A Perfect TWELVE

The Complete Book of Aunts seemed like an odd title when it was first presented to me last year. Who would buy such a thing? After all, aunts are usually mothers, daughters, wives and sisters before they are aunts. I'm an uncle, but it certainly isn't a defining characteristic of my personality. I wouldn't even be remotely tempted to buy a book about uncles. I stared at the page and tried to imagine where in the store we would even shelve such a book. I was about to say "skip", when my Hachette rep mentioned that this book was being published by Jonathan Karp's imprint TWELVE.

That changed everything for me. I refocused on the catalog page, noticing that the dog on the book's cover was an alligator. I began to think that perhaps a strange book detailing aunts in history from Aunt Jemima to John Lennon's Aunt Mimi might have campy appeal. I decided to order ten copies and put it on our recommended reading section during the holiday season. Why such a drastic turnaround based on the publisher? Karp, the former editor-in-chief of Random House, is attempting to do something that is completely counter to much of publishing today. He's actually showing tremendous restraint in the number of books he's publishing, he's giving them all personal attention by editing them himself and he's going full bore on the publicity and marketing for his books. Hallelujah. If you are a bookseller, or a reader for that matter, it's like watching a true craftsman at work.

TWELVE, which released its first title a year ago, only publishes 12 books a year, neatly timed to one a month. Karp, who receives hundreds of solid manuscripts from established writers, saw something in Rupert Christiansen's book on aunts to warrant a full month of his company's time. I knew that TWELVE wouldn't let The Complete Book of Aunts die an anonymous death. There would be a heavy ad campaign and clever marketing to back it up. Karp's investment of time and money in a quirky title was enough for me to take a leap of faith and give the title front-of-store positioning. My gamble paid off, with the title garnering over 25 sales during the holiday season.

One of the most unusual aspects of TWELVE is the eclectic selection of titles. When the imprint was first introduced, I imagined a tightly focused house that would excel in one type of book. That simply isn't true. Karp has published fiction from established authors, like Christopher Buckley, and from unknowns like Matt Richtel. TWELVE's nonfiction has ranged from current affairs to histories to memoirs to philosophy and featured authors from John McCain to Christopher Hitchens. It's all held together by a vision of what makes a great book.

"We want to publish singular books -- stories, perspectives, and voices readers aren't likely to get elsewhere with the same kind of authority," Karp wrote during in an email interview. "Works of high quality and broad appeal. Books that influence the national conversation, entertain, and illuminate.... It's possible to fall in love twelve times a year without being promiscuous in your taste."

TWELVE led the national conversation for a while last year with the release of Hitchens' God is not Great. The title seemed to ignite a societal debate on atheism that had been simmering for years. Hitchens' work reached the top of the New York Times' bestseller list and was featured in countless newspaper articles, magazine pieces and radio shows. Hitchens always generates great publicity: you can't attack Mother Theresa and fly under the media radar. But the avalanche of attention that God is not Great received far outpaced his other recent books.

Karp has said in other interviews, when he was first founding TWELVE, that he believes "talented authors deserve a massive amount of attention." So far, he has delivered on that belief. Each book is promoted nationally. There won't be any authors crying because the publicity has been pulled from their titles.

"I suspect our spending per title is greater than the industry average, but that may be true for all Hachette books," Karp said. "Generally, this company (Hachette) has always published fewer titles than its competitors and marketed them more aggressively. That marketing philosophy was one of the reasons I wanted to publish books here. Authors appreciate that kind of attention, and we want to attract the very best writers."

Karp will have to attract the best writers if TWELVE has a chance to flourish in the future. That's going to be a tough task. TWELVE is operating in an industry where publishing more titles always seems to be the way to grow. The pressure to show sales gains, despite falling readership, from the corporate parents of book publishers is immense. Karp doesn't shy away from the challenge.

"Our goal is to keep raising the bar -- to publish progressively better books, by the finest writers, and to help them reach more and more readers. As a business, we won't grow by publishing more titles -- our promise to publish only twelve new books a year is inherent in the name of the imprint -- so the only way to grow is to sell more copies of the books we do publish, in hardcover and ultimately in paperback," Karp said.

I wondered if perhaps Karp was trying to start a trend in publishing. I must admit I'm a bit fascinated with trends after reading another TWELVE book, Microtrends: The Small Voices Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne. Penn, an advisor to Hillary Clinton, discusses dozens of trends that are bubbling under the surface of our culture. My favorite one is that a discernible number of young people are aspiring to become snipers. Those inclined toward military work used to want to fly air force jets, drive a tank, or blow things up, but now the glamour job is the secret marksman. However, Karp eschewed the notion of being a publishing trendsetter.

"This model works best for TWELVE. Larger companies have different goals and different objectives. We want each book to have the potential to be a bestseller. A larger company may not have that objective for every book it acquires, but by acquiring more books, those companies are giving a lot of talented writers a chance to begin to find a readership," Karp wrote. "Personally, I've come to believe the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson: The publisher who publishes best, publishes least. (Not his exact words, but I'm sure it was his intention.)"

In my research for this article, I couldn't find the Thomas Jefferson quote that Karp mentioned. However, we should all remember what Jefferson said about reading on numerous occasions: "I cannot live without books." Somehow, I think Jefferson could live without a lot of the books being published today, but he just might perish without his monthly title from TWELVE.

Hachette Takes a Hatchet to Indies

Hachette Book Group, better known as Little Brown, has been doing a lot of things right when it comes to independent bookstores over the last few years. Several senior members of Hachette came out to Boulder late in 2006 to have discussions with dozens of representatives from independent bookstores all around the country. During those conversations, I certainly got the sense that Hachette was a publisher that really cared about the independent marketplace.

It's not just the words of a few executives that put them on the positive side of the ledger, however. Their actions speak as loud as their words. No one in the business has a better cooperative advertising plan to offer bookstores for their newsletters. They, unlike Penguin USA and Simon & Schuster, actually let the bookstores choose what books they want to feature, and the co-op pool is generous enough, unlike Random House and HarperCollins, that we don't have to be all that picky. Hachette introduced a thoughtful and superbly marketed imprint, Twelve, last year, giving independent bookstores tailor-made books, like Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great and Christopher Buckley's Boomtown, to sell to our demographic. They have also honed their Emerging Authors program, throwing marketing and co-op dollars behind writers that independent bookstores can sell.

It was with all this in mind that I began my Hachette appointment last Thursday. Not even the immediate over hyping of James Patterson pablum (a full-color, glossy calendar marked with the release dates of his eight new books) was able to break me out of my good spirits. It was only when I tried to order six copies of Patterson's novel Sail (co-written, of course, by Howard Roughan) that the appointment quickly turned sour. Suddenly, my thoughts of Hachette went from warm and fuzzy to cold and prickly.

My rep informed me that if I ordered six copies of the Patterson book, I wouldn't get them in time for the national laydown date. The only books that Hachette will send out on time are those that are ordered in carton quantities. I looked at him as if he were speaking Aramaic and was an escaped lunatic from a bad Mel Gibson film. I smiled, in response: surely I had misunderstood him. Obviously, Hachette wouldn't renege on the most basic job of a publisher -- to deliver new books on time. I asked him what he meant. Unfortunately, what he meant was that Hachette, for all its smooth talk and gestures of good will to the independent stores over the last few years, had, in fact, adopted a policy that would put independent stores around the country at a distinct competitive disadvantage. Worse yet, the customers would think it was the bookstore's fault when a beloved author's title was not in.

I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. It's not really possible to be mad at my Hachette rep. He is about the nicest, kindest man I know, and besides, he didn't come up with this asinine policy. "When will we get the books?" I asked. He assured me that we would get the books within a few days after the laydown date. "That simply is not good enough," I told him. Faced with an immediate decision on Sail, however, I upped our order to meet the 10-copy carton requirement to ensure I'd get the books on time. We typically sell more than half of all the Patterson books (typically six or eight copies) that we are going to sell in the first two weeks of the book's release. I couldn't risk missing that window because of Hachette's ineptitude.

As the appointment went on, I seethed with anger at every book I ordered. Between my buy and the kids' buy, the Boulder Book Store easily ordered over 500 books on Thursday. There were a handful of laydowns that I just couldn't bring myself to order in carton quantity. When those books are released, we will not have them. Despite our large buy, our order isn't good enough for the number crunchers at Hachette. Those will be dark days in our store. Hachette will rev up its publicity machine with a national media onslaught for these titles, and we will invariably have a few customers who will request those titles. We won't have them. Of course, Borders and Barnes & Noble will have them in stock. It's not so hard to order a carton of books when you have a 1,000 locations.

Sure, I could order a carton of every laydown book, but just how much shipping (Hachette's money sending the books to us and ours on the returns) do we need to burn when we know we aren't going to sell that many books? Shame on Hachette for putting independent bookstores around the country in this position.

Obviously, Hachette has figured out that it costs more money to break open the cartons and repackage these books in a timely manner. Somehow every other publisher has worked out a method that doesn't unfairly penalize independent stores. Every other publisher gets their laydown books to independent bookstores on time. Only Hachette has decided to purposely thrust themselves into a situation where they will appear incompetent to booksellers throughout America. In the hope that Hachette will rethink their terribly insensitive decision, here are a few suggestions on how they could address this issue:

• Give stores incentives to buy carton quantities. Perhaps, Hachette could offer extra co-op or discount on the first carton that an account orders to each ship-to location. Gigantic stores that order 5,000 cartons to a central distribution center would only get the deal on the first carton. Smaller indies would have some encouragement to bump their orders up.
• Make all new releases national laydowns. Random House sets all of its new books to be released on Tuesdays. It doesn't matter if it's the biggest book of the season or a book with a tiny print run. The problem with Hachette is that only a dozen or so books are laydowns. They end up getting caught shipping five books at a time when an account doesn't order a full carton. If every title were released as a laydown, there'd be at least a box or two of books being shipped to the indies every week.
• Realize that there is a cost of doing business. Breaking up cartons for independents is just a small cost of doing business. Stop counting your pennies and look at the broader scope of the relationship.
• Up the price of laydown titles by $1.00 to cover the cost of shipping individual books. Will anyone really notice if Sail, already listed at an inflated $27.99, were $28.99 instead?

I hope that Hachette can figure this out, because I'd like to get back to concentrating on all the great things they do. There's a new David Sedaris book, Indefinite Leave to Remain, coming out in May, and it doesn't get any better than that for an independent bookstore. Oh yeah -- I bought 10 cartons of the Sedaris book, plus a display. A purchase like that should be enough to convince Hachette it's worth their while to send the Boulder Book Store a few stray books on time.

Bargain Shopping

The Boulder Book Store marks each new year with an all-store sale on January 1st. We've turned what used to be the slowest day of the year into one of the busiest. I remember working New Year's Day in the years before the sale, when you could play a hand of solitaire at the front register between customers. Now, we welcome all the exhausted, the hungover, the stuffed, the seemingly shopped out, the football-hating customers and give them 20% off. It's not an original idea. We stole it from Changing Hands Bookstore in Arizona.

Yesterday, customers came to the register juggling stacks of books, eager to spend their holiday gift cards. My favorite shoppers were the ones looking for the super discounts. They trolled through the remainders and used books, looking for the deal of the year on books that were already absurdly cheap. We even had a number of customers down on their hands and knees wading through our used book markdowns that normally sell for one to three dollars. I didn't want to break it to them: they were only going to save 20 to 60 cents on a book they may not ever read. Didn't these bargain shoppers get the memo? Spend more, save more.

As I waded through dozens of customers in our upper north room who all seemed to be looking for the perfect calendar, I started thinking about the psychology of a sale. Let's face it, most of our customers could easily afford everything they were buying at full price. In the case of the calendars, they would have had a much better selection two months ago and they would have had the added bonus of being able to circle our January 1st sale on their brand new 2008 calendar ahead of time. Instead, they chose to come out on a cold holiday and brave the crowds to save just a few bucks. Most of the shoppers were our frequent buyers who get 10% off all year round, so they were really saving an extra 10% yesterday on items that are already priced as low as one dollar.

I don't think it's the money that is saved. After all, you could go to the library and save 100% on most of these items. It must be the perception of finding a great deal. The excitement of the hunt. A customer's perception really is everything in the retail business. About three days before Christmas, I had a customer approach me to discuss the "pricing" of our items. He was holding Tony Hillerman's new paperback Shape Shifter ($9.99) in one hand and the "Planet Earth" DVD ($79.99) in the other. He wanted to know how we had the gall to charge $9.99 for a flimsy paperback.

My mouth dropped open as I stared at the "Planet Earth" DVD that was in the hand that he wasn't shaking at me. Finally, I focused on the Hillerman. It was one of the steroid mass market editions that are becoming more popular from the major publishers. They look like the old mass markets, except they're an inch or two taller. I personally wouldn't be caught dead reading something that appears so ungainly, but I tried to remember the reasons the publishers were giving for the new size. The main reason the publishers gave to retailers was that it would allow them to effortlessly milk an extra two dollars from the customers. Their words were, "a more attractive price point for the retailer." That reasoning wouldn't work in this situation. The next explanation was that the print size in this format would be bigger for the aging baby boomers. I tried that one.

"I don't need bigger print," he said through nearly clenched teeth. "I've been reading Hillerman for 20 years and never complained." I was sorely tempted to comment on the fact that he had no qualms about spending nearly 80 dollars on a DVD. It was hard to resist pointing out that our net profit on the DVD was about three times the cost of the Hillerman book. Instead, I offered him my 30% employee discount on the book. In the end, I didn't want to jeopardize the DVD sale. It was almost worth giving him the book for free. My god, even the Boulder Book Store is reduced to using books as a loss leader.

At least I didn't get any bitter comments yesterday. The sun was shining, the air was crisp and everything in the store was a bargain, or at least in the case of Tony Hillerman, it was priced just right.

Eli Gottlieb: Now You See Him

Eli Gottlieb, the author of the forthcoming novel Now You See Him, is making the transition from unknown writer to literary star in one giant leap. His novel, a tautly written suspense tale, has garnered superb bookseller reaction, received a starred Publishers Weekly review and has been optioned for a movie by Jeff Sharp, the producer of "Boys Don't Cry."

The attention might be a little overwhelming if Gottlieb were fresh from an MFA program or if he were a twenty-something wunderkind, but Gottlieb isn't a neophyte at the writing game. He has waited a long time for this moment, and experience has taught him to take nothing for granted. In 1997, his first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was published to strong reviews and even won two prizes. Now, it's out of print and sells for a penny on Amazon. In between his two works of fiction, Gottlieb made his living in the decidedly unglamorous world of ghostwriting and editing for magazines. He is currently a contributing editor for 5280, a Denver magazine.

I caught up with Gottlieb, a Boulder resident, at my favorite sushi restaurant, to ask him about his new novel, the expectations for him and about writing and literature in general. Above all, I had one really pressing question: just how does a writer find himself anointed the "next big thing" in publishing? Why him? Why not one of the many other novelists with new books on the way?

He admitted that it seemed truly unbelievable how responsive booksellers had been to his book. He also credited the marketing department of William Morrow, his publisher. "I'm thrilled with what they are doing. I've never had anything like that before. My publicist seems to be everywhere. I don't see how he has time to do anything else. It's incredible." That may be true, but plenty of books get that type of attention and never even cause a blip on the literary landscape.

One interesting marketing tactic, however, was that Morrow sent out a whopping 7,500 reader's copies of the novel to booksellers. That's an incredible number of promotional copies. Some books don't get print runs that big. It reminded me of something that I'd heard many years ago from Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic. It was at a party for Leif Enger's debut novel, Peace Like a River. Entrekin mused that the most effective way to promote a book would be simply to give out 10,000 copies. Perhaps he was right. It seems that there are booksellers at every independent store in the country that have already read Gottlieb's novel.

Even so, a smart, intellectual novel that also sells amazingly well is a rarity. We've often been inundated with reader's copies for the supposed "next big thing" that end up unread and donated to the Salvation Army before the hardback has even been released. Every now and then one breaks out, like Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and becomes both a literary and commercial sensation. Did Gottlieb really think that was possible for him?

He laughed in response and told me that he knew Smith when he lived in Rome and was very impressed with her. "When that happens, the author seem to be coming from a different place, saying something original." I thought I saw him shrug just a little bit. "I'm a Jewish guy. I'm about 40 years too late."

When I pressed him on the qualities that Now You See Him might possess to cause such a groundswell of enthusiasm, he finally took a stab at the answer. "I think it gives sincere literary pleasure, while igniting suspense."

Suspense is the key word when discussing his novel. Gottlieb talks about writing the book in a "glide" -- although it did take two years of hard work. The first person narration of Nick Framingham is pitch perfect, and once that voice enfolds the reader, it's as if the story is told in a near breathless white heat. Gottlieb thoroughly inhabits his narrator, and the story naturally unfolds based on the fascinating cast of characters that Gottlieb puts in Nick's world. The reader is held in a position of suspense because Nick is not all that reliable of a narrator when it comes to his perceptions of people, and he also seems to be hiding something. The gradual discovery of what he may be hiding is one of the joys of the novel.

"Very early on in my life, I understood the importance of keeping a secret," Gottlieb said. "That aspect of hiding evolved as the story went on."

Gottlieb is not a writer who maps out his plots before writing. He lets the characters take his stories where they need to go. This is in contrast to many novelists. Last year, when I visited William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, I was transfixed by the writing on the walls of his study. In Faulkner's hand, the entire outline for his novel A Fable, which follows soldiers for a week, was mapped out day by day. Needless to say, Gottlieb's walls are clean.

"A lot of writers create their novels by reading a printed circuit diagram of the whole plot," Gottlieb said. "I can't do that. I started as a poet, and poets make local connections. They aren't concerned with the big picture. Poets are addicted to local intensity. That's what's important. Obviously, in a novel I had to pull back and make sure that the larger elements cohere."

That intensity is felt acutely throughout Now You See Him. The suspense hums through Gottlieb's prose and helps create tension in scenes that otherwise might lay flat on the page. One of my favorite scenes is when Nick, a married man, is meeting an old girlfriend, and Gottlieb uses language that is both poetic and blunt to give the scene real visceral energy:

"She displaced any doubts I had about the purpose of our encounter by ignoring my inclined, politely pursed lips and pulling me toward her into a three-point stance of breasts, lips and cocked pelvis. Lucy was delicately made, but Belinda was built like a beautiful nose tackle, with all her physical features outsized, as if for the anatomically hard of hearing."

The language is punchy, packed with descriptive details and has a rhythm. But Gottlieb is not just using poetic language for its own sake. The description of Belinda throws Nick's reliability, and perhaps even his sanity, into question. It's hard to imagine anything less feminine than a football nose tackle. It's the most brutal position on the field, whose job is simply to run other players over. Nose tackles are destroyers, not mistresses.

Even though Nick is the heart of the novel, he is ostensibly telling the story of his childhood best friend, Rob Castor. Castor, who was a literary sensation about ten years earlier, has murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide before the novel begins. His actions have brought a media frenzy to the small upstate New York town where Nick lives (not unlike the media circus that Jon Benet Ramsey's murder brought to Boulder). Nick's life is falling apart as he tries to understand the crime. It's a thrilling story of deception and betrayal that gets told in bits and pieces between Nick's own tale of woe. Gottlieb related that the original idea behind the novel was a romantic scene between Rob and his girlfriend.

"It's sort of a bait and switch," Gottlieb said. "As I started telling Rob's story, I needed to show where he and Nick came from. I needed to go deeper into that past. After all, you can't expect a nebbish to lead. You have to present the charismatic guy first, and then let the nebbish guy step forward."

As I read the book and thought about Nick's yearnings to be like his friend Rob and his admiration for his childhood buddy, despite the horrible crime he committed, I couldn't help but think a bit about F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby. It's another narrating Nick telling us the story of a charismatic leading man, Jay Gatsby. Was this deliberate?

"I didn't set out to do that," Gottlieb demurred. "I haven't thought about it. But, Gatsby does ring true. I've read Fitzgerald, and all those characters are within me. When I think of the book, I think of Graham Greene and his novels. Graham Greene is my man."

Does all of this add up to a literary sensation? It's impossible to tell. Gottlieb had several questions for me. How important was it to be a No. 1 Booksense pick? Would it really help his sales to go up into the Colorado mountains and sign books? Would anyone want to see him? How many sales would constitute success? I told him I didn't know any of these answers for sure, and that each book is different, but I knew a successful book when I saw one. I assured him that everything was lining up just right for Now You See Him.

"I consider myself a good soldier. I'll do whatever it takes and go wherever they ask me to go," he said. "I've lived the bohemian lifestyle, going from hand to mouth, for a long time. I'm ready for success. I welcome it."

After reading his elegantly told story, which keeps the suspense flowing while delivering one beautiful sentence after another, I'd say that he deserves all the success that comes his way.

Call for Elizabeth Hardwick Information

Elizabeth Hardwick, the doyen of the New York Review of Books, died earlier this month at the age of 91. Her literary legacy was vast, but she was best known as a critic and essayist. She descried the failings of book reviews in the late 1950s, and as a reaction to it and a newspaper strike that had knocked The New York Times Book Review out of circulation, co-founded The New York Review of Books with her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, and others.

Her marriage to Lowell was famously troubled. He was beset by manic depression, in an age when there weren't great treatment options, and he frequently took off with other women during his manic bouts. The relationship reached its low point when Lowell published The Dolphin, a collection that set many of Hardwick's anguished letters and phone calls in sonnet form.

In addition to four volumes of essays, Hardwick also published several novels, including the autobiographical Sleepless Nights in 1979. She was a common participant in literary prize juries for decades. Most notably, she championed Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as a member of the 1974 Pulitzer fiction committee; the choice was rejected by the Pulitzer board, and no prize was given that year.

What most impresses me about Hardwick is the variety of topics that she was able to write about with great intelligence, originality and wit. She was from Kentucky, and that aspect of her personality never seems to have gotten lost, despite her time in New York. In researching this entry, I came across a wonderful article she wrote for The New York Review of Books late in her life about horse racing in Kentucky, titled Celebrities. It was the last thing I expected to find, but it all made sense given her background as a Kentucky belle.

My former college professor, advisor and mentor, Sonya Jones, who is now at the University of Kentucky, is beginning the arduous and hopefully exhilarating task of writing a biography of Hardwick. I believe that Sonya, a poet herself, is the perfect person for this task. Sonya's literary sensibilities and her shared Kentucky background with Hardwick bode well. I can hardly wait for the publication.

Alas, there is much to be done. Sonya is gathering information, and asked for my help in spreading the word. She would like to hear from writers, editors and publishers who knew Hardwick or had contact with her or Robert Lowell. Sonya Jones can be contacted at drjones@jonesfoundation.net.

Boulder's Reading DNA

I love the frantic final weekend before Christmas when shoppers are desperate to buy the right presents and are hungry for recommendations. To be honest, I also relish the fact that it is too late for Amazon to come to the rescue of a picky shopper. If we don't have the obscure World War II title a customer was planning to buy for Uncle Fred, they ask you for a suggestion on a military book, rather than haughtily utter the words, "I'll just get it online." Also, without the internet to fall back on, we see more of a cross-section of our community than at any other time of year. It's a time to learn about Boulderites who don't often frequent the store.

The most satisfying titles a bookseller can move are the ones that they've personally picked out as being outstanding books. For the Boulder Book Store, those books live on our recommended cases and they help distinguish the store from all other booksellers. The section is an eclectic assortment of old and new titles that are selected by the booksellers, the buyers and the marketing department. It's also a place where we experiment with some obscure new titles from unknown authors. There are four recommended cases and they start right at the front door. It's impossible to miss the array of titles and the colorful tags beneath them in plastic sleeves which extol their virtues. Many of our customers never get any further into the store than those shelves.

During the Christmas season just about any book we throw on those cases flies out of the store. In fact, when we sell out of a book during this time of year, we will run around the store in a mad attempt to find something else worthy to place on the case. In an effort to understand just what's happening on the selling floor this month, I've decided to look at our bestselling recommended titles so far this December.

Here's the list.

1. Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden
2. Daring Book for Girls by Andrea Buchanon
3. This I Believe edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman
4. Off the Grid Homes by Lori Ryker
5. World Without Us by Alan Weisman
6. Thirst by Mary Oliver
7. If You Lived Here I'd Know Your Name by Heather Lende
8. Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
9. Modoc by Ralph Helfer
10. Porn For Women by Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative

The top two spots are nostalgia books from HarperCollins designed to teach boys and girls to be kids again. Really, though, they seem to be aimed at adults craving the joys of their "rugged" childhoods before those evil video games took over. Try teaching a kid today how to make a slingshot and he'll show you how much better the shooting is on his Gameboy. They're beautifully packaged, if a bit soporific when you really try to read them, but they've been a publishing sensation for much of the year.

This I Believe is a collection of personal essays by ordinary people that aired on NPR. In addition to regular Joes, there are also pieces by John Updike, Isabel Allende and Gloria Steinem. It's a series that NPR started in 2005 and if you've heard them, you know how moving they can be. Interestingly, in the 1950s, Edwin R. Murrow hosted a radio program with the same name and basically the same mission.

Off the Grid Homes is a unique Boulder phenomenon. There doesn't appear to be another store in America where this book is a bestseller. The photographs are fantastic and the topic, how to make your home self-sufficient, is perfect for our energy frazzled times. What makes Ryker's book so intriguing is that she uses case studies and shows the architectural designs for these houses. It's truly remarkable what savings are possible with current technology. I also think it speaks to Boulder's ethos and values in an important way that distinguishes our community from many other places in America.

My wife and I visited the Earthship community in Taos, New Mexico over Thanksgiving break and it was an eye-opening experience. All the homes in the development are off the grid, not only for power, but for water. The houses have huge (6,000 gallon) cisterns in them and even in Taos' arid climate, the families have enough water to meet their needs and grow an impressive indoor garden. The building materials in Taos were old tires filled with dirt for the two-foot-thick exterior walls and hundreds of soda cans fused together with mud for the non-weight-bearing indoor walls. The homes were bizarre looking from the outside, but inside the were spacious and the rooms flowed naturally into each other and featured floor to ceiling windows. The residents have no need for heating or cooling because the thick walls provide natural insulation. In the winter, the sun soaks into those walls, releasing enough heat to keep the house at 60 even on the coldest days. The constant sound of water cycling into the cistern created a pleasing background noise as we took our tour. Ryker's examples in Off the Grid Homes aren't all as radical as that, but she does discuss some of the same technology that makes the Taos community possible.

Alan Weisman's book, World Without Us, is simply the coolest book of the year. Weisman, a journalist, investigated what would happen to the world if humans were to suddenly disappear. It's a frightening look at the havoc that we have wrought on our planet. Within the first few days, the New York City subways would completely flood. The bridges of New York wouldn't last more than a couple hundred years, at the most. That's the good news. The bad news is what will last. Little bits of plastic that we've created will stay around for millions of years choking land and sea animals until microbes evolve to break them down. The radioactivity from the nuclear waste and power plants that seeps into the environment once we are no longer present to maintain those sites, will plague and destroy life for eons.

When my St. Martins rep presented this book to me, he had a poster that showed a timeline of the earth going forward without humans. I was transfixed by it and read many of the items out loud to my colleagues. As soon as I saw that poster, I knew that this was a book that would appeal to our environmentally-concerned and scientific-minded customers. I couldn't wait to get that poster into everyone's hands. Unfortunately, that piece of marketing genius was not reproduced in the hardback. More importantly, however, Weisman proves himself to be an entertaining writer, who fuses all the information he gleaned from hundreds of people in countless fields into a thrilling narrative. We can always hope that the poster will be in the paperback. To get a true idea of the book visit Weisman's website World Without Us.

Porn for Women is the goofiest title on our recommended bestseller list. It's a humor book aimed at women who are 35-years-old and older. Now that's refreshing. Almost all humor books are published for young men. Most of the genre appeals to either the prurient interest of boys (comic books, gross joke books) or to a sort of masculine humor that is characterized by late night talk shows, Steven Colbert and The Onion. Yes, there are a few women comics and many women, especially younger women, laugh along with the boys. But it seems that there is precious little in the humor category aimed at our core demographic of readers.

Despite its title, Porn for Women is not prurient. It plays on the expectation and delivers the opposite. What really turns women on, according to the book, is for a handsome man to vacuum the floor, take her shoe shopping and do the laundry. The perfect man would gladly go
to a crafts fair rather than have to suffer through a football game. It's hysterically and tastefully done and when you get to the sex, it's impossible not to appreciate the cleverness behind the whole book. A hint for the guys--women want hours and hours, more than you thought possible, of foreplay.

When I look at this overall list of books, I see the genetics of our store and its customers. It's like looking at a snippet of our town's DNA. The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls reveal how many families live here and their need to give their children an authentic experience. Off The Grid shows our environmental ethic. Mary Oliver's inclusion is remarkable because, after all, how many poets make any kind of bestseller list? In Boulder, it is possible even for a poet. I'm a little surprised to see so many paperbacks (7) in the top ten. I would have thought that with the holiday gift-giving, a few more hardbacks would have crept in. Perhaps that is indicative of a season without any truly hot books. I just know that giving extravagantly at the holidays is in Boulder's genes, so here's hoping these books lead us through a banner weekend.

A Visit From Public Affairs

Susan Weinberg, the publisher of Public Affairs, dropped by last Thursday with two colleagues to check out the store, meet some staff members and kill some time before a Christmas party here in Boulder. It was the first time I had met Susan, and I was instantly taken in by her fast-talking, friendly manner. I was eager to meet her because Public Affairs publishes several great books a year that appeal to our progressive market, and I wanted to ensure that Boulder Book Store was firmly on their publicity radar. Public Affairs is the type of publisher that I really admire. They have a strong focus (politics, media and history) and they are really good at publishing important, thought-provoking titles. Mercifully, they aren't trying to be everything for everyone like so many other presses.

We were huddled in the new nonfiction section, when I asked Susan about What Happened, Scott McClellan's tell-all about the Bush administration that Public Affairs is publishing in April. She lit up and became incredibly animated, and despite being a petite woman, it seemed that she was looming over me as she began excitedly talking about the book and opening the catalog to its description. I broke in long enough to ask her about the quote in the catalog where McClellan, Bush's former press secretary, discusses defending Karl Rove and Scooter Libby to the media. McClellan writes, "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself."

She told me that they were extremely eager to get the finished book, but she added a caveat -- McClellan is not specifically saying that he was knowingly lied to by Bush. Maybe McClellan, who goes back to the Texas days with Bush, believes that, but his own words seem to belie it. Susan was so thrilled to be talking about the new catalog (hot off the press) that she began selling the list to me one book at a time as we stood in the congested section with shoppers milling all about us. I stopped her after the third book -- and several curious glances from customers trying to select Christmas gifts -- and asked the group if they wanted a store tour.

We started by the front door in our recommended section. All three were gushing with praise at the eclectic selection on the shelves, and I stood there like a proud papa talking about how strongly the titles sell and how it's a real team effort to create the section. Susan was particularly elated to see Modoc on our shelves. She worked on the book when she was with Harper and couldn't believe it when I told her that the tear-jerker about the elephant was the bestselling title in the section.

In the basement, we ran into the owner of the store, who was changing a light ballast, and I left Susan and her managing editor to speak with him. I accompanied her other colleague, Greg, who is actually with Public Affairs' parent company Perseus, into shipping and receiving. This was a bold move on his part, since we've spent the better part of 2007 cursing out Perseus and its shipping. Earlier this year, I sent off a few angry emails to Greg and we had a heated phone exchange (he was actually very calm) about how their shipping and discounts simply weren't adequate for a major publishing house.

The news was all good in the basement. It seems that companies can change and our receiving folks gave Perseus a big thumbs-up and said that they were in the top third of all companies. I also admitted to Greg that the discount structure was greatly improved. Perhaps this shouldn't be a big surprise since Perseus was just named publisher of the year by the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. Ironically, HarperCollins, which used to distribute Perseus before they struck out on their own, was now getting the full brunt of our receivers' wrath.

To conclude Susan's visit, we went up to the store's historic second floor ballroom. Upon entering the room, Susan immediately commented upon the beautiful stained glass windows. It reminded me of the time about a dozen years ago when the novelist Kaye Gibbons came to sign at the store. She sat down, took a look around and said, "This is the most beautiful room I've ever spoken in. Look at those windows."

As Susan and her colleagues continued to admire the space, I put in my pitch for a spring signing with Robert Bryce, the author of Gusher of Lies. Bryce questions the whole idea of energy independence and if it is really achievable. He claims that renewable energy such as wind and solar power (sacred cows in Boulder) cannot meet America's growing energy demands. According to Bryce, the true answer to our energy problems comes from interdependence with other countries. It would be a great contrarian view to bring to Boulder and could spur some wonderful conversations.

Susan noted that Bryce was going to Denver on his tour and that Public Affairs could easily add another day for Boulder on the tour. By this time we were all grinning. I had gotten a potentially important event for the store, met an interesting publisher and was able to show off the store. The three New Yorkers escaped the city for a day and got to see what they said was a "great" independent bookstore. Susan paid us a high compliment when she said that bookselling would be a different business if there were more stores like Boulder Book Store in the country. Perhaps there would be if there were more publishers like Public Affairs.