2010 Lists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Movies

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

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


Music

The ten tunes in most frequent personal rotation in 2010.

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

Ten Harvard/MIT/Yale 2010 favorites

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

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

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



The Naïve & the Sentimental Novelist
Orhan Pamuk (Harvard)

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


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

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


Age of Fracture
Daniel T. Rodgers (Harvard)

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


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

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


Designing Media
Bill Moggridge (MIT)

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



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

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


A Little Book of Language
David Crystal (Yale)

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


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

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


Houdini: Art and Magic
Brooke Kamin Rapaport (Yale)

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


Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
Isabel Schulz (Yale)

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


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

the book of the year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

know your grapes

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

another round of sales conferences finished: 25 tips for reps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Stimpson, book traveler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Fall 2010 Biography Gems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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