Changes Here, There and Everywhere

Avin Domnitz to Leave American Booksellers Association

I was quite surprised by the announcement last week that Avin Domnitz would be leaving his post as Chief Executive Officer of the American Booksellers Association later this year. To me, Domnitz, with his booming voice and large energetic bearing, has come to embody the trade group that has fought so valiantly for independent booksellers during this past decade.

Domnitz seemed to be everywhere, from the corridors of the large convention halls in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles at Book Expo America and the hotel lobbies that house the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association meetings in Colorado, to our new fiction section browsing for a book to read while on vacation. He was constantly championing the cause of independent bookstores at these gatherings and he was always willing to speak one on one to booksellers with suggestions on how to survive in this almost impossible business climate.

Over the years, I've had to endure a lot of complaints about the ABA. Booksellers would grumble that the ABA wasn't doing enough to help member stores, the initiatives were ineffective, ABA should only focus on one particular agenda item (the focus always changed with the person I was talking to), and that it was absurd for poor, beaten down booksellers to have to support the large staff infrastructure and high salaries of ABA. Heck, if someone could make money in bookselling more power to them.

I never took much stock in those complaints. The job that Domnitz was trying to accomplish was remarkably complex. The ABA is made up mostly of tiny little almost invisible mom and pop stores while the big glamorous booksellers (like Powell's and Tattered Cover) get all of the press and attention. It's almost two completely different constituencies. Domnitz, through programs like Booksense (now IndieBound), the suing of publishers for unfair trade practices and most recently the litigation in New York to get Amazon to pay sales tax has tried to find the common ground.

I don't think it will be easy to find someone to replace Domnitz. He was simply impossible to ignore. Sure, some booksellers thought he was full of bombast and empty rhetoric, but people took notice when he entered the room. He got publishers to pay attention to independent stores during a time when there were many more reasons for them to cast us aside.

Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops Closing
This headline nearly broke my heart until I saw the glimmer of hope in the articles. Harry W. Schwartz, the venerable bookseller that has been serving Milwaukee for 82 years, announced yesterday that it was going to close its four stores at the end of March. My sadness was personal because my dear friend Daniel Goldin has been the buyer for Schwartz for over 20 years.

Daniel is the smartest, most passionate bookseller I know. He's an amazing reader, a kind soul and he possesses a remarkable business mind. I owe much of my success as a buyer to the advice he has given me over the years. I almost picked up the phone and called him to commiserate before I finished reading the article. Luckily, I didn't. It turns out that Daniel will be purchasing Schwartz's best store, the Downer Avenue location and renaming it Boswell Book Company. If anyone can make an independent book store thrive in an old Great Lake's city it is Daniel.

Still, the news was a major blow to people in the independent bookseller community. After all, Schwartz is one of the great stores in the country (hosting magnificent events under the guidance of another old friend of mine Nancy Quinn) and it has survived rough times in the past including the Great Depression. But this time there was no hope. Sales were down 17 % last year and didn't show any promise of rebounding this year. Carol Grossmeyer, Schwartz's President, said, "we really believe that the multiple-store model that we had become, and that worked so well for us in the 1980s and 1990s, is not feasible anymore."

If she's right then we could be headed for very interesting times in the bookselling community. Barnes & Noble and Borders have taken the multiple-store model to huge extremes. However, Powell's and Tattered Cover also have multiple locations. What are the implications for them? Will they go the way of Schwartz and Washington bookseller Olsson's? I hope not. The results of more closings like this, leading to fewer dedicated booksellers will be truly devastating for authors and readers in addition to booksellers.

The irony that Domnitz got his bookselling experience and made his reputation at Schwartz during their heyday is quite hard to avoid this week. His retirement and the closing of Schwartz seems like a true end of a bookselling era.

Boy, It's a Little Stressful Around Here

We've seen our share of tension here at the store over the past few weeks. It's been a time of reckoning as we try to align our staff and our inventory to the new economic reality. It's also been a time of looking ahead and trying to project what our future holds. Projecting much optimism is nearly impossible.

Fortunately, due to normal staff turnover, we have been able to avoid layoffs. However, we have shifted people's responsibilities, accepted resignations without any hope of hiring replacements and foisted more work upon fewer people. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this transition is that we are struggling to make our young staff members understand the seriousness of the situation. It's been a challenge.

As I listened to Barack Obama's inaugural address this morning and he discussed putting aside petty recriminations and choosing work over leisure, I couldn't help thinking of the hurdles that our staff faces in these coming months. I can only hope that we can rise and meet our challenges.

Meeting these enormous challenges despite the obvious difficulties is truly our best option. I think I echo most of our staff's feelings when I say that I've had enough change for one year and it's only Jan. 20.

To Go Where No Buyer Has Gone Before

I got a glimpse into the future this week when I bought the HarperCollins children's and the Penguin adult hardcover lists using the electronic catalog Edelweiss instead of the paper catalogs provided by the publishers. Edelweiss, an offshoot of the popular bookstore data analysis program Above the Treeline, is attempting to position itself as the industry's catalog repository of the future.

Why should each publisher have to develop their own ecatalog when Treeline can create a format that will allow them to just plug their title information into it? Overjoyed buyers would only have to learn one program instead of dozens. At least that's the reasoning of Treeline's founder John Rubin. Rubin has been working furiously since last June's Book Expo America in Los Angeles, when HarperCollins announced their ambitious plans to rid themselves of paper catalogs, to get his product off the ground.

Rubin was in my office for the HarperCollins children's buy along with my Harper rep John Zeck. Zeck and I have been two of the biggest proponents of Treeline over the last few years. It's a program with an enormous amount of potential to revolutionize how bookstores and publishers relate to each other. Publishers can see nearly real time sales data at stores on a title-by-title level as well as their aggregate sales.

Much to my frustration, the industry tends to use Treeline, which has the analytical power of a Maserati, as a child's tricycle. Publisher reps timidly suggest that stores buy a title here and there based on Treeline data. Instead, the publishers could do something truly useful like allot co-op dollars to stores for the year based on the Treeline data. Get one more marginal title into a store or save hundreds of hours of extra labor? Seems like an easy decision, and yet every publisher has opted for the extra title so far. In my experience, only Random House has made some attempts to use the true power of the program.

Rubin is smart enough to know that his program is under-utilized by the industry and saw a golden opportunity to position Treeline front and center as publishers looked for ways to save catalog costs. It's a bold step but one that might be necessary for the long-term survival of Treeline. When the cost-cutters at bookstores and publishers start snipping their budgets, it's easy to imagine Treeline, a program filled with potential but short on results, just might go by the wayside.

Well, after two full days on Edelweiss, I can honestly say that Rubin is well on his way to changing the industry in a drastic way. Each buy took a little longer than it would have taken using a paper catalog, but I should be able to get that time back when I dump the order directly into our Point of Sale system rather than having to enter each title of the purchase order by hand.

Edelweiss is organized by catalog just like the publisher's mailings, and that's how I bought the lists. It is possible to reorganize the catalogs on Edelweiss and look at a publisher's whole list by category or date. That's what I planned to do with the Penguin hardbacks, but I was thwarted. When I brought up all of the fiction titles, the rep's notes, which contained co-op incentives, disappeared. It was frustrating, but an email to Rubin resulted in the glitch being fixed by the end of the day.

The more challenging and entertaining appointment was the Harper's children's buy. Zeck and I have a routine (we are both gregarious East Coast guys) that usually distracts everyone else in the office. The day is spent thrusting and parrying over the merits of Harper's books, co-op, publishing philosophy, as well as our bookstore's buying policies, independent stores' reluctance to change and whatever happens to be in the news that day. Add in the fact that I hadn't bought a major children's list in over a year, the confusion of learning Edelweiss and Rubin's high energy presence and it was quite a day in the office.

The next day Penguin rep Tom Benton and I were able to power through the Putnam, Viking, Riverhead and Penguin Press catalogs in just over four hours. His appointment was noticeably calmer then Zeck's. We were both a little more familiar with the mechanics of the ecatalog and Tom's demeanor is much more low key. Instead of a fencing match, our appointments are more like a civil conversation between old friends. We trade ideas about what songs to download from emusic and consult the baseball schedule before making our summer appointment. Also, with Rubin off skiing in the Colorado high country, we were able to proceed more like a normal appointment.

During the Harper meeting, Rubin quickly typed in notes every time Zeck or myself stumbled over a difficulty in the program. Why can't we assign department categories to books when we are in the title list view? How can we tell whether a comparable title mentioned by the publisher is a hardback or paperback? Shouldn't this page load quicker? What is this buyer rating feature?

We spent most of the day in the single title detail screens, going title by title through the catalog. I would have preferred scrolling down the title list screen that shows dozens of titles and then just darting in and out of the detail screens but this just wasn't practical because the title list screen took a little too long to load. Rubin left determined to increase the speed of the list page and was already emailing his programmers with ideas before the appointment ended.

One of the catalog's features is that the reps can rate the priority of the titles and buyers can sort by the priority level. Zeck had rated a couple dozen at high priority, and in the future I would probably start with those titles. Going title by title through the catalog, it was interesting to see which ones popped out as priority titles.

I loved having the comparable books a single click away rather than having to type in the ISBN. The other great thing about seeing the author's previous title in Edelweiss is that the sales and inventory data for the first three months after the book was released come from Treeline. In our POS system if a title is over a year old we lose this monthly data. These out-of-the-gate sales are critical for determining an initial buy, and for the first time ever, I was able to see it on older titles.

I also appreciated that Edelweiss is adding up your buy as you go along. That was particularly critical since I was intent on ordering less this year. During the Penguin buy, I was determined to cut at least 20% off of last year's buy. It was great to have a running tally of the dollars spent as I went along. Unfortunately, Penguin made this task of cutting dollars fairly easy by publishing a pretty weak list this season. Hopefully, the presence of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which Tom described as "the most accessible Pynchon ever" will help redeem the list.

I found that I relied on Zeck and Benton more than usual during these appointments. This might have been because the difficulty of dealing with a new program made it a bit harder to focus on the titles or that I needed more help in deciding which piece of the abundant information to give credence. Harper sometimes listed 25 comparable titles for a children's picture book or teen fiction title. I'd turn to Zeck with a forlorn look in my eyes and he'd invariably tell me to compare the book to Marley and Me which seemed to be listed half the time.

Penguin actually had the opposite problem -- a lack of information. Putnam at least populated its catalog with cover images, descriptions, quotes and an occasional comparable title, but Penguin Press frequently had no information whatsoever accompanying its titles. One piece of information that I had on the Penguin Press catalog was Tom's suggested orders. Those suggestions would have been more effective if they weren't hovering in the middle of an empty screen. Reviewing those titles, I'd look at Tom's lonely suggestion and ask him if it was perhaps based on more information than I could see. We both peered at his paper catalog with its scribbled notes about print runs and publicity and tried to come up with a number.

When my buying appointment with John Zeck was finally over (Harper's children's catalog alone contained 232 items, and that didn't include Greenwillow or Hyperion), we were too exhausted to attempt a marketing meeting. Next meeting I might tell him to just sort out his top 100 titles before we sit down. Tom Benton and I decided to meet with the store's marketing manager after we'd completed all of the online catalogs (significantly fewer titles than Harper) and save the old-fashioned Dorling Kindersley's and Rough Guides' paper catalogs for another day.

As I was doing the buys, I was using Edelweiss' tagging feature to highlight different titles for our store's newsletter, displays and possible events. Our marketing manager opened up the catalog, sorted it by the tags and instantly had the information she needed. She cut and pasted the title and ISBN info from the catalogs, and the marketing appointment took half the time it normally does. I think I can safely say she was an instant convert to the ecatalogs.

On reflection, I don't think too many buyers will choose to use Edelweiss instead of the publishers' catalogs at this point. Buyers, like many people, are averse to change and it's not clear that the ecatalog is advantageous yet. Looking at all the titles and imprints on screen in the same format (a Putnam title looks like a Viking title) gets a little tedious. I think a few tweaks, especially getting the title list page to load faster and being able to order directly off of that page could change things quickly. Suddenly, the ecatalog would be quicker to buy than the paper ones because it's faster to scroll down a page of books that are mostly skips than to turn page after page.

I was extremely impressed with John Rubin's attentiveness to what the reps and I needed and his willingness to make the necessary changes to make the system even better. After all, I was basically the first beta tester and I consider it a bit of a miracle that we were able to do two major buys in the first two days. Hopefully, over the next few months several more teams of curious and intrepid buyers and sales reps will use the program. Their input could mean the difference between revving up that sports car engine he's designed or merely pedaling uphill in one speed.

Slicing and Dicing the Orders

I am not very good at doing things in secret. Usually, like right now, I announce my new projects or new ideas (wonderful or awful) on my blog. Twittering, with it's tiny 140-character entries, has also become a nightly habit that soothes my inner bookseller. Let's face it, I'm fairly obnoxious when I'm on to something new.

Last Monday I started canceling books off of our frontlist winter purchase orders. These are the books scheduled to arrive in the frozen months of January, February and March. Sales are already frigid during that time of year, and one can only surmise that 2009 winter sales will approach absolute zero. I feared that I'd get a lot of resistance from my reps and the publishers, so I went about the project quietly.

My goal was to pare these already tight orders down another 10% to 20%. That was a modest number. Every year when I analyze my buys, I notice that we sell zero copies of nearly 25% of the titles we bring in. Cut those books out and ultimately reduce returns was my goal.

I started with my Harper adult order. My Harper rep is, to employ a euphemism, extremely enthusiastic about his books. Surely, there would be dozens of books to lop off that order. I worried that if I called him and told him of my intention he'd be a tad bit irritated. I printed up our order and began to attack it with a highlighter.

The very first book on the order was the paperback of Scott Spencer's Willing. Boy, this was going to be easier then I thought. Willing is hands down the single worst novel that I have managed to finish this decade. Spencer, who made his reputation writing Endless Love, manages to offend everyone with his idiotic plot of a freelance writer going on a high-end traveling sex tour. I drew a quick yellow line through the title despite the fact we sold four copies of the book in hardback.

In all, I axed a dozen paperback fiction titles. The hardback titles were more difficult because my initial buys were quite spare, but I managed to trim four titles off of Harper's list. These were books that I only bought in twos. Two is a tepid buy and those titles weren't getting supported by co-op dollars from the publisher or display plans from us. Our chances of selling those titles in a good economy were marginal, now they are nil.

Besides cutting out these small books, I went through the orders and began reducing quantities on bigger buys. Instead of 25 copies of Alexander McCall Smith's Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, I figured we could survive with 16 from Random House. Did I really need 10 copies of Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand & the World She Made? Perhaps six would make a nice face out.

Slowly, but surely, the cuts began to add up. We got nearly $2,000 at retail out of both the Random House and Harper orders. During the process, I began to get a better feeling for these lists. I looked up several of the books on Amazon, and I discovered what other stores were ordering of these titles by using Above the Treeline (a computer program that allows us to see other independent stores' sales and ordering information).

Unable to do things quietly anymore (it's just not my nature), I mentioned in a twitter post that I was cutting the orders. To my surprise, my Penguin rep called and asked how I was doing the cuts and if I was going to eviscerate his order, could he help. I also spoke to a Random House executive who offered to assist me in reducing our orders to them.

I worked with my Penguin rep and a Random House rep yesterday to cut orders and those calls were much less painful then I expected and much more fruitful. We cut the Penguin hardback order by 16.4% and the Random House order by 13.4%, but I feel much more confident that I made the right decisions now. It was interesting to hear the reps admit that they were overzealous on a few titles when they originally sold me and they also informed me that my passion on a few titles was perhaps a bit overboard. We had remarkably open and honest conversations about the real potential of these titles shorn of the usual pressure from sales conferences and sentimentality of personal favorites.

We even did a little horse trading. My Penguin rep advised me to cut Stuart Brown's Play from eight to five in exchange for increasing our buy from five to eight on Nothing to Fear by Adam Cohen. Suddenly, a book about F.D.R.'s first 100 days seems much more timely and vital then it did when I originally bought the list in September. As for Brown's Play, five is still a huge buy (the fifth biggest out of the more than 200 stores that report to Above the Treeline) and enough to get it noticed.

So far I've cut almost $12,000 at retail off of our winter orders. Hopefully, with the help of a few more reps I can double that number by the end of next week. It's not what I expected to be doing during the holiday season. However, if I can avoid the pain of massive returns and unpayable invoices next year because of ill-timed orders arriving in the dead of winter, then that just might be a present for us, the reps and publishers alike.

This is a secret that's just too good not to share.

Coherent Thoughts and Russian Literature

I am finding it difficult to put together a coherent blog post, or even two thoughts, with a newborn in the apartment. She's up at all hours of the night, short-circuiting my brain functions. The problem is compounded because she has also exhausted my muse (her mother). Instead of stepping in and helping me out, the youngster is seemingly unwilling to give me much feedback on my different ideas. The baby apparently has no discernible opinion on the settlement between Google and the publishers, any feelings about the retail holiday season, or a single idea about a book capable of breaking through the economic morass.

I'm left with scattered thoughts and bags under my eyes. Here's a few observations from my last week at the store.

Can the Vampires Save Christmas?

Stephanie Meyer and her vampires have taken over the bookselling world. We don't really have any bestsellers besides for Meyer's Twilight and its sequel New Moon. Since Thanksgiving, I've been asked two questions over and over again: Do we have Stephanie Meyer's books? and What is the combination to our bathroom doors? I'm stupid enough that I approach each customer encounter with eagerness and bated breath (hoping that they will ask me for a suggestion on a great new novel or an idea for what to buy their husband) only to have to point the way to a mass market paperback or curse the owner of the store for putting locks on our customer bathrooms.

The problem with Meyer's vampires is that it doesn't matter how many of these books that we sell because we simply cannot move enough of them at $7.99 or $11.99 to make it a profitable holiday season. Don't get me wrong, I love selling dozens of these books about hunky vampires to young excited readers everyday, I just miss the $35 price tag of Harry Potter. I'm hoping that the collectors edition of Twilight priced at $30 takes off.

It seems that everyone has caught the Meyer fever. A group of young women from the bookstore accompanied the sixth-grade daughter of our children's buyer to the movie Twilight. Their reviews, besides for the middle-schooler, were either tepid or filled with qualifications, but they seemed to thoroughly enjoy the outing. I did find it interesting that a couple of our staff members developed flu-like symptoms within a week.

Customers Concerned About Us

Our business was fairly brisk on the day after Thanksgiving. We were down just a point or two from last year's Black Friday's totals. I found that encouraging. It was fueled largely by tourists in town visiting relatives for the holidays. The regular customers who came in expressed a tremendous level of concern for the store's welfare.

"How are you guys handling the economy?" was the main question I got. When I related to them that we were doing okay until November (one of the worst months in the store's 35-year history), a look of fear interrupted their cheerful countenances. "Surely, people can still afford books," they often respond, patting my hand. I thank them for coming in and then I pitch our January 1st sale.

I'm sure most people in Boulder can still afford books. Home prices haven't really fallen here and foreclosures are almost unheard of, but people's stock portfolios and 401ks must be a little lighter. The truth is, right now no one wants to buy anything including books whether they can afford to or not. Perhaps reminding them of our 25% off sale will induce them to spend a little more money with us.

A Valuable Sense of Community

I've been amazed by the amount of goodwill that I've received since Martina was born. Various members of the bookstore staff brought over dinner every night for a week. My sales reps have sent dozens of cards and many presents. Several customers have stopped me on the sales floor or specifically come in to ask for me and offer congratulations.

We are in a business that truly values people and relationships and for that I am eternally grateful. It's that thought and all of the people who have enriched my life that makes plowing through these tough times bearable.

Don't All Babies Love Russian Novelists?


I haven't quite found my groove yet when it comes to reading books to the baby. She can't really appreciate picture books because as a newborn her vision isn't up to snuff and I can't bring myself to read her silly nursery rhymes when I know that she can't understand the words. Instead, I decided to use the time to read her some great literature. Perhaps, it would somehow sink in.

For a couple of days, I was reading her Richard Yates' Reservation Road, but a tale about suburban angst and relationship disenchantment, regardless of how well it was written, felt inappropriate. We moved on to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was eager to share with her the 2001 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. We started out great, but by page 12 she was crying every time I stumbled over Stepan Arkadyich's name. Who knows what would have happened had I persisted until Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky entered the text? I might have sent her screaming at the mere mention of Russian literature for the rest of her life.

Instead of reading I tried singing, despite being vocally challenged. I can't carry a tune, and I wouldn't know a key if it was in a dirty diaper. I gave "Rock-a-bye Baby" my all, until I realized on about the 50th time through that it is an atrocious song. Why is the cradle in the tree? Is it war time? Is this some horrible prank? A botched kidnapping, perhaps? Why is it comforting to sing about the cradle (with the baby in it) falling out of the tree?

I never liked the song anyway. Before long, I noticed that I was humming a Clash song that seemed to calm her down. I couldn't remember any words except the three-word refrain, "Drug-stabbing time." Well, that sounded just as soothing as "Rock-a-bye Baby." At least nothing awful is happening to a sleeping infant.

Kash's Baby Corner

Kash's Book Corner is undergoing a huge upheaval with the addition of a new baby into the fold. Our first child, Martina, was born on Tuesday and we returned from the hospital on Thursday afternoon. Hopefully, if Martina takes after her mother, she should begin work as a Kash's Book Corner assistant copy editor by 2023. As I am sure most parents know, it is almost impossible to have any lengthy coherent thoughts during these first few sleep deprived days. My guess is that things should get back to normal around here in roughly 940 weeks.

Here are a few random observations and notes from my first 72 hours as a daddy.

Labor is also Difficult for Dad

I dreamed about the birth of my baby for the entire pregnancy. I expected to be totally overwhelmed with emotion when she was born and my eyes would tear up just thinking of holding her fresh from the womb in the hospital. Well, things went as expected during most of labor. We were both so excited and expectant that despite the pain, even my wife was strangely blissful. However, after two hours of watching my wife trying to push the baby out, I was just thinking "get out of my wife now, kid." All the lovey, dovey, romanticized visions of the birth moment were gone. In fact, I didn't get weepy when the baby was born. I was just intensely relieved and grateful that my wife's pain was subsiding.

What's in a Name?

We named her Martina after my mother-in-law's family name of Martiny. Last summer we attended an amazing family reunion with over 100 relatives in Allegany, New York. Sure, I had to wear a nametag that said "in-law" on it that was only slightly less humiliating then having a scarlet "I" branded on me. Still, I was taken by the family's rich history, diversity and endurance. I also enjoyed our remarkable hike up to the Martiny Rocks on the family's former homestead. It was a walk that Thomas Merton used to make when he lived in the area. I wanted my daughter to feel connected to that history.

Also, I'm a tremendous sports fan and the greatest female athlete I've ever seen in person was Martina Navratilova at the United States Open. She was often reviled by the fans and whenever she played Chris Evert the crowd was strongly against her. Not me. I always rooted for her. More often than not she prevailed in those epic matches with remarkable grace. I'd be proud if my daughter showed those qualities some day.

I'm Blue because she's spitting Black

Our time in the hospital was largely uneventful. The baby was healthy and took to nursing. Mommy was exhausted and hurting but otherwise fine. All of that was a tremendous relief. In fact, we were often told what a model infant we had. Just as I was beginning to relax during that first night and bask in the glory of being a father, Martina started burping like she wanted to spit something up. I grabbed her and put her over my shoulder. As I patted her back, black stuff began coming out of her mouth. My beautiful baby is possessed, I thought.

As this was happening, a fantastic nurse (she taught us how to swaddle, change diapers, hold the baby and calm the baby, all after midnight) came into the room and seized the baby out of my arms. She turned her over on her stomach and began hitting her back hard until Martina began crying. The nurse commanded me to get out the suction bulb. In a panic, I began overturning things in the room until I eventually found it and handed it to her. She suctioned the baby's mouth out and handed her back to me.

In her fairly thick Polish accent she said, "it is not good when baby starts turning blue. You must turn her over and make her cry." I rocked the hysterical baby and said, "Blue, what about the black stuff coming out of her mouth and nose?" She looked on me with great tenderness. "That is dried blood that she gulped in the amniotic fluid. She's a strong baby and probably coughed most of it out. It's a good thing." I took a deep breath. Black is good. Blue is bad.

This is what I call Nightlife

We aren't getting much sleep which is what I expected. However, I must admit that I'm surprised by how blissful some of the sleepless middle-of-the-night hours can be. Last night, our first night home, Martina was screaming her head off at about 1:30 a.m. She had just nursed and her diaper was dry. There was nothing to do but hold her and walk with her and try and let her mother get a little sleep.

Little by little she began to settle down. Eventually, we sat in a rocking chair together and passed the time with me speaking nonsense (she doesn't object to this like most people) and her occasionally looking up at me with her half-opened right eye. Around 2:00 a.m. I tried to put her down in the bassinet, but her shrieks made it clear she wasn't interested. Instead, we lay on the couch together. She fell into a fitful sleep while lying on my chest. She was moving her perfectly formed little hands and contorting her face into every expression a person can exhibit as she snuggled into my warm T-shirt.

If I have ever been more content, it was probably over 40 years ago in the middle of a winter's night when I lay on my daddy's chest and fell asleep listening to his voice in my ear.

I Lied to the President-elect

I met Barack Obama at a Book Expo America event in 2006. In February of this year, on the day of the Colorado caucus, I wrote about the experience in Kash's Book Corner. That post has become the most popular entry on the blog. Now that he is President-elect, I thought I'd link to it today. Here it is Lying Bookseller, Smooth Politician.

Proud to say Barack Obama is our Man

The Boulder Book Store threw off the last shreds of objectivity last week and came out completely for Barack Obama and the entire slate of Democratic candidates running for office in this election. In the past, we have struggled to represent the right-wing, lunatic fringe and appease the rabid conservatives with a few token titles. We still have the conservative political books but that certainly won't fool anyone as to our true feelings. Now, as soon as you walk in our front door, you are greeted by a large table manned by the Boulder County Democratic Party.

Our inventory has always tilted significantly to the left. We are in a liberal town, with a liberal staff and an extremely liberal customer base. It's simply good business to sell Bush Countdown Clocks, anything by Michael Moore, and Barack Obama Llamas. However, we, like most bookstores, were always hesitant to take a clear stance in a national election. Why alienate a few conservative customers if we didn't need to? That all changed last week as the owner and the staff (you can't find a single employee that is even neutral in this election) felt the outcome of the election was more critical then any other concern.

I'm grateful for this decision. I was weary of trying to pretend to be objective and just business-minded when we are not. In 2004, several people (I won't call them customers because they usually didn't buy anything) complained bitterly about our election display. We had six shelves of books and all but a dozen or so were either anti George W. Bush or pro John Kerry. I walked these sputtering, incensed people over to the computer terminal and showed them our relative sales of Al Franken and Ann Coulter books. Most of them were surprised by the 50-1 margin that Franken outsold Coulter. I told them that they could buy some conservative books while they were at the store and that would impact our future buys on that author. They never did.

What is remarkable about this election is that hardly anyone has complained about our selection. We are much more biased in our inventory mix towards Obama then we ever were towards Kerry. We have a full selection of Obama t-shirts, bumper stickers and pins to go along with all the flattering books. Hardly a peep from the conservatives. It's like the fight has left the right. Perhaps they haven't gotten their marching orders telling them to walk into local bookstores and complain about the media bias.

Really, what's wrong with a store showing some bias in an election? We are human beings enmeshed in our communities, after all. We have a stake in the outcome of these races. People often work at bookstores because they value ideas and opinions more then it is fiscally responsible to do so. To ask these people to pretend that they don't have an opinion, or that the store as whole doesn't have an opinion, on the biggest issue of the day, is absurd. Especially now.

George Bush, Dick Cheney and the Republican party have spent the last seven years doing everything they can to trample on the very civil liberties that are at the heart of our value system. People who have disagreed with this administration have endured years of affronts and attempts to stifle dissent. It is our patriotic responsibility to take a stance in this election. To do any less would be un-American and we wouldn't want to give the right any cause to accuse us of that.

Go Obama. The time has come.