Leafing Against a Snowy Background

Book catalogs and seed catalogs – those are the ones I can’t resist. And yet, as I’ve cautioned authors thinking about titles and book cover design, any particular item in a catalog has but a moment to capture attention before the reader turns the page. Here, for example, is the way I recently leafed through a catalog of philosophy titles from Rowman & Littlefield.

Opening the front cover, I was immediately faced with a page of book covers. One read, in prominent letters, Jane Austen, and underneath the image, “See page 35.” So yes, I turned right away to page 35 and there found Jane Austen and Philosophy, an edited volume with contributions by many philosophers. Once, years ago, I wanted to write a book to be called Jane Austen and the Age of Reason. (Though the “Age of Reason” actually predated Austen, I felt she was strongly influenced by it and had any number of passages in her books in my mind.) But I had other work to do then, and after that the years went by, and soon everyone, it seemed, was writing about Jane, and I felt she’d been pestered enough. But I did not make a career in academia, and “publish or perish” is not the fire held to my feet. If it were, no doubt I would have turned to St. Jane in my hour of need.

I note any number of “X and Philosophy” titles. Stephen King and Philosophy sits to the left of Jane Austen, and she is flanked on the other side by Jim Henson and Philosophy. Turning back to earlier pages of the catalog, I find The Philosophy of Pornography and say a mental “No, thank you” to that one. Am I not curious? Not curious enough, it seems. Later on in the catalog I find Roald Dahl and Philosophy and Dr. Seuss and Philosophy.

There are books on politics, race, animals, and the environment – all important topics – but when I see Deleuze’s Political Vision, I say “No, thank you” again. I cannot forgive Deleuze his reading of Bergson. And here is a book called The Moral Defense of Homosexuality, which makes me pause to reflect on the strangeness of such an idea -- that is, the idea that homosexuality is in need of a moral defense. Does red hair need a moral defense? Does entropy need a moral defense? I can see moral objections to promiscuity or pedophilia or any number of sexual practices, on the part of heterosexuals or homosexuals, but homosexuality itself is a fact, isn’t it?

I continue to turn the pages, content to have made my life as a bookseller rather than an academic. I don’t get summers off, have no paid benefits, not even a guaranteed salary (or minimum wage!), but I can read whatever I like, in the field of philosophy as elsewhere. Feeling no professional pressure bearing down on me as I survey titles and descriptions makes the browsing delightful.

Then I see The Dialectic of Duration and yelp excitedly! I read the title aloud to David, who responds, “So?” “Duration is a Bergsonian concept,” I remind him, “and it’s written by Gaston Bachelard!” Now he is mildly intrigued (he loves Bachelard), so I read the description of the book, and there, sure enough,

The work is motivated by a refutation of Bergson’s notion of duration – ‘lived time’, experienced as continuous. For Bachelard, experienced time is irreducibly fractured and interrupted....

It troubles me not that Bachelard opposes Bergson, since it seems he has done it in an interesting way, and anyway, I find anti-Bergson writings very thought-stimulating – though sometimes, I must admit, almost too much so. When I read Bertrand Russell’s quibbles with Bergson, for instance, I was so irate I could not sleep and stayed up all night writing a refutation of Russell’s critique. Really, I wondered if he had read Bergson at all, he got him so wrong! Someone of Russell’s stature should have been ashamed of himself to skate over the surface in that sophomoric way, I thought.

But back to the catalog. One title, The Changing Face of Alterity, reminds me of a dear friend, no longer among us, whose chief area of study was alterity. Otherness. I wonder what Annie would make of our world today. And here’s another one that stops me in my tracks: The Phenomenology of Gravidity. Of what? Gravidity, the description notes, is “the actual experience of bearing a child.” Well, there, I’ve learned something new.

Then comes Hegel, Hegel, and more Hegel. “They just can’t let him go,” I observe, and David is vastly amused. Of course, the same is true of Heidegger and Socrates and all the big names. If I were in an academic world, I would surely have to read Socrates Tenured, a book claiming to diagnose the crisis facing the humanities and charting a road forward.

Well, that was refreshing, and along with the general entertainment of browsing, I found one irresistible title. So now, on to the seed catalogs!

Winter is a time to read books and to dream of spring.

Is Overkill Even Possible?

Spring maples

Everywhere, flowers! High above the ground, the first, faintest blush of red flowers shows in maple tree crowns, challenging notions of where blossoms belong. In this season of burgeoning abundance, I have taken another crazy leap and started a new blog. I plan to be more faithful to it than I have been to my kitchen musings or the abandoned sketches and drawings, however, because this is another blog related to my bookstore.

And because, here’s the thing. The blog you’re reading, Books in Northport, has never been a one-subject forum. As you know, I wander from bookstore and book reviews into philosophy or gardening or local politics or world economics, and I don’t apologize for doing so. Walks in the woods and laundry on the line are as much part of my life as is my bookstore. But now, with the sad demise of Partners Book Distributing, all of us with independent bookstores are going to have to work a lot harder to bring books to our customers’ attention that might otherwise have a hard time finding local readers.

Therefore, Northport Bookstore News! That’s the place where you’ll see just the books, ma’am, just the books. No long essays or diatribes or meanderings far from the bookstore door. No, just -- here’s a new book, and here’s why you should consider buying it. That will be the focus. Books at a glance, as it were.

My first post on Northport Bookstore News features a new regional book. Go check it out! Since it is regional authors and publishers, along with us booksellers, who will most feel the absence of Partners, my new blog is partly an effort to compensate for our mutual loss. Not all titles featured there, however, will be of local or regional interest, and I probably will not stick strictly to new books, either. All I’m promising is to focus on books and not be excessively wordy.

There is a gadget on this blog, up there on the right column, called “Subscribe by e-mail,” and I’ve added that gadget to the new blog, also. If you’re not a subscriber here already, consider subscribing. On the other hand, if you want “just the books, ma’am,” subscribe to the new blog. And, naturally, it won’t hurt my feelings if people choose to subscribe to both.

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." 

Grants Are Great But Not a Long-Term Solution

The biggest news in the book world this week, which I mention in case you have been vacationing on Mars and missed all the announcements, is that bestselling author James Patterson is giving a million dollars in grant money to over fifty independent bookstores across the United States. Julie Bosman, writing for the New York Times, claims, “Independent bookstores ... have found themselves a Daddy Warbucks.” The Warbucks analogy makes for a catchy sentence, but it’s unlikely that Patterson will be coming back to the same bookstores again and again to rescue them from oblivion, and the recipients of the grants aren't counting on that, either. They are, however, making plans to do things they would otherwise be unable to do so quickly or easily, if at all.

One of my regular customers (and a good friend) asked if I’d applied. No, I didn’t. New books are only a fraction of my shop’s inventory, I’m not in a major city, I have no paid staff – I didn’t think I would fit the profile. But I'm happy for all those whose mini-grant applications were funded.

It’s very generous of Patterson to shell out a million dollars to independent bookstores, especially since, with his reputation, he could live the rest of his life on the profits from online sales. (Can you imagine if your novels accounted for one out of every 17 hardcover novels sold for four years running?) What he realizes – and clearly deeply cares about – is that in the current business climate, not only are bookstores “at risk” (chains as well as indies, if not more so), but also libraries, publishers, and “the future of American literature.” In my view, it is the attention he brings to these issues that has value far above and beyond the individual grants to individual bookstores.

Did everyone reading today’s post notice the new banner text at the top of the Books in Northport site? I feel I need to be much more up-front about the difference between Dog Ears Books and the online behemoth seller of “everything.” (If you think the behemoth seller is creating jobs, please read what one of the most wealthy one-percenters has to say.) Behemoth does not even have highest possible profits as a goal: the goal is nothing short of world domination, annihilating all competition, leaving nothing but scorched earth for “consumers.”

Please ask yourselves these questions: How long will books remain “cheap” (cheapened by the behemoth) if market world domination is achieved? More importantly – the question implied in Patterson’s warning – what level of quality can we continue to expect of books (whether physical, virtual, residing in clouds, or whatever), and what variety will be available, in the event that the behemoth succeeds in the world domination plan? What will get “published,” and what won’t? What books will you hear about, and how?

Recently I wrote that more and more I feel like a “character in a fantasy novel.” It isn’t that I consider my tiny contribution to the world of literature the deciding factor in literature’s future – hardly! I can be called a lot of things but not, I think, a megalomaniac! What I do believe, very strongly, is that it’s important for each small individual to do his or her part to bring about the world we want to see in the future. This is my Sixties background: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

And if you want, if you value, for yourselves, your children, your grandchildren, a future with bookstores, with libraries, with bona fide quality publishers, and a future in which at least a few novelists and poets and writers can make a living by writing, while the rest make at least part of their living that way, you need to consider very carefully where you make your book purchases. It matters. If my bookstore were to vanish tomorrow, it would still matter.

The way we live today is shaping the world of tomorrow.

***Please see my previous post and leave a comment to qualify for a drawing in the current book giveaway, courtesy of Viking Books. Sorry, overseas readers, the offer is good only within the United States. But thank you, as always, for visiting Books in Northport.

February 2012 - still one of my favorite pictures