who needs editors? writers.

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

Case in point: the October 17 New York Times front page celebration 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 of the sales and distribution pie, the company has brought in a couple publishing veterans to acquire a branded line of fiction and nonfiction, and to, as the Times put it, “gnaw away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.”

Whether the book industry is in desperate need of more concentration in the hands of one corporate giant is worth considering, but not today.  What caught my eye and dropped 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 now are the writer and the reader.”

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

Perhaps because I’ve been able to observe the process that connects the writer and the reader at close hand for a decade at three stellar academic presses, my standards are a bit high.  But in my experience, a text which travels through the time-consuming labyrinth of editors, copy editors, readers, syndics, designers, production people, lawyers, marketing experts, social media experts, sales departments and booksellers is in every case a better text 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 checks along the way keep many books from ever getting published.  Too bad.  The chronically rejected author now has unprecedented options to 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 couple centuries.   

There’s nothing so depressing, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious, as reading the pages of ads for vanity presses in reputable book media like The New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books.  Even with just a couple sentences of boilerplate about each title- small samples, presumably, of the author's style- the contrast between these blasts of self-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 and abolishing gatekeepers will simply drag the book industry toward a more sophisticated form of vanity publishing. 

 

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

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

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own…You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did." 

To this I would add:  nobody- or precious 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 while you wrote, perhaps someone even gave you ideas.  And once an editor recognized quality and meaning in your work, and persuaded her house to take a chance on you, a complicated publishing apparatus improved on your creation.

That’s not always how it works.  And one solution might be more publishers, not fewer.  But as a reader, I’ll continue to buy books that have been brought to market by experienced professionals with a publishing legacy, and will be wary of books that make a virtue out of scorning them.

Canadian v. US bookselling: ten generalizations

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

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

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

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

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

[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.