"In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer's market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you're used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they're often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love--not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde's notion of 'the gift.' Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn't want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support."

 

Pamela Grath, owner of Dog Ears Books, Northport, Mich., wrote regarding the controversy that erupted earlier this week regarding a Kindle book, The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure by Phillip Greaves, that Amazon was selling... and then not selling after public outcry.

If a governmental authority tells me I can't sell something, threatening me with punishment under the law if I go against the authority, that is censorship. If I as a bookseller choose not to sell something, I am exercising my own judgment and freedom of speech and expressing my own values. It doesn't matter how large the business it is: it always retains the right to say no, even when it is not forbidden to say yes. This is not censorship. It is fundamental to freedom.

Refusal to discriminate is another way to exercise freedom and a way to announce to the world that your company has no values beyond the marketplace. There will always be people who will admire that and see it as the ultimate expression of freedom, but the freedom of those of us who discriminate on the basis of value, choosing not to sell books with content we find reprehensible, deserves at least as much recognition under freedom's flag.

 

Joseph-Beth Booksellers has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will close its store in Lyndhurst, Ohio as well as the Nashville, Tenn., Davis-Kidd bookshop by the end of the year. Last week, the company announced it was closing stores in Charlotte, N.C., and Pittsburgh, Pa. (Shelf Awareness, November 5, 2010).

Joseph-Beth cited "continuing challenges for the book industry; a weak economy and resulting sales decline; along with economic forecasts for the first half of 2011" for the decision, noting that these factors "represent significant challenges to Joseph-Beth and the entire retail industry," WKYC-TV reported.

"We have definitely had our struggles in the Cleveland market," said Neil Van Uum, owner of the Joseph-Beth Group. "Having grown up in Cleveland, I still feel as if this is my home. It breaks my heart to have to close the Legacy Village store. We love our presence at the Cleveland Clinic and I hope to re-group and possibly establish a position in the bookselling marketplace again in Cleveland someday."

NashvillePost.com reported that Van Uum called Davis-Kidd "an institution in Nashville. It breaks my heart to have to close this store."

"I'm surprised," Thelma Kidd observed. "I'm sad. I'm disappointed. But I do know the book industry is much more difficult now.... A lot of people love that store. It has meant so much--let's not speak in the past tense yet--it means so much to so many people."

Added Karen Davis, her former business partner: "It was and is a great bookstore, and it gave a lot to this community. It's some sort of commentary, maybe, on the times--bookselling has changed. I'm very sorry to see it happen."

Van Uum told the Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader that customers will not see changes at the Lexington location as the bankruptcy progresses, since that store is the chain's best. "We've got a few great bookstores, and we're going to focus on those and make them better."

In addition to Lexington and the Cleveland Clinic, the stores that will remain open are in Cincinnati, Memphis, Tenn., and Fredricksburg, Va.

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday, meet Small Business Saturday. American Express OPEN has teamed up with advocacy groups and public and private organizations, including Facebook, Yelp, and the 3/50 Project, to declare the Saturday after Thanksgiving Small Business Saturday. The debut event will be held November 27, according to Bookselling This Week.

Crain's reported that American Express hopes the retailers' initiative "will start a movement toward shopping at local, independently owned businesses." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed the concept at a launch event earlier this week with American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault.

"This is the start of a movement," Chenault said. "We want to really get people in the local community heavily involved in driving this. This is not a flash in the pan; we are committed to this effort for years to come." To boost interest among small businesses and consumers, American Express will give $100 worth of Facebook advertising to 10,000 business owners who sign up for the program. The company will also give a $25 statement credit to 100,000 card members who register their card and use it at a small business on November 27.

Bloomberg "dismissed concerns that small businesses could not offer the sharp discounts that make Black Friday and Cyber Monday so attractive to many consumers. He countered that value to consumers is more than just the price--shopping where the owner speaks the same language as the consumer, for instance, or simply feeling good about supporting a local business," Crain's wrote.

Thomas Talbot, manager of Crawford Doyle Booksellers in Manhattan, offered a succinct endorsement in the Wall Street Journal: "It couldn't hurt."

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To celebrate the release of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, Abrams employees decked themselves out in purple!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, the fifth book in the bestselling series by Jeff Kinney, sold more than 375,000 copies during its first day on sale in the U.S., up more than 50% over Dog Days, the previous book in the series that came out October 12, 2009 from Amulet Books, an Abrams imprint. On Tuesday, BookPeople bookstore, Austin, Tex., hosted Kinney's initial tour appearance and more than 1,600 fans attended.

"After months of anticipation, retail sales for Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth have exceeded all expectations the first day," said Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs. "Clearly, excited and eager fans rushed out to buy the book as soon as it was made available. We're looking forward to even more great news as the weekend approaches and kids have time off from school to flood the stores and buy and read the book." There are now more than 42 million Wimpy Kid books in print in the U.S. and Canada.

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In other book launch news, Decision Points, the memoir by former President George W. Bush that had a highly publicized launch by Crown this week, "got off to a strong start on Tuesday, selling at least 170,000 hardcover copies plus an estimated 50,000 e-books," the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that those numbers do not include sales at independent bookstores or at Kroger.

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Gaspereau Press, the Nova Scotia publisher of Giller winner The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, is being urged to have another publisher print more copies of the book so that the author can benefit from the prize, the Globe and Mail reported.

Gaspereau is hand-printing just 1,000 copies of the book a week, and the owners have turned down several overtures by larger publishers to help. Some have found "the non-commercial" approach inspiring. But others note that the author could lose tens of thousands in sales.

Gaspereau co-owner Gary Dunfield has assured Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the award, that he is working on a solution to solve the problem.

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A Real Bookstore, a 20,000-square-foot indie, will open November 18 in Fairview, Tex. Owner Teri Tanner, former managing partner of the now-closed Legacy Books in Plano, told Bookselling This Week: "We are a general-interest bookstore, but we've expanded the children's section considerably compared to the former Legacy Books location. We have 2,000 square feet dedicated to children's titles and activity space."

Tanner added that A Real Bookstore's primary marketing effort "is outreach to schools. We'll keep a family focus. I think all of us in the business of books need to remember that when you get beyond the East and West coasts, the book-buying public looks like a family. To overlook that is to overlook a lot of opportunity.... Our nearest neighbors are families with school-age children, and even though we aren't open yet, they're calling and leaving us notes and messages to say how excited they are that we've come to their community."

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"Once upon a time, book lovers saw the big chain bookstores as enemies," the Christian Science Monitor wrote in its storybook opening to an article about reaction from residents of Encino, Calif., to the news that a Barnes & Noble store "is being pushed out of town by rising rents." Local radio station KCRW spoke with "outraged neighborhood readers and browsers, as well as others who mourn the passing of another cultural resource."

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Barnes & Noble will create what it is calling "the ultimate play room for children" with the initial rollout of 3,000-sq.-ft. boutiques in five test stores: Enfield and Manchester, Conn.; North Brunswick and Holmdel, N.J.; and Bronx, N.Y.

In partnerships with toy and game manufacturers, B&N will feature five interactive play areas--Building (in partnership with LEGO and Rokenbok), Learning (products from LeapFrog), Imagining (products from Playmobil, Calico Critters and Puppet Theater), Creating (products from Crayola and American Girl crafts) and Playing (products include Thomas the Tank Engine, Olivia and Curious George).

Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for B&N, said the company is trying to focus "on areas where the business is exploding, and reducing areas that have matured and slowed down." She noted that the average B&N bookstore, "which spans around 25,000 to 30,000 square feet, continues to carry about 200,000 book titles," the Wall Street Journal wrote. The boutiques will replace the music and DVD sections of those stores.

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The urban migratory habits of New York's literary agents were explored by the New York Times, which reported that when David Black "contemplated moving his 21-year-old literary agency to a new office space this summer, he had one nagging worry: the East River."

"Would that be a problem?" Black wondered. "Is water a barrier to clients? Is it a barrier to the business? That was really the question." Despite the uncertainty, Black relocated to Brooklyn, "a move across the river that few literary agents in the Manhattan-centric publishing industry have dared to make," the Times noted, adding that Black "joined a few other literary-agent refugees from Manhattan, along with tiny boutique agencies that were founded in Brooklyn, not to mention the scores of writers, new independent bookstores and small but renowned publishers that are based there."

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Author Rick Moody contemplated the "the question of home" in the New York Times, writing that the question "has shifted dramatically in the last year and a half for a simple and felicitous reason: the birth of my daughter, Hazel. My daughter has an entirely different conception of what home is.... home is the place where people know your name and look forward to seeing you each morning, like Rasim or Murat in the lobby, or Audrey at the bakery, or Mike at the dry cleaner's, even when there’s little more to the association than that. And Hazel in turn taught me: get off the laptop, get out into the neighborhood, feel what's going on. It's where the stories are."

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Great moments in science and literature: The Telegraph reported that British scientists may have unlocked the secret to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. Scientists at the Scotland's University of St. Andrews "have produced flexible metamaterial 'membranes' using a new technique that frees the meta-atoms from the hard surface they are constructed on.... Stacking the membranes together could produce a flexible 'smart fabric' that may provide the basis of an invisibility cloak, the scientists believe."

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For NPR's Three Books series, Kathryn Erskine--author of Mockingbird, Quaking and Ibhubesi: The Lion--recommended "Three Books In Unflinching, Unforgettable Voices," including Sold by Patricia McCormick, Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir by Neely Tucker and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

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Word-lovers tattoo alert: Flavorwire showcased 10 "Impressive Typographical Tattoos," noting that they "aren’t just popular with design geeks. In fact, the trend has become so widespread that Ina Saltz has published two photographic books on the topic: Body Type and Body Type 2."

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Effective January 3, Lori Benton will succeed Suzanne Murphy as v-p and publisher of the Scholastic Trade Publishing division, where she will oversee all of its imprints and report to Ellie Berger, president.
 
Benton was most recently general manager and publisher of the fiction division at Minnesota-based Capstone Publishers. She has served as v-p and publisher of Harcourt's children’s books division, associate publisher and director of marketing for Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, and associate marketing director for the children's book division at Morrow. She comes from bookseller stock, having spent 13 years as the children's book buyer at the Book Shop, Boise, Idaho. Benton served as chair of the board of directors for the CBC (2003-2005), and currently chairs the CBC's non-profit foundation, Every Child a Reader.

Saturday and Sunday on PBS TV's Religion and Ethics Newsweekly: Rushworth Kidder, author of Good Kids, Tough Choices: How Parents Can Help Their Children Do the Right Thing (Jossey-Bass, $16.95, 9780470547625/0470547626). The show followed Kidder to New York City and spent two days visiting him in Maine.

 

Fox 2000 has acquired Pure--the first of a three-novel series by Julianna Baggott--in a deal "that's high six-figure against 7-figures," Deadline.com reported, adding that the book "created wild buzz this week, and [Wednesday] night, it looked like DreamWorks was going to get it.... Elizabeth Gabler's Fox 2000 took it off the table [yesterday] morning by buying all three books." The film will be produced by Karen Rosenfelt (The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me), the lead producer on the Twilight Saga series.  

Deadline.com noted that Pure "is a dystopic tale about an apocalyptic event that creates two classes of people. The underclass consists of those who were scarred, and the 'Pures' are those who were untouched and live separate from the others. The movie deal occurs before an auction for publishing rights that has been scheduled for Tuesday by New York-based lit agent Nat Sobel. Manager Justin Manask, who handled the film deal with attorney Marcy Morris, distributed watermarked copies of the script to six producers earlier this week. Reaction to the manuscript was strong."

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Warner Bros. has acquired feature rights to develop Brad Thor's Scot Harvath novels "and set up development with Warner-based Bill Gerber and Casey Wasserman," Variety reported. Gerber plans to develop The Lions of Lucerne first, as an "origins" story. The deal also includes The Athena Project, "due to be published later this month as the first book in a series about a team of female agents trained in black ops, a group that was introduced in Foreign Influence."

 

Winners of the 2010 Canadian Children's Literature Awards, which "exemplify some of the best work by Canadian authors and illustrators, have been named by the the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. The CCBC award winners:

TD Canadian Children's Literature: The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade
Marilyn Baillie Picture Book: Timmerman Was Here by Colleen Sydor, illustrated by Nicolas Debon
Norma Fleck Nonfiction: Adventures on the Ancient Silk Road by Priscilla Galloway with Dawn Hunter
Geoffrey Bilson Historical Fiction for Young People: Vanishing Girl (The Boy Sherlock Holmes, Book 3) by Shane Peacock

 

John Reimringer has a BS in journalism from the University of Kansas and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. He has worked for the Santa Fe Railroad; as a newspaper editor in Kansas; as a youth hostel night porter in Edinburgh, Scotland; for the University of Iowa Law Library; in the University of Kansas public relations office; and as a college English instructor in Minnesota. He lives in Saint Paul with his wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg. Vestments, an Indie Next selection for October 2010, is his first novel, and was published in September by Milkweed Editions.

On your nightstand now:

Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye. Great novel about Minnesota and Lake Superior--Duluth and the North Shore and ore boats.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Lord of the Rings. I was 10 or so and at an aunt's apartment after her funeral, bored with the adults, and picked up a Ross Macdonald novel with a lot of sex off her bookshelf. An uncle found me with the book and, instead of scolding me, said, "Here's something you might like more" and led me back to the bookshelf and a paperback set of Tolkien. It was a challenging read at that age, but all the more magical for that. 

Your top five authors:

Hemingway, Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, John McGahern, Andre Dubus. All strongest at the short story, and most of them Catholic.

Book you've faked reading:

Ulysses. Twice. But I read once that in Hemingway's copy, which was one where you had to cut the pages open, the only pages cut were Molly Bloom's soliloquy.

Books you're an evangelist for:

The Night Birds by Tom Maltman and Where No Gods Came by Sheila O'Connor. Great Minnesota books by great Minnesota writers: Tom's is about the 1862 Sioux uprising near Mankato; Sheila's is about a Catholic girl trying to deal with a crazy mother in Minneapolis.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Can't think of one. But I did read Moby Dick at age 10 because I'd seen the movie and thought it was an action novel. I'm telling you, that whaler's chapel description takes forever to read when you're 10.

Book that changed your life:

For Whom the Bell Tolls. I picked it up off a communal bookshelf when I was working at a youth hostel in Edinburgh, Scotland, and from the first line--"He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest..."--I was captivated. I wanted to write like that. I'd wanted to be a writer as a kid, but that novel, that moment, reawakened my interest in writing as an adult.

Favorite line from a book:

Lots, but how are you going to beat the last two paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, as originally written:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I say "originally written" because current editions of the book inexplicably change "orgastic" to "orgiastic." It's "orgastic" in the first edition. "Orgiastic" reduces Gatsby to his parties; "orgastic" gets at the self-creation that was Gatsby's essence. I'm on a mission from God here.

Best story title:

Andre Dubus, "If They Knew Yvonne."

Favorite song lyric:

Bruce Springsteen, from "Racing in the Streets": "I got a '69 Chevy with a 396/ Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor/ She's waiting tonight down in the parking lot/ Outside the Seven-Eleven store...." I grew up among gearheads in Topeka, Kansas, and that lyric captures car culture perfectly. Rob Sheffield in the Rolling Stone Album Guide calls it Springsteen's best song ever.

Book you've read that almost no one else has:

Joiner by my late professor James Whitehead. Three times. Even the italics.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It's way different from the way I write, and different than my usual taste in reading, but what a glorious book! I'd put it in the ring against anything as the best novel of the 20th century.

 

Voice of America, the superb new collection of stories by E.C. Osondu, would be more accurately titled Voices of Nigeria. The 18 short stories all focus on Nigerians, either in Africa or America. You meet two little girls in a refugee camp watching their mother forced into a second marriage. You meet a childless wife in America who is trying to satisfy her mother-in-law by returning home to Nigeria to try the "homegrown" methods of the Baby Market.

Osondu makes no attempt to fan dramatic flames; the stories are potent enough in themselves, narrated in a quiet, neutral style in which expert storytelling is the only device. Dad's childhood friend from Nigeria visits him in Maryland and brings a white woman for dinner. The execution of robbers on a Nigerian beach is witnessed by a boy's brother who is growing up to the same fate.

The cast of characters is composed of anything but stereotypes--from rascals to saints, victims to victimizers, they run the entire gamut of humanity. Osondu has sympathy for all of them. His characters, male and female, child and adult, are caught up in a moment of decision in which they succinctly define themselves, like the Nigerian bride who thinks she's marrying an American medical doctor and discovers he's really a nursing assistant in a retirement home. Whether the stories take place in the teeming, dangerous streets of Lagos, in refugee camps, remote villages or American tenements, there's an authenticity in Osondu's style that makes his situations utterly believable.

Happily, though Osondu looks unflinchingly at corruption and deceit, he knows how to laugh. When the village women take pity on the unfed hunting dogs during the famine, the dogs return the favor by sniffing out spilled semen on the returning hunters. When Nduka finally finds an African-American man to marry his Nigerian wife and get her a visa to America, everyone gets along a little too well. Paiko is caught in a raid on a brothel and ends up being jailed by the police as a captured robber.

Using a lean and spare style, without a single extra word, it only takes Osondu a few swift, economical strokes to conjure up a very real Nigeria. Tale by tale, the quality of this collection is uniformly high, laced with just the right details and the whole subsumed in a compassion that embraces the variety and complexity of the Nigerian experience. --Nick DiMartino

Shelf Talker: Simple, precise storytelling conjures up both Nigeria and America in this superb collection of tales from E.C. Osondu.

 

 

Earlier this year, when Kathy Patrick, owner of Beauty and the Book, Jefferson, Tex., read and loved My Orange Duffel Bag: A Journey to Radical Change, a self-published book by Sam Bracken and Echo Garrett, she did not hesitate to take the next logical step and dye her hair orange.

Well, no, the story is not that simple, though Kathy's passion for this book is a classic example of how, in our ongoing discussion about independent publishers and independent booksellers, we might pause to remember that sometimes it really does come down to the book.   

Kathy loves books and authors and readers. Talk with her for a minute and you know that if you know anything. Even a partial list of her accomplishments in the book world is impressive: the Pulpwood Queens Book Club, which now has 400 chapters nationwide; her book The Pulpwood Queen's Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life; and her now legendary Girlfriend Weekend, an annual convention hosted by the Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys book clubs.

I forgot to ask Kathy whether she plays poker, but if she does I suspect she goes "all in" with every hand because that's how she handsells the books she adopts. Traditional publisher? Independent publisher? Self-publisher? Kathy's response is the same: Show me the book.

My Orange Duffel Bag is a perfect example. When co-author Echo Garret sent her a copy, Kathy quickly realized it was "exactly the kind of book that I want to get into the hands of readers, an incredible story but more important, Sam Bracken is doing something proactive to help homeless teens and those aging out of foster care. As the youth group leader for my church, children are as close to my heart as authors, books, reading and literacy. I am a firm believer that if we treat our children as our most precious gifts, this world would become a much better place."

Echo recalls the beginning this way: "We had a pilot program with the state of Georgia to train 25 foster youth on the principles in the book, and it had been tested in a school in Roswell as well. We printed 5,000 books in our first print run, and got our first shipment in May. I happened to see a write-up about how influential Kathy Patrick is in the book world, so I wrote her an e-mail, said a prayer and put a book in FedEx to her. By the time I got back from the FedEx box, she’d already written back, saying that our book sounded like exactly the kind of book she looks for.

"The next night she called me and told me she was making our book her November pick. We talked for an hour, and I explained that we were self-publishing because we didn’t neatly fit into the traditional realm. Nobody knew what to do with us. But we knew where we were heading. The more I told her about our crazy journey to trying to get My Orange Duffel Bag published, the more engaged she became. I told her that we’d invested a ton of our money and time and love and life into this project. For us, it’s a passion. We’re creating a movement to help spark literacy and positive change for kids that most of our society overlooks. When she understood that we needed help selling the book fast to pay for our printing bill, she declared that she’d dye her hair orange if we sold 1,000 books in that first month. We did and she did. Kathy was the first one I sent our full vision to. She believed in us from the beginning. Having our vision validated by someone as influential as Kathy gave us great courage that we were on the right path. Now we’ve almost sold out of our first printing, and we’ve ordered 10,000 more books. We’re on a rocket ride and the momentum is building fast."

Kathy launched her national campaign for My Orange Duffel Bag on her Facebook page. "It was kind of a crazy promotion," she said. "We sold like 326 copies the first day and made our goal after a week and a half. I was just a walking billboard for the book. I didn't even know the power of Facebook until then."

Echo noted that while their agent had shopped the project to major publishers and found considerable interest, "each wanted to turn it into something very different from what our vision was." Kathy said she also called some publishers, but did not have much luck "because they didn't know what it was. Is it a book? Is it a journal? Is it a diary? Whatever it is, it's a tremendous story. I just know that every time people read it they call me."

Kathy's orange hair may have faded, but the orange book lives on, which pleases her. "I'm a big believer that a book is not a six-week commodity. Who made up that rule? I question everything. People either think I'm an amazing innovator or a pain in the rump."

She also shared a story that occurred this week, which sums up nicely what indie booksellers can do when they choose to make a book their own: "A judge and his wife stopped by who had heard about me through their Methodist Church in Canton, Tex. I took my youth group to help repair homes and paint houses as part of U.M. ARMY project there. Anyway, they stayed for two hours and when they left, they had decided to purchase My Orange Duffel Bag for all their Christmas presents. As they were getting ready to leave, this judge handed me his card and told me that if I do indeed start my own Pulpwood Queen Publishing endeavor, give him one week, and I will have all the investors I need. I am in awe of the wonderful places books take me, so it just energizes my batteries and my endeavors to help authors, their books, literacy and reading efforts. Thank you Echo and Sam for letting me be a part of your book and it's message. I have done nothing more than share a great read and it just proves to me sharing a good book is a gift that keeps on giving."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)