Taking Stock — and Putting Stock in Truth and Books

Although winter is still far in the future, there is a rich, fecund aroma of autumn in the September air, and the inevitable lull following the Labor Day weekend seems like a good time to take stock (before "going forward," as it seems we must say these days, adding that phrase to anything having to do with the future). So here is my very general report on the 2019 season for my life, my bookstore, my authors, and for bookstores in general in the United States. How’s that for biting off more than anyone will feel like chewing on a rainy Tuesday morning?

Our pack of three got through the busy summer without catastrophes of any kind. We kept up (if barely) with laundry and mowing grass and got enough sleep most nights that morning’s arrival did not bring excessive dismay. June, you may recall, was cool and wet (that’s when the grass grew at jungle speed), July and August more summery but only rarely too warm. It was a beautiful summer, really. 

Old Sarah, now 84 in dog years, staggers a bit from time to time but can also still run like the wind and jump like a steeplechase champion. Her dog mom and dad — that’s me and the Artist — have slowed down, too, but then we don’t even try to keep up with the pace of former years. Visits from family and friends are less strenuous, because our plans for the time are less ambitious. Being together is enough.

It was a good season in the bookstore. Being closed on Sundays was a good decision, and opening at 10 a.m. most days, instead of the officially stated 11 a.m., worked out well, too. (No one minds when a business opens early.) Having TEA events (Thursday Evening Authors) every other week, for a total of five, was a manageable and successful plan that I’ll repeat in 2020. And taking credit and debit cards for the second year in a row was a life-saver both for my business and my customers.

My authors! I would be nowhere and nothing without them! Here are the nine top-selling titles for August at Dog Ears Books:

1. From the Place of the Gathering Light, by Kathleen Stocking
2. Beautiful Music, by Michael Zadoorian
3. Downstream From Here, by Charles Eisendrath
4. The Leisure Seeker, by Michael Zadoorian
5. Letters from the Leelanau, by Kathleen Stocking

(Do you see some repetition of author names in the list so far? And we’re not done yet.)

6.  Dune Dragons, by Gretchen Rose, tied with Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, by Michael Zadoorian

7.  The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne

8.  Lake Michigan Rock Picker’s Guide, by Bruce Mueller and Kevin Gauthier

9.  And in a 5-way tie for ninth place we have:

Even in Darkness, by Barbara Stark-Nemon

Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems

Leelanau by Kayak, by Jon R. Constant

Long Arc of the Universe, by Kathleen Stocking

and

Trails of M-22, BY Jim DuFresne

I’ll not continue to tenth place, because there are far too many in that position to list.

And now for the general state of indie bookstores across the United States, for those readers who may be interested. 

I had to do some digging on the question, and what prompted my quest was yet another wanderer one day last week bemoaning the disappearance of bookstores. His wife had given him a time limit of 10 minutes to look at books. He proclaimed that time constraint as he entered, along with his love of bookstores -- but then, instead of using his precious time to peruse the shelves, he came and planted himself in front of my desk and demanded to know: “How do you stay in business?” 

I really hate questions about business from curiosity-seekers! I love questions about books! I even welcome questions about other bookstores! But inquiring about the health of my business is like asking a cattleman how many cows he runs or querying an investor about the returns on her stock portfolio. (NYOB!) You’re here, in a bookstore! It’s open! The shelves are filled with books! I want to say, “If you truly love books, you won’t be able to keep your hands off them, and if you’re not interested in books, why did you come in at all?”

But back to his question: “How do you stay in business?”

My answer was brief and to the point: “I sell books.”

He then starts into a long “yes, but” routine about bookstores closing right and left, and I ask him where he lives, if he visits bookstores there, and if he buys books in those bookstores. He says he does. “Well, that’s how they stay in business,” I tell him.

Unfortunately for me, though, he happened in during a quiet afternoon lull and could not let go of his curiosity, so fixated on what he was convinced is the sad, sorry state of American bricks-and-mortar bookselling that he was blind to my treasure-filled shelves. Sigh! If my business were in decline — which it is not — he and his ilk would not be the cure!

But what how much evidence does he have for his belief? And what is the truth of this widespread belief, anyway, the claim I have heard so many times over the years and, yes, this past summer, also, that bookstores are vanishing from the American scene?

Each issue of my daily e-mail “Shelf Awareness” newsletter brings me news of various independent bookstores opening, moving, offered for sale, bought by new owners, and closing across the country. If I look beyond the newsletter, it’s fairly simple to find statistics on how many bookstores have closed during a certain time period, but I don’t find similar stats for the new bookstores that opened. What is the bottom line? Are we indie booksellers an endangered species, like the hawksbill sea turtle, and I just haven’t gotten word yet of my imminent demise? 

Here’s a surprise: There are more bookstores in the United States today than there were in the 1930s. When you stop to think about how much closer to home in general people shopped back then, that seems counterintuitive, which goes to show once again that what “makes sense” to us isn’t always how things are or ever were.

Next surprise: Between 2000 and 2007, over a thousand American bookstores closed their doors, for one reason or another. But between 2009 and 2015, the number of indies rose by 35%! 

Another surprise: Sales rose 9% in indie bookstores from 2017 to 2018. Who expected that back in 2007?

My view from the bookstore counter goes back now 26 years, and during the very first summer,1993, in the little shed right down Waukazoo Street (long gone now) from where I sit this morning, over and over I heard visitors to my little treasure island lament upon entry, “No one reads books any more!” Mind you, they were not referring to themselves but to people they took to be the majority of Americans. They, of course, did read, and that's why they were delighted to find a bookstore while on vacation. Some had very extensive private libraries  at home that held many more volumes than my then-tiny shop had on offer. But time and time again I heard the mournful refrain: “No one reads books any more!” 

Well, if that had been true in 1993 or if it had become true in any of the intervening years since, I would not still be a bookseller, because my business is not a hobby. There’s no secret trust fund behind it, paying expenses and buying inventory. What I told last week’s curiosity-seeker was my bottom-line truth: I stay in business by selling books.

Maybe we readers are tempted to think of bookstores as endangered and of books as disappearing because it seems to add value to what we love and allow us, as readers, to feel more special, perhaps even elite. I can kind of understand that, but at the same time I want to push back against it and object, albeit gently and lovingly, as follows: 

Dear friends, 

Personally written and illustrated, printed-on-paper, well-produced books are special, but it is not their scarcity that makes them precious. Books are part of our common human heritage, the earth’s history and cultures that have made us and continue to make us who we are. The more of us who share in that wealth, the richer we all are! Is that a paradox? Nonetheless, I believe it to be true. And you, my readers, my bookstore customers, are very special people, every single one of you! Thank you for another wonderful summer of books in Northport!

Love,

Pamela

Who Doesn't Love a Bestseller?

A poet and fiction writer in the Upper Peninsula, Ron Riekki, collects from Michigan booksellers every month their lists of top-selling titles by Michigan authors and then puts it all together for the state as a whole. It’s been interesting for me over the past three years to keep track of and contribute, month by month, my bestselling titles from Dog Ears Books in Northport. So it occurred to me this morning that other people might find it interesting, too, and here's the result -- July's hot books out here at the tip of the Leelanau peninsula!

Note: Not all books are pictured because they are on re-order.

Leading the pack once again — no surprise — is Kathleen Stocking’s From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces. Gathering Light is Stocking’s fourth book but the first since her Letters From the Leelanau (1990) that stays right here at home, with the people and places of our home county. Themes of geologic time and democracy on the ground are the threads with which these pieces are woven. I’ve sold 37 copies of this book in July, almost 70 since May 15, and there’s no end in sight, which makes sense because — truly — if you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau.

It’s no surprise, either, to find Hard Cider, by Barbara Stark-Nemon, in the #2 position on my July list. The numbers for this title would have been higher still if we hadn’t sold out of available copies at her library event and if the book hadn’t been out of stock at my distributor’s warehouse. (I hope to have more copies soon.) This book seems to be catching fire elsewhere, too (hence the wait for restocking!), but it’s especially popular here because Northport and Leelanau Township are the setting. Locals and visitors alike will recognize familiar places (and a few people, e.g., Sally at Dolls and More) in this engaging novel featuring a mature woman reinventing herself as a cider maker in northern Michigan. Family complications and secrets add suspense to the plot.

The Trails of M-22, by Jim DuFresne, certainly deserves its third-place position on my July bestseller list in Northport. As I’ve mentioned before when writing about this book, the author did not simply loop around the highway south of Northport but made it clear to the tip of Leelanau Township (M-22 and Beyond?). Each trail in the book is shown with a detailed map, with level of difficulty clearly indicated, so beginning hikers can enjoy choosing their first trails, while I’ve heard a couple of avid and dedicated couples say they plan to hike every trail in the book. 

And fourth place goes to Dorene O’Brien, my Thursday Evening Author from July 25, with her short story collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope. I’ve often remarked that most short stories seem darker in tone than most novels, and that was the case with O’Brien’s first collection, but this new book, while still introducing us to characters with difficult lives, does seem to offer hope on the horizon. Dorene’s bookstore presentation was delightful, too, giving us what one audience member later called “a magical evening.” More people should try reading short stories. I enjoyed this collection so much I've already read it twice this year!

Fifth place was a tie between Stark-Nemon’s Even in Darkness and Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems. I’m happy that Barbara’s first novel continues to find new readers and that the lovely small new Harrison anthology of poetry (posthumous) by the late Jim Harrison is also selling well. Since many of the early collections from which these poems have been selected are now out of print, Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems belongs in the library of long-time Harrison aficionados, as well as with readers only now discovering his work. A few of Jim’s novels were made into movies, his essays on food were published widely during his lifetime, but at heart Jim was always, first and foremost, a poet, and I believe his poetry will be his most enduring legacy. 

Finally, another tie for sixth place: The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne, and Beautiful Music, by Michael Zadoorian. Translated into twenty-five foreign languages, with a movie now in development, The Marsh King’s Daughter, set in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula, has taken the world by storm. Who would have predicted it? The author’s deep knowledge of northern natural terrain is what drew me to the novel. Readers unfamiliar with Michigan, off in Sweden or Korea, may read it more simply for the thrilling suspense. And I anticipate Zadoorian’s Beautiful Music to soar this month, with the author’s guest appearance as my Thursday Evening Author on August 8. A coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Detroit, Beautiful Music tells a story of a loner adolescent who finds salvation in rock-n-roll. Yeah!!! I have also restocked Zadoorian’s previous novel, The Leisure Seeker (made into a movie with Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren) as well as his dynamite collection of short stories, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit. 

And there you have it — just a few of the “must” reads of summer 2019 in Northport, Michigan. Time to get started, if you haven’t already! And please join us on Thursday, August 8, 7 p.m. to hear and meet Michael Zadoorian!

Not All Lights Are Out!

Not frozen yet

Kathie &Barbara

The last day of our 2018 season, Friday, November 30, was a good day at Dog Ears Books. Many friends stopped in to enjoy cookies, shop the sale, and exchange wishes for a good winter and happy holidays. Serendipitous encounters occurred, also, such as this one between a local reader and this year’s bestselling local author. And about those bestsellers, here are the top-selling titles for the past three years at Dog Ears Books:

Bestsellers, 2016-18

2016 was a tie between Kathleen Stocking’s The Long Arc of the Universe and Jim DuFresne’s Trails of M-22. 

In 2017 Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester came out on top early in the season and stayed there all year.

And for 2018, the #1 book in Northport was easily Barbara Stark-Nemon’s Hard Cider. 

Congratulations to these hard-working and very deserving authors!

As Friday drew to a close and quiet descended over the village of Northport, holiday lights shining against the dark were an irresistible temptation. Though we will not be on hand this year for Christmas and New Year’s, I’m glad we’ve had a chance to enjoy the beginning of the holiday season with local friends. And I also want all my readers to know that there are still  several pockets of lively activity in Northport. One of them (featured in the novel Hard Cider, by the way) is Sally Coohon’s shop, Dolls and More. Stopping in on Friday morning while Bruce took charge of sales at the bookstore, I found Sally providing guidance and support to a local man making a memorial quilt with his beloved late dog’s scarves. 

Working on the backing

Memorial quilt top

Twinkling holiday lights rest on poinsettia quilt

One small corner of Sally's treasure island of materials!

So much going on everywhere!

Sally offers instruction in quilting, knitting, stamping, and holiday crafts, and her shop is warm and cozy and welcoming, a most cheery place to spend time when the weather outside is frightful.

The Artist and I will be spending our winter in a place even quieter than Northport, out in that Arizona ghost town I chronicled in 2015 and again in early 2018. What will winter be like in Cochise County this time around? How will our friends at home in Leelanau fare in terms of snow, ice, and cold? And what exciting books, new and old, will come our way in the months ahead? There again I trust to serendipity and wish a sleighful of it to all of you!

Have We Left Macomb County Yet?

For thus hath the Lord said unto me,

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

-      Isaiah 21:6

Go Set a Watchman,

by Harper Lee

NY: HarperCollins, 2015

Hardcover, $27.99

We’re back in Macomb County, Alabama. It is the 1950s. Jean Louise, formerly the child called “Scout,” now 26 years old and visiting from New York City, thinks she has outgrown her hometown -- but she still wrestles with the idea of marrying Hank, who would never live anywhere else. Her beloved  brother Jem is dead. Jean Louise doesn’t fit in with the women of the town, whatever their age. The last straw is discovering that her father-hero-god, Atticus, has feet of clay. Atticus is a flawed human being. But then, Scout herself is not perfect....

Everyone in America knows the story behind this book. We have all read in the newspapers and online and heard on the radio (and online) that Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee’s first version of the novel that eventually became the award-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor in the 1950s was most taken with the flashbacks to childhood in the manuscript and suggested that the author rewrite the story, setting it entirely in that era, telling it all from the child's point of view. Perhaps it was the image of Scout and Jem in the balcony of the courthouse, watching their father from the “colored” section, that inspired the editor’s suggestions.

Did the editor also urge Lee to make Atticus a more sympathetic character? In the rewrite, was it Harper Lee’s idea or the editor’s to have Atticus lose the case in which he defended the black man from a rape charge, rather than winning it, as in GSAW’s backstory? Why the change? For the sake of realism or because the novel’s readership would find the TKAM outcome more acceptable?

Because I know so many writers and hear so many of their stories of revising and rewriting and responding to suggestions from agents and editors, and because I have been writing a first novel myself this year (writing, revising, beginning again after scrapping earlier chapters), I am fascinated by Harper Lee’s two novels – the distance between them, the changes, the different shapes, and the editor’s input. When I started reading the first pages of GSAW, I couldn’t help reading each word and sentence very consciously, remarking every choice of word and arrangement of words, but gradually the story took me over, and I let it carry me like a river.

When Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia and realizes for the first time what her aunt meant by insisting that Calpurnia was like family but not family, when Calpurnia does not respond to Jean Louise as if to her little child, Scout, a crack appears in Jean Louise’s picture of the way she grew up. I could not help thinking in this section of a far lesser novel, The Help. Love across such differences in situation could only be ambivalent. Soon Jean Louise realizes a similar ambivalence in her love for Hank and even for her father. She realizes her separateness. What she must learn before the end of the book is that separateness does not contradict her belonging to a community and that she does not have to agree with every opinion held by another individual to love that person.

If Harper Lee’s publisher had, years ago, given us instead TKAM instead of GSAW, would we ever have had the former at all? And what would have been the fate of GSAW if published in 1960 instead of TKAM? It strikes me that the American reading public in 1960 can be seen as Jean Louise at 26 years old in GSAW: on the cusp of growing up, starting in that direction, but with a long way to go.

If Harper Lee had published this newly released novel thirty years ago, might she have gone on to write a third by now, one in which Jean Louise reaches a wise maturity and works with Calpurnia to bring about a New South? We will never know, and there will not be a third Harper Lee Novel. But when I reached the last page of Go Set a Watchman, I was very glad to have been able to read it. I expected to find it interesting only because I was curious, for reasons mentioned above, and found, in addition, a novel satisfying to read in itself. That was a complete surprise, given most of the reviews.

What I wonder now is, where is our country in 2015, fifty-five years after the original publication of Harper Lee’s beloved classic? How many Americans are able to continue a conversation across differences, political as well as racial and religious? Do we run away from those whose opinions we find distasteful and repulsive, refusing to have anything to do with them, seeing the world as Us vs. Them?

After reading the new release, do we think Jean Louise will grow up? At the end of the story, we have hopes that she will, but the larger question probably is, will we? And where are we today, relative to where we were in 1960? What do you think?

The Comfort of an Old, Familiar Book

What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past – problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of it had vanished from human memory; and if that were so, what a crowd of emotions clung to him as to their last home before annihilation! He must be kind to them, must treasure them in his mind before their long sleep. - James Hilton, Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1934)

It was another sunny morning on Thursday, with orchards breaking out into first bloom, yellow violets smiling in happy little knots at the edge of the woods, trees dripping with leaves and first flowers and catkins, but temperature dropped in the afternoon, and so, with lawn all mowed and straw bales in place for this year’s garden, and after two days filled with outdoor exertion, I was ready for a slow, quiet, indoor evening and the comfort of a small, old volume.

Old Mr. Chipping! There he was on the shelf, that old retired schoolmaster living in a boarding house across the way from the school where he had taught for so many years, still serving afternoon tea to boys new and old (dismissing them when his energy flagged), remembering the years before and during World War I, marveling at the changes brought by the postwar period, and imagining the memoir he knows he will never write. The fictional Mr. Chips, as they all called him, lived his life for the most part within a small geographical plot, but the area covered contained as much of England as of himself. Maybe this is part of why the book was so popular. The passage above on memory, though, is very personal – universal but necessarily personal, for all that – that sense that every memory, even the least scrap not shared with another living person, is priceless for living on in one’s own mind.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips was a runaway bestseller in 1934. My copy shows that the book was first published in June of that year and reprinted twice the same month, then reprinted twice in July, again in August, twice in September, and then again in October. That’s as far as the printing history opposite the half-title page goes, from which I conclude that my copy is from that October printing. A slight novel, only 125 pages, the main character’s entire life was centered on his students at a second-tier English boys’ school (not the best, but decent) before, during, and following a brief, happy marriage to a beloved bride who died in childbirth, leaving him alone again. It’s a simple story of a simple man who over time made himself irreplaceable in his small world. Reprints continued through 1935, 1936, 1938 and ’39, and there were further printings by Little, Brown (the original American publisher) in1948 and 1959, along with paperback and school editions. It was probably the 1959 issue that my parents had in the house when I was young, and I probably read it then on the front porch on a summer afternoon, lying on my stomach on the day bed, bare feet waving in the air.

A stage play was produced in 1938, and the first film version appeared in 1939, starring Robert Donat in the role that won him that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor, over the heads of Laurence Olivier in “Wuthering Heights,” Clark Gable in “Gone with the Wind and Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.” The film was remade in 1969 with Peter O’Toole, in 1974 as a television mini-series with Roy Marsdon, and most recently in 2002 with Martin Clunes in a Masterpiece Theatre production. The older he grew, it seems, the more beloved he was.

He had to take care of himself when there were east winds, but autumn and winter were not really so bad; there were warm fires, and books, and you could look forward to summer.

On a cool, overcast spring evening, looking forward to summer myself but not in any hurry for it, I enjoyed having imaginary tea again with Mr. Chips. He is still good company, as he has been to thousands of other readers and viewers over the decades. An old friend.

Friday morning, May 10: Wake to patter of rain. Have proof-reading to do, and I'll be in and out of the bookstore, where Bruce will be working today in my stead. That works. The occasional indoor day is not so bad.