Books by Booksellers and the People Who Love Them

March 11, 2004

Booksellers constantly pass judgments on books, critically evaluating the subject matter, the treatment, the cover art, and the author's past work. Some booksellers are even driven to see if they can produce something worthy of a place on their own shelves. Bookseller and author Peter Glassman of Books of Wonder in New York posed the problem to BTW, "Can I write a book without all the mistakes that lead me to reject a lot of other books? That's my challenge."

Recently, a number of booksellers, and very good friends of booksellers, have also taken up the challenge.

Ellen Moore and Kira Stevens, who wrote Good Books Lately: The One-Stop Resource for Book Groups and Other Greedy Readers (Griffin), were Ph.D. candidates in English at the University of Denver looking forward to academic careers. Both were researching topics related to book groups. Stevens, having worked at Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store for 10 years, where she talked to hundreds of readers and people involved in book groups, joined with Moore to form a book-club consulting company. They offer many suggestions for starting, maintaining, and improving books clubs and reading groups on their Web site, http://www.goodbookslately.com/, and in their new book. Nominating the title for the March/April 2004 Book Sense 76, Maryjude Hoeffel of Bookin' It in Little Falls, Minnesota, wrote: "Chock-full of great tips and advice, this helpful resource is a must-read for any book group member or leader wanting to enhance their reading/discussion experience. The stories, comments, recommendations (of what to read and what to avoid!) from book groups around the country are gems."

Cottage for Sale ... Must Be Moved, by Kate Whouley, will be published in May 2004 by Commonwealth Editions. Whouley is founder of the 16-year-old consulting service for those in the retail book business, Books in Common, and many booksellers know of her work as editor of the fifth edition of ABA's Manual on Bookselling, technical editor of Bookselling for Dummies (Wiley), a columnist for American Bookseller magazine, and a contributor to many publications about the book business. She has also been a manager and buyer at a number of bookstores. But Cottage for Sale is not a story about bookselling; it's the story of a marriage. Whouley, who is single, 'married' her three-room house on Cape Cod to a 386-square-foot, slightly shabby, former vacation cottage. The cottage was, as suitors go, geographically undesirable: 30 miles away via crowded Cape Cod roads. Plenty of differences between the two parties had to be adjudicated -- fortunately Whouley had a sense of humor, good friends with building experience, and an assortment of colorful small-town characters involved in the complicated project. Whouley told BTW that, were she to pitch this book to a customer, she might say, "Early readers compared it to Tracy Kidder's House and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun. I'm honored by such comparisons, but for me, Cottage is a more personal book…. While the house move and house marriage provide the plot, the narrative weaves and bobs. I think Cottage is less about houses and more about home: what it means, how we make it, and where we find it in our lives and in ourselves."

Many in the book industry have long enjoyed the missives of Carl Lennertz, but Cursed by a Happy Childhood: Tales of Growing Up, Then and Now (Harmony/Crown, May 2004) is his first book. Well known to all in the book business as a tireless promoter of Book Sense, Lennertz is now vice-president, independent retailing at HarperCollins. Throughout over 20 years in publishing, he has always maintained close contact with booksellers and others with his amusing, genial, elliptical style in letters, columns, and e-mail messages. Cursed is a gentle read, perfect for a day on the protected beaches in the coves of Long Island's North Fork, where Lennertz spent his happy childhood. Lennertz, whose book recommendations carry significant weight, was asked how this book might be pitched. "I guess," he said in an e-mail to BTW, "it is a nostalgic book about a father and a daughter, with the dad having grown up in the '60s in a small town, now raising a daughter in a city ... and both funny and serious ... but mostly funny ... lessons about peer pressure, teachers, music, and more." Lennertz recalls his childhood, feeling "safe, loved, and lucky." In Cursed, he conveys the same reassuring message to the readers, including his own daughter, who is growing up in Manhattan.

Who Pooped in the Park? (Farcountry Press) is a kid's guide to scats and tracks, according to the author, bookstore owner and technical and nonfiction writer Gary Robson. The bookstore Robson owns is Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana, and scat is, well, animal poop. The park in the title is either Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, or Grand Teton National Park, depending on the edition. The story, illustrated by Elijah Brady Clark, centers on Michael, a young boy terrified by bears, who travels to the national park with his parents and older sister, and learns about the animals without getting close enough to be scared. They discover a lot about the animals as they examine the scats (droppings), tracks (footprints), sheds (dropped antlers), and scratched up trees. All three editions tell the same story, but with different wildlife, including bears, wolves, mountain lions, elk, deer, moose, beavers, and rabbits. The information has been vetted by park rangers, naturalists, and trackers, said Robson, and offers additional facts in reference grids and sidebars called "Straight Poop." "Yes, there are a bunch of books about scats and tracks," Robson told BTW via e-mail, "but most are written for adults, and even the ones for kids aren't fun. This is a book that the kids can enjoy because there's a story line to it, and it has scatological humor and trivia -- always a hit with kids." Robson used his bookselling experience to determine that with a catchy title and good cover art, a book in a window display will cause people to stop and come into the store. "I wanted this to be one of those books," said Robson, "and I think it is. People spot the window display and walk in to take a closer look at the book. Even if they don't buy Who Pooped in the Park?, they're in my store and they may buy something else."

Betsy Burton, founder and owner of The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, is under contract with Gibbs Smith, a Utah-based publisher, for And I Work at the Reader's Trade. Burton has taken her 27 years of bookselling -- hosting authors, reading, and handselling -- and turned it into a book, set to launch at BookExpo America 2005. Burton doesn't dish dirt about authors she's met, but personalizes them through her experiences. "Anyone who loves books would get ideas about books to read," Burton said of her book. She alternates chapters about books specifically, with chapters about the book business. Discussions of troubled partnerships, censorship, "the business of the business," the Book Sense program, and the right to privacy issues fought for by the Tattered Cover, are all included. Burton said that she tries to describe "the art of bookselling … what we do versus what the chains do." The book, she said, "while telling the story of one bookstore, tells something about every independent bookstore."

After 30 years of bookselling, Corey Mesler, now co-owner of Burke's Book Store in Memphis, Tennessee, knows a little something about the business. As a middle-aged man with two kids and a marriage of a decade-plus to Burke's co-owner, Cheryl Mesler, he felt he knew the territory for his first novel about a married, middle-aged bookseller, named Jim, with a wife and two children. Talk: A Novel in Dialogue, published in 2002 by Livingston Press, chronicles Jim's crisis as he considers having an affair. "I am not Jim," read the t-shirt that Mesler wore around the store following the publication of Talk. Mesler told BTW that he made the main character a bookseller because "it was easier" than learning about some unfamiliar trade. His all-dialogue book was described as "zingy with the zeitgeist," by author Robert Olen Butler, among other very positive reviews. The book is still a bestseller at Burke's, and Mesler has other books in the pipeline.

Books of Wonder's Glassman has had his name on the jacket of quite a few books over the years. He's written three books for children, The Wizard Next Door (Morrow), My Working Mom (Morrow), and most recently, My Dad's Job (S&S). He has also edited the Books of Wonder classics, published by Morrow and has edited and published works under the Peter Glassman imprint of North-South Books and SeaStar Books, now Chronicle Books.

Barbara Earl Thomas, an artist as well as a bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, has had more than 20 of her paintings, along with her writings, published in Storm Watch by the University of Washington Press. Thomas, the granddaughter of Southern sharecroppers who migrated to Seattle in the mid-1940s, expresses both her Southern roots and appreciation of the Northwestern landscape.

Co-owner of Mysterious Galaxy Books in San Diego, California, Jeff Mariotte has written numerous fantasy books and comics, some with the help of Maryelizabeth Hart, his spouse and co-owner of Mysterious Galaxy; Terry Gilman is the third co-owner. For a complete list of his publications see http://www.jeffmariotte.com/ .

Among booksellers and associates whose books have recently been mentioned in BTW is Pam Rosenthal, part-owner of Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco, who wrote The Bookseller's Daughter (Kensington), a romance tale set in France just before the Revolution. (For more about this title, click here.) And, of course, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression President Chris Finan is the author of acclaimed history Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (Hill and Wang). (For more about this title, click here.) --Nomi Schwartz

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