How I Became a Bookseller

Note: This blog entry is part of the American Booksellers Association blog carnival. A blog carnival is a collection of posts on a given topic. Links to blog entries on how people became booksellers will be published on ABA Omnibus on March 25th.

The glimmering movie screen in Houston’s art deco Alabama Theater was an immense backdrop to aisles and aisles of carefully shelved books. The looming, white expanse stretched across the entire back end of the flagship Bookstop location like an enormous blank page. It was there to project your imagination upon even as you discovered the published efforts of thousands of authors.

Unfortunately, my imagination was in short supply on the hot, muggy, September day that I first entered the historic theater-turned-bookstore in 1987. I needed a job, and I was desperate to land one. I was daydreaming about paying my rent, buying gas for my car and maybe having enough money left over to buy my girlfriend, Cathy, dinner. The three months of freedom from academia since my college graduation had turned into a strange, humid, house of horrors on the Gulf Coast that I couldn’t seem to exit.

Houston wasn’t even the beginning of my adventures. I had spent the better part of the summer in New Orleans with my college friend Debbie and later, her girlfriend, Barb. We arrived on a sweltering day in late July and quickly found an apartment on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line above a steak and eggs joint on South Carrollton Avenue. It wasn’t a bad place: hardwood floors, a banana tree in the backyard, a sunny kitchen and one air conditioner. Sure, the neighborhood was a bit seedy, but we were beginning life on our own in a new, exotic city.

Day after day, Deb and I looked for work as we waited for Barb to join us. I applied to restaurants (talking up my busboy experience in high school), newspapers (noting my experience as the editor of my college paper), and to music stores (pointing out my years as college a DJ). No luck. No matter where I went, I was told that there weren’t any jobs.

New Orleans was quickly becoming a disaster for me. Ronald Reagan might have brought morning to America with his Reaganomics, but New Orleans was still mired in darkness. Unemployment was in double digits, the racial tension in the city was palpable, and no one in the south wanted to have anything to do with me and my foreign-sounding name. Truthfully, why should anyone in Louisiana be able to pronounce my name right when I couldn’t even say New Orleans properly?

Early in my stay, I had wandered into a bar and ordered a drink -- something strong and cheap. A grizzled old man sitting on the barstool next to me looked intensely at me, his eyes taking in my ripped jeans and my faded Who t-shirt. Finally, he said in a gravelly voice, “How long you been in Nawlins?”

“Excuse me?”

“Nawlins,” he said, gesturing around the bar with his arm.

I was flummoxed. “Nawlins,” he yelled again as if I was deaf. Then, thinking I’d put the pieces together at last, I decided that Nawlins must be the name of the bar.

I picked up the sweating glass, swallowed a mouthful of my drink and said, “I just got here. I’ve been here five minutes, tops. I walked in the door, sat down and ordered my drink.”

He stared at me pretty hard and I stared back at him, looking right into his clouded blue eyes and wondering if he was going to lunge at me. Suddenly, he broke out into a big grin and raised his glass. “You’re all right, son. You’re all right.” He turned in his stool and shouted to some guys playing pool, “Says he’s been in Nawlins for five minutes! That’s the first time I heard that. Five minutes in Nawlins and comes straight here, to this fine establishment.”

Rejected from one job after another, Deb and I quickly discovered that we couldn’t afford life in New Orleans on our dwindling savings. We could barely pay for beignets from a street vendor as a weekend splurge. Late at night, we stood outside of the city’s bars and listened to the raw music flowing out into the street through the opened windows.

It was on one of these nights in late August that I came to realize my time in New Orleans was over. Earlier that day, I had checked back in at a local music store for about the tenth time, hoping to see if there were any openings. When I pleaded my case to the reluctant manager, he simply said, “Look, you don’t even have a degree in music. I’ve got 20 resumes from music majors, some with graduate degrees. But I’ll hold onto your resume, if you really want me to.”

That night, as we walked the streets of the city, I was so disconsolate that I bought a small bottle of scotch. Debbie, who was celebrating Barb’s imminent arrival the next day, was happy to share swigs as we pushed through the neighborhoods in our quest for live music. Eventually, we came to a bar where the guitars sounded as though they were being played underwater, and the singer’s voice sounded like it had been treated with sandpaper. The front of the bar was opened like a garage door, and Deb and I swayed to this dark music and drank scotch from our paper bag.

As the night wore on, we were joined by at least a half-dozen men sipping cheap liquor out of their own paper bags and enjoying the music. Most of them looked to be homeless, and we were the only white people among this ragtag crew. They treated us well and offered to share their schnapps with us after Deb and I drained our bottle. Throughout the hot, humid night, one common thread ran through our conversation with these men: Why would you be in New Orleans if you could get out?

By the morning, just as Barb was arriving at the apartment, I was making plans to move to Houston and join my girlfriend, Cathy, in her hometown. She had transferred back to the University of Houston and was about to start the fall semester. I figured the economy had to be better there, and perhaps in a big, modern city, gleaming with glass skyscrapers, my Armenian name wouldn’t be such a handicap.

A few days after my arrival in Houston, a fledgling weekly newspaper out in the distant suburbs hired me on as the sports editor. I was elated, relieved and immensely grateful to the publisher, a woman in her forties. My euphoria died when I reported to work and discovered that the newspaper didn’t exist. It was my job, as well as that of a few other journalistic wannabes, to will it into existence. Basically, I was a commissioned sales rep, pounding the scorching hot Texas blacktop trying to sell inches of ad copy for a newspaper that was a figment of the owner’s imagination. Once enough ads were sold and an issue was in the works, then I could be the sports editor.

I spent a week going in and out of every kind of business in a dozen different nondescript strip malls, including grimy car repair shops, Mexican bakeries, mom-and-pop drug stores, an Irish pub, Chinese restaurants, a tattoo parlor and even an adult bookstore with a peep show. My spiel was awful and my sales technique thoroughly inept. I didn’t know what geographic area that the newspaper would cover, what our politics were or what kind of stories we’d write. Those things kept changing based on where we sold the ads.

Each day I returned to the office empty-handed, and the publisher would scowl at me and chastise me like a lazy child. Finally, I sold a quarter-page ad to a photography store. I almost kissed the man when he bought it. My commission, for the week, came to about $50. It was barely enough to buy my lunches and the gas I’d used.

The next Monday morning, I couldn’t bear the thought of driving 50 miles across the flat Texas landscape only to find failure waiting. I quit with a phone call before I even got out of bed. My worst fears and personal doubts were realized when the publisher replied, “I didn’t think you’d last from the moment I saw you. I thought I’d give you a chance to prove me wrong. A lot of good that did me.”

I would have stayed in bed, hiding, for the rest of the day, but that afternoon, with Cathy’s urging, I was in the Alabama Theater Bookstop with my resume and a desperate plea. I told the clerk at the counter that I would clean toilets, mop the floor, work the midnight shift, work both Saturday and Sunday. She looked up with what seemed to be a hint of kindness and promised that she’d do what she could.

By the time I got back to the apartment, there was a message on the machine from the store manager. The next morning, I was in his office for an interview, freshly shaved, wearing an ironed shirt, my best pants and black, polished shoes. My lifetime revolt against my father’s lawyerly ways and wardrobe advice had come to a quick end after a couple months of near-poverty. I was offered the job at $4.00 an hour before I even left the manager’s office that day. I could even work 40 hours per week if I wanted.

Despite being part of a small regional chain (there were nearly 20 stores in Texas and Florida, including four in Houston), the Alabama Theater Bookstop was a truly unique store that had been featured in national magazines for its historic architecture and funky layout. We were located in a hip, gay neighborhood teeming with actors, writers and artists. The store was the hub of a small, socially liberal oasis in a largely buttoned-downed city.

Although my friends Deb and Barb were in a lesbian relationship in New Orleans, the experience of gay culture was new to me. I grew up mostly in the suburbs, and Allegheny College is a fairly conservative school with a very small gay population. This urban, gay neighborhood forced me to see the world in a different way, to accept things that I hadn’t previously encountered. The Bookstop had its share of cross-dressers and flamboyant types saunter in on many a weekend night, but I found the cultural differences to be more subtle. There were a lot of jokes in our tiny break room that I just didn’t get. There were secrets that I was never privy to. It was a lesson in being an outsider.

I quickly gained two responsibilities at the store beyond the usual duties of a bookseller: author companion during signings and assistant in the large magazine section

Bookstop specialized in huge celebrity signings. We’d take out an ad in the Sunday paper, and customers would line up out our front door and around the block. It was my job to make sure that the author (though calling some of these people authors was a stretch) had everything he or she needed. Making the author feel appreciated became more of a challenge when there were no lines. One night, I listened to a hyped-up Tama Janowitz ramble on for over an hour, nodding and laughing as I pretended to follow along with her gossiping monologue, all the time peeking at the front doors in hopes that a fan of hers would arrive and rescue me.

The magazines were thrust upon me because our magazine buyer was in and out of the hospital with various complications from AIDS. It was tedious, those first few days, searching for the titles at the base of the big movie screen, desperately trying to pull all the old copies and still helping the customers who wandered by.

Each time the magazine buyer returned to the store, he looked more frail, more beleaguered, and his skin seemed to be flaking off his arms. The long-time staff members, who had worked with him for years, fawned over him, while the newer employees just tried to politely take on as much of his work as possible without making it obvious.

On days when he returned, there would be hushed conversations about the state of his health, whispered remembrances of other men who had succumbed to the disease in our neighborhood, and lots of head-shaking about what was happening to the community. My two best friends in the store were having an on-again, off-again relationship, and I could see that they were deeply impacted by the increasing frequency of our magazine buyer’s trips to the hospital. One of my friends was already feeling skittish about whether or not he was really gay. The illness that was among us seemed to be pushing him away from the relationship, despite the deep and genuine affection he felt for his boyfriend.

My dual duties (yucking it up with authors and subbing for a dying man) gave the job a surreal quality. One day, Chuck Norris was in the store signing his autobiography. Things were going great until I joked that he wasn’t any taller than me, and his high-heeled cowboy boots weren’t fooling anyone. He challenged me to a fight. For a moment, I thought he was kidding, but when the sneer stayed on his face, I feared he may be serious. Luckily, I escaped unscathed, and we all got a good laugh out of it afterwards.

The mirth would completely disappear the next day, however, when I was unloading a large order of gay men’s magazines because our magazine buyer was too sick to come in. I used to wonder how many of our customers who had bought these very magazines over the years had perished since, and how many more were dying now.


Outside of the store’s thick art deco walls, the city of Houston was grinding me down. The incessant heat, the horrendous traffic and the complete flatness of the landscape were things I could never get used to. Where was downtown? Why weren’t there sidewalks in our neighborhood? Why did everyone make such a big deal about the Galleria when it was just a gaudy mall?

In the evenings, Cathy and I used to walk or jog along the bayous that ran through the city. When she first told me about them back in Pennsylvania, I imagined lush waterways, perhaps lined with magnolias. Instead, I found wide concrete troughs with dirty rainwater and few trees. Occasionally, we went to the beach down in Galveston. Our day would invariably be marred by a pick-up truck carrying a keg that would pull up right alongside our blanket. It was like sunbathing on the highway.

Despite these glaring problems, just about everyone who lived in Houston seemed to love the city, including Cathy. I felt more and more out of sorts and out of place, except when I was roaming the aisles of the Bookstop in a conversation with a customer or in the employee break room debating why we shelved Larry McMurtry in literature instead of fiction.

Many of the customers would ask me where I was from after hearing my East Coast accent. When I told them Philadelphia, they’d look at me like I’d managed to escape from a gulag. They ask me how long I’d been in Houston (pronouncing it “Youston”) and why I moved to the city. Then the inevitable question would come: “How do you like Youston?”

I’d tell them, “I love my girlfriend.” Usually, they wouldn’t get my attempts at misdirection, and they’d ask again, “But what do you think of Youston?” I’d take a deep breath and tell them that I was enjoying my stay.

I was not alone in having my troubles getting along in Houston. One of my favorite customers was Joe Barry Carroll, the NBA player. Carroll, who had been traded to the Rockets in the middle of the season from the Golden State Warriors, used to skulk around the bookstore late at night. One evening, I got into a conversation with him. This was not an easy feat because Carroll, nicknamed Joe Barely Cares, was known as a loner who was loathe to even grant interviews.

We talked of literature and, if I remember right, philosophy. He bought books that reflected a highly educated and eclectic taste. I asked him about life in the NBA. He told me it was pretty bad, especially the traveling. The guys never wanted to discuss anything interesting or real. Here was man who should have been a graduate student in some liberal arts field, and he was stuck traveling the country with a bunch of college drop-outs. I came to feel sorry for the poor guy, an intellectual trapped in a 7-foot-1 body. In a strange way, I came to identify with him and looked forward to his visits. I wondered if my cynical East Coast personality stuck out in Houston, like his height did.


The blank screen in the Bookstop continued to tower above us all, as the spring of 1988 turned towards the hot, hot summer. The shipping-and-receiving department, where the magazines were dropped off, was behind that high screen. One day, I was working back there when I turned and saw one of the female employees crying. I went to comfort her in the way an awkward 22-year-old guy consoles a sobbing woman in her forties: I tried to hug her without touching her. She had seen the magazine buyer the previous day and said that his condition had grown worse. He hadn’t been back in the store in weeks, and I’d come to think of the magazine job as my own.

On the other side of the screen, Randy Shilts’ book And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic was selling like crazy. Shilts had captured the moment in time perfectly. For months before the book was released, people had been asking about it, waiting for it. Our special orders were piling up every single day. In 1988, there was no hope for AIDS victims; what people needed was some kind of an explanation, and Shilts was providing that.

My two friends in the store broke up for good not long after that. The one that was unsure about his sexuality knew that he could never tell his family he was gay. He was headed to medical school, and although he loved his boyfriend, he couldn’t lead the life necessary to sustain that relationship. I remember him telling me that there are many lives you can lead, and sometimes you have to recognize the ones you can’t.

His words made me think longingly of Deb and Barb in New Orleans, and the life that I’d so quickly given up on. I thought of those blues clubs and how New Orleans, for all its faults, was a city that I could understand and live in, and that perhaps Houston was a city, no matter what the job, that I could not live in. I began to realize that as hard as I tried to feel at home and as much as I cared for Cathy, I couldn’t project a life in Texas upon the big empty screen of my future.

A few days before our relationship began to crumble, I was promoted to a supervisor role at the bookstore. It was a short, joyous time period. I was now up to $5.00 per hour and could move out of the shadow of the magazine buyer. I’d have a few more bucks for going out, and perhaps Cathy and I could even take a little trip. However, it was not to be. As my relationship collapsed over the next few months, I also decided that I needed to do something serious with my life. I couldn’t stay in bookselling forever. I had to find a “real” job. In July of 1988, I quit the Bookstop and thought I had left bookselling for good.

By August, I was out of Houston and have never returned. Over the years, I have come to realize that during my time in Texas I loved, not just my girlfriend, but also the Alabama Theater Bookstop and many of my co-workers there. I left in such a hurry, distraught over the broken relationship and feeling like a failure because I never did find a real job, that I never said goodbye to any of my friends at the book store.

At a recent American Bookseller Association meeting in Brooklyn, I ran into a bookseller from Blue Willow Books in Houston. I mentioned my days in the Alabama Theater and she told me that there was talk in Houston about a developer tearing it down. My heart started racing as I thought of that movie palace being destroyed by the wrecking ball. I just might have to return to Houston before the demolishing crew arrives, taking one last look at that movie screen to see what’s playing on it now.

Flat Stanley Flies

A few weeks ago I received a letter from my six-year old nephew, Quinn, asking me to assist him with a school project. This was an unusual request because Quinn lives 2,000 miles away in New Jersey. Also, Quinn and I don't really speak too much about school when we get together every summer for our week on the beach in Cape May. Our conversations usually are about the important things in life, like waves, hermit crabs, ice cream and bugs.

I was overjoyed that Quinn's project was book-related so that I could add some professional expertise. Ever since he was born, I have been sending him books. Quinn and his sister Evelyn probably have one of the biggest collections of picture book samples in North America. Last summer, Quinn was fascinated by Lynn Reid Banks' Indian in the Cupboard. I was so thrilled by his jump to chapter books that I began counting down the days until I could introduce him to Philip Roth. However, my wife tells me that six is a bit too young for Portnoy's Complaint. Regardless of what Quinn and his sister read, I'm just hoping to create a couple of dedicated readers.

Here is our correspondence:

Dear Uncl Arsie,

In scool, we read a book about a boy who was flattened by a bulleten board. His nam is Flat Stanley, and he can travel in an envlobe. I am mailing my Flat Stanley to you. Please take him somewhere and writ back telling me where he went. If you have pictures or postcards, please send them too. I will take Flat Stanley back to school and share his adventures with my class. Please send him back by Friday, March 14, 2008. Thank you for your help.

Love Quinn.

Dear Quinn,

Aunt Emily and I took Flat Stanley on many adventures during his time in Colorado. We kept trying to figure out just what he’d enjoy the most. Was he a sports fan? Was he an athlete? Did he like to eat? Did he want to visit other children’s book characters? Did he want a thrill that he’d never forget? You might have noticed that, unlike you and your sister Evelyn, he doesn’t say much, and also his face rarely changes expressions. He smiles at everything. We had to guess what he liked and didn’t like.

We took him to a University of Colorado women’s basketball game. Your Aunt Emily is a big fan of the team and Flat Stanley seemed to enjoy rooting for the Buffalos. Perhaps he was too enthusiastic in his cheering. Another fan, sitting behind us, told Flat Stanley to sit down because he was blocking his view.

A few days later it seemed that Flat Stanley was a bit lonely. He wasn’t talking to us and if you look at him upside down, then his smile becomes a frown. We didn’t want him to be sad. We all went down to the bookstore and he saw some of his friends, including the Cat in the Hat and Fancy Nancy. I introduced him to my buddy, Russell the Sheep. Doesn’t he look much happier in the photo we took of him in front of the bookstore?

We became concerned that Flat Stanley wasn’t getting any exercise. When you and your sister visit, you guys are running all over the place, climbing on rocks and making snow forts. Flat Stanley just sat around our house all day. Maybe he got some exercise while Aunt Emily and I were at work, but we never saw him move a muscle on his own. One day we all went to Beach Park to get Flat Stanley some exercise. The funny thing about Beach Park is that there is no beach and no ocean. It was okay because they had rocks. Flat Stanley turned out to be quite a climber. He also hiked in the mountain foothills.

We introduced Flat Stanley to our friends Stephanie and Elliot and they were quite surprised about how skinny he was. We explained that he was flattened by a bulletin board. Elliot said that was no excuse for his staying so thin. They said that we should have fattened him up. I told them I don’t know what he likes to eat. Stephanie said, not to worry, that she would make a cake that children’s book characters always enjoy. Here’s a picture of not-so-Flat Stanley after he ate more than half of Stephanie’s Pig Pickin’ Cake. It’s made with oranges and pineapples and has a whipped cream frosting.

For Stanley’s goodbye, we decided to give him a thrill he’d never forget. We found a paraglider willing to take Flat Stanley up for a ride. The paraglider flew off the cliff like a giant bird, and Flat Stanley had to hang on for dear life. They soared high up in the air and flew for over ten minutes before landing in a park almost a mile away.

Well, it’s been fun having Flat Stanley visit us. Maybe we’ll see him this summer.

Love,

Uncle Arsen

Literary Scraps for Real Readers

Networking Not Working

One day after work last week, I found myself in a dimly lit music venue a few blocks from the store wearing a bizarre name tag and scrounging for a few bites of food. I was at a networking function for writers hosted by Boulder's Daily Camera newspaper and a new magazine called The New West. I never would have attended this soiree, except that I really wanted to meet Jenny Shank, a writer for New West, who said wonderful things about my blog. I wanted to thank her in person and make sure she wasn't deranged. I also wanted to express my gratitude for the book coverage that she's providing the region on the New West website.

I don't usually go for networking events. I'm not interested in small talk, unless it is about baseball, and I am absolutely terrible about keeping people's names straight when I first meet them. The name tags should have helped with that problem, but they didn't. In addition to your name, the tag included either the first line of a novel, an author's name or the title of a book. The venue's black walls and mood lighting might work for a rock show, but it made reading name tags a challenge. You can only squint at a woman's breast for so long trying to read her name before getting walloped. I ended up calling one woman Jodi, but it turned out her author was Jodi Picoult. The idea of the name tags was that you were supposed to walk around the room to find your name tag match and start a conversation with them. On mine, I had the first line from Ian McEwan's Saturday. I never did find out who had the title, but the bookstore's promotional assistant, who sits five feet away from me every work day, had McEwan's name.

Even without the name tags, the event would have seemed a bit strange. The attendees were an odd mix of published writers, aspiring writers, publishers and reporters. It sounded great until you looked a little closer. The local publishers generally don't publish the type of work that the writers write, and the reporters generally don't report on the type of books that the publishers publish. Romance writers and young adult authors aren't going to find their way into the catalog of a nonfiction publisher. Rocky Mountain News freelancers aren't all that likely to review a hiking book.

I was mostly besieged by writers who had a book that we should be selling or could be selling or for some reason -- usually because it was self-published without a spine -- just wouldn't sell. I listened to them all, took a few bookmarks and anxiously looked around for the food. Every few minutes, the book editor of the Daily Camera got on stage and announced another winner from a drawing of business cards. The lucky person went up and selected a book. I had no hopes of winning because I had left my business cards at the office. I've managed to make 500 business cards last over 10 years in this manner.

It was great to meet Jenny from The New West, and I was very encouraged by her enthusiasm and energy for what's happening in books in the Rocky Mountain region. I must admit I was discouraged by most of the writers that I met. Many of them, especially the reporters, are excellent writers but can barely make ends meet. I was shocked by how many of them hold down full-time jobs, but still need to freelance to supplement their income.

The whole event was a study in irony, since the Daily Camera was one of the chief sponsors. The Daily Camera, like many newspapers throughout the country, has drastically cut its book coverage in the last few years. The difference is that Boulder is one of the most literate towns in America, and the paper rarely utilizes the great writers that are here. For example, the paper hardly ever features authors in any section other than the book page, and it didn't have the sense to keep Clay Evans, their passionate, talented, home-grown book editor. That they could be involved in holding a networking event for writers is almost comical. Perhaps Boulder's authors and reporters wouldn't have to stand around trying desperately to make connections if they actually had a local paper that supported and valued their work.

New Century, Same Old Story

I recently read a novel that was an extremely accurate depiction of the trials and tribulations of today's literary world. Struggling writers, the battle between artistic merit and commercial viability, the plethora of books being published, and the infighting of book reviewers are all featured prominently in George Gissing's New Grub Street. The funny thing is, Gissing has been dead for over a century and his masterpiece was published in 1891. Yet, as Francine Prose mentions in the Modern Library edition introduction, many passages seem to be taken out of today's conversations.

Gissing, a writer in the naturalistic style of Theodore Dreiser and Emile Zola, depicts several writers in 1880s London trying to make their way in the literary world. He's concerned about the working class, the poor and the downtrodden members of the writing class. Edwin Reardon is small-time novelist who can't compromise his artistic values to write something commercially appealing. Alfred Yule is an aging reviewer, novelist and essayist, who has never attained prosperity. Jasper Milvain, Reardon's friend, is his opposite, a man who will do whatever it takes to get ahead. Jasper is one of literature's great networkers, by the way. The two friends' divergent paths tell you all you need to know about Gissing's thoughts on literature.

When it comes to newspapers and magazines, Gissing predicts the advent of USA Today and other dumbed-down publications. One of the more worldly, if less literary, characters in New Grub Street proposes to change the magazine Chat into a publication called Chit-Chat. The new title is supposed to better represent the changes in the literary journal he is proposing -- all the articles will be limited to two inches in length and no paragraph will be longer than an inch. Is it any surprise when Chit-Chat becomes London's most influential magazine on culture?

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the novel:

"Speaking seriously, we know that a really good book will more likely than not receive fair treatment from two or three reviewers; yes, but also more likely than not it will be swamped in the flood of literature that pours forth week after week, and won't have attention fixed long enough upon it to establish its repute....The growing flood of literature swamps everything but works of primary genius. If a clever and conscientious book does not spring to success at once, there's precious small chance that it will survive. "

"If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I, become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres. I should be within the truth if I had said 'a vastly inferior book.'"

"I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty-thousand copies."

Too many books in 1880s London? I'd love to show Gissing my stack of Random House catalogs.

Let the Readers Read

A few days ago, I was asked to write a short piece for the PubWest newsletter on what independent bookstores, and specifically the Boulder Book Store, do to attract non-readers. Publishers Association of the West is a collection of western publishers. I've spoken at their annual conference in the past and was asked to contribute to the newsletter by a Kash's Book Corner reader who is with Boulder's Velo Press. The question was spurred on by the NEA's "Reading at Risk" report that showed that fewer people are reading now than during an earlier, Edenic period in our nation's history.

I started writing about the bookstore's free giveaways to teachers and schools, our attempts to make the store less stuffy and more inviting to people that might not be regular readers, and our multitude of events that appeal to the general population rather than the literary reader. It was the usual litany of desperate measures that you hear from bookstores around the country.

About halfway through my writing, I just got pissed off. Reading is just about the greatest pleasure a person can have in the world. It's absurd that we have to coddle all of the idiots out there that can't figure out how much fun it is to read a book or even a magazine. Perhaps bookstores would be better served, and the Boulder Book Store does this to a great extent, by catering to the people that are passionate about reading. It's more important to coddle the true readers in our community than become missionaries to the unconverted.


Books aren't going to disappear. If people haven't learned to value reading by the time they would become our customers, our chances of winning them over aren't very good. Even if all the independent stores in the country banded together, their efforts would be a mere drop in the cultural cesspool of our society. Instead, let's focus on the really cool people that are smart and hip enough to read books. Maybe the non-readers will start wondering what's going on and want to join the club. Sounds crazy? Look at Harry Potter.

I'm tired of being flogged by the NEA study. Do people really think that books are less prominent now than 5o years ago? Books were never absolutely central to the majority of Americans' lives. There has always been a select group buying most of the books published. It's hard for me to believe that things are as dire as the NEA would like us to believe. For bookstores, it is really a matter of competing for the book sales that are out there, not trying to drum up a bunch of reluctant readers. Today, there are three bookstores of over 20,000 square feet in Boulder. There probably wasn't a single bookstore that size in the entire state of Colorado in 1958, despite the fact that no one could buy books online back then.

There was a great article, Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading, in the February issue of Harper's Magazine by Ursula Le Guin that discusses the history of reading in America and makes some great points about the NEA study and publishing today. It should be required reading for anyone who ever mentions this NEA study again.

Going to School with the Publishers

The most complicated publishers to buy, for me, are the numerous university presses. This is publishing stripped to its nearly unsaleable essence. There are no glossy two-page spreads in the Duke University catalog, there's no marketing push behind a Penn State ceramics title and there's no name recognition for a Louisiana State University poet. Instead, there is earnest catalog copy, a photo of the cover that reveals the minimal design budget of the press, and a note that the author is an honorary fellow, distinguished professor or senior lecturer at a university far, far away from Boulder.

Despite this lack of marketability, there are some great titles in these catalogs. It's my job, with the help of my sales reps, to ferret out just what might work in Boulder. It's an almost impossible task, but occasionally we hit upon a bestseller, or at least something approximating one. Last Wednesday I sat down with my Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. rep to look at the summer titles. Over the years, I've come to learn that we have some luck with Harvard and Yale titles but that M.I.T. is extremely difficult. That said, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness by James Austin, an M.I.T. book from the 1990s, has been a huge seller for us over the years. Austin, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, wrote about two topics of intense interest to our customers -- Buddhism and neurology.

As I sat down with John, my rep, I could only hope that there would be just such a hidden nugget buried in these catalogs. John is one of the best-read and engaging of my reps; he actually understands many of the books that his academic presses publish. He's from Milwaukee and even though his territory covers the northern United States from Buffalo to Seattle, he has taken the time to get know our store and our market.

The first thing we did was go over our numbers from last year's buy. Unfortunately, they weren't pretty. Over forty percent of the titles we brought in didn't sell a single copy. Ouch! The bestseller was Existentialism is a Humanism by John Paul Sartre. Not exactly a fresh new voice. Every season, I pull the trigger on a a couple of titles from his presses and try to stack them up at the front of our store. We work together to come up with the most likely candidates from his lists, give them some marketing exposure in our email newsletter and see what happens. Last year we bet on Galapagos: The Islands that Changed the World from Yale and 100 Butterflies & Moths from Harvard. Both titles were beautiful nature books, but neither one sold well. Perhaps the summer isn't the right time to gamble on fairly expensive picture books. It's a lesson I need to learn over and over again.

With that fresh in my mind, I began perusing the Yale list. As usual, I was greeted by a plethora of titles that I just didn't quite understand. John patiently explained a few of them, like Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Nudge is about how choices can be framed to help people make decisions that will improve their lives rather than make them worse. Once I heard John's full explanation of the book, I recognized a comparison to the bestseller Freakonomics. I bought four copies, convinced it had a shot to sell and might garner some prominent review attention. Jonathan Zittrain's title The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It was one I just couldn't get my head around. Zittrain's argument is that the internet is on a path toward closing opportunities and innovation. By the second paragraph of catalog copy, my eyes were glazed over and nothing John could say was able to awake me from my stupor.

As I paged through the eclectic selections, including books on Napoleon, the hamburger, the Comanche empire and joint pain, I kept my eye out for a book or two that might actually sell in Boulder -- a book that we could promote to our customers. After last year's debacle, I took the safe route and gambled on James Speth's The Bridge at the End of the World. Speth, who has had a previous strong seller with Red Sky at Morning, argues in his new book that our current environmental situation is a serious indictment of modern capitalism. Anything on climate change seems to find an audience in Boulder and Speth's willingness to tie our failure into an attack on capitalism, while not wholly original, should resonate with our readers. Best of all, because it is from a respected university press, I could be fairly certain that Speth's arguments would be well-reasoned and erudite.

Next, it was on to Harvard. I must admit that I find buying these Ivy League presses a bit humorous. The fact that I'm expected to make decisions on books published by schools that wouldn't have taken me in as a student 20 years ago seems absurd. Who am I to judge a worthwhile academic title? Anyway, in my judgment I found it hard to give Harvard a passing grade this semester. I didn't find a single title that seemed worthy of stacking up.

I bought a few copies of The Road to Dallas by David Kaiser, which promises to tell the unvarnished truth about the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy conspiracy wing nuts, like my dad, will buy it, but really, hasn't this territory been mined hundreds of times before? Beautiful Minds, a comparison in the evolution of apes and dolphins, seemed good for our nature section, but a bit of a stretch to try and foist on the general public. Mario Vargas Llosa's collection of essays, Wellsprings, was also intriguing, but somehow a sophisticated book of literary criticism didn't seem too likely to make a splash in the summer.

Finally, I was left with M.I.T. The odds of hitting paydirt weren't great, but hey, I've got to have an open mind. Anything is possible, each turn of the catalog page revealing a whole new world of possibilities. I must admit, it didn't look promising, as I passed on Digital Culture, Play, and Identity, a $30 book exploring the cultural implications of the online game World of Warcraft, and New Tech, New Ties, a look at the sociological impact of the mobile phone. Maybe these subjects would work as magazine articles, but entire books?

As I was about to give up hope of finding a book that we could really run with, I found SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms by Francois Blanciak. At first I couldn't grasp the idea behind this little paperback. It's billed as "a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere." It asks the question, "What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program and budget?" It's filled with strange drawings of kneeling pyramids, seismic columns and many other bizarre forms. Finally, it started to make sense when I read, "The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing -- and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved."

Wow. It's science fiction for architects. It also seems to have a strange graphic design element going on. After all, many of these drawings are forms that can only exist on paper. I asked John what he thought and he shared my enthusiasm. We had a book to take a risk on. It seemed ideal for Boulder's strong community of architects and architecture enthusiasts, and also for our customers who seem to revel in just the sort of post-modern aesthetic that this book represents.

My God, after an hour mired in academic catalogs, I'm almost sounding like an Ivy League undergrad.

Lying Bookseller, Smooth Politician

Bookselling has afforded me many opportunities to meet great writers and public figures. I've detailed my encounters with Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and Thich Nhat Hanh during the past year in this blog. However, as I sat in an overheated middle school auditorium waiting to cast my vote for Barack Obama in Colorado's caucus on Tuesday, I realized that if Obama wins, I can add a United States President to my celebrity list.

It's not a pretty story, and if Obama were a hawkish right-wing Republican who might gleefully classify big-mouth booksellers as enemy combatants, I'd already be looking for property in Canada. Our encounter occurred at the 2006 Book Expo America in Washington, D.C. during a Crown Publishing dinner at the Occidental Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. The restaurant--a very staid eatery with hundreds of portraits of formerly powerful white men on the walls--bills itself as the place "where statesman dine." You can see why that's true. No normal human being would subject themselves to a five-course meal while being stared at by the members of Richard Nixon's cabinet.

The Crown party, featuring not only Obama, but Juan Williams, Ina Garten, Michael Isikoff and Gillian Flynn, was the top event of that year's Book Expo and there was quite a bit of internal discussion about who on our staff would get to go. I was accompanied by our young marketing manager who was new to the book business and fairly naive about politics. We arrived early and headed straight to the bar. Obama, who was promoting Audacity of Hope, had not yet arrived and, in fact, the rumors were that he might not make it to the dinner at all.

At the bar, we fell into an entertaining conversation with Flynn about her debut novel Sharp Objects. It was the type of novel, a mystery, that I probably would never read. I feigned interest as I scanned the room searching for a luminary to pounce upon. Gradually, I was drawn in by the attractive Flynn and her tales of Hollywood's elites. She's the television critic for Entertainment Weekly. I asked her if she was ever intimidated by a star, at which she laughed and said that actually the only actor who ever made her nervous was Dennis Quaid. "Dennis Quaid?" I screamed out. Then Flynn quickly explained that she'd had a crush on him since she was a girl.

Eventually, our tight, fairly drunken circle was broken up when one of Crown's publicists introduced a few other booksellers to Flynn. I wandered off and, in my desire to snag another drink, basically ran over Ina Garten. I was busy apologizing when I suddenly realized who she was. "But you're wearing shoes!" I stammered. She gave me a look of mild reproach. "Is the whole 'barefoot' thing just a marketing ploy?" I asked with genuine shock in my voice. "My God," I thought, "does the Naked Chef wear clothes when he cooks?" Finally, she broke the tension by laughing. She told me about the dessert that she had created for that evening's meal. It involved strawberries and balsamic vinegar and sounded like something that would go horribly wrong if attempted at home.

By this time, the bar was mobbed and still there was no sign of Barack Obama. I was rehearsing what I might say to him if I got the chance when I caught a few words in Juan Williams' familiar voice booming across the room. Everything I imagined saying to Obama suddenly sounded like the slurred ravings of a groupie. My internal monologue was interrupted by Crown's attempt to get us to sit down at our assigned tables. It was then, as I was moving from the bar, that Obama entered the room.

He was taller than I imagined, but more slight--all elbows and shoulders and chin on first impression. A coterie of editors and publicists guided him through the bar. I stood at a safe distance observing how firmly he shook everyone's hand and how easily a smile came to his lips. It was a crazy scene, with dozens of people vying for his attention. I figured at most I'd get a quick handshake as the whisked him over to a more important bookseller or media member.

Ironically, I was missing a book group discussion about his first book, Dreams From My Father, back in Boulder. My wife had spent the previous two weeks reading his autobiography in preparation for the discussion and she had read a few passages out loud to me. The language was surprisingly lyrical and my wife, a tough reader, had been impressed by his writing style. Since I knew I was going to miss the group, I hadn't even cracked open the book. These thoughts were in my mind as I felt someone grasp my elbow. It was my Random House regional sales manager.

"Do you want to meet him?" she asked.

"Of course!" I answered back.

She guided me through the hordes of people and a moment later I was in front of the Illinois senator. He stuck out his hand and gripped mine as I told him who I was. It was like a cheesy movie scene: everyone seemed to fade away, the din of dozens of conversations slipped to a whisper as he focused on me. I had to fill that silence. I needed to hold his attention for a moment more.

"I just finished reading Dreams From My Father," I lied. He paused a beat and once again I rushed in to fill the void. "I expected a fascinating story, but I was surprised by how strong the writing is. It's really well written for a politician."

His face broke into a broad grin. "Well, Arsen, that's setting the bar pretty low."

"I didn't mean it like that. I just meant..." What the hell did I mean? I didn't even read his book and now I had insulted him.

Things took a down turn when he patted me on the shoulder and said, "I'm just honored that you read it." Now the guilt from my lying and insulting was in full force. I could feel the blood rushing to my bald head.

In desperation I changed the conversation to safer ground. "Are you going to tour for this new book?" I asked.

"We are going to try to do a few things, but I have a pretty busy schedule."

"You have to come to Boulder. It's a tailor-made town for you. We'd sell out a theater in a heartbeat if you came."

"I'd love to get to Boulder," he said. "We'll see if we can work something out."

I sensed the crowd pushing in on us. Our fleeting moment together was nearing it's end. I looked at the portraits on the walls of staid white men surrounding us and motioned to them. "It would be amazing, if you ended it up on the wall in here one day," I said.

He laughed again and as the smile left his lips his attention was already being pulled towards another bookseller. My moment was over and I slinked back into the crowd wondering why I spent our brief time together lying and insulting him.

The rest of the evening went by in a fog. I sat at a large round table with Isikoff, who bonded with a few women from a tiny bookstore in West Virginia, and completely ignored me. About midway through the meal, I began to think that perhaps the Hubris in the title of his new book referred to himself rather than the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the bookstore's young marketing manager sat next to Juan Williams. She had no idea who he was and when he told her that he worked for both Fox News and National Public Radio she quizzed him on how that was possible. "Aren't they complete opposites?" Williams patted her on the forearm and assured her he was capable of being a good reporter for both.

Later, when she learned that his book Enough basically blamed the plight of many African Americans on their own leaders and themselves, she asked him about the huge amount of racism and white privilege in our society. Again, he condescended to her and told her that his was a realistic look at the situation.

The crowning glory of the evening for her came when the main course arrived. She looked at the crayfish with their heads attached and proclaimed that she wasn't interested in eating anything with eyes. Williams let out a laugh and said, "You're such a child."

When I met up with her at the end of the dinner, she recounted the conversations with Williams and said she couldn't leave fast enough. It turned out that, aside from her awkward exchanges with Williams, her dessert plate was significantly more vinegar than fruit. I told her that I wanted one last chance to speak to Obama and make amends for my fibbing. Unfortunately, as we made our way over to his table, it was apparent that he'd left long before dessert was even served. My chance to set the record straight was gone.

The other day as I sat in the caucus casting my vote for Obama, I thought of that dinner of nearly two years ago. My whole life I've been lied to by presidents from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to both Bushes. If Obama gets elected, I'll have finally turned the tables and lied to a President.

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.