"They place their hearts with their books."--Children's book author A.C.E. Bauer on independent booksellers on kidsheartauthors.com. The site aims to generate support for the Valentine's Day event that will take place tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 12 noon in more than 40 independent New England bookstores, involving 170 authors and artists.
The American Booksellers Association is simultaneously cutting its own operating costs substantially, halving membership dues and determined to maintain its core services, as outlined in a letter to members by president Gayle Shanks.
According to Shanks's letter, at a meeting in Salt Lake City earlier this month, the board decided to enact a hiring freeze that will reduce staff 12%--or 5.5 full-time equivalent positions--through attrition; a wage freeze; a suspension of contributions to the 401(k) and SEP plans; elimination of "discretionary" travel; elimination of "discretionary" spending; more web-based means for communicating ABA education programs; cancellation of the annual spring forum schedule; and revamping the group medical benefit.
At the same time, dues for 2009 are being reduced 50%, retroactive to January 1. Shanks explained: "The Board of Directors understands the enormity and seriousness of the financial difficulties facing our members. We, too, are booksellers. ABA is fortunate enough to have sufficient resources to be able to make these adjustments at this time. We only hope that this dues reduction helps to relieve some small amount of pressure and makes life a little easier for our fellow booksellers. We are committed to do whatever we can to help ensure that as many bookstores as possible emerge from this crisis stronger than ever."
Besides the sales drop many booksellers have experienced, the association's substantial investments have likely taken a hit during the past six months.
Following the usual protocol, the ABA nominating committee has nominated current v-p Michael Tucker of Books Inc., San Francisco, Calif., to become president and Becky Anderson to become v-p, secretary, beginning in June, Bookselling This Week reported. Current president Gayle Shanks of Changing Hands, Tempe, Ariz., will leave the board in June. Betsy Burton of the King's English, Salt Lake City, Utah, has been nominated to join the board.
Members vote this spring, and changes will be made at the ABA annual meeting during BEA in New York.
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In Other Words, Portland, Ore., "took one quick moment to celebrate successfully keeping the nonprofit feminist bookstore open late last year in the face of near-fatal debt," according to the Oregonian. In December the bookshop raised $13,000 to cover a short-term loan and $8,000 to stay open through spring.
"When we opened in 1993, there were 200 feminist bookstores in the country; now there are about 30," program director Katie Carter said. According to the Oregonian, In Other Words "has restructured to include increased used-book sales, strengthened its online presence, created consignment space for local artists to sell their work, and plans continuing fundraising."
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USA Today featured a video tour hosted by Nora Roberts of her newly renovated (to the tune of approximately $3 million) Boonsboro (Md.) Inn, and the Nick and Nora room in particular.
"It's a comfortable room that blends sleek art deco and fussy Hollywood glamour," said Roberts, "which strikes me as very Nick and Nora Charles." She believes "they'd be very comfortable and happy here. . . . The whole idea was the rooms' themes had to be linked to literary couples who ended up with happy endings," said Roberts. "Romeo and Juliet? Dead. Tristan and Isolde? Dead. Not happy. Dead, dead, dead. Rhett Butler and Scarlett? He didn't give a damn. You try finding seven of them."
Describing the inn before renovations, Roberts said, "It was this wonderful old building with all this history, and it was just going to ruin. My idea was that I could fix it up and bring it back to life. It's really satisfying to turn it back into what it was, what it was intended for." Her husband, Bruce Wilder, runs Turn the Page Bookstore Cafe in Boonsboro.
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"It's like chalk and cheese," Kevin Rafferty told the Edinburgh Evening News regarding the profound difference in his 21-year-old stepson's life since Brian Rafferty opened a used bookstore in the city. Brian, who is 21 and has Asperger Syndrome, struggled to find work before his family hatched the idea of opening Broughton Street Book Shop.
"At a time when people without special needs are struggling to get jobs, it made it even harder for Brian," said Kevin. "It was a friend who first came up with the idea of a second-hand book shop because we didn't want to buy lots of high-value stock in case the venture didn't work. We are doing this to give Brian a purpose in life and a reason for getting up in the morning. The difference in Brian is unbelievable."
During December, bookstore sales fell 4.7% to $2.051 billion--down for the fourth month in a row--according to preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau. In November, bookstore sales fell 13% compared to the same period a year earlier.
By comparison, total retail sales in December dropped 9.3% to $354.751 billion compared to the same period a year earlier.
Bookstore sales for all of 2008 were down 0.5% to $16.93 billion. During 2008, total retail sales fell an identical 0.5% to $4,016 billion.
Note: under Census Bureau definitions, bookstore sales are of new books and do not include "electronic home shopping, mail-order, or direct sale" or used book sales.
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In January, general retail sales rose 1% compared to the previous month, but were down 9.7% compared to January 2008, according to Commerce Department estimates. Most observers attributed the meager improvement over December to heavy discounts, giveaways and three-for-one deals.
---Last December, net book sales rose 9.7% to $1.5 billion, as reported to the Association of American Publishers by 81 member publishers. For the year, net sales fell 2.4% to $10.6 billion.
Among results by category:
Tonight on Charlie Rose: Thomas E. Ricks, author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (Penguin Press, $27.95, 9781594201974/1594201978).
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Tomorrow on Weekend Edition Saturday: Amy Dickinson, author of The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them (Hyperion, $22.99, 9781401322854/1401322859).
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Monday on the Dr. Phil Show: M. Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (Overlook, $24.95, 9781590200636/1590200632).
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Monday on the Leonard Lopate Show: John Hanc, author of The Coolest Race on Earth: Mud, Madmen, Glaciers and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon (Chicago Review Press, $22.95, 9781556527388/1556527381).
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Monday on the Tavis Smiley Show: former President Jimmy Carter, author of We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work (Simon & Schuster, $27, 9781439140635/1439140634).
Jamie Ford is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the Western name "Ford," thus confusing countless generations. Ford is a short-story writer, an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and a survivor of Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Having grown up near Seattle's Chinatown, he now lives in Montana, where he's on a never-ending quest to find decent dim sum. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Ballantine, $24, 9780345505330/0345505336), is an Indie Next List selection for February. Visit him online at jamieford.com.
On your nightstand now:
Gerald's Game by Stephen King, right next to my handcuffs. Actually I just looked, and there's a huge stack of old Japanese comics, mainly Lone Wolf & Cub, which I like better than the Americanized version, Road to Perdition.
Favorite book when you were a child:
It's a toss-up between The White Mountains by John Christopher, part of the Tripod Series, and my sister's dog-eared copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was a very intrepid fourth grader.
Your top five authors:
Harlan Ellison. His essays from the Los Angeles Free Press circa 1970-something are still amazing. Like reading a painfully honest and often incendiary blog, 30 years before the Internet.
Stan Lee. The Marvel Comics writer and editor who gave us Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the X-men, et al. A century from now we'll remember him as the Shakespeare of our time (or at least P.T. Barnum).
Sherman Alexie. When funny, tragic, lyrical minds write books, the world is a better place.
Orson Scott Card. A pure storyteller in an age of performance writing. Rarely do SF&F characters feel so real.
Nikki Giovanni. Do poets count? Of course, they do. I love her for evangelizing hip-hop as a natural extension of the spoken word and for reminding us that the work of our heart is on par with the work of our hands.
Book you've faked reading:
I'll admit that I faked reading Finnegans Wake, if James Joyce will admit that he faked writing it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Off the top of my head I'll say The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by the abovementioned Sherman Alexie. It's poignant and charming and brilliant, and the artwork is perfect. But beyond that, I'd say that I'm an evangelist for anything that makes non-readers read--especially young readers. I know some people knock Stephenie Meyer or whomever is über-popular, but in an age when fewer and fewer teens actually read books, how can we criticize anyone who generates that much traffic at your local bookstore?
Book you've bought for the cover:
Honestly, I never do that. I have a degree in design, so my tastes are pretty esoteric. Plus, I shop at places like Kinokuniya, in Seattle, and would end up buying scores of Japanese novels written in tategaki (reading right to left).
Book that changed your life:
Whatever book I was checking out when I met my wife. Yes, we met at that hotbed of swinging singles activity, the public library. Hey, don't knock it--librarians are hot. Batgirl was a librarian.
Favorite line from a book:
"If your soul truly cries out for music and books, and you cannot afford them . . . steal them. And repay society later."--Harlan Ellison, The Harlan Ellison Hornbook.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I bumped into Dave at Comic Con this year and was star-struck to the point of paralysis.
Darling Jim by Christian Moerk (Henry Holt & Company, $25.00 Hardcover, 9780805089479, March 2009)
Christian Moerk's Darling Jim is just what the doctor ordered for the winter blahs: a dark, 300-page thriller that regrettably lasts only about 48 hours, since you can't put down this dreadful, compulsively-readable tale.
This successful Danish novel, translated by the author, opens with poor Desmond, the postman, going crazy from what has just been found in the house at 1 Strand Street in a little town called Malahide, just north of Dublin. Moira Hegarty has been whacked to death with a shovel, her niece Fiona has been stabbed 19 times, apparently by her aunt, and along with her younger sister has been slowly poisoned and shackled inside the house in rooms with one-way locks.
It's like plunging into a gothic Scandinavian mystery written by Hans Christian Andersen in a really bad mood. Two diaries and a frame story set in a post office provide the narrative structure, while the relentless storytelling employs every known hook and trick to keep us gasping as we circle, with merciless momentum, right back to the opening scene, the catastrophic, Greek tragedy ending in the Malahide death house.
Getting there is the scary part. You read with anxiety, watching these magnificently alive women move toward their fates, captivated by the dangerous, seductive traveling storyteller, darling Jim, whose appearance in town coincides with the deaths of a number of lovely young women.
A handsome young serial killer, a desperate, murderous aunt who will stop at nothing for revenge, and an ominous voice over the radio airwaves that knows too much, all close in on the pretty Walsh sisters. Will they also destroy Niall, the poor young postal clerk who loses his job on the day he finds Fiona's diary in the dead letter bin, who is risking his life to travel back to that guilty, suspicious town in search of the final pieces of the puzzle? Moerk holds back one of his best surprises till the very end.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A modern gothic mystery set in Ireland, Darling Jim is a tragic and compelling tale of three young sisters, an itinerant storyteller, a desperate aunt and a postal clerk in search of the truth.
I received some early Valentine's Day gifts over the weekend. Among the readers who answered my call for thoughts about reading in public was John Maruskin, who offered tough love: "I think you're paying too much attention to yourself; give more attention to the book." Great advice. So I tried, and nearly succeeded, though the experiment was flawed because I happened to be in Manhattan. Brandishing a book in New York is like reading in public with training wheels.
Then, on Saturday, I was riding the 86th Street crosstown bus when I heard a man reading out loud to his voluntary audience--a female companion--as well as an obviously involuntary crowd, in whose faces I read something else entirely. Suddenly I realized that if you really want to become a pariah, reading Emerson silently in a Vermont supermarket checkout line pales in comparison to reading, aloud and at length, from a book on public transit. I wasn't tempted to ask him to stop, though I'll confess I did momentarily consider thanking him for his contribution to this week's column.
But I'm trying to give more attention to the book here, so let's return to our primary question: How do you feel about reading in public?
Lori Kauffman of Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass., considered the advantages of urban settings: "Maybe this is just from living in Cambridge and working in Brookline, where it sometimes seems as if half of the population is in school and the other half is teaching them, but when I'm in public it's odd for me not to see people reading! Especially on the bus or subway. I think one of the best parts of living in a city with public transportation is that it provides a good excuse to read everyday--I actually look forward to my commute! (By the way, I find that an excellent test of how good a book is is how close I come to missing my stop because I'm too engrossed in what I'm reading.)"
It's not always easy, however. Julie Leonard of Troubadour Books, Boulder, Colo., noted that her "teenage daughters wonder why it is that a person sitting in a public place like the cafeteria, reading, is assumed to want someone to come up and start talking to them. Most annoying of all: the person who interrupts their reading to ask, 'What are you reading?' Being polite types, they resist the temptation to answer, 'Nothing any more, since you butted in."
Susan Weis of breathe books, Baltimore, Md., shared something that happened at the Winter Institute in Salt Lake City: "A fellow bookstore person and I took a long walk around the deserted city on Sunday afternoon. One of the few places open was a Carl's Jr. There was a woman in the window reading a paperback. Both my friend and I slowed down and took notice . . . Did we know her? After all she was reading a book and we just came from a book show--we must know her! We didn't, but we felt so close to her and even spoke about the scene later because we know what it's like to sit in a window and read. We felt so close to this anonymous woman, almost as if she was a friend."
The response most in keeping with the spirit of the upcoming holiday (Valentine's, not Friday the 13th) came from Ellen Stimson: "You make it sound almost salacious, which makes it even more appealing. How does one stand being in public without a book? This is the only defense people in small towns have in the school parking lot, at the coffee shop, or in any line anywhere. You need them less in the safe anonymity of the city, so naturally they are more ubiquitous there as a result. No one cares. No one probably cares in the small towns either. After all, my defense is protecting them from the requisite interaction too. I never go out without the armor of a book.
"And how does one make snap judgments about other people at the pool or on the plane unless you can surreptitiously sneak a look at what they are reading? I love thinking about how their book matches, or doesn't, their clothes and other accoutrements. Oh Bob, take the book. Since you seem to think it is forbidden it might be even better for you."
Ya gotta love that theory. Happy Valentine's Day reading everywhere.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)
