher was OS indef so I put it on wholesaler TBO, and it eventually came after cascading three times,” everyone will get it. But in addition to the well-trodden specialized book jargon we have all mastered, there are lots of familiar phenomena- about which only a bookseller would care- that occur frequently enough in the bookstore that it seems to me they have earned descriptors of their own. A few examples:

1. Books that are too wide and fall off the shelf when spined, or too tall so they have to be shelved sideways, meaning the only way to shelve them is to face them out. Yet they don’t really merit faceout treatment. Name that dilemma.

2. Books of which you have one copy and it must be shelved somewhere specific.  Yet the title actually falls into two, three or more subject categories.  Some publishers call this “interdisciplinary,” and think it’s a plus. Perhaps they haven’t worked in a bookstore  (I used to have a buyer who would order one copy for each conceivable category. Those days are long gone.)

3. Books which fall into no recognizable subject category whatever.

4. When a section bulges to bursting in one part of the alphabet- say P through T- but is loose and floppy in another- say H through L- what’s that called?

5. The sex books that migrate all over the store because a customer would rather appear to be browsing, say, foreign languages, than kinky erotica. Name that rover!

6. The stand-alone end cap: I’ve heard it called a widow. Can I get a second? .

7. When you’re looking for a book for a customer and you can’t see it because it’s on display face-out.

8. What shall we call the last straggler books on the “to be shelved” cart that every bookseller leaves, hoping someone else will do it? (I will bet many of them fit into category three above.)

9. A customer asks for a book which hadn’t sold in 18 months and which you returned yesterday. This item eligible in several categories: what to call the book, what to call the customer, what to call your stifled, exasperated reaction?

10. The biggest ill-conceived buy of the holiday season deserves a name of its own, no?

11. And how about the biggest truly under the radar holiday success story?

12. What about the title you just know you will be returning even as you tell the rep you’ll take one? And when you miraculously sell it?

13. A new, publicity-driven title is ordered in one copy and it sells immediately. It is re-ordered and re-ordered for a couple weeks. But at some point the demand dries up. The copy you sold last week was in fact the last you would sell. What to call the superfluous copy you replaced it with? (“Return” is not eligible.)

14. The hardcover book that lands in February, is dead by May, is returned in July, and mysteriously comes back to life in October when an irate customer is appalled that you don’t have it.

15. Thinking an author is a steady seller and ordering accordingly, only to actually check one day and find that you were confusing “shelving” with “selling.” Having a shelf full of Joyce Carol Oates doesn’t necessarily mean her sales are robust.

16. You get a special order and put it together with four other backlist books you probably wouldn’t have needed or wanted; those four come but the special doesn’t. This is called…..? (Watch your language!)

17. To help you sell a fancy art book, the publisher helpfully supplies an extra so that customers can peruse and mangle. This already has a good term: “display copy.” But what to call the copy you gamely ordered for stock that did NOT come with an extra after it has been abused into unsalable and unreturnable condition by browsers?

18. The oblivious group of patrons (if that’s the right term when they don’t buy anything) who use the store as a showroom, whipping out their devices to scan and price check competitor’s right under your nose. The ones who use staff to help track down and identify what they want before shopping elsewhere are especially in need of a name.

19. The bookseller skips a new title. Let’s even say the rep agreed it wasn’t a good match. Later, a customer special orders and buys the book. By accident or design, it lands on a to-be-ordered list and gets restocked. It goes on to become a steady seller. It’s as if the customer directly intervened in the process to seed the store inventory. What to call this specimen of book, and the phenomenon?

20.  Wild card.  Any experienced bookseller could think of more examples. Perhaps, in the spirit of DARE, the Dictionary of American Regional English, there could be local accents and slang in our new lexicon. And remember, we are book people so we are polite. Suggestions welcome!

the summer joys of bookstores

Last week I was asked to be on a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) in Chicago. This happened once before, twenty years ago, when AAUP was in a masochistic mood and invited opinionated booksellers to scold them about what they are doing wrong. Our bill of indictment then seems pretty innocuous: print ISBN’s on the books; improve your discount schedule; do something about freight costs.

Mission (mainly) accomplished on all three of those fronts. But the stakes at this year’s panel were much bigger, though somewhat masked by a deceptively gauzy title: “The Changing Bookstore Landscape.” No kidding!

It was a treat to share a podium with four of the smartest minds in contemporary bookselling. These were Bruce Miller, who represents a cornucopia of university presses to booksellers across the Midwest (and who is single-handedly leading the charge to save the University of Missouri Press); Cathy Schornstein, veteran Midwest Field Rep for HarperCollins, and someone who knows bookselling and repping inside out; Linda Bubon, of Women & Children First in Chicago, who somehow didn’t get the memo that feminist bookstores are dead and has transformed her wonderful neighborhood shop into a beloved community institution; and Jack Cella, manager of the legendary Seminary Coop Bookstores, who has ignored many such memos about the supposed hopelessness of academic bookselling, and will be moving the store into expanded quarters in Hyde Park this fall.

 I’d scoped out the space during the previous panel presentation. This was on something called “Meta Data.” The room was packed and everyone leaned forward wearing looks that might have been eagerness to learn or might have been desperation. It reminded me of going to ancient ABA panels on the rise of the CD-ROM, the feeling of “this is coming and we’d better know about it.”

The difference now is that “this”- the digital, the E, the Meta- really is coming, indeed its already crashed through the door. As I scanned the titles and affiliations beside the names of conference attendees, there were many incomprehensible job descriptions that all seemed to have to do with transforming books into data. I wondered who would come to a panel about yesterday, i.e. bookstores. Yet the room was packed and attentive. Granted, the first question was “what about E-books?”

 But the unifying theme of the presentations, which were optimistic without being sugar-coated, was that physical bookstores selling physical books are here to stay. Indeed, the great digital turn may even end up being a boon to booksellers. And that bookstores need university presses.

There were many interesting comments and ideas presented. But my favorite, which cropped up in a variety of ways, was the idea of the bookstore as a locus of discovery. Online search is an incredibly useful tool for finding what you think you want. But the bookstore remains the place to find what you didn’t know you wanted.

 I had the luck to follow up all this hard thinking in Chicago with a visit to several excellent bookstores during a round of sales calls in St Louis and Iowa City. I wish there had been a way to simply put a typical buying session between a university press rep and an experienced indie bookseller up on that stage. It might have been a revelation to anyone doubting the continued viability of traditional bookselling. But when my meetings were finished and I got to put on my customer hat for an hour, the idea of the bookstore as a place for random book revelation really hit home.

At Left Bank Books, I stumbled upon a Penguin Classics edition of Ernest Poole’s The Harbor, “the 1915 socialist masterpiece by the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.” I’d dimly heard of him. It looks fantastic. Thanks to Kris Kleindienst for stocking it!

Subterranean Books in University City is one of my favorite kinds of stores- small, selective, and every title seems hand-picked. Here I saw and instantly coveted a resurrected classic called High Street. First published in 1938, it’s a quirky, young adultish illustrated survey of the shops on a typical British High Street by architectural historian J. M. Richards. The plates were destroyed in the London blitz and it’s been unavailable for decades. This is right up my friend Daniel Goldin’s alley but it may be a keeper. Thank you Subterranean!

 At Prairie Lights in Iowa City, where it’s nearly impossible to get out of the store without an armload of surprises, Paul Ingram made sure I paid attention to Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, the new story collection by Etgar Keret. He knows his customer’s reading tastes and he knows mine, and though I may have eventually crossed paths with Keret I was glad to do it here.

 On to Iowa Book around the corner, where Matt Lage curates the finest remainder selection west of the Mississippi. Remainders get a bad rap, and for some good reasons. They are inevitably monuments to failure. But the fact is that there are lots of deserving books that get a third lease on life on the bargain table. My haul from Matt: Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (this is a book I’d almost bought when it came out, and almost bought again in paper, but really couldn’t say no to a third time at 6.98); Jacques Godbout’s Québécois classic Le Couteau sur la table, which I can add to my growing collection of Canadian novels in French that I never actually finish; and The Great Iowa Touring Book: 27 Spectacular Auto Trips. It’s a beautiful state. Who can resist it at 4.98?

Finally, the bricks and mortar general used bookstore is the last to get any love in the book industry ecosystem. Yet when you step into one like Murphy-Brookfield in Iowa City (especially when the thermometer reads 106 outside) it’s impossible to deny that we need them. I struck serendipitous gold there in two ways. First, I found an early novel by one of my new favorite authors, South African Damon Galgut. Second, I found a treasure trove of old Virago Classics. This popular series of mainly unheralded British women novelists was an eighties phenomenon. They’ve been superseded by the wonderful Persephone Press line from the UK, which- scandal! - do not have a US distributor.

The Viragos are as addictive as candy, and to leave Iowa City with Winifred Holtby, Emily Holmes Coleman, Lettice Cooper, Pamela Frankau, E. Arnot Robertson and Laura Talbot was as pleasant a book surprise as I could have ever anticipated.

I’m glad that the university presses are paying attention and doing what they need to do to adapt to the demands of the digital future. And I hope that everyone who works for a university press drops by an actual bookstore regularly to remember why we’re doing it all in the first place.

2011 best of's

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 it would 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 and loved) in 2011

1.            The Color of Rain/ William Brittelle

2.            Dignified Man/ Songbird Sing

3.            I Never Learnt to Share/ James Blake

4.            Powa/ Tune-Yards

5.            Scandal at the Parkade/ Owen Pallett

6.            Stony & Cory/ Kid Creole & the Coconuts

7.            José Larralde-Quimey Neuquén/ Chancha via Circuito

8.            Excuse me baby/ Dizzy K. Falola

9.            Voice/ Ani DiFranco

10.          One Day we will Pay/ Coati Mundi

unpack your library!

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

Like foodies collecting cookbooks, bibliophiles have always 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, conceived by 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 thirteen contemporary writers is completely addictive.  It’s without question the affordable gift book of the year for the book crazed.

What makes UML so appealing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                To what extent should and can a personal book collection be private?

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

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

                Deciding what to keep and what to shed- how?

                What are your rules for lending books?

                What are the shelves made of and where did you get them?

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

                What will your library look like in ten years?

Perhaps these are not the most urgent social questions for the end of 2011, but as a reader and a book hoarder I loved 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 living rooms at IKEA without studying the spines of the book props on the shelves.  Interestingly, they use real books!  Alas, they are in Swedish.

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