Let the Great World Spin

My uncle Nick died yesterday. It was sudden and completely unexpected. He was trim and fit and seemed to be in the prime of his life though he was in his mid-sixties. I expected another 20 years of visits with him at least. After all, his father, my grandfather, lived an active life until the age of 97.

The world seems strangely tilted to me today: the sidewalks slanted, the blue sky too low, the bird calls too loud, the grass in this strangely rainy season a too-brilliant green. I spent the night and early morning hours in a daze, pacing the hardwood floors of my apartment and intermittently lying on the couch trying to read Colum McCann's beautiful new novel Let the Great World Spin through the tears in my eyes. It's a novel suffused with death and grief (at least the first 115 pages) and each passage sent my mind reeling back to thoughts of Uncle Nick.

My father had three younger brothers, John, Nick and Ron, and a much younger sister, Ardelle, who is closer in age to me than to my dad. I was the first grandchild in the family, and thus some of my earliest memories are of lively family vacations at my paternal grandparents' house. My three uncles knelt on the floor and would bark at me like three big dogs. I turned with glee from one to the other, stumbling over the large oriental rug that covered the living room floor as I tried to find a safe haven from the doggies. They'd gradually close in on me until there was no escape. There was no getting away from their embraces of playful joy and love.

Throughout my childhood, my father would regale my sisters and I with the exploits of his childhood featuring the four brothers. In the room where I slept at my grandparents' house, there was a picture frame with four individual shots of the boys. My father was respectably buttoned-down forever in his role as the eldest brother, the characteristic wave in his hair already present even though I didn't quite recognize his face. Nick's photo I remember the best. He had a slight sneer. It was a look that he carried into adulthood. I would have recognized him anywhere.

I imagined the brothers as my own version of the Little Rascals. Four boys loose on the neighborhood, causing havoc; four boys getting into trouble down on the boardwalk every summer. It was Nick that played most prominently in these tales. He was the brother that my father was most closely bonded to, despite the fact that John was closer to him in age. At the center of many of these stories was the family's dry cleaning business. It was where they all came of age. In my teenage years, if I acted out at all, I was always threatened with a summer stint at one of the dry cleaning locations. "You don't know how easy you've got it," my dad would laugh. "I'll send you off with my father and you'll never complain again."

The brothers were in the family dry cleaning business, Frankford Associates founded in the early 1930s by my grandfather, at various times in their lives. My father became a lawyer -- he still practices -- and never spent time there after college. John, who was also my godfather, eventually moved out to California when I was in high school and died about 12 years later. Nick and Ron stayed in the business. They were joined at various times over the years by both of Nick's sons and Ardelle's boy. For a short time, I served as the parts manager of the business.

Frankford Associates was not a place I ever expected to find myself. I was off to college at the age of 17 and destined for a professional career. I wasn't going to look back. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and my family as possible. I didn't know what profession I might choose, but it was unimaginable to me that I'd spend it in the dry cleaning business. I must have been insufferable.

I ended up there because it was my only option when I was mired and paralyzed by pain and depression after a traumatic breakup. Somehow, I had lost the thread of my life. I couldn't understand how I had become the person I was. I moved back home after four years in college and a year in Houston. I had no prospects for a professional life, no ambition for one. My father talked to my Uncle Nick and my grandfather, and they installed me as the least-qualified parts manager in the history of the dry cleaning business.

Each day, I would drive down to the Frankford Associates office. I would sit in my office and mope. My grandfather and my uncle Nick would be working on deals on the phone, visiting clients, going back into the warehouse. I just waited for the phone to ring and for someone, usually with a heavy Korean accent, to tell me that their Multimatic cleaning machine was broken and they needed a part. I would consult the instruction manual, examining the diagram of the machine trying to locate the part. Finally, I'd plunge into the parts room. It was filled with hundreds of poorly labeled cardboard bins holding bolts, washers, elbow joints, and switches. I'd try in vain to find the broken piece.

My searches were almost always futile. I'd go back out to the main office and wait for Nick to get off the phone. Often, I was searching for the wrong part. He'd patiently show me the correct part in the manual and walk me into the parts room. The whole time I'd be looking down at the floor and wondering why I had to do anything in this world, tears nearly forming in my eyes as I thought about the life I expected and the pain that had derailed it. Sometimes, when he found the part, I wanted to hug him out of gratitude

It went on like that day after day. My father, who dropped by the office on occassion and my grandfather talked to me at times and told me to hang in there and to buck up. I knew they were right, but somehow it wasn't getting through. Nick rarely broached the topic of my breakup with me. However, every day he was the one who took me out to lunch. He was the one who treated me as if I really was somehow valuable to the business and who showed me how to do my job. Slowly, day by day, hour by hour, he brought me back into the present moment with simple conversations about politics, sports, the state of Philadelphia or anything else that two guys on a lunch break would talk about.

The weekends were a wasteland for me. Without the daily routine of going into the office, I just sank into my morass, my eyes glued to the television, not really comprehending even the most inane sitcoms. Soon, Nick was asking me if I wanted to make the rounds to the coin operated washing and drying machines that he owned at area schools on Saturdays. We drove around together. I must have been the worst company. I remember one drive where I leaned my forehead against the passenger window for miles, just watching the trees go by. Nick talked to me as if nothing was wrong. Slowly, I came to look forward to these drives.

Gradually, I began to learn the job despite myself. I even began to revel in some of the personalities of the office. The two repair guys that we employed were both gruff and alcoholic. One time I went out with Stanley, a man in his early 30s with stringy hair and pockmarked skin who had several girlfriends, if he was to be believed, to fix one of the machines. I didn't have the slightest idea of why I was going on this trip. I couldn't fix anything. Nick pulled me aside, "Just make sure he gets there and gets back. That's all you have to do."

It was 11 a.m. or so when we headed out in Stanley's van. Stanley looked like he hadn't slept in a week. His eyes were bloodshot, his clothes were wrinkled and his movements slow. The parts and tools rattled in the back as we pulled out onto North Philly's Torresdale Avenue. I buckled my seat belt and prayed I was smelling last night's alcohol on Stanley's shirt. Not five minutes into the drive, Stanley turned into a nearly deserted parking lot.

"Why are we stopping?" I asked.

"There's a club I want to visit," he said. "We've got plenty of time. I just have to replace a valve on that machine. It'll take me five minutes. No one has to know."

I looked at him like he was nuts. "Stanley, just fix the machine and get back to the office," I said.

He ran his hand through his hair and banged the steering wheel in an agitated manner. "I thought you were cool, man." He leaned back. "This is the best strip club and there's almost no one in there this early. We'll have all the girls."

I couldn't help but laugh. I think it was the first time I'd laughed in months. We pulled out of the parking lot and headed towards the dry cleaner. Stanley cursed me the whole way. When Stanley started fixing the machine, he was different man. His hands moved in the guts of the machine like a skilled surgeon. Not a single movement was wasted. We were out of there in five minutes. I couldn't wait to tell my Uncle Nick just how right he was to send me along on this mission.

Five months into my tenure at Frankford Associates, I landed a job as a sports reporter in southern Maryland. I thought my uncle would be overjoyed to be released from the burden of bringing me back to life. When I told him, his response was more complicated than I expected.

"Now that we are finally getting some work out of you, you're leaving us," he said. He seemed to mean it. I was surprised. But then he congratulated me and slapped me on the back.

I think, in a way, I have missed those times with my uncle for the last 20 years. The lunches, the drives in the country, the simple, quiet moments in the office when he was teaching me how to read a manual, or write a purchase order, or just find the right elbow joint. To work with him every day knowing how much he cared for me was one of the great blessings of my life.

In the small hours of this morning, I came across this passage in Let the Great World Spin: "Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons."

I put the book down and thought about uncles and nephews. It didn't seem very democratic to me. It seemed terribly unfair.

So today the world keeps spinning, but without my Uncle Nick it doesn't seem so great.

Random House's Hail Mary Pass

I've had my head buried in the Random House Fall catalogs most of this week. It's a wonderful place where fine literature is abundant, and intelligent history, science, and current affairs books are plentiful. It's a book lover's utopia that for moments at a time can almost counteract the bookseller's dystopia in which we are living.

The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group catalog in particular was truly amazing. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it is the single best catalog I have perused in my 12 years as a buyer. Now before we break out the champagne, I have a few caveats.

First of all, this shouldn't really be just one catalog. Corporate ownership of publishing has given us these many headed beasts where several formerly vibrant individual publishers or imprints are forced into one unruly tent. This catalog is the result of some layoffs at Doubleday that forced it into Knopf's lap. Now, you have the greatest literary publisher in the land leading off the season with schlock-meister Dan Brown's Lost Symbol. Perhaps if Dan Brown could have delivered his manuscript as scheduled a few years ago, a few more people at Doubleday would still have their jobs and Knopf could focus its attention on Alice Munro, Richard Russo, A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro. Oh well.

My second reason for not celebrating is that this list might be too much, too late. The idea is that all of these great books are going to magically produce more customers for the holiday season. I have my doubts. After several extremely fallow Fall seasons, our customers have come to expect little new and exciting at Christmas from the publishers. Also, the recession has taken its toll and to think that an industry which currently accepts 10% down as being, well, acceptable, is suddenly going to rebound and be in the black because of a few great titles strikes me as naive. I am not of the "build it and they will come," mindset.

My final word of caution comes from a little history lesson. A few years ago, when Da Vinci Code was selling like iPhones, we were overjoyed. The Boulder Book Store sold more than 500 copies that December alone and nearly 1800 overall. We not only had the champagne out, we were drenched in it. I sobered up quickly when I ran the numbers on hardback fiction in January. Our sales in that section were only up moderately. In fact we sold only about 150 more units than the previous year. Basically, Dan Brown had wiped out the rest of the books in the section. It's conceivable that 350 of his sales might have gone to other books. They weren't really additional sales. Many titles severely underperformed that season.

Okay, enough caveats. Yesterday was still an amazing day as I paged through the catalog and parried with my rep on the quantities that I'd order in for the store. I also shared my thoughts throughout the day with fellow booksellers, reps and authors on Twitter. Here's a blow by blow account of how the buy proceeded.

As I awaited for Ron, my longtime Random House rep, to arrive at ten, I sent out a message on Twitter. It was a plea for help, a cry in the dark.

"Buying RH today. The Doubleday/Knopf side. Must decide on Dan Brown. What are others doing? We sold 1800 of Da Vinci in hdbk. 500 of new bk?"

I got two responses. One from a new store that was in awe that we could sell 1800 copies of any single book and one from the buyer at Maria's down in Durango. Joe from Maria's said they were looking at buying 150 and 500 sounded about right for my buy. That gave me more confidence with my hunch. Given the difference in our stores' sizes, I figured we should be buying about three to four times what Maria's does.

Ron arrived and the Dan Brown book was first on our list. It wasn't even in the catalog. Just a boring photocopied sheet. "I'll take 500," I boldly exclaimed. I waited for Ron to argue that I should take 1,000, maybe even more. But he surprised me. He told me the carton quantity was 16 and that there was a 12-copy floor display. We ended up buying 30 cartons and the floor display. That's 492. I was talked down on my buy. Ron was playing it cool.

Now we opened the catalog. I expected the pages to glow or at least shimmer. I'd heard so much about this catalog. I had done some homework on the paperbacks in the back of the catalog, but I hadn't even looked at the hardbacks. I wanted the experience of having Ron sell me this list without having developed preconceived prejudices. Instead of a page glowing with heavenly light, I was staring at what looked like a fairly pedestrian current affairs book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell.

I was speechless. Ron, as usual, rushed in to fill the silence. He started his well-rehearsed spiel about how this book was a look at the demographic revolution in Europe and how the Muslim populations were growing and asserting themselves in the different countries. I yawned. I'm sure Caldwell's book is well researched, but I was ready for some bling, for crying out loud.

"Knopf is leading off what is supposed to be the greatest list in history with this book?" I asked Ron. "It's a European book. It hardly has a market here." Ron patiently withstood my mini-diatribe. "I'll take one copy," I finally said.

A few moments later Ron was enthusiastically describing Thomas Trofimuk's debut novel Waiting for Columbus on page 10, while I was salivating over Jon Krakauer's new book Where Men Win Glory. Here was the bling. We were even getting an event with Krakauer. Ring, ring go the cash registers. It's been a long wait for this book. Last year, back when Doubleday actually existed as an independent entity, this book was cataloged and then cancelled. Still, Ron went on and on about how Trofimuk was an in-house favorite. I should really give him a chance.

"I'll tell you what Ron why don't we use Dan Brown's book as a bank. If I buy three from an unknown author, we will just lower my order on The Lost Symbol by three. So let's take three on Trofimuk and only 489 on Brown."

Ron chuckled, typed in the three and ignored my request to lower the Dan Brown number. I turned to the Krakauer and wrote in 100. We will order many, many more for the event. Sure, I'm a bit worried that the topic, Pat Tillman -- the football player who was killed in Afghanistan -- might not resonate with our core audience, but the enthusiasm for Krakauer overrides that. Here's a writer that you just have to trust. He has delivered every time. If he thinks Tillman is important enough to write about, I've got to believe that he's going to turn his story into a must read.

Johnathan Lethem's Chronic City was next up on the docket. I'm currently reading this strange Bellow-like novel (huge compliment) about a former child t.v. star living in Manhattan. Lethem's world seems like ours except there's a tiger on the loose in the northern reaches of the island and the narrator's girlfriend is an astronaut stuck out in space with no way to return. So far, I love it. I ordered a dozen.

Earlier in the week, I complained about the sheer number of titles that Random House was publishing on Twitter. James Othmer, the author of the forthcoming Doubleday book Adland responded with, "Hah! I was already neurotic over sharing a pub date w/D. Brown then I saw your spot on Tweet. Good luck!"

Confronted with Othmer's book on the catalog page, I tried to see it in the best light possible. It's basically a book about advertising (sounds like a contemporary Mad Men) that is gunning for a general audience. Ron showed me two possible covers. One bizarrely featured a fried chicken leg, while the other showed the earth. I ordered five copies and prayed the chicken leg would go away. My guess is that without the personal interaction with Othmer on Twitter, I would have gagged on that chicken leg and moved on without bringing the book into the store.

I moved into the Nan A. Talese section of the catalog. Talese is Random House's venerable editor who seems to have the magic touch every season. I'd actually call it genius and talent. During a bookseller dinner at BEA she stood up and said some very kind words about independent booksellers and the importance of the written word. I was feeling warm and fuzzy to her as I turned the pages.

Pat Conroy, who hasn't had a new novel out since I've been a buyer, has delivered South of Broad. I bought two dozen. That's a low number in some ways, but with the plethora of big books and the slowing economy it's enough to give it a look. Besides it comes out in September which gives me plenty of time to react before Christmas if the book takes off.

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood was next. It's her first novel since Oryx & Crake. My wife is currently reading it. At night Emily lies in bed dutifully reading Atwood, while I lie next to her reading Lethem and the baby lies between us. Occassionally we reach across Martina and hold hands or even kiss.

This past weekend Emily and I were in a sandwich shop eating lunch after a hike watching the Mets and Yankees play on this gorgeous 40-inch flat screen television when an ad came on that we found quite interesting. The sound was off so we didn't know what the ad was about. The first shot showed a couple in bed. They were both reading. "Looks like us," I joked. The second scene showed the pair involved in separate hobbies. The third shot showed them snuggling and the word Viagra came across the screen.

Emily and I both started laughing. Obviously, the only reason you would read in bed with your spouse is because you couldn't get it on. Well, the television couple didn't have Atwood and Lethem to keep them entertained. If they did, they might read right through the Viagra and that dreaded four-hour erection.

Knopf was next. There aren't really enough good things that can be said about this publisher. Last year, eight of the top ten New York Times Books of the Year were Knopf titles. This list included novels by Kazuo Ishiguro (24 copies), Lorrie Moore (12), James Ellroy (12), A.S. Byatt's most promising since Possession (16), and Richard Russo (21). In a year without Dan Brown and a recession all of those numbers would have been about 50% higher. Still, that's a lot of books.

But wait there's more. It seems that Nabokov's heirs, first his wife and now his son, have refused to carry out his last wishes. They did not burn his notes for the novel he was working on at the time of his death. After years of dithering, his son Dmitri has decided to release the book. However, it's more than a book. It will contain facsimiles of the 138 index cards that Nabokov used for his notes. A new Nabokov for crying out loud.

As I finished the astounding buy, Ron looked like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. I was exhilerated, exhausted and just a bit discomfited. Knopf could produce Nabokov out thin air, but could they actually make customers appear? If they really had the magic touch, where is the J.D. Salinger novel?

Where was I going to put all of these books? I know deep down in my heart that there are only so many sales to be had this Fall. There's a certain desperation to this list. If times were good and cash flow not so tight, it's hard to imagine that Knopf wouldn't have moved some of these titles back into early 2010.

In a panicked Tweet at the end of the buy, I threw my own hail mary pass in an attempt to preserve the store's cash flow position. "My RH rep is just spoon feeding me now. It's like the Manchurian Candidate. I'm programmed to cancel my Harper & Penguin orders."

Ron grinned. He's been advocating that position for years. We were finally seeing eye to eye.

Impressions of Book Expo

Just What is BEA?

The annual Book Expo America has been many things over the years in addition to being an industry-wide celebration. Politicians including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have used the convention to garner some press for their projects and stroke their authorial ambitions. Celebrities from Prince to Hugh Hefner have thrown lavish parties ostensibly for forgettable books, and it's been a place to air out every half-baked idea in publishing.

The consistent theme throughout the years, whether the convention was in glitzy Las Vegas, pre-Katrina New Orleans, workman-like Chicago, or the center of the publishing universe, New York, has been that BEA is about books. The big houses displayed their fall lists in force, passing out galleys, bringing in authors, hanging giant banners and thrusting endless catalogs on unsuspecting booksellers. If you didn't return home with a dozen buzz books (titles that everyone was talking about), it seemed like you somehow missed the show.


This year's fete was held in New York's remarkably dull Jacob Javits Center. Yes, dull. Lacking luster. Brutish. New York couldn't do any better for a convention center than an ugly squarish black glass building that makes the Port Authority look like a monument to sensible architecture? Worse yet it is set in the most hidden and forsaken part of the city where restaurants and retail establishments won't even venture. Is there any other part of Manhattan that more resembles downtown Flint, Michigan?


Still, despite the sordid location, the transitioning print to digital world that publishers and booksellers occupy, and the horrendous economy (we are two steps ahead of the automakers and one step ahead of the newspapers), I couldn't wait for the show to begin. It was a chance to escape the depressing spreadsheets of the store, an opportunity to convene with creative booksellers and publishers, and perhaps rub shoulders with some authors that I revere.


Here are some thoughts and impressions of the just-completed show:

Where Are The Books?

Most publishers drastically cut back the number of advance reader's copies that they gave out. The booths were sparse, the freebies (despite Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson's assertion that free is the next big price point) were almost non-existent. Where was the swag? All I wanted was a deck of cards advertising a book or a publisher. Used to be, I'd see five of those a show. Nowadays, all I got were brochures to go to netgalley and pick up my reader's copy. No thanks, I'll stay with my 30-year-old hardback John Updike novel that I carried to the show.

Perhaps most surprising about the publishers' reticence to give things away and show off their new titles is that this Fall list just may be the best array of new titles that I have ever seen. New novels from John Irving, E.L. Doctorow, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Richard Russo, and Philip Roth, not to mention Dan Brown and Audrey Niffenegger are on the docket. You would never have guessed that this Fall was an embarrassment of riches based on what we saw on the show floor. Are the publishers trying to hide these books?

You Call That A Booth?

Instead of getting booksellers excited about titles, many publishers seemed to be trying to win an award for best Scandinavian interior design. The booths were small and austere with clean lines, sleek chairs and plush carpet. HarperCollins didn't even have posters of the titles. Only their pesky light boards that flashed a new book jacket every ten seconds stood in the way of the booth winning an award for most monochromatic space in New York City.

A few booths (Hay House, Workman and Andrews McMeel) went all out and stocked their displays with . . . gasp . . . books. The big guys almost uniformly avoided the heavy, messy objects as best that they could. At least Random House, Harper and Penguin were in the hall. Macmillan, home to Henry Holt, St. Martins and Farrar Strauss & Giroux was nowhere to be seen.

Hey, Richard Russo, Pass the Potatoes

Two of three dinners I attended (Random House on Saturday night and FSG on Thursday night) didn't feature any authors. The Random House dinner, usually one of the swankiest affairs at BEA, never features authors. In fact, a few years ago when Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier was there I think most booksellers felt that he was crashing the party.

However, the FSG dinner, which I've only attended for two years, was also devoid of authors. Apparently, the authors are an every-other-year phenomenon at FSG. When the convention is held in New York, the editorial staff comes out in full force. I didn't really mind, because I love the folks at FSG and I am notorious for sticking my foot in my mouth when speaking with writers. The dinner at the Indian restaurant Devi was wonderful, and from my stand point I wouldn't change a thing.

Still, I wonder about the decision to keep the authors and booksellers separate coming from a literary publisher that had no presence on the BEA floor. Wasn't this the golden opportunity to get excited about their titles? At least it was FSG; I'm going to show the love for their books no matter what anyway. Perhaps they knew that all along.

Oh yeah, the dinner that actually did include authors was Friday night's party hosted by Grove/Atlantic and Granta. Sherman Alexie and Paul Auster led an all-star lineup that kept the conversation flowing as smoothly as the free wine in the beautiful loft of Granta's editor John Freeman.

E-readers are Really Sexy

Ebooks were everywhere. You couldn't go more than a few steps without someone talking about the impact of ebooks on the industry. I'm a naysayer. Not about the fact that ebooks will become a major force, but about their impact on the written word. I think they will not lead to an improvement of literary life, rather a diminishment of it.

Enough preaching, because I must admit that my favorite booth in the entire exhibit was for a new e-reader, oddly called C*ol-er. I was darting through one of the aisles, hoping to avoid the L. Ron Hubbard fanatics, when I was stopped dead by a 6-foot-1 blond woman in a small pink bikini. Wow!!

Before I knew what happened I was reeled into this strange tropical booth featuring attractive women in bathing suits and unattractive men in Hawaiian shirts. One of the men took my elbow and tried to lead me away from the barely clad blond to blab about an e-reader that comes in half a dozen different iPod-like colors.

I tried to focus on his spiel, but then I felt that if I didn't ogle the blond, who so obviously wanted to be looked at, that I'd be insulting her. What was she doing in that tiny bikini in the frigid hall?Was she some model hired just to lure people in? I asked a few perfunctory questions to the man about the e-reader, and much to my surprise when he got stumped, she answered.

Now, I was really intrigued. Was this woman someone who worked at the office and just decided to dress for BEA in a provocative manner? Was this a sales rep? If that's an ebook sales rep, the printed book as we know it is dead for sure. The conversation ended when I asked if she would provide private e-reader lessons, if I bought the device.

How Does Lorrie Moore Do It?

Lorrie Moore has the potential for comic genius somewhere in the realm of Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin, Gilda Radner and Grover. I saw her speak at Saturday's author luncheon and all I can say is this woman should be out on the circuit. She read questions that "readers" had written to her and then answered them.

The first one was, "What the hell took you so long to write your new novel? Are you lazy?" Moore refused to answer that one. The second was more to her liking, "How do you do it? How do you raise a son as a single mom, teach at a university and still have time to write a novel? How do you do it?" The question also mentioned her ex-husband's obnoxious emails and other details of her personal life making it clear that she wrote the question. The answer was simple, "I don't answer personal questions."

Her deadpan delivery, self deprecation and timing were stellar. She told several jokes until she had the audience reeled in, and then she socked us with a touching, emotional story about her grandfather's failure to write a novel. She's picking up where he left off, perhaps. It's the family's curse. If your family can't put a curse on you, who can? She's ready for the Borscht belt. I can't wait to read her novel, A Gate at the Stairs.

Is This Really the End?

Walking around this subdued, fairly moribund show I really wondered if BEA has reached its logical end. The economy perhaps sped up the Expo's deterioration by a few years, but it sure seems like an antiquated but beautiful idea to bring all the publishers under one tent and let the booksellers look around. Maybe it's quaint to think that buzz could start on a show floor. Heck, the major publisher that most needs buzz, Macmillan, didn't even show up. Who will follow suit next year?

We have the Internet nowadays. Twitter creates the buzz. Go to Good Reads if you want a recommendation. The publisher tent is open 24/7. The most vibrant discussions at the show involved the new social media that is all around us. Twitter got the most praise, which if past experience at the show is an indicator, probably means it will be dead in a year. Once the book geeks adopt a technology, you know it's passe. Facebook, which already feels like it has peaked, also earned high praise from booksellers and publishers. YouTube was hardly mentioned, so I'm guessing that it will continue to grow in popularity.

I hope that BEA can morph into something meaningful for publishers, authors and booksellers. There must be a way to communicate with each other, to wow each other that doesn't involve cheap Ikea-looking furniture. I think the dinners are valuable, the chance to meet authors is valuable, the empty booths are not. Something is going to change, because those vacant booths cost a lot of money.

Needing Great Fiction

The Excuse

I've taken a brief respite from Kash's Book Corner. The sheer exhaustion of trying to get a five-month old to sleep every night should be enough of an excuse for neglecting the blog. We spent a great week in Clearwater, Florida with my father and my daughter was a little angel for her grandpa. Now that we are home she's not so cooperative.

In all honesty, I can't blame my slothful ways fully on my child. I'm a baseball fanatic, perhaps even an addict, and it's hard for me to devote my spare time in April to anything besides for listening to the Phillies games, playing fantasy baseball and getting ready for softball season. In fact, we met my father in Clearwater because that is the spring training home of the Phillies.

The Sadness

I was also thrown by the tragedy of Henry Hubert's death last week. Henry was my Oxford rep for about 10 years. We were both honored by our peers with Mountain & Plains Independent Booksellers Association awards in the same year. I was humbled to share the stage with such a great book man. Henry was in the business for several years before I was even born. Books were bought and sold differently in the years that he was coming up. He was around when the imprints were the names of flesh and blood people. I could be in the business for 100 years and there are things that Henry understood that I could never learn.

I saw Henry last summer when he came to sell me the University of Chicago list. He told me it was the end of selling for him. It wasn't bringing in much money, but more importantly to Henry it wasn't fun or human any more. He didn't want to enter the digital age; he wasn't one for communicating by email. It was a business plain and simple and Henry was about books. Where was the love of books and reading he wanted to know?

He insisted that I call my wife Emily and invite her down for lunch. We went to a wonderful French restaurant in town and as usual Henry examined the menu with great care and ordered an appetizer, a glass of wine, desert and a coffee in addition to his entree. He loved good food. The slow lunches used to drive me a little crazy, but over the years Henry taught me to enjoy the small moments that come to us in the middle of our hectic days.

During that lunch, I remember smiling proudly because Henry was so effusive in his praise for Emily and he was quite gallant in telling her how pregnancy truly became her. I'm sorry that my daughter Martina will never get to meet Henry. He sent her a present upon her birth, but he did not come up to Boulder in the last few months.

In addition to my sadness about Henry, I joined the city of Philadelphia in mourning the death of Harry Kalas the Phillies great play-by-play voice. Thanks to the advent of the Internet and satellite radio, I've been listening to the Phillies home broadcasts for the last 8 years or so. It was wonderful to get reacquainted with the baritone voice that helped raise me. I was the kid hiding under the covers with a transistor radio as Kalas called the games. I didn't love Kalas like I loved Henry Hubert, but there is still a feeling of emptiness that needs to be honored.

I tuned into the Phillies game the day that Kalas died. It was an afternoon affair in Washington and I was home for lunch. It was also the day that I learned of Henry Hubert's death. I held the baby on my lap and slowly ate my sandwich as a moment of silence was held for Kalas. The game began immediately following the tribute. The Phil's color man Larry Andersen, one of the heroes of the 1993 pennant winners, was sobbing on the radio. I put my sandwich down, kissed the baby and handed her to Emily.

"I'm going back to work," I said. "I can be depressed all on my own today without having to hear the Phillies lose."

Emily hugged me, Martina clutched between us, and we both thought of Henry and what we'd lost.

The Escape

As usual in times of emotional crisis or sadness, I turn to books. It seems like a wonderful crop of fiction is about to be published. I delved into several advance reader's copies and I'm happy to report that there are three books coming out in the next six weeks that I can heartily endorse. Here are the shelf talkers I wrote up for the store's recommended section:

The Signal by Ron Carlson
No other novelist writes about the western landscape with such care and precision as Ron Carlson. The pristine lakes, glacial valleys and horse ranches of Wyoming's Wind River Mountains are the backdrop to this tenderly rendered story of love torn apart. Hidden in the beautiful wilderness, in the form of poachers and criminals, danger lurks. The threats may destroy Carlson's estranged lovers, but it just may offer them a chance for redemption.


Border Songs by Jim Lynch
The border between Washington State and Canada is crawling with drug smugglers, illegal immigrants and renegade dairy farmers in this slyly humorous satirical novel. Thrust into the spotlight of this nether world of fascinating schemers is Brandon Vanderkool, a 6-foot-9, slightly autistic, remarkably artistic, innocent border patrol agent. Vanderkool only wants to track birds and build Andy Goldsworthy type sculptures but the criminals keep getting in the way.

Woodsburner by John Pipkin
In this remarkable re-creation of the day that Henry David Thoreau burnt down 300 acres of the Concord woods, Pipkin explores Thoreau's mind, life in 1840s Massachusetts and 19th century pornography. Odd characters, including a bookseller who resorts to selling erotic drawings to save his business and a farmhand named Oddmund, populate this historic novel. Pipkin grapples with the meeting between transcendentalism and everyday life and not surprisingly Thoreau seems mighty strange compared to his contemporaries

HarperCollins' Loss is Our Loss

The best sales rep I have ever worked with in my 12 years of buying will be retiring later this year. HarperCollins' John Zeck was not planning to retire so soon, but when the publisher offered early retirement he took them up on their deal. Ouch.

I have had some amazing reps, including this year's Publishers Weekly Rep of the Year Penguin's Tom Benton, my legendary Random House rep Ron Smith, and my always patient and very understanding Hachette rep Randy Hickernell but no one did nearly as much for their publisher as John Zeck.

Zeck is a tireless promoter of Harper's titles. What makes him different than almost every other rep is that he closely monitors his books from the initial sales call, to their release, to their sell through and even onto their life as remainders. He does this for dozens and dozens of titles every single season despite having the largest list of any rep, selling both kids and adult titles and working a huge territory.

If you aren't in the publishing industry, you'd probably assume that following a title through its life cycle is a standard practice for a sales rep. You would be wrong. Most reps follow through on a couple of titles and then they're off to the next season. The sheer volume of new books means that the reps are constantly working six to nine months in the future.

I encountered the awesome power of Zeck during my first year as a buyer. I was under a mandate to reduce the store's inventory and I was in over my head when it came to juggling all the responsibilities of my new job. Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells was beginning to take off in paperback. We had sold 20 copies in a few weeks and I was playing catch up with the inventory. I got a call from Zeck that I will never forget.

"Hey Dude, you need to order 100 copies of Divine Secrets."
"I don't need that many. Maybe another 20."
"No. You need at least 100. This book is going to be huge. You've got to stop chasing it."
"We aren't selling 100 copies a month of anything right now. It's too many."
"Just trust me on this. I'll eat the books if they don't sell."

I bought the 100 books, in part just to get him off the phone, and they sold in just a few weeks. By then I knew to keep about 100 books in stock at all times. We went on to sell 2,964 copies of Divine Secrets. Sure, we would have sold the bulk of those copies without John's help. However the truth is it would have taken me three months to get up to the quantity I really needed to sell the book to its fullest potential. John got me there in one phone call.

John and a few other notable long-time reps really taught me how to be a buyer. On long drives up and down from the mountains to ski, I peppered him with questions about the industry. I must have driven him nuts. "Why aren't there better incentives to buy nonreturnable?" "What kind of sell through on the frontlist are publishers really expecting?" "How come we have to buy by season instead of monthly?" "What percentage of hardbacks is sold in the first month of release?" He answered every question like a hyper big brother. Sometimes the answers were pure bullshit, but he always made me think. He always challenged me to do a better job, which was to sell more books.

His influence and his gregarious personality extended far beyond the booksellers his me. Last week my wife was listening to a Lisa Scottoline audiobook. At the end of the nine discs, Scottoline's acknowledgements were read. My wife was shocked to hear Scottoline mention the "world famous John Zeck." How many times does a Philadelphia author publicly single out and thank the Denver based rep for his help? Never.

Zeck is one of a kind when it comes to dealing with authors. He fully understood that they were the lifeblood of the industry and even if they weren't always the most pleasant people every effort needed to be extended to make them feel welcome and comfortable. At a recent promotional dinner hosted by Zeck, Simon Van Booy the author of the forthcoming Love Begins in Winter, leaned over to me and said pointing to John, "He's incredible. Is he like this for every author?" The answer, of course, was yes.

It's easy to lose sight of just how incredible John Zeck is at his job because of his larger-than-life personality. He takes over the whole office during a sales call. It's hard for anyone to get any work done when his booming voice drowns out their thoughts. He barks commands at our marketing director; he issues directives to our backlist buyers. He's a whirlwind with a new idea every 10 minutes.

The disruption to the office is exacerbated because he seems to be chronically disorganized and have attention deficit disorder. However, he knows his books, he knows our store, and he can work the Above the Treeline inventory system better than anyone in the country. By the time he leaves the office we are seeing a dozen titles in a different light, we have taken up the mantle for the books he is passionate about.

His passion isn't just about hot new books, or sexy titles by up and coming authors. When we run out of the Goodnight Moon board book for even a day, I'm liable to get a call from Zeck. "I'm looking at Above the Treeline, and you're out of Goodnight Moon again?! Just order a dozen and get it over with." Does that sound like a disorganized person who has trouble focusing? No way. Sometimes, I think John's hit upon the perfect salesman act. He creates a huge storm, but he has an idea about how every piece of dust is going to settle.

Harper would be insane to lose him. I predict that without an absolutely top-notch replacement, who would probably cost nearly as much as whatever Zeck is earning, our sales will drop by 10%. When I told our children's buyer, she rolled her eyes and indicated the falloff would be much greater in her department. Zeck has cajoled, bullied, and outsmarted us to the point where Harper dominates our children's recommended titles and overall sales.

Here's my suggestion to Harper. Pay John Zeck the early retirement package (call it a bonus and fire someone at Fox News to cover it), give him a couple months off, let him choose his territory and be thankful that you dodged a bullet. I have no idea if John would even consider this deal, but frankly, if Harper were to cut their sales department to one person, that person needs to be John Zeck.

Hachette: From Boom to Bust

Hachette Gets Cheap, Real Cheap
During the deluge of bad news that has pounded the publishing industry in the last six months, one company, Hachette Book Group, has emerged unscathed. Thanks to the popularity of Stephanie Meyer, Malcolm Gladwell, David Sedaris, and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, not to mention the dozen or so James Patterson best sellers that come out every year, Hachette is sailing through this recession. While Random House, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin, and Simon & Schuster were all cutting back, Hachette was handing out bonuses.

I don't begrudge anyone in publishing a bonus and was quite happy to find out that the people I know in Hachette were being rewarded for a magnificent year. Just about everyone connected to the printed word is undervalued and poorly paid, so to see bonuses being doled out during hard times was the feel good story of the Christmas season.

Unfortunately, Hachette has decided to not only withhold their largess from their bookselling partners, but they have instituted severe cutbacks that will cost many independent stores $3,000 in the upcoming year. It turns out they want to improve on their good fortunes, by breaking the backs of the very bookstores that promote and sell their titles.

Yesterday, we were informed that Hachette was eliminating their newsletter co-op program ($2,000), their author events co-op ($200 to $800 per year) and their Emerging Voices program ($200). These were all programs where bookstores acted in concert with Hachette to promote individual titles. We bought display quantities of 40 different titles and advertised them in our email newsletter to earn the $2,000. We hosted events to earn the $200 event co-op fee and, most importantly, we bought 10 copies of books by relatively unknown authors to earn the co-op attached with the Emerging Voices authors.

In most businesses, $3,000 might be a fairly insignificant amount. In the bookselling world where a profit of 2% is considered stellar, it is a critical sum. That's enough money to pay a bookseller for one hour of work every Monday through Saturday all year long. Unfortunately, that's how little booksellers earn. It's enough money that we and other stores have been brainstorming how we can possibly make cuts to save it. Heck, we are even buying cheaper toilet paper and paper towels just to realize a savings of about $1,000.

The worst part of Hachette's moves is that many of these programs are working. We bought 10 copies of Katie Crouch's Girls in Trucks when it appeared on the Emerging Voices last year. It's a book I probably would have brought in only two copies without the Hachette incentive. We have now sold 67 hardbacks and are expecting it to explode in paperback this summer.

"I think the newsletter program really worked," my Hachette rep Randy said. "You would change buys from three to eights. There were titles that you bought tens of that you never would have bought in those quantities without the extra money."

Earlier today I tried to reduce my buy of Giulia Melucci's I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti, one of this season's Emerging Voices books, from 10 to 3. It's too late. Hachette has already invoiced us. I can tell you in the future we won't look on Hachette's midlist titles with such a generous eye.

As usual, Hachette made it's decisions with very little input. No bookseller input at all from what I can tell. A little over a year ago, Hachette tried to unilaterally impose a case quantity minimum on hot new titles. That ill conceived idea, which now sounds brilliant compared to eliminating most of their co-op, met with such wrath from booksellers it was quickly rescinded.

One can only hope that this initiative meets the same fate. I doubt it. There is simply too much money on the table. It's a shame to see Hachette take their successes for granted and dump on the booksellers who have worked so hard to sell their titles. Something tells me that they won't get much bookseller support when the next tsunami hits the publishing world.

Musings about eBooks.

The launch of Amazon's Kindle 2 on February 9th has released a torrent of discussion about the future of ebooks on television, in newspapers, in the pages of national magazines, as well as online conversations in blogs and on Twitter. I've refrained from joining the choir of commentators because I feel that I don't have a cogent argument to put forward about my extreme discomfort when it comes to eBooks.

I sincerely believe that if Amazon's Kindle or Sony's Reader Digital Book or perhaps an iPhone eReader application were to take off the way the iPod has over the last five years, bookstores as we know them would cease to exist. Sure, there would be some small, niche stores. Perhaps even a few general booksellers that were a tiny fraction of the size of my store could exist in big tourist destinations, but the world of oversized chain booksellers and scrappy full-service, general independents would largely disappear.

Instead of trying to put together a rational, logical essay about all of these ideas swirling in my head, I thought I'd just jot down a few thoughts about eBooks, in an effort to join the conversation.

• The prices of Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader are outrageous. We are talking about a device to enable people to read books. Books, the top source of information for about 500 years, have been relatively affordable, throughout modern history, for people of all walks of life. New books generally range in price from $3 (Dover classics and children's early readers) to $35 (hardcover biographies or histories). The $359 price tag truly prevents eReaders from being something that will be available to all classes of Americans, let alone people in poorer countries. If some books are eventually only published as eBooks, millions of people will not have access to them. That's scary.
  



• Every new scientific or technological idea is not necessarily a good one. My wife and I have been debating the merits of cloning Neanderthals for the past few weeks. I've been in favor of bringing our ancient relatives back to life. It would only take about 30 million dollars to meet one. We could clone about 25,000 (a small city) if we spent the entire stimulus bill on the project. My wife is concerned about the ethics and humanity of the enterprise. EBooks seem about as necessary in today's world as Neanderthals. For generations, the book has been an unbelievably efficient means of communicating complex ideas and stories. EBooks don't add anything to the reading experience. IPods, on the other hand, allow us to mix our music and categorize it in ways that weren't possible unless you were a disc jockey. We aren't going to make mixed books. Do you need to carry around 100 books? Should we scrap books simply because we can? What are the real ramifications of digitizing our cultural legacy? Could a virus wipe out a future Thomas Paine's cry for revolution?
  


• Reading is a vacation from the computer and television screens. We spend half our waking lives, maybe more, in front of these screens. Reading a book slows us down, forces us to concentrate in a way that neither the television nor the Internet does. If reading a novel is no different than reading a website with multiple links, will our ability to focus on something longer than a blog post begin to erode?
  


• Now that I have a baby, I seem to find myself in the library a bit more. It's a restful place in downtown Boulder with excellent diaper-changing facilities. We've started borrowing DVDs and books on CD while we are there. Almost all of the library's numerous patrons are glued to computer screens. Many are watching entertainment videos on YouTube, viewing sports clips on ESPN or just tweaking their resumes. Often, I amble, virtually alone, through the stacks of books, glancing at their colorful spines. I get the feeling in those quiet aisles, as I look at John Dos Passos' collected works taking up half a shelf, that I'm witnessing the demise of a whole civilization of learning. I think eBooks will just hasten the decline. Without their physical aspect, books will have no chance of competing in the entertainment world.
  


• Each night, I read a book to our four-month-old daughter, Martina, before putting her to bed. We've read Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D.B. Johnson, my personal favorite, Chubbo's Pool by Betsy Lewin, I Kissed the Baby by Mary Murphy and Dawn by Uri Shulevitz several times. I perch her on my lap and spread open the beautiful, illustrated pages before her. The paintings take up most of her field of vision. She's completely absorbed by the riot of colors and shapes that she sees. EBooks will never be able to do that.
  

There are two recent blog posts that I would recommend for a sane and rational bookseller perspective on eBooks. Rich Rennick, a bookseller with Malaprop's in Asheville, North Carolina states his belief that there are opportunities for independent bookstores in his post What About EBooks? Patrick, a bookseller with Vromans, the top independent bookstore in Los Angeles, talks about the actual experience of reading an eBook and what the future of eBooks might mean for independents in his recent post, I Read and E-Book (And I Liked It).