Shelf Awareness Newsletter: Column Archives

When a Book & the World Intersect

Robert Gray — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:38:44 +0000

Attila Ambrus was released Tuesday after 12 years in a Hungarian prison. He is now 44 years old. That may not seem like breaking news in the publishing industry, but it is to this former bookseller. Attila is more than just a character in a book I read seven years ago.

For the past week, I've been communicating with Julian Rubinstein, author of Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives and Broken Hearts (Little, Brown, 2005). He traveled to Hungary for the release of his friend and the subject of his book.

Yesterday, Rubinstein observed that Attila "has been part of my life for 13 years now, so this is all still sinking in for me, has been quite intense, still only two days since his release.... I met Attila in a private apartment of a friend last night. Only the few people closest to him were there. He hadn’t spoken to any media yet (though erroneous reports about him are all over the news.) There’s no easy way to describe what it’s like to be so close to someone who's a piece of living history and who's also so vulnerable. He was always an anachronism. He has the 'betyar' (bandit) honesty and a purity that was still there last night. Those of us who care about him are just hoping right now that he finds a way to make a life for himself."

There's the man, and then there is Rubinstein's book, which is how I met Attila. We all have that personal list of books we feel like we "discovered"; books we recommend to people who later come back and say, "I never would have found that anywhere else." Then it becomes their discovery.

When I was a bookseller, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber was one of those titles I could sell to almost anyone--men, women, readers, nonreaders, even people who claimed they didn't like nonfiction. Sometimes I found myself saying it "reads like a novel" (a meaningless, if effective, handselling point if ever there was one), though had this book been a novel, the author would probably have been advised to tone down its larger-than-life details.

A Transylvania-born Hungarian, Attila defected from Romania to Hungary in 1988. He struggled initially to find his way in Budapest, but evolved over time from a poverty-stricken refugee who owned only the clothes on his back to a janitor/Zamboni driver for a hockey team, a building superintendent, a pelt smuggler, a willing--if inept--professional goalie (he once gave up 88 goals in six games) and, ultimately, one of Budapest's most successful bank robbers and a modern-day legend.

Because of his penchant for drinking whiskey before making his "unorthodox requests for withdrawal," he was dubbed the Viszkis Rabló (Whiskey Robber) by the host of the TV show Kriminális, who also noted that Attila robbed institutions by "asking for the money--because that's how he does it: he asks."

Given the turbulent state of the country's political structure and economy at the time, Attila's reputation was burnished by generally good publicity. An editorial in the Hungarian daily Magyar Hírlap, for example, suggested Attila was attacking an unjust system: "He didn't rob a bank. He just performed a peculiar redistribution of the wealth, which differed from the elites only in its method."

In an e-mail last week, Rubinstein noted that "Attila's crime spree so obviously struck a chord with people disillusioned about the corruption in the political and banking system in nascent capitalist Hungary. Attila's robberies of state-owned banks as his choice target drove this point home."

You can learn more about Attila's backstory on Rubinstein's dedicated website, which includes a 2007 prison interview and an audio clip of Eric Bogosian and Gary Shteyngart performing a scene from the book.

But this is neither a book review nor a handselling seminar. This is simply a moment to consider the ripple effect a book can have on one reader; to reflect on the manner in which words and the world intersect; to realize that the fascinating and entertaining Attila Ambrus in Ballad of the Whiskey Robber is also an ex-convict facing the harsh realities of a country quite unlike the one he knew before he went to prison.

Although I only know Attila through Rubinstein's book, this week I do feel a small link to his world and it is more than a reader's connection. So tonight, for what it's worth, I'm raising a glass to toast the Whiskey Robber and his newfound, complicated freedom.--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1658.

Vonnegut vs. Exley in Literary Super Bowl XLVI

Robert Gray — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:01:28 +0000

Last week, poet and City Lights bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood firmly, if fruitlessly, behind his San Francisco 49ers to win the NFC championship, telling the New York Times: "I think they’ll beat the Giants easily, no problem. Their players are smarter and faster. Their coach is smarter. Of course, what do I know? I’m no expert on football."

The Awl countered Ferlinghetti with some deft literary prognosticating of its own, correctly picking the Giants over the 49ers, as well as the New England Patriots over the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC championship, while employing the poetic forms villanelle and sestina respectively to enhance the selections:

The wind at Candlestick will blow in from the shore
If the passing games are off that might be the reason.
But does Eli Manning have more miracles in store?

As it turned out, Eli did have more miracles, and just three days after the 103rd birthday of Baltimore's ill-favored favorite son Edgar Allan Poe, the Ravens--named for the ominous "ebony bird" in his classic poem--saw their season fall from the sky. Quoth the Patriots (I cannot resist this temptation), "Nevermore."

Even the tabloids have been in a literary mood. Last Friday, the New York Daily News offered a pre-game book recommendation under the headline: "If the Giants beat the 49ers, what will you read to celebrate?"

As a football literary equivalent to baseball's The Natural by Bernard Malamud, the News suggested Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, in which he wrote:

Why did football bring me so to life. I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it; I chose to believe that it was not unlike the jobs which all men, in some sunnier past, had been called upon to do. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of something known, scarcely remembered, elusive as integrity--perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.

Would Exley even recognize the game and business of professional football now? A Fan's Notes was published in 1968. The first Super Bowl, a relatively modest affair played in 1967, was the only one not to sell out, literally if not figuratively.

Since the Giants and Patriots are now headed to Indianapolis for Super Bowl Sunday on February 5, perhaps this year's literary gridiron spokesperson should be the late Kurt Vonnegut, an Indianapolis native. A Washington Post preview of the Super Bowl city highlighted its year-old, "small but fascinating for literary lovers," Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, and noted that a "giant mural of Vonnegut looms over the 300 block of Massachusetts Avenue."

My own intensive research leads me to believe he might back New England. In Slapstick, he wrote: "Mother and I surely did not oppose Eliza and her lawyer in any way, so she easily regained control of her wealth. And nearly the first thing she did was to buy half-interest in the New England Patriots professional football team."

And then there's evidence he rooted against the Giants some years ago. In Keeping Literary Company: Working With Writers Since the Sixties, Jerome Klinkowitz recalls visiting the author at his Manhattan apartment during a Giants-Minnesota Vikings playoff game: "And so my first hour with Kurt Vonnegut was spent in the shared presence of America's most popular culture of the moment, a highly touted football game on TV with the season's most expensive commercials washing over us every ten or twelve minutes."

Klinkowitz noted that as Vonnegut analyzed the game, CBS's camera angles and the timing of commercial breaks, it "was interesting to see Kurt both within his culture and rising above it to make structural comments on how it worked. Here was a writer of all those stories for Colliers' and the Post, plus we were seeing the graduate-trained anthropologist watching humankind at play and the scientist adept at chemistry, biology, and mechanical engineering, fascinated with the tinkering behind how things worked."

A Midwesterner at heart, Vonnegut was pleased to see the Vikings beat the Giants that day. So perhaps the literary lines can now be drawn for Super Bowl XLVI: Exley's Giants against Vonnegut's Patriots. Ladies and gentlemen, place your fictional bets.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1651.

Can a Book Be Your Friend?

Robert Gray — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:32:20 +0000

Yes.

You might think the inspiration for this week's column comes from my being stuck in single-digit Northeastern temperatures while all the cool kids are partying at ABA's Winter Institute in New Orleans. Am I just retreating behind a flimsy veil of literary references for solace?

Yes.

I mean... No. My interest in the books-as-friends conundrum was actually prompted by a couple of factors, one being Rick Gekoski's piece in the Guardian earlier this week under the provocative headline "Some of My Worst Friends Are Books."

While acknowledging that authors have traditionally been granted the right to be "inhabited by persons and voices," Gekoski considered the comparable experience among readers, who are also "invaded by voices.... It is a heady relationship, and can make our everyday ones seem pale and listless. It is no wonder that people claim that reading provides us with the best of friends. Dickens refers to 'the friendships we form with books,' while Charles Lamb regarded books as 'the best company.' "

Gekoski noted that "an admired writer is a peculiar but superior form of 'friend.' There are a number of senses of the term in which this seems true: someone you can turn to; someone who has wisdom to transmit; who has been a constant and trusted presence; who can share similar experiences with us; who can give without asking anything in return."

That lack of "return" proved a bit problematic for Gekoski, who conceded that a book "is not company. We engage with it, argue with it, carry it around in our pockets and minds, are haunted by memories of it for years. But it doesn't argue back, doesn't engage, never inquires how our day has been, gives only what it wishes. Books are selfish. Everything, every word, is on their terms. That's what I like about them."

But book friendships have their own particular layers of complexity, as well as more give and take than he suggests. My best book friends do argue back (often when I need their scolding the least); they do engage; and I really don't want them to inquire how my day has been. If a book "gives only what it wishes," then why do we find hidden--even unintended--meanings within the pages?

Another contributor to my interest in book friendship is The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer's recently published memoir exploring his long "friendship" (I don't know what else to call it, except perhaps psychological kinship) with Graham Greene's work and life.

For Iyer, the "return" is both tangible and spectral: "Walking through a book by an author long dead is not a comforting experience; I began to feel I was a compound ghost that someone else had dreamed up, and his novels were my unwritten autobiography."

He accepts the oddness of this one-way friendship between writer and reader, noting the irony that "the man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they've met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he's read, even if he's never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer, to some other creature's voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day."

The bookcase near my desk shelters a few of my best book friends, some of whom I've known for more than four decades. They ask little of me, but give much in return. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," a small leather-bound edition of Emerson's Essays counsels sharply, as is its way. "I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.... I will receive from them not what they have but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them."

Can a book be your friend? Absolutely, though I'll concede that a book will never buy you a beer in New Orleans during WI7 and talk for hours about... books.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1646.

Poetry, Community & William Stafford's Birthday

Robert Gray — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:48:57 +0000

Making these word things to
step on across the world, I
could call them snowshoes.

It has been a snowless winter here in upstate New York, but this morning six inches cover the ground and big flakes are falling as I consider the opening lines of "Report from a Far Place" by the late William Stafford, whose birthday is next Tuesday.

Stafford has, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, become my winter poet. There's a good reason why a weathered copy of The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998) is now open on my desk. I can thank Tom Lavoie--formerly with the University of Arkansas Press (now retired)--for the inspiration to take this fine collection down from the shelf and reread it. Last week, he told me about the William Stafford Birthday Commemorative Readings series, held each January and sponsored by the Friends of William Stafford, which is based in Oregon, where the poet lived for many years.

"He was well loved. And now the whole state celebrates with Stafford readings," Lavoie noted. "As a recent resident of Portland and a fan of poetry, I was mighty impressed with how the whole state celebrates the birthday of 'its' poet, a long-time teacher at Lewis and Clark College. Commemorative readings and events take place at more than 60 venues, making January one big Stafford poetry fest."

Stafford was born January 17, 1914, and died in 1993. His annual "birthday parties" are now held throughout Oregon and Washington; in California, Nevada, Ohio, New Jersey, Vermont, New York City; and overseas in Glasgow, Scotland, and Sapporo, Japan. The events take place in libraries, bookstores, art galleries, college campuses, a national park, a hospital and even a prison. Local poets and organizers create specific programs, and often audience members are encouraged to share their favorite Stafford poems or anecdotes. More than 225 poets, musicians and speakers will participate.

Paulann Petersen, FWS board member and Oregon's current poet laureate, has been "organizing these events on a large scale for 12 years. 15 years ago, I held one at a public library in the town where I taught high school. The next year, I did the same. The year after that I hosted two events, and both were so crowded (one was SRO to the point that people were literally standing outside in January's cold, trying to hear!), I realized there should be more of these. Year by year, the events have grown in number. Year by year more states have hosted events. For the past few years, we've had international events on the roster. Essentially they've grown in number because I've asked people I know or meet if they're interested in hosting one. Bill has fans everywhere. Sometimes people contact me with an interest to host one."

Village Books, Bellingham, Wash., will have a Stafford event next week, as it has for the past few years. "Because of Bellingham's strong poetry community, and our store's relationship with many local poets, we are able to host great events like these, and bring in good-sized audiences to our store," said events coordinator Christina Claassen. "William Stafford's work is important, not only because of his strong, beautiful language and messages, but because of its connection to the region. He may be best known as Oregon's poet laureate, but his influence in Washington's literary community is just as strong. We are honored to continue celebrating his work at our store."

What is it about Stafford's poetry that draws such enthusiastic and widespread response? "Each of Bill's poems is an invitation, an invitation so hospitable and inclusive it seems to turn the schoolish world of reading and writing poetry upside down," Petersen observed. "Here is a voice that invites us to do our own adventuring in literature. Here is a voice that invites us into '...rooms in a life, apart from others, rich / with whatever happens....' This is a voice of accessibility, telling us that poems can be as near as the very center of our lives. Poetry isn't the domain of the select, the elect. Poetry is, as William Stafford assures us, the domain of anyone willing to listen, anyone willing to watch for all that the wide world sends swirling our way."

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

Petersen called Stafford "a mentor. From him I learn compassion, wisdom, the exhilaration of attentiveness. From him I learn to be more of the person I'd like to be.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1642.

Refuge & Prospect in 2012

Robert Gray — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:55:49 +0000

Q: Does Russo's sell eReaders?
A: No, we'll let the other guys sell you the machine. Our expertise is books, so come to us for great e-book selections, prices and recommendations.

This little q&a appeared in an e-newsletter from Russo's Books, Bakersfield, Calif., last week. I bought the e-book edition of Arguably by Christopher Hitchens from them a couple of days ago. That seems to be how it works for me now. I purchased John Berger's Bento's Sketchbook from Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., last month after receiving an e-mail notice about something else entirely. I wanted the book, and there they virtually were.

"People hold books in a special way--like they hold nothing else," Berger writes. "They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner." I don't hold my e-reader that special way; it's just a tool, maybe even a toy. My home is engulfed in traditional books, which I do handle with care. There's room for both. All part of the adaptation process.

Many of the communications from indies that hit my inbox during this holiday season were inviting their communities to buy e-books for new devices (and old, of course); to explore the new IndieBound Reader app; or to take advantage of e-knowledgeable booksellers on the sales floor as well as in special "get to know your e-reader" sessions hosted by the stores.

Independent booksellers are in the e-game now, exploring the potential of, and finding their place in, this evolving digital book landscape just as they have faced every other challenge that has come their way over the decades.

Maybe "landscape" is the right way to think about it after all. In The Experience of Landscape (1975), Jay Appleton introduced his Prospect-Refuge theory, seen through the lens of our oldest instincts for survival as applied to our aesthetic experience of landscape.

In the prehistoric sense of the term, when we were in caves our survival depended upon how far we were willing to venture out on the open savannah to hunt and gather. It was all about balance. Stay in the cave too long and you died. Go too far away from it and you were prey. The survivors (our great-grandparents to the nth power) found the right balance between the two and eventually became, among other things, landscape architects and booksellers.

A bookstore traditionally provides the temporary refuge of quiet and a cozy space. It offers limitless prospect within the pages of books on the shelves. But I'm intrigued by another way in which Prospect-Refuge theory can be applied to the book trade. The best indie booksellers--the ones who fended off any number of predators on the retail savannah--have always been willing to venture a little farther from their refuge to scout the terrain for opportunities to survive... and to evolve.

Consider a digital ancestor of e-books. During the mid-1990s, Voyager introduced a collection of interactive multimedia CD-ROM products, ranging widely from The Complete Maus and Poetry in Motion to Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel and The Residents: Freak Show. I was reminded of these during the holidays when I happened to hear Schubert's "Trout Quintet" on the radio. One of the first Voyager discs I tried was an interactive version of this piece.

At the bookstore where I was working then, we carried a full display of Voyager products near the POS counter, as well as a demo computer to showcase them. We were booksellers, but some of us also became CD-ROM handsellers. I don't recall how many we sold, but having them on the sales floor sent a message to our customers that the bookshop was as intrigued by prospect as it was by refuge.

That was at least 15 years ago and the basic rule hasn't changed. The cave feels safe, but we also know we must explore the digital savannah, where some of the fiercest retail predators are roaming about. The best indies are not prey, however; they still look ahead more often than they glance furtively over their shoulders.

"At times, it can feel as if the whole planet is joyriding in somebody else's Porsche, at ninety miles per hour, around blind curves," Pico Iyer wrote in his book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. That's another e-book I bought last year. It was published in 2000, which now makes his message ancestral rather than dystopian.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1637.

Building the Perfect Bookmas Tree

Robert Gray — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:20:47 +0000

Books and trees; trees and books. You can have the oddest thoughts when you find yourself standing in the rain on a chilly December evening in Manhattan, alternately watching skaters tumble to the brilliant ice of Rockefeller Center's rink and studying a monumental Norway Spruce with its "30,000 environmentally friendly LED lights on five miles of wire."

I was in just such a position a couple of weeks ago, and for some reason I thought about the many Book Christmas Trees I'd noticed this year. They aren't a new idea (see a few incarnations here), but 2011 seems to have been unofficially designated the Year of the Bookmas Tree, with examples popping up everywhere I turn, including, naturally, bookstores (Murder By the Book, Houston, Tex.), libraries (West Virginia Library Commission) and publishers (Atria Books). GalleyCat offered a virtual "Book Christmas Tree Farm" slide show tour.

We don't usually have a tree in our house, but I did consider making a Bookmas Tree for us. The best I could come up with during some outdoor beta testing, however, was a minimalist, hybrid version I dubbed "A Book & a Nook Tree," inspired no doubt by Charlie Brown's classic underachieving nevergreen.

Then "what to my wondering eyes should appear" in my e-mail inbox but the vision of a 9.5-foot Bookmas Tree that currently occupies the four-story atrium of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was constructed using pre-1956 National Union Catalog volumes, "rarely used reference books [that] made an ideal book tree, with their evergreen covers and gold lettering on the spine," according to the library.

Conceived by librarian Erin Fisher, the project was executed by Alden Kamaunu, manager of the center's building operations, and library technician Larry Smith. They created two prototypes before coming up with a workable final design, which took three hours and 348 books to construct (You can watch a Flickr version of that process here).

The base of the tree was made of 10 books placed in a circle, and as the tree "grew," the number of books used diminished to a single volume at the top. "It had to be perfect," Kamaunu said. "It may look simple enough, but most book trees look like pyramids. We wanted ours to look like a real tree. There was a lot of trial and error." Although it has not been weighed, he estimated the book tree would hit the scales at more than 400 pounds.

That's Chase Duhon, a junior majoring in biology, standing in front of the Knowledge Center's Bookmas Tree, which is topped by an unusual, if apt, combo of the school's mascot Wolfie--in a tiny Santa Claus hat--and a Hawaiian-themed decoration. They earned this place of honor because the Nevada Wolf Pack football team will play Southern Miss in the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl game on Christmas Eve (and Kamaunu is from Hawaii).

Angela Bakker, the university's communications and marketing specialist, said there have been plenty of "Wow, that’s awesome!" comments from visitors to the Knowledge Center, and many people have posed for pictures in front of it.

"If you think of it, we're returning the books to their original state. We had trees, which we turned into books, and now we're returning them back to their original form--a tree," said Todd Borman, an information technology specialist working at the center's help desk, which is located near the tree.

Books and trees; trees and books. Standing in the rain at Rockefeller Center earlier this month, I suppose I caught just a glimpse of that centuries-old relationship, and its connection to the spirit of a lifetime's worth of holiday seasons.

"Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood," Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Tree. "I begin to consider, what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.

"Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top--for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth--I look into my youngest Christmas recollections!" Happy Bookmas to all, and to all a good read.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1632.

Knowledge Center photo by Claudene Wharton

The Ghost of Book Christmas Yet to Come

Robert Gray — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:15:30 +0000

Marley was virtually dead: to begin with...

On the third night, as Scrooge lay in bed, double-checking accounts on his iPad, once again the Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached from deep within the dimly backlit touch screen. When it came, Scrooge tapped furiously, hoping to delete the specter, but to no avail, for in the very pixels through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Book Christmas Yet to Come?" Scrooge asked. The Spirit answered not, but crooked its finger in a ghastly invitation that thrilled Scrooge with a vague uncertain horror, to know that in that dusky screen, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him.

The Phantom moved away as it had come toward him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which somehow bore him into this virtual world and carried him along.

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of businessmen. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.

"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I don't know much about it, either way. I only know the printed version of A Christmas Carol is dead.''
"Why, what was the matter with it?" asked one of the gentlemen. "I thought it'd never die."
"God knows,'' said the first, with a yawn. "Though it's likely to be a very cheap funeral, for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it."

The Phantom glided onto a crowded street and stopped before a shop's holiday window display. Scrooge looked about in that very place for his own image, but there was no likeness of himself there, nor any sign of Mr. Dickens's books. Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand, which made him shudder, and feel very cold. Was he as dead as Marley now, a mere digital specter himself?

They left the busy scene, and ventured into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, though he recognized its situation. Far in this den of infamous resort, there was an obscure used bookshop. Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of the bookseller, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop.

"Who's the worse for the loss of a few books like these?" cried the woman as she threw her bundle on the floor. "Not a dead man, I suppose."

Scrooge listened in horror. "Spirit!'' he said, shuddering from head to foot. "I see, I see. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is this?'' He recoiled in terror, for the scene had suddenly changed, and now he almost touched a bare bookcase, dusty and shrouded in cobwebs. Scrooge glanced toward the Phantom. Its steady hand was pointed to the empty space.

"Spirit!" he said. "This is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!'' The Spirit was immovable as ever. In his agony, Scrooge caught the spectral hand. The Spirit repulsed him. But then, holding up his own hands in a reader's pose, Scrooge saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed and dwindled down into the iPad's screen, from which Scrooge had somehow emerged.

Opening his Twitter account, he called outward to @bobcratchit.

"WHAT'S TODAY?" Scrooge cried.
"Eh?" returned @bobcratchit, with all his might of wonder.
"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" typed Scrooge.
"To-day? Why, Christmas Day."
"OMG! It's Christmas Day! I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night."
"LOL!!!!!" replied @bobcratchit
"Do you know the Bookseller, in the next street but one, at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"I should hope I do," wrote @bobcratchit.
"Tomorrow go and buy every copy of A Christmas Carol they have and give them away in the streets!"
"Great idea IMHO! Merry Xmas!"

Then Scrooge went to his shelves and found his own leather-bound volume of Mr. Dickens's fine story, which had been too long neglected after the introduction of an enhanced digital edition.

"I shall love it, as long as I live!" he cried, patting the book with his hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its cover! It's a wonderful book!"--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1628.

Just Readers Asking Indie Booksellers Questions

Robert Gray — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:24:59 +0000

How do you persuade people who use bookshops to browse but then buy online that they should purchase from you?

"By smiling sweetly and embarrassing them when they want to write down the ISBNs and say they'll think about it. We take every opportunity to remind them that they don't get our fantastic personal service on the Internet.... Basically, use us or lose us!"

This was the reply from Anne Wicks, owner of Castle Hill Bookshop, North Yorkshire, who fielded questions last month in the second of four sessions titled "Live Webchat: An Independent Bookseller Answers Your Questions." The series, presented by the Guardian in association with the Hive Network, concludes today when Daniel Johns of University Bookseller in Plymouth "tells us how he has used his IT knowledge to enhance the family business."

As everyone knows by now, Amazon will play the Grinch tomorrow, urging people to become $5 secret non-shoppers at bricks-and-mortar stores and adding one more lump of coal to the book trade's Christmas stocking, which is already overflowing with challenges and question marks.

The Guardian's indie bookseller webchats are a reminder that consumers have some concerns and questions of their own. As the series has progressed, I've noticed a gradual and intriguing turn toward serious queries about industry topics and I want to share some of my favorites. I'd love to hear from U.S. booksellers how they might have answered, had their customers been the ones asking.

In the first indie webchat, Tamara Macfarlane of London's Tales on Moon Lane fielded several "usual suspects" questions about title recommendations and tips on getting published. Only one was about the business side of books:

There [are] an increasing number of writers sounding the death knell for the printing press.... For the most part, the discussion has left out how this might affect children's literature. Do you see the future of children's publishing going the same way? Also, what benefits--if any--do you think will come as children's books become children's e-books?

The following week, Anne Wicks had a few more industry-related questions, including:

We very rarely buy hardbacks these days--just too expensive. How important are these to the economics of publishing and more importantly bookselling?

By the time the third webchat occurred last Friday, however, participants came prepared to rattle off multiple-part questions for Sheila O'Reilly of Dulwich Books in south London:

What's your biggest challenge and how much has changed in the last nine years? Do you see e-books as an opportunity or a serious threat to your business? I'm prepared to pay a little more for personal service but in tough times how do you make sure you keep your customers loyal?

Where are you going, where are we going? Will independent bookshops aim primarily to develop and retain loyal, regular, specifically local custom? As a sort of niche customer base, rather than trying to compete for the wider, more fickle, more impersonal customer base served by the Amazons of the industry? Or are independent bookshops likely to compete directly, possibly through imitation? For example, with second-hand book sections, or e-book download stations, or free post-and-packaging deliveries home and abroad?

I've noticed a trend towards cross-over shops on the high street, selling a mix of products. In my neighborhood there's a shop that sells flowers and clothes, for example. And another that sells art and books. Is this sort of hybrid business model an option, do you think, for independent booksellers? Should people be thinking about mixing services in this way to attract new customers and maintain interest?

What can you say to a book-buyer to persuade them to pay full cover price for a book in an indie rather than go for the knock-down price-tag? Are there enough customers in Austerity Britain who will pay extra for the personal service and literary knowledge that indie booksellers can often provide?

Whew! My favorite questioner was AggieH, who asked: "How do you actually ensure that staff are well-read and well-informed?" She also wondered if O'Reilly could "recall any particularly unexpected recommendation from a member of staff or a customer--some out-of-the-blue, never-heard-of-it-before book, new or old--that indeed turned out to be wonderful as they claimed?"

O'Reilly recommended Pollard by Laura Beatty, to which AggieH responded: "Thank you for some very interesting insights. And for the Pollard recommendation. I just let the first pages convince me via Amazon's 'Look inside' but will of course make sure to buy it from an independent." Maybe tomorrow would be an appropriate day to shop for it, AggieH.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1623.

Home Is Where the Author Event Is

Robert Gray — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:25:08 +0000

The traditional "author reading tour" has been attracting bad press for several years now, most recently in the Wall Street Journal, which noted that "what was once reflexive has been rethought by independent bookstores around the country."

As a former bookseller who has seen--and, yes, often endured--countless author readings, I'm as big a fan of creative event alternatives as anyone on the planet, particularly when they factor indies into the mix. Thus, today's story:

Earlier this fall, novelist Katharine Weber told me about a party she had attended to celebrate the publication of John Burnham Schwartz's latest novel, Northwest Corner. Author Dani Shapiro and her husband, filmmaker Michael Marens, hosted the bookish gathering at their Bethlehem, Conn., home.

"He had read at the nearby Hickory Stick Bookshop that afternoon," Weber recalled. "I couldn't get to the reading, and asked Dani if I should phone Fran Keilty at the store to buy a copy of the book which someone could carry along to her house for me, and Dani told me that Fran would be selling books at the party, no worries."

Keilty said Hickory Stick does four or five such events each year, either host- or author-generated: "We really like author parties as it gives a wonderful opportunity for writer and audience to engage in a much more intimate setting than a traditional booksigning provides."

Walking the fine line between friend and merchant could be unsettling, but Keilty said, "When we do it, for the most part we know the people, so it doesn't feel that uncomfortable. It's a lovely experience. In all cases where we've done it, the major motivation is to honor their friend, the author. It's all about the author."

This wasn't a first for Shapiro: "Last year, when our friend Martha McPhee published her lovely novel Dear Money, it occurred to me that it would be great to celebrate her and at the same time bring people to the Hickory Stick, which is a bookstore I love and very much want to support. Back then, Fran suggested selling books at the party, and I was still very much in the 'old school' mindset of thinking that selling books at book parties was... somehow pushy or tacky. I have so changed my tune about that! This time, for John, when Fran suggested selling books at the party, I was delighted--and honestly it sold a whole bunch more books. I've seen, on my own extended book tour for Devotion, which has lasted almost 19 months now, that so many of the best events have happened in people's homes, or backyards, or in other venues like restaurants or country clubs... with booksellers present, selling books.

"John is a dear friend of ours, and so the idea of throwing a book party for him was the most natural thing in the world. We live in an area that has a literary history, and its fair share of writers and artists, many of whom turned out for the event, and then a whole bunch of our friends and neighbors who are avid readers."

Attendance at Shapiro's "little book party" was a pleasant surprise for Schwartz, who added, "That's Dani for you; she's made a very dynamic and interesting social life for her family in the country. I was just the happy recipient. I have a number of good friends in the area, even a couple of relatives; and Dani knows the lovely owners of the local bookstore quite well, so having them sell books at the house during the party--something which might feel rather awkward at another occasion--felt perfectly comfortable and right. I'm sure that in this particular case the sense of celebration was heightened by the fact that so many writers and artists live in the area, and the abundance of good wine and food certainly helped too. The evening felt remarkably joyous and warm."

Shapiro hopes to continue hosting these events once or twice a year for writer friends: "I just told Meredith Maran, who has a novel [A Theory of Small Earthquakes] coming out in February, that we'd make arrangements with the Hickory Stick and throw her a similar party when she comes to the east coast on her book tour. I feel strongly that we writers should be supporting each other in whatever ways we can. Besides, most writers like a good party!"

Weber noted that during the Schwartz event, "as we watched Fran selling books on the dining table (she also had some of John's backlist in paper), Dani and I chatted about how we both used to think selling books at a book party, especially in someone's home, was tacky. But now? It seems like a very good and necessary thing to do. Because in addition to supporting a fellow author, this is what we can do to support an independent bookseller like Fran and Hickory Stick. It would be a great trend to start, authors hosting events for fellow authors at which independent booksellers are invited to sell books."--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1617.

Black Friday Demystified

Robert Gray — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:30:00 +0000

I won't lie; my first Black Friday as a bookseller scared the hell out of me for a month before it arrived. In 1992, I was just a 42-year-old kid with a crazy dream. I'd been a bookseller for six months and believed nirvana had been attained. Like most rookies, I wanted nothing more from life at that point than to be in the stacks all day, talking with other book lovers about our mutual addiction. Who knew there was a catch?

Shortly after Halloween, however, as if inspired by the ghoulish holiday itself, my colleagues began to spin cautionary tales about the post-Thanksgiving blitz--the crowds, the noise, the complaints, the screaming kids and, sometimes, adults; the crush of bodies, the scattered heaps of browsed and discarded books. Zombies were still a couple of decades away from becoming fashionable, so I imagined an episode of The Twilight Zone as conceived by Stephen King.

"It's bad?" I asked.
"You don’t want to know," the veterans replied, exchanging mirrored glances of suppressed terror.

Prior to my incarnation as a bookseller, in those innocent days before YouTube and mobile phone cameras, BF had been nothing more than a vague concept to me, a headline I saw in the paper or a brief news report of lines outside department stores. I wasn't a shopper, so I had no reason to care--or be afraid--until then.

To allay my fears, I immersed myself in the intensive BF preparations, as walls of new books and key backlist titles piled higher in the backstock area (for those were the ancient times of backstock, a concept we can only imagine now).

I don't recall Thanksgiving Day 1992 because, no doubt, I was paralyzed with trepidation. The next morning, I arrived at the store early and we went through last-minute battle plans: register and lunch schedules, sales floor assignments, pep talks. Then it was time. We opened the doors and unleashed retail demons. As I recall it now, "overwhelming" is a fair description of what happened, but panic somehow blended nicely with adrenaline-laced professionalism to turn the day into an efficient, exhausting and profitable blur. Not scary, as it turned out, but... not quite un-scary either.

In subsequent years, BF would lose much of its anticipatory terror for me. As my responsibilities at the bookstore grew, I worried less about surviving the stampede and more about finding ways to increase the potential for even larger stampedes. I focused on the practical aspects like inventory and weather, and let human nature take its course.

Big-box stores and online options increasingly dominated the scene during the late 1990s and early 21st century, so BF gradually seemed to become less monumental--at best the second busiest day of the year after Christmas Eve, and sometimes not even the busiest day of Thanksgiving weekend.

I'm not a bookseller anymore, and still not much of a shopper, but I do harbor remnants of an odd, nightmarish nostalgia for my first BF. This time of year, I often wonder if the big day has lost its edge for other booksellers. There are so many alternatives now; the concept has been spun and twisted into all sorts of new shapes, sizes and goals. Here's a sampling:

Independent bookstores have Plaid Friday and Small Business Saturday.

Online sellers have Cyber Monday, but are also "offering an arsenal of mobile-only deals intended to pick off shoppers as they wait in line," the New York Times reported. There are, not surprisingly, apps for that.

The Occupy movement is weighing in this year with Occupy Black Friday and Reoccupy Main Street.

I've read about several smaller BF options, too. For example, knowing there would "be no Black Friday sales at Uptown's Borders this year," the Chicago Writers House Project created a pop-up bookstore in the empty building last week and hosted Chicago Book Expo, which featured the works of "more than 40 fiction and poetry presses," as well as readings, live performances and architectural walking tours. I like that.

In spite of the general demystification of bookseller BF, however, I'm sure when Friday morning arrives, I will recall, if only for a moment, that nervous frontline bookseller in 1992 who watched those doors creak open and the book-loving masses attack. Maybe I'll even hear the distant whisper of Rod Serling's voice: "Picture, if you will, an ordinary bookshop...."--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1611.