Make room for one more awesome event during BEA!

Announcing:

THE TRIP TO GREENPOINT TO

VISIT WORD,

MEET BOOKAVORE,

AND HAVE A DONUT.

What? The title wasn’t clear enough for you? I think the purpose and content of this trip are obvious enough.

Where? Again, see title. 126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222.

Why? Because there is only so much show floor you can walk before you get sick of ugly carpet and the feeling of your arms going slowly numb under the weight of four overloaded tote bags. Because you like donuts, or at least are curious about these donuts I talk about all the time. Because you have always secretly wondered if I do, in fact, really eat books for meals. Because all purchases at WORD are 10% off this weekend when you show your BEA badge. Because I have to work all day so I want to bring BEA to me!

When? Saturday, May 30, 11am-9pm.

Who? You! Me. Donuts. Cat pictures. Books.

How? Follow these insanely-detailed directions from Javitz to WORD (hey, I get lost all the time, don’t want that to happen to anyone else):

1. Walk east on W35th towards 10th Ave (those of you without a compass, this means walk out the front doors and in the direction of the construction. They’re still doing construction there, right?). At the corner of 35th and 8th, descend into the subway station.

2. Take the E train heading UPTOWN. Get off at 23rd St/Ely Ave (this is the stop after Lexington Ave/53rd St).

3. Walk through the station toward the G train. At some point it will stop being the 23rd/Ely station and start being the Court Square station, for reasons that have never been made clear to me. Get on the G heading to Smith and 9th St. Almost inevitably, wait for awhile. Wait a little longer. Keep waiting! This is good, you’re getting the real Brooklyn experience.

4. Take the G to Greenpoint Ave. When you get off the train and go through the turnstiles, don’t take the exit immediately to your right, take the one further back on the right.

5. Go up the stairs and immediately turn right. You’ll walk down Manhattan Avenue for a hot minute and then reach Milton St. Make a right on Milton. Walk down it. Then you’ll be at the corner of Franklin and Milton. More importantly, then you’ll be at WORD! Good on ya. If you get lost, you can call me at 718 383 0096.

So there you go. When you need a break from the craziness of BEA, come visit your friendly neighborhood Bookavore for a donut and a smile. And cat pictures.

After this article in Shelf Awareness last month, about the potential of e-ARCS for reviewing and especially indie bookstores, I got a number of very thoughtful responses. Several people wrote in to affirm that they definitely were not interested in e-ARCs at all and have concerns that for booksellers to start to work with e-books puts the future of the book at greater risk.  Several others wrote in to say they were very interested in e-readers, even though they love physical books.  And a few introduced thoughts that had never entered my mind! Below is a selection of voices that I think are crucial to the discussion:

“Let me say I would dearly love an e-reader for ARC’s!! I will be anyone’s guinea pig on this! I find the amount of paper products in my office overwhelming.  Publisher’s catalogs, toy catalogs and then what-have-you catalogs. I have been known to purge so severely that my new catalogs are recycled with the old! (My reps just bring them now.)  The book sorting and sharing is never ending, as you say.  But you forgot to mention the book that has been out on the floor for 3 months and the ARC mysteriously reappears on the shelf to be re-sorted and weeded.”  —Andrea Vuleta, General Manager, Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Book Shop (CA)

“The aspect that isn’t being discussed is that, as a collector, I like having ARCs in my collection. Yes, fewer of them are printed and, to me, that makes them more interesting. There are often changes in the art between the ARC and the finished book and I like having those differences represented- often I prefer the artwork of the ARC. There can be changes to the story or some other aspect of the text between the ARC and the finished book and, to me, that’s worth keeping. Being in the bookworld, I am lucky enough to be able to be many of them signed by the visiting author, so I have sets – the ARC and the hardcover – and I like that. Makes my shelves jammed, but I like it. In fact, if there are gaps in my collection, they are the ARCs of author’s earlier books that I don’t have.

“I recall one author bemoaning how some faceless copy editor decided that the last three paragraphs in the author’s book really weren’t necessary so they were omitted from the finished book. Until the paperback, the only way to read the full book, as written by the author, was in the ARC.

“In another case, an author was horrified to find that an earlier and inferior version of the manuscript was mistakenly issued as the ARC and thought reviews and reactions to the book were hurt by it. He wanted anyone who had read the ARC to read the book again, in hardcover. Otherwise, you hadn’t really read ‘his book’.

“These kinds of stories, along with the artifact itself, makes me value ARCs as a collector. And, for that reason, I’d hate to see them go.”  —JB Dickey, owner, Seattle Mystery Bookshop (WA)

“Being one who tends to see both sides of an issue simultaneously, I can certainly support your reasoning about reducing waste and being more ‘green.’ But I’m also concerned that booksellers need to ‘walk the talk.’ If they’re reading books — even if in galley form — on an e-reader, why shouldn’t more customers do the same?

“One alternative solution that came to me is for publishers to use the same model with booksellers as agents do with acquisitions editors: present a one or two page summary, along with a sample chapter. Since we can’t possibly read all the ARCs that we get anyway, we could at least get a feel for the content, style of writing, and whether any of our customers would like the book. Publishers could then produce galleys with print-on-demand technology, should there be some requests for the book.”  —Mark Kaufman, Paz & Associates

“The moment I heard of e-readers I thought they would be an excellent tool for me as a bookseller. Imagine seeing a book promoted on a television show, website or actually meeting the author that interested me. I could IMMEDIATELY go to the publisher website, enter my super secret spidey code and download a copy to start reading. If I didn’t like it… no problem… delete it. If I DID like it… start the buzz.”  —Deb Hunter, Chicklet Books (NJ)

And here’s a helpful link from Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Partners, about a study they did for netGalley that looks at the costs to publishers of making e-ARCs available.

Any other voices out there in the ether that want to chime in?

If you’ve ever visited me in a bookstore in person and asked for a cookbook recommendation, I undoubtedly started with How To Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman. This is because it is the best cookbook I know of. However, often when I recommend it, people have looked at me like I am crazy. Not the Joy of Cooking? Better Homes and Gardens? Rachael Ray?

No, friends, no. Let me tell you a little story about last night that will help illustrate why I am so devoted to The Bittman (as I refer to it in my head).

By the time I got home from work last night, it was 10pm and I was starving. I had a whole pantry of nothing in particular and a refrigerator of wilted leeks and condiments. I saw a bag of whole-wheat pasta snuggled in the back corner of the pantry, so pasta it was. But it was going to be boring old nothing on it at all pasta. Blegh. Wait, I thought. I bet THE BITTMAN can save my meal! And o boy did it ever.

I flipped in the index (the completeness of which is one of my favorite things about the book) to pasta, then went the to appropriate page. Right there, a basic little recipe for oil and garlic sauce. Alright! This meal was not going to totally suck.

But wait! There were, as there are with almost every recipe in the book, several suggested variations on the recipe. Including one that called for toasted breadcrumbs. Which were also lurking in my pantry. And when I moved them, I found a small jar of tomato paste. So I toasted the breadcrumbs in garlic-y oil, added the tomato paste, and then added a cup or so of pasta water to thin the sauce out (a trick I learned from earlier treks through THE BITTMAN). Tossed it with the pasta, spiral pasta, which held the tomato-breadcrumb sauce beautifully, added salt and pepper, and holy shit, I had the best pasta dish I’ve made in months!

That is the beauty of The Bittman, for me. It has never let me down. It has endless variations that keep my meals from being boring. Whenever I panic and think, ack, how long SHOULD I boil these eggs/steam this broccoli/let this dough rise, The Bittman is there with its lovely index and personable and clear writing to keep me calm. I don’t worry when I see strange vegetables at the farmers’ market. I buy them with confidence, because The Bittman is waiting at home to give me five ways to prepare them.  You will feel like the MacGyver of cooking with this book.

In fact, it’s the only cookbook that I give a pass for not having any pictures (aside from some very helpful drawings for various skills like coring a cabbage, another thing I learned from The Bittman). Normally I like my cookbooks full of food porn. My other favorites—Nigella for baking, Ina for entertaining—oblige with glossy arty photos that make me drool, but that is not what The Bittman is for. It is a cooking tool, as indispensible to my kitchen as a paring knife and saucepan.

So when you’re looking for the right gift for graduation, housewarming, or for “hey dude maybe YOU could try cooking every once in awhile around here,” get The Bittman. If you’re a vegetarian, there is also How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, which is basically just as awesome. Get both, they look really nice together on the shelf and both have the satisfying heft of true wisdom.

As a bonus, below please find the recipe for my dinner last night, which I am naming Bookseller & Bittman Pasta to honor both my inspiration and the fact that it is pretty cheap to make.

You will need:

a bag of whole-wheat pasta (I used Trader Joe’s whole-wheat spiral pasta, forget what the Italian name for it is)

garlic, 2-3 cloves (I used this awesome thing I found the other day which is basically little ice cubes of crushed garlic, I think the brand name was Doret)

one little can tomato paste

1/2-1 cup breadcrumbs (I had some that came with herbs included, I highly recommend these. If not, you’ll probably want to add some Italian herbs into the recipe)

good olive oil

salt and pepper

Instructions:

1. Start the water boiling. Add a lot of salt (I love salt, but even if you don’t, The Bittman instructs that a good amount of salt is crucial to the best pasta).

2. This whole step, keep the burner on medium heat. Get out a decent-sized saucepan and put in a few glugs of olive oil. (The Bittman recipe calls for 1/3 cup, but I hate measuring olive oil, it’s always such a mess.) Add garlic, let it do its thing for awhile, then add the bread crumbs, 1/2 cup or so. Then you’ll probably need to add more olive oil so they’re soaked through. Move the bread crumbs around enough to keep them from burning, but not so much that they don’t crisp up, for 3 minutes or so, until they start to smell really good. Add most of the can of tomato paste (you can probably add the whole can, I just didn’t). Mix it up until you have this kind of bread crumb tomato mush. Turn off the burner.

3. At this point your pasta water should be boiling. Add pasta. Go find your book and read for a little bit.

4. Five minutes later, look up in shock. Holy shit! The pasta! Fish a piece out, it should be done. (The Bittman has very wise words about how to tell when pasta is done that you should check out.)

5. Before you drain the pasta, dip a measuring cup in and take out a little over a cup of the pasta water (I used a 2-cup Pyrex measure, which was perfect for this). Put that water in with the bread crumbs and tomato, stir to make a thick sauce. Add more water if you want. Take out another cup or so of water. Drain the pasta.

6. Put the pasta back in the pot, pour the tomato sauce over top. You will probably need to pour in a bit more water so that it all comes together well. I added more breadcrumbs at this point, I don’t remember why. Salt and pepper to taste. The pepper isn’t so important, but the right amount of salt makes this perfect. I did not have cheese in the house (I know, very surprising!) but if I had, I bet some sort of Parmaesan with a nice bite would have set this off really well.

7. Enjoy! This made about four big bowls. Just as good as leftovers (eating it right now) as it was last night. Incredibly satisfying.

(In which I present another possibility for the future of the physical book, because I felt there just wasn’t enough talk about the whole thing.)

Friday and Saturday, the stars aligned and I had—wait for it—two days off in a row.  I know! It was heavenly! And on the second day, I made a trip to the farmers’ market and read (the Contract With God trilogy, fantastic) in the park. Beautiful day, yummy apples, great book.

And then my phone said, “doodle doodle doo.” I looked at it, of course. 2 new emails, neither important, and about 80 tweets in the last hour from people I follow.  Started reading them, but my heart wasn’t really in it.  Maybe I should check my blog reader, I thought.  Then I thought, what the hell is wrong with me? I’m outside on a great day reading a great book and I’m feeling obligated to keep up with the 140-character thoughts of over 200 people?  No offense to the folks I follow on Twitter, all of whom are incredibly fascinating, of course, I just couldn’t believe the extent to which I was freaked out about “missing something” on a Saturday morning.  Same thing with email. I’ve always been a habitual email refresher, and my phone just aids & abets. It sits in my purse and whenever it makes a little noise, I excuse myself from whatever I’m doing, and check what is, half the time, an advertisement.

So I took the day off from the internet on Saturday. I put my phone away and disabled my internet access and just…had a day. Read some more, cleaned, watched Adam’s Rib and began to wonder if in fact Katherine Hepburn is secretly my great-aunt or something. Invented the umpteenth variation on my basic couscous recipe.  It wasn’t the perfect day, but it was nice. And a piece of that was disengaging from the ever-present Internet on purpose. The more of the day I spent not with the Internet, the more I spent not giving a shit about it. So what if another #amazonfail was happening? I was reading, don’t bother me.

This experiment wasn’t perfect; for example, my inattention to the phone for 12 hours caused family members to worry and even call the store to see what was going on. (In future, I will be sure to announce my days off so nobody worries that I am dead.) But I will definitely do it again.

Of course, even on my days off I can’t stop thinking about <serious voice> THE FUTURE OF THE PRINTED BOOK </serious voice>. So I was wondering at the end of my disconnected day, could this be a future trend, people taking the day off from connectivity? I think we all know the stress that comes from being too plugged-in.  I’m feeling it, and I’m a member of the connected generation, the generation with thumb calluses from texting, the generation that feels in emoticons, the generation with ethernet cables for veins. Despite my well-documented enthusiam for technology, some days I feel like checking email and Twitter and blogs any time after 10am is like trying to merge onto I-95 at 75 mph without slowing down.  I can imagine a near future where people say, “hey, just so you know, Friday I’m disconnecting for the day.” And that’s that.

And what will people do on the days they choose to disconnect? Probably the same things I did. Watch a movie, clean the house, make couscous, and maybe even…read a book! A real book. Not connected to anything! With paper and glue and even that o-so-worshiped book smell that is everybody’s first reason to defend physical books.  I still think e-books will be part of the future and that as booksellers we need to understand them, but I also think e-books and physical books will come to serve different purposes in our lives, different delivery for different types of content.

To that end, I think an important part of the physical book’s future will be a refuge from the always-on, always-running digital culture.  I love digital culture, I’m happy to be a part of it—I love connecting with people I wouldn’t know otherwise, I love how quickly we’re beginning to come up with ideas, I love the sheer number of new things I learn everyday (even if it’s making my TBR pile more unwieldy than usual).  But it can wear me down. I’m sure I’m not the only one.  And I bet books will be a place to which we turn to stop and breathe and enjoy the feeling of devoting all our attention to just one person telling us one story at a time.

A small conversation on Twitter sparked this question: what books are now out of print that you would sell the hell out of if they were still in print?

I’ll start with three of mine.  They’re all kids’ books, I’m guessing in part because I’m too young to have loved grown-up books that are now OP, and in part because it’s the books I grew up with that really imprinted themselves on me and follow me around all day.

1. The A. I. Gang trilogy by Bruce Coville (originally published by Minstrel Books, part of S&S).  Fantastic work of sci-fi for older middle grade that I was completely obsessed with.  I have no idea why this isn’t available anymore, especially because I thought it was a given that Coville rocks, but I’m really glad I still have my copies.  Great characters, includes fantastic female characters and characters of color without being tokenist, hilarious, and so, so smart. This is a series that made me seriously think about nuclear war and the stupidity of Mutually Assured Destruction when I was all of, like, 10. Still re-read them everytime I move and have to re-pack them.  This series has perhaps the highest badge of honor I can give it: as a kid, I regularly pretended I was one of the characters and/or had extensive daydreams in which I re-wrote myself into the story.  I can say that about maybe two other books (The Dark is Rising series and The Egypt Game).  I really wish it was still around, I think it would delight fans of The Mysterious Benedict Society and E. L. Konigsberg but would also be great for reluctant readers, male or female.

2. Nobodies and Somebodies by Doris Orgel (originally published by Viking). This book was YA before YA was cool and before I was old enough to know what YA was.  Actually, I guess nowadays it would be high MG as well.  No matter, it is still great.  Story of a girl who moves to a new area and new school and gets caught up in the craziness of the cool and the uncool, but that looks at several points of view rather than walking the well-trod “man, those popular girls sure are bitchy” route. Would love to be able to sell this book again.  One character lies about having swum with dolphins to be cool, and the popular girls paint their nails in a really weird way that’s actually impossible, and there’s lots of kicking heels against the heater to protest popular girls even though it disrupts the class pet. This should be re-released as a TPO as MG so I can sell it to tweens who want a more sophisticated read.

3. Ash by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (originally published by Orchard Books). Another book that would still be in print if it had been published after the onset of YA madness. A very real look at what life is like when your sibling is mentally ill and your family is just a normal family.  I love this book so much, I can’t count how many times I’ve re-read it.  (Full disclosure, I think my mom and she were once in the same writer’s group, but as it happened so long ago that I can’t remember for sure, I doubt it’s influencing my mentioning it here.)  In voice, it’s an early King Dork, but telling a totally different story.  You know what, I’m going to type out the prologue so you can hear the voice, see if you get drawn into it the way I get every time I read it:

“The Last Will and Testament of Wesley Willian Libby, age 15 (cause you never know when a truck’s gonna hit you)

“Being of sound mind and body, not counting pigeon toes and baby flab, I hereby declare this my 1st and last will and testament so far.

“To my beloved month Bonnie Lynn Tibbetts Libby I leave my Bible. But 1st my best friend Merle R. Daigle’s gotta go through and erase some stuff. Merle, you know what I’m talking about.

“To my beloved father Stefan Edward Libby, known to the rest of creation as Steve, I leave the violin you never wanted to buy me. Sell it and buy the CB you was always after us to pitch in and get you for Christmas. And if you dig deep in my closet you’re gonna find an old G.I. Joe wearing them army medals of yours you LOST a few years ago. Don’t get all mad that I didn’t confess this when I was alive.  You woulda killed me.

“To my once-in-a-great-while beloved sister Deena T. Libby, OFFICIALLY known on her birth certificate as Dayna Theresa, which I personally think is a better name, I don’t leave nothing.

“No, just kidding Deena–you get the dust balls under my bed and the snotty handkerchief in my pants pocket when I die.”

“No, no, DEENA, just kidding! You can have my breadbox. Guess I should cross that out and write “CD-radio,” but Mama told me it was a breadbox under the Christmas tree and now that’s what it is. Also, my entire CD collection, except for the Roy Boys Grammy Ethyl give me for my birthdays, and Grammy had better take them back cause Deena would overreact if she had to share her room with Acuff, Rogers, Orbison & Clark.

“To the aforementioned best friend Merle R. Daigle, who’d get embarrassed if I called him beloved so I won’t, I leave my entire comic book collection except for the 1961 Green Honet and the ‘62 Wonder Woman and the ‘65 Superman cause them’s worth money and Mama & Daddy can sell them to pay for my funeral. Better clean out my college account at the Fleet Bank of Maine and use that for the funeral too. Only about $142.67 in there, so don’t get no expensive casket. Cremate me. But that don’t mean to keep my ashes around the house in no sicko urn. Bury them out back next to Togo, or put them in the cemetery with Grampy Libby. Even better, use them to fertilize Millard Worcester’s blueberry field, which’s got sentimental value to me but I can’t say why cause it’s Merle’s secret too.

“Merle also gets the personal effects in my locker if I die during the school year, but DON’T let NOBODY else in the locker, Merle, or I’ll haunt you, I swear.

“To the Calvary Bible Church I leave all my clothes to put in a gar(b)age sale or to give to the homeless cause Mama wouldn’t have the heart to do it herself. Except my Knights of Sisyphus T-shirt—that goes back to Ash. The church can also have my baseball equipment, Scrabble, books and junk so the kids will finally have something to do when the parents are fellowshipping at covered dish suppers.

“To my beloved brother Ashton Allen Libby I leave a composition book with some stuff written in it ONLY for him. Merle, you gotta get it for Ash out of the Shibboleth, and nobody else nag Merle to find out what the Shibboleth is cause that’s just between him & me. Now Merle, don’t get all mad, but the book’s in a secret compartment that YOU don’t know about. Take a hammer and pull up that floorboard with the big knothole, the one you always call Mrs. Fish-Lips’ belly button. Then paw around in there till you find the book, but don’t you dare read it or I’ll haunt you WITH CHAINS, I swear. If it ain’t there, that means I changed my mind and already give Ash the composition book.

“If there’s anything I left out then it ain’t important and Deena can have it.

“Just kidding! I didn’t leave nothing out.”

So, there’s my tribute to some books I wish were still around so I could sell them all over the place. What about you? What books do you try to recommend or sell but they’re out of print? Include the publisher name if you have it, maybe one of these days someone will stumble across this post and try to bring the book back.

It’s all over these interwebs, and my store has a response! Cutting and pasting the whole thing here, since I was the author and I give myself permission.  You should click the link to see the picture of our bestseller list with IndieBound logo hovering above, though.

Over the weekend, you may have heard something about a controversy over recent changes to Amazon’s ranking system that are primarily affecting books with sexual content, and especially books with GLBT content, by removing their rankings and thus impacting their visibility on the site.  More information is easy to find, as the internet has basically exploded about the whole thing.

Though it’s not clear yet what’s happened, here at WORD, we wanted to take this opportunity to assure our customers that the problem of books with “adult content” not being ranked is not endemic across the book industry. In the interests of transparency, our bestseller list is calculated as follows:

1. On first day of new month, run sales report for previous month.

2. Type top ten bestselling titles on a list.

3. Print out list on yellow paper.

(Possible glitch: the manager forgets how to count.  If this happens, we’ll be the first people to let you know.)

As you can see, it is a simple process and any book can be a part. We invite customers to test this assertion by buying dozens of copies of whichever adult title they like best to drive it to the top of our bestseller list.  No one would be more amused than we by an April bestseller list composed of gay erotica and perennial bestseller Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

This should clarify our position nicely, but if you have any other questions, you are welcome to email us at info@wordbrooklyn.com, call at 718 383 0096 (no extension, no phone tree, and definitely no hold music), or for direct human contact, visit us in person at 126 Franklin Street.

Who! Wants! To Be! A Bookseller!

First, yesterday’s answers.  The yellow book with Arial font was No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.  The graphic novel I was looking for was The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert.  Donuts to Liberty and jjchristie when they are next in town!  (Or, depending on how you feel about stale donuts, I can ship one.)

Today’s game is courtesy of Katherine at Bunch of Grapes (on Twitter: @KatherineBoG).  I don’t know the answer either, so she will be the judge.  Prize is a donut.  All prizes will be donuts from now on.

“My all time fave: 2 cousin hamsters, B&W picture book, but there’s a piece of nougat in color, French author. Can you get it?”

Keep in mind that the first tip for playing Who Wants To Be A Bookseller is that none of the clues are guaranteed to be correct.

Who! Wants! To Be! A Bookseller!

Haven’t had a good one of these in awhile, but here goes:

“I don’t remember what the title or the author is, but it’s a yellow cover, and I think the title is in Arial font.”

First to get it right gets a free Peter Pan donut next time they come to Greenpoint.

O yeah, I pulled one of these at Bergen Street Comics the other day.  I was looking for a book with the following qualities:

—graphic novel

—published by First Second

—I was pretty sure there was a woman on the cover

—and I was pretty sure it was old-fashioned in some way.

First to get this right gets a donut, too.

ETA 4 APR 09: Winners have been declared—this game moves hella faster when Twitter is involved.

Wow, I have put a multi-paragraph book review together for once! It’s for Tilting at Windmills, vol. 2, by Brian Hibbs (IDW, $19.99).  Brian Hibbs is the owner of Comix Experience, in San Francisco.

I bought this at brand-new Brooklyn comic book store Bergen Street Comics, which I highly recommend to any and all NYC comics-lovers.  The store is beautifully laid-out and so, so organized, which I prize very highly in any bookshop but especially comic shops.  NYC people, think Rocketship-level of blissful organization and shelving.  And they’re also on Twitter as @BergenStComics, and here’s the great review on the Greenlight Bookstore Blog that put them on my radar.

The book, I would recommend as well, but as I was told when I bought it, it is HEAVILY about Direct Market comics-selling and very little else.  You would have to be, like me, a huge nerd about retail AND comics in order to love this book despite it being just about the nuts-and-bolts of comic retail.

But I am, so I loved it.  Hibbs’ style is perfect for what he’s writing about—for those familiar with bookseller blogs, this book (which is primarily made up of columns that have run on Newsrama over the last several years) is very similar to Kash’s Book Corner in tone and content.  Both focus on a lot of specifics of their job, and neither are afraid to point out the emperor has no clothes, and it’s clear in each that this comes from a place of great love for their profession and for what they sell.

And in fact, there’s more in common in Direct Market comics retail and independent bookstore retail than I had thought.  Most Direct Market stores fit the profile of being local and indie, and it seems we can all agree that Diamond has…well…issues, sometimes.  I also found a lot to identify with in Hibbs’ excellent descriptions of the buying game, especially as comics stores have it a lot rougher than us, because they are usually ordering non-returnable.  Of course, bookstores try to minimize returns, because freight ain’t getting any cheaper, but it did help me to appreciate what we have.  On the other hand, as trade book publishers start to get more serious about giving a seriously better discount to accounts that order non-returnable (and by serious I mean more than a 3 or 4 point bump, if any publishers are listening), it’s good to get a look at how that might change our buying patterns.

One of the more interesting things Hibbs has been doing for the last five years is comparing how comics/GNs sell in bookstores (using BookScan numbers) to how they sell in the Direct Market (using Diamond’s numbers). Interestingly, this appears to have initially been a response to a fear on the part of Direct Market retailers that comics publishers were putting too much faith in the salvation of the general bookstore market for their medium.  I must admit I’d never considered bookstores a threat to comic stores.  I’ve been working in bookstores for years, and despite the fact that I have gotten a discount at those stores, I’ve usually bought my comics full-price at comic stores.  Mostly because they had a better selection, and because I could depend on the people behind the counter for great recommendations. If anything, I’ve come to see bookstores selling comics/GNs as good for comic stores, because at a certain level of interest, I’m going to send people to a comic store.  We’ve got five shelves at my store for GNs and it breaks my heart what we can’t carry, but really, comics are a medium, not a genre.  So it just makes sense that they have their own stores owned by people who seriously know what they’re talking about.

At BEA last year the phrase on everyone’s (and I do mean, to the point of nausea, EVERYONE) lips was, “graphic novels are a gateway drug!” As in, for kids, to keep them interested in books in general.  The same might be said of general-interest bookstores.  In that sense, one could see bookstores as the sleazy people who hang around playgrounds to get kids started, and comic stores as the actual drug dealer’s house.  In the nicest possible sense, of course.  (Now you perhaps see what “graphic novels are a gateway drug!” drives me so crazy.  The metaphor goes right off the rails without too much push.)

Anyway, I found myself getting a bit defensive at the BookScan numbers and Hibbs’ conclusions.  Hibbs freely admits that the BookScan numbers blow, which is good, but does not always take that into account when comparing Direct Market figures to bookstore figures.  At least the way I see it, as I would interpret his findings a bit differently.  But that makes sense.  I’m bringing bias to the table when I look at them and so is he, and we both know it.  And overall, the message is the same, and shouldn’t surprise anyone: comics and graphic novels work better at comic stores.  Indie booksellers in particular shouldn’t be shocked by this—we already know that specialists and people who love reading what they stock are best at their jobs.  That is, after all, the main argument we are currently making to justify our existence.

Two things that really surprised me: Hibbs only just got a POS system in 2007!  I quite literally CANNOT imagine running a store without a POS and was, frankly, assuming throughout the book that he had one until he said he was just getting one.  Especially with what seems to me like a buying process that is at least twice as complicated as ours!  The other is that, until recently when Hibbs and a few other lead comic store owners started one, comic stores did not have a trade organization.  This was obvious to me early on—when he would talk about a general grievance that many fellow store owners shared, I kept thinking to myself, why don’t they get their version of the ABA to work on that?  Answer: they didn’t have one.  Again, much admiration, and MUCH realization of how luckily we are to have the ABA.

So, now that they have one, though (ComicsPRO), I started thinking by the end of the book that it and the ABA should work together, or have some sort of informal link.  Perhaps this already exists, or has been tried before, but if not, it seems like we have enough in common that something good could come of it.  It seems like they derive the same sheer joy we do from meeting with likeminded retailers and hearing new perspectives, and I think it could be fun.  At the least, I think comics retailers would be a great addition to IndieBound in a more formal way.  Also, moving from a suburban to an urban store recently, I’ve become very conscious that the various differences between bookstores have as much to do with location (urban, suburban, rural) as with size, which is how it seems we’re more commonly divided right now (small, medium, large).  I wonder if there are certain topics with which I’d have more in common with an urban comic store of our current size than a rural general bookstore of our current size.

I can’t just generally recommend this book because I recognize that most people do not dig detailed discussion of buying.  Especially if you are not into comics, and therefore the content he’s talking about will make no sense to you.  If you don’t have a passing familiarity with concepts like Marvel’s Civil War, or DC’s 52, then the experience might be sort of like watching a Harry Potter movie when you haven’t read the books—you’ll get something out of it, but if you don’t know the backstory, there will be places you’ll be pretty confused (or bored). But to people with weird and oddly specific interests like me, and I suspect there are a few of you reading this, I can’t recommend this highly enough.  It’s good to see what other people are up to, especially when they are this interesting, funny, and good at making complex situations easy to understand.

(And of course, if you are reading this in NYC, I recommend you go get it at Bergen Street Comics.  It might even still be on the front counter!)

I haven’t written book reviews on here in quite awhile, and I realized that yesterday after I finished The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.  It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time and that’s saying something, because I’ve been on a streak of great books lately.

Despite myself I’ve read almost nothing but new or new-ish releases lately.  I blame Twitter—everyone gets going on about a book and I just want to read it right away!  Not an awful thing, though, because right now over half of the books I’m reading are good enough to recommend to other people.  (This is way above average for my reading experience, because normally I’m just guessing with stuff I get from the stack of ARCs.)  On the other hand, I do apologize that most of these are only available in hardcover or not out yet.  Even though, as I note in the title, I consider them all worth a hardcover purchase.

These aren’t really reviews—as I’ve noted before, I am a bookseller by profession, not a book reviewer.  As you’ll see, there is a reason for that.  Let’s start with the book that inspired all this.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (Knopf, already out).
I am still in that weird place with this book.  You know, the place where it’s all really fresh and you can’t talk about it coherently.  But I will say this—this book came with nothing but the highest praise from a number of booksellers I really respect, and they were 100% right.  It was hard for me to crack into because I’ve never experienced a voice like it before, and it took me awhile to settle into it, but it was definitely worth the effort.  This book is so good that on Saturday, when I had to put it down to get ready for work, I got MAD.  I was seriously angry that I had to put it down!

I was just trying to write any sort of summing-up of the book and I just can’t.  It’s still too close.  I’ll just say that I recommend it as highly as everybody else did.

As a side note, this is the sort of book it is still possible to sell in hardcover without begging.  This is because it is COOL.  Take a look at the cover image.  The cover and spine, wherever it is pink, it is FUZZY.  It is just too cool.  This is the sort of thing that I find is currently necessary to push a customer over the edge into dropping $30+ on a HC, especially for a name they don’t know.  I can sing all the hosannas I want, but the fuzzy cover really can tip the scales.

(As a further side note, this is why I am so bummed FSG is not re-printing 2666 in the cool 3-books-in-a-box edition.  People loved that.  A woman actually pouted at me on Saturday when I told her it wasn’t available anymore.  I don’t blame her, as I think I pouted myself when I first heard the news. ETA: THIS IS NOT TRUE! This morning I found out they DID decide to re-print, and this afternoon I rec’d 3 copies into our stock.  So ignore this!)

The City & The City by China Mieville (Del Ray, May).
Though I have heard people praise his writing many times, this is actually the first Mieville book I’ve picked up.  No idea why it grabbed my attention, but I’m glad it did.  I loved it so much that I added all his backlist to a recent order and will catch myself up.  Fantastic book.  Just the right amount of fantasy, in the sense that it can absolutely be cross-sold to people who don’t like it.  The concept—two cities literally on top of one another, two populaces that have spent their entire lives pretending not to see one another, and wondering who keeps it all rigid—is a beautiful and beautifully-executed one.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster, already out).

What can I say about this book that this fantastic video does not?

Not much, except that it really does live up to the hype.  I follow a number of slightly-finicky people on Twitter who all seem to agree.

The Manual of Detection by Jebidiah Berry (Penguin Press, already out).
Another Twitter recommend, though the final push came from a customer recommending it to me.  (When the internet world and the real world tell me the same thing, I try to pay attention.)  This is a beyond-solid detective book with a great paranormal twist that only has a few flaws, all of which I chalk up to it being a debut and didn’t make me like the book any less.  Also a great cover.  I think this is a great book for summer—it starts light and gets darker, and I think I would have enjoyed trickling into the dark bits of the book while sitting in broad July sunlight.

For a creep-yourself-out trifecta, add

The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell (Algonquin, and, I know I’m late to the party on this one, but it really is great, and think of it this way, it’s the one book in this post in PB soon!) and

Darling Jim by Christian Moerk (Henry Holt, April), a book that is still giving me chills to think about.  This book is the literary fiction equivalent of a good true crime book, except you don’t have to feel guilty about reading it after you’re done.

Shimmer by Eric Barnes (Unbridled, June).
Another fantastic book for summer.  Luckily, I already tried to write a blurb for it for Eric’s website, so will just c-and-p that here: A lot of books are labeled “literary thrillers.” Most of the time that’s a lie.  It’s not when applied to Shimmer.  The book moves at a breathtaking pace, but I was purposely slowing my reading to enjoy both the writing and the structure of the book.  It’s a rare writer who can make you like the man at the root of Ponzi scheme that is technological, financial, and poised to ruin the lives of everybody he knows, but Barnes definitely pulls it off.  Shimmer is beautiful in the way that a collapsing building is; more beautiful, because throughout it you can cling to the hope that the building will somehow put itself back together.  A great book across the board that I would sell to almost anybody.
Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel (Unbridled, June).

Ha! ANOTHER book I have already written something about!  Unfortunately for you, it was a very rambling email after I had just finished it.  And before I post the email, I can’t tell you how excited I am that WORD will be hosting Emily’s launch party.

“Maybe not the sort of thing I would have picked up on my own, but I’m glad you told me to read the first four chapters.  That was enough to get me hooked.  Actually, the first chapter was–in particular, “tracking a rare butterfly-like quotation as it fluttered through thickets of dense tropical paragraphs” (3).

What a strangely beautiful book.  I don’t envy whoever has to write the jacket copy for it, as I can’t even sum it up in my head.  But here are the things I was struck by: I found the scenes with young Lilia and her father moving (first time I’ve ever empathized with a man abducting his daughter, somehow even before I knew why it was justified), I found Eli’s love for Lilia beautiful, and just many little descriptive sentences that were lovely but did not feel the need to call attention to themselves.  It was almost like watching a ballet, a destructive ballet.  The piece of the letter he wrote to Zed, on page 240, brought me to tears.

And there were a few little things that endeared the book to me as well–I am a secret language nerd, so Eli’s thesis was interesting, and also as a person who avoided a lifetime of academia on purpose, I really identified with his frustrations with people just TALKING about things and deconstructing things and so on, and never really doing anything.  And yet, his discomfort with the woman he loves doing things, because it means he gets hurt.  I still haven’t talked about how much I love Graydon!  Even though I also didn’t really like him at all.  What a fascinating, maddening character.”

The Believers by Zoe Heller (Harper, already out).
Very very very funny.  I love books in which I hate almost all the characters.  Heller’s depiction of the rich snotty liberal is spot-on and worth the price of admission.  I was especially drawn to Rosa, because I am always interested in maybe converting to Judaism (although not Orthodox, as she is), and I found the scenes in which she alternately loves and loathes the strictness of such a faith to be some of the most compelling.  The ideas about belief and its types go far deeper than I expected.  I think this would make a good book club book for book clubs that don’t like super serious stuff but also want something with a little meat to it.

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton (Grand Central, April).

Three reasons I loved this book:

1.    This passage:
“She liked to tell her friends, and on occasion her radio audience, how frightened Frank became if there wasn’t printed matter near his person.  Their car had once broken down, and for some unexplained—perhaps paranormal—reason, they’d had no reading material for the two hours they’d had to wait for rescue.  Frank had almost gone mad.  There had not even been the Saab manual.  He sweated and he paced, reciting all the soliloquies that were his set pieces, roving through Othello, Lear, Merchant, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, and a few sonnets as well” (37).

2.    A character who shares my name!  This is perhaps not the most shocking thing, as my first name is fairly common and my last name even more so.  But it has never happened to me before, and certainly never as a minor character who talks about gardens on NPR.

3.    It is awesome and bizarre and hilarious.  This is the sort of book that I fear won’t get great critical attention because it was written by a woman, hinges on ideas about relationships, and because the protagonist is writing a romance novel.  But it should.  This book is just FUN and a perfect read.

Trouble by Kate Christensen.
One of the cool things about Greenpoint is that we are home to several great authors, and one of them is Kate Christensen, who I loved long before I moved here.  Her latest is not much like The Epicure’s Lament or PEN/Faulkner Award-winning The Great Man—as someone put it to me, “it’s commercial, but I don’t mean that as an insult.” And indeed that is the case.  This is probably an easier sell than her earlier books, and I think that’s fantastic, because I’d love for her to reach a larger audience.  This is a great place to start if you haven’t read anything of hers before.  Her ability to tell a gripping story is very well-displayed in this tale of two friends who run away to Mexico to escape the messes their lives have become.

Also, the sex scenes are fantastic.  If kids were still naïve enough to pass around books with the sex scene pages dog-eared, this book would definitely deserve that treatment.  Fantastic enough to get their own paragraph.

Can’t wait to throw a party for this one, either (in June, Brooklynites).  Am still trying to find a way to responsibly incorporate tequila—hey, it’s very important to the book, okay?  At the least, sangria.

Did you get all the way to the end? Wow, I’m impressed, as I barely did. Here is your prize: what have you read lately worth recommending?