Two Very Different Topics: First, A Trend I Despise; Then, Advice to Aspiring Novelists

Tuesday afternoon, 2/27/24, 64 degrees and sunny -- like a day in May!

 

First, online sellers:

 

An increasing common trend on multiple-dealer book sites has to do with the so-called “descriptions” some dealers are attaching to books they offer for sale. For example, for one title I searched, a copy offered was graded as Good, the so-called “description” reading as follows:

 

Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. 

 

I have italicized the words ‘can’ and ‘may’ to indicate my objection: The seller is simply giving a (partial) generic description to accompany the grade “good,” without reference to the particular copy beyond saying that it lacks a dust jacket. I don’t want to buy a book with highlighting! Has someone defaced the pages with highlighting or not? I understand that a book graded as “good” may show wear on the spine ends, but does this copy have worn ends, and if so, how bad are they?

 

By contrast, here is what can truly be called a description:

 

Clean and unmarked anywhere; front gutter cracked but binding firm; lovely engravings by author; unfaded green boards with gilt lettering and ornamentation on red patches well protected by pictorial dj that has chipping at edges, but protected from further wear by Brodart cover. Good in unclipped dj, plus Brodart jacket.

 

Both online dealers offer books for sale, but I would dignify only the second with the title ‘bookseller.’ Notice that both sellers have graded their copies (of the same title) as Good. Which copy would you feel more confident purchasing?

I am very happy with the copy I bought.

 

Here is a general guideline for grading collectible books, with grades ranging from Very Fine (VG) down to Good (G). In general, used books not attractive to collectors but still desirable to readers or other book dealers may be given lower grades than Good, such as Fair; Poor; Binding Copy; or Reading Copy. Guides explain how to assign a grade, but only the seller can provide the specific information to explain how s/he arrived at that grade for a particular copy. Saying a copy “can” or “may” have such and such a flaw is not a description. It is a sign of unprofessionalism and laziness. 

 

I stopped listing books for sale online when the site I listed with was bought by the behemoth and a different format put in place for uploading titles, as my old lists could not simply be transferred to the new format, and there was no one “at the other end” to help. Add to that my reality as a one-person operation, a “Mom&Pop” that was and is (even more so now) just “Mom.” With no second person on-site who could devote fulltime to uploading titles to be sold online, and then factoring in the “race to the bottom” for prices (one dealer would list a book for $15, the next would list the same book for $12, and so on down to $1.99), it wasn’t worth my time.

 

Given that race to the bottom on prices asked, along with the fact that processing an order for a $4 book is NO less time-consuming than processing an order for a $40 book (listing, delisting, packaging, shipping, and sometimes communicating with the buyer), you can see why sellers without traditional bookman standards would cut corners with their descriptions, but that's not the way I do business, and I prefer to deal with honest-to-goodness booksellers – preferably with open shops – who adhere to my standards. I don’t care to waste my time buying something I’ll be disappointed to receive – and that I wouldn’t want to sell to my own bookstore customers.

 

 

Now, to change the subject. I was going to add the notes below at the end of my February Books Read list, since three different books I read this month prompted these thoughts, but I decided to post them separately today and get it out of the way. Words to the wise!

 

 

Advice to Novelists and Wannabes

 

Beginning the novel: Beginning fiction writers often have a problem with getting their novels started, wanting to include too much backstory on every character. A good editor will tell them, “You need to know all that about your character, but your readers don’t.” A good model for filling in backstory with a sentence here and there is Walter Mosley. He is a master. Most editors coaching an otherwise wonderful novelist will help the writer overcome this problem, because the truth is, you can begin a story anywhere, and wherever you start will be the beginning.

This author is a great model for how to incorporate backstory.

Ending the novel: A different problem is the unsatisfactory finish, because even readers who may persist hopefully through slow initial pages want a story that builds a strong narrative arc, reaches some sort of climax or epiphany or decisive moment – but doesn’t stop there, with the author suddenly slamming the door with a bang, whether or not on a tangle of loose ends! Ouch! Rats! Take the time to give us a metaphorical literary hug and murmur sweet nothings or at least wave goodbye, for heaven’s sake, before sauntering thoughtfully down the road. We don’t want to be dumped unceremoniously at the curb after spending all this time with you! That is very unkind! A comic novel, a tragic novel, a mystery will each have a different kind of denouement, but some kind each must have, if the reader is not to feel cheated.

Wednesday: Be ready for a whiteout without warning! Dress for wind chill!

A Bookseller Reads a Magazine

[Images unrelated to today's text]

Part I. A Dark Vision!

I’d slipped a slim, aged paperback into my bag before leaving the bookstore that day, but once home a magazine on the table caught my eye. Amazingly — because while I do read a magazine from time to time, it’s as likely to be two or three years old as the book in my bag is to have been published in some long-ago decade — this issue of The Atlantic was current, and the cover story, “What Jeff Bezos Wants,” dark matter with an insulting, impersonal gravity, pulled me into its force field.

Be it here recognized by all my half-dozen readers that when it comes to online shopping, RESIST! is my middle name. That the online behemoth cannot count my household among its far-flung dominion of eager, satisfied vassals. That unsolicited e-mails from the behemoth’s robots are not simply transferred to the very ordinary virtual wastebasket labeled TRASH in my mail program but summarily relegated to the JUNK! file. 

Such is my storm-battered position on a shrinking island which I hold and defend with my very life. Thank heaven the Artist is right there with me! We have chosen to live in the slow lane.

But now I read on. Does anything in the article surprise me? Statistics of the corporation’s market share, internal memos and “Leadership Principles,” punishment of sellers who do not bow to its will, the fact that it pays no federal tax? Infuriating but not either unknown or unsuspected. Thinking of the Pentagon storing all its files in the behemoth’s cloud is alarming in a surreal, nightmarish, downright dystopian way but hardly astonishing. 

For me, though, writer Franklin Foer hits pay dirt when he reveals the ultimate Bezos goal, which is nothing less than the colonization of outer space, made necessary by the ruin and despoliation of earth, that ruin hastened by the glorious, unbounded consumerism encouraged by none other than the behemoth itself. Because, as we all know, earth and its resources are not boundless. Bezos, no fool, recognizes the fact. And so world domination is for him only an intermediate challenge.

Oh, on and on it goes, but read it for yourself: The Atlantic, November 2019, Vol. 324, no. 5, the Tech Issue. Or here it is in paperless form. 

And if steam isn’t coming out of your ears yet, take a look at what this kind of retail does to communities. Yep, huge tax abatements — huge community investments in infrastructure — thousands of tractor trailers a day — roads the towns can’t afford to maintain — millions of dollars of community debt — temp jobs with no security or benefits — until robots replace even the human temp workers. Ask yourself: Do you want to invest in this kind of future? Because our choices will decide the planet's future.

Intermission

That long magazine article brought painful thoughts and memories to mind, but we were meeting friends in town for dinner, so retreating into gloom was not an option. And as we drove through the darkness, my mental clouds lifted. We’re alive. We’re together. We’re here now. Which served as a reminder that everything is temporary and all lives mortal. 

Part II. A Lighter Side

Back home again, later that same evening, I picked up the magazine again and turned to a different article, this time an interview/sketch with and about children’s book author Sandra Boynton, “The Bard of Bedtime.” I’d vaguely heard of Sandra Boynton before but had never focused on her work. Now, however, I learn that she was a student of Maurice Sendak, and I am intrigued. Says the writer of the article, “Boynton’s books oscillate between orders and disarray, wisdom and nonsense.” Boynton addresses her youngest pre-reader children with respect and is not afraid to use a word like “intone” in her minimalist text. She makes every syllable count. Her animals are really people, and not all people or even all kids are the same. 

I read on and on, carefully, skipping not a single word, and long before I reach the end of the article I have resolved to order Sandra Boynton board books the very next day, feeling much better and also feeling confident that I will have appreciative customers for these books in Northport. I can make small contributions in my little world, and this is where I need to put my mental energy.

Intermission

I don’t have anything special to say here but for consistency’s sake another break seemed indicated. Take a deep breath. Look around. What do you think so far? You don’t need to tell me. 

Part III. Everything Ends

The final piece I read in the magazine that night, three narrow columns in length and taking up less than a single page, was about endings, echoing my thoughts up in that first intermission. It was Ben Healy’s “Study of Studies” feature, this one titled “All Good Things …” Yes, all things will come to an end, but “even endings may be better than expected,” Healy finds, and that’s a good reminder, too. Maybe for some among us it’s even more than a reminder. More like a novel insight, one we need to reflect on for a while. 

In the old days, wars used to end, and that was a good thing -- wars ending. I am still curious and still learning but no longer have an obligation to spend my days in a classroom, and I feel good about that. All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Socrates died. The biggest ego, the loudest voice, the richest man on earth — all are mortal. As am I. As are you. 

My question (again) is, when our lives end, what kind of world do we want to leave behind?

I could say much more about endings as they relate to books and bookstores and all kinds of businesses, but right now I feel the end of this post approaching. Ah! Here it is! What a relief!

Future of America -- For the Birds?

Before 6 a.m. in late April, southern Arizona’s outdoor air temperature is perfect: a refreshing predawn cool after the previous day’s blinding light and baking heat. There is no harsh wind, only the slightest of gentle breezes that barely stirs new leaves on honey mesquite, their sweet, light green like the world’s first leaves. A mockingbird near the cabin competes with rooster and peacocks across the road, far back from the highway, to call the sun up, and a cardinal joins eagerly in the morning chorus.

Sunrise has moved considerably south since December. In winter, it is a front-of-cabin thing, welcome for the light it brings to strike directly on windows and the warmth it gradually contributes to our indoor space. Post-equinox sunrise, by contrast, is best watched from behind the cabin and outdoors, and east-facing blinds remain closed. Bright light stripes windows, nonetheless, but our object now is not to add to indoor warmth but to keep it at a minimum. 

A green mantle spreads over the hills. A distant dove calls. Shadows grow long in the mountains as the sun rises in harsh magnificence. And now the cactus wren, Arizona’s state bird, launches into his rough-edged, repetitive “song,” somehow cheery without being in any way what one might call beautiful. Some birds give us beauty, others awe or smiles or even laughter, according to their effect on us.

I have been reading An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future, by Robert Kaplan, published in 1998, and was nearing the end this morning, having begun with Chapter 13 and after that skipping back and forth from section to section, finally going back to start at the beginning and then leapfrogging over sections read earlier to make my way through the final sections. This is not the way I usually read a book. The reason I approached this particular book in such an odd way is that my time in Arizona (for this year, anyway) is drawing to a close, and consequently my initial interest was in the part of the author’s travels that took him from Mexico to Tucson. Alas, no mention was made of Cochise County. Kaplan crossed the border at Nogales, from the state of Sonora into the Arizona county of Santa Cruz. 

But the book begins at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, coincidentally the place my father, one year long ago, did his annual summer officers’ training (Command and General Staff School, a requirement for keeping his rank in the Army Reserve) while my mother and sisters and I visited friends in Wisconsin. Kaplan calls Leavenworth “the last redoubt of the nation state,” which makes sense as one reads on. In fact, I found some justification for not reading his chapters in order, since the order of the chapters itself does not represent the temporal order of the author’s continuous travels. Rather, the organization of the book is thematic, intended to illustrate his gradually unfolding thesis about what the future may hold for our country, based on what he finds along the way.

I had to keep reminding myself that the book was written two decades ago. Where Kaplan sees strollers in an American city, for instance, and only one of them is speaking into a “cellular” phone, I should not expect the same scene today. Population numbers and demographic percentages would have to be revised now, also. Much of what he describes I have seen for myself, however, and so it is a familiar America — but I have never thought to anticipate the future he predicts, and so An Empire Wilderness gives me food for thought.  

In general, Kaplan foresees a diminished role for federal government and more local control, but in the form of “city-states” rather than cities and in cooperative geographical regions, with natural geographical boundaries, rather than exercised by state government. His example of Montana, a state where east and west have little in common, could be applied also to the Dakotas or to Michigan with its two peninsulas. (How much understanding for its place in the great scheme of things can Houghton expect from Lansing?) All of this I was taking in with a “Hmmm. We’ll see” attitude, alternately nodding and pausing, until the author threw in an idea that hit me like a bucket of cold water thrown in the face, such a shock it was -- . 

He writes that Canada, our neighbor to the north, is too large and unwieldy to hold together and is likely to break apart into separate regional pieces, Quebec joining Maine, British Columbia forming a region with the American Pacific Northwest, and so on. Two features of this idea were especially striking: one was that other people, some of them Canadians, apparently shared Kaplan’s view and did not find it alarming or even surprising; another was the inevitability they all saw in this imagined future. Kaplan does not write “if this were to happen” but that 

"…the character and timing of Canada’s dissolution will [my emphasis added] affect America’s own future in unpredictable ways."

As the United States also reverts to regionalism, why would the U.S. not also be expected to dissolve as a unified country? Because of our louder presence on the world stage and a more widespread and dispersed national population (without the enormous empty expanses of northern Canada)? The prediction, you see, is that while regionalism will be more and more important in the future of the United States, our federal government will continue its basic function of protection, while Canada’s future regionalism will mean that country completely disintegrates. 

Well, this idea makes me think about death! -- and why it is a negative though unavoidable prospect. Not only will it be the end of sense experience — no more sunrise! no more birdsong! — but also, when it comes to each of us, individually, it brings down the curtain on the play at large. What happens next? We don’t get to find out! No wonder literature and drama and film are so satisfying, where we get to see “THE END,” at least as as the writer and director conceived a conclusion, although we often wonder even so “What happened next”” in the lives of the characters. 

I did reach the end of An Empire Wilderness, however, and sooner than I expected, not having realized that remaining pages held not another chapter but a long selected bibliography preceding an index. And so the author envisions democracy slipping away, “silently replaced by the power of corporations and other great concentrations of wealth.” Ugh! Most of us see that scenario already underway. (For years I have shaken my head in bafflement over Americans who express fear of government interference in their lives and shrug indifferently at growing interference in their lives by commercial interests.) And yet, somehow, Kaplan holds out hope — hope for a global increase of human rights, backed by American military might, and the eventual emergence of an “authentic planetary civil society.” 

I wonder…. Does Kaplan’s scenario for the world’s future — diminishing importance, if not outright disintegration, of nation-states; increasing geographical regionalism; eventual global unity of values — contain its own impossible contradictions? What does the future hold for any little geographical region of the planet? For the arid American Southwest, the water-blessed Great Lakes states, old Rust Belt cities, gated enclaves of wealth in every state, family farms and ranches — our land, water, air, and all living things who share the earth with us?

Another morning dawns. The birds begin another day of concentration on staying alive and still find time to sing. We can do worse than to follow their example and take time to be grateful for another day of light and color and song before our time upon the stage is ended.

Last Time a Shock

First times are marked in the moment and often memorialized in snapshots. A first haircut, first bicycle, first date, first job, first car. Many are landmarks in life's landscape -- for me, my first garden, Traverse City, 1970; first bookstore, Northport, 1993 (and a score of more personal dates).

It is often only in retrospect that we recognize a last time. The last trip to the U.P. in the old truck. A last trip on a favorite country road, lined the next time with subdivisions, shopping centers, and mini-malls. The last letter from a friend before receiving news of her death or a last evening spent with other old friends, gone too soon.

(When something or someone is a treasured part of one’s life and memories, the last time always comes too soon.)

I began ordering new books from Partners Book Distributing, down in Holt, Michigan, in the late 1990s. Until then, I had bought and sold only used books, but every summer there was heavy demand for nature field guides – more than I could supply with used versions, or maybe I didn’t have the specific guide a customer wanted -- and finally it occurred to me to remedy the situation in the only sensible manner. Partners was the distributor of new books for the Great Lakes region. They were not tiny -- but neither were they a global, engulf-and-devour presence in the world. When you called, real human beings answered the phone. It was always a pleasure. It wasn’t long before I was inspired to order a few children’s books with Michigan themes. Then fiction and poetry and memoirs....

Some people don’t believe in middlemen, but I do. Without book distributors, a bookstore would have to maintain separate accounts for every publisher, large and small, and every self-published author whose books were worth stocking. Say I want to order only one or two copies of a book. Will the publisher extend a discount for a single book? Ha! The sad truth is that without distributors, there are many books a bookstore cannot stock. And books need visibility! Placing an order with a distributor makes it possible for me to order as many or as few of each title as I need, flexibility which is absolutely critical for small operations like mine.

Independent bookstores. Small regional publishers. New authors without name recognition. All of us depend on book distributors, and in the Great Lakes Region (with a second division in the West), Partners was the gold standard.

On March 30, UPS delivered a box to Dog Ears Books from Partners. I opened it eagerly, happily, as if it were a Christmas present, even though I knew what I had ordered. (Opening a box of books is always exciting.) I could not see into the future, close as it was.

Two days later, on Friday, April first, there was a strange message in my e-mail from someone with my larger, national distributor, assuring me that they would try to supply as many as possible of the titles Partners “had carried,” though they would be unable to pick up each and every one. Had? What could that mean? What was going on?

I called Partners and asked for my favorite salesman. “Is this an April fool’s joke?” I asked. Sadly, he told me it was not. That very day was the last day of business for Partners, and the box I had received on Wednesday was the last I would ever have from them.

Stunned, I called a friend with a new small publishing house. He was in shock, too. And we were not alone. A self-published children’s book author who had been thrilled to have Partners agree to carry her book knew nothing of the closing until she heard it from me. Now she’s completely at sea. Regional authors, publishers, and bookstore owners were all blindsided and devastated. None of us knows yet quite how far-reaching will be the effects, but we know they’ll be significant, and we can’t believe they will be good for any of us.

I don’t clear out my inbox as often or as thoroughly as perhaps I should (I am not the world’s most efficient business person -- and too bad about that, but I am what I am), so I looked and found “Ye Olde Partners Page” from March 24. Here’s one line from that page:

Tune in next week for the quixotic conclusion of Great Lakes Alien Lawman!   

Only, as it turned out, there was no “next week."

I never imagined that these old friends, these valued partners in my book world, would ride off into the sunset before I did. What will the sales and warehouse staff do now? And what will the rest of us do without them?

I feel like raging against this "Good-night."