Whitman(s)

Last Friday, the 26th, was the anniversary of Walt Whitman's death. With April, and National Poetry Month, just around the corner, I just wanted to share these famous images of our first, unofficial, poet laureate.

from Song of Myself--
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

It's almost silly to try and quote just a few lines from Mr. Whitman but those do as well as anything else, I suppose.

I should also mention that Jude Nutter's superbly titled and written collection of poems "I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman" is a finalist for this year's MN Book Award.

Is this heaven?

It's actually in Australia. Photo sent to us by Martha Russell, friend of the store.

Late to the proverbial dance...

One of the biggest perks of the job for lots of booksellers is the fact that we got advance copies of books. It's a feeling of wonder to be able to read a book before it is actually available to the general public. Yet it is also a double-edged sword. We need to read these books so we can talk about them when they do become available. It does, however, sometimes make the question of: "What are you reading/loving right now" more difficult. It can seem snobby or aloof to discuss a book that we can't actually sell yet.

Right now, I'm dealing with this very scenario. Last week I got an advance copy of Jon Clinch's "Kings of the Earth" in the mail. The book isn't due into stores until July 6, 2010 so it seems a little foolish to talk about it right now. In any case, I'm going to do so with a couple bonus hooks. First, several of us here loved his first novel, "Finn." It's dangerous ground to take on such a mythical and beloved book or character. Clinch used his debut book to look at Huck's father and how historical fiction can both stay true to an original story and re-create it at the same time.

"Kings of the Earth" does something similar--though not in dealing with a treasured novel--but rather using the story of a real family and jumping off from there. The Ward brothers were a fairly well-known, if misunderstood, family in Munnsville, NY. Delbert, Roscoe, Lyman and Bill were life-long farmers and were left to their own, simple, devices, until Bill died. Then the story gets really bizarre. A fine quasi-documentary called "Brother's Keeper" was done in 1992. It is a moving portrait of family and of what kind of lives exist outside the cultural norm. The fictionalized family portrait is something I'm excited to sell. The movie is something I wish I would have seen long ago.

New Directions

Rainy days in bookstores can bring some zany adventures. People browse longer. Relax and sit and simply peruse. Customers ask more questions and others help to provide answers. But we got stuck today and it seemed like a fun thing to share.

A customer couldn't remember the name of a particular Javier Marias title. Karen went to the New Directions website and that's where the real fun began. At the top of the page are eleven small photos of people related to New Directions. See how many of them you can name. The two Micawber's employees and a couple customers did pretty well but were absolutely stumped on a couple. Number Nine, if going from left to right, especially had us guessing. So I called our Norton rep because she sells us ND and she gave me the name of "who to talk to." Sadly, that woman is on vacation, but a very kind intern told me she'd do the legwork and get back to me.

New Directions has gotten some buzz in the past few years due, mostly, to Roberto Bolaño's resurgence in popularity. Buzz is an odd word to use in regards to them, though, because it is antithetical to what they've been doing for over seventy years. If there is one thing I could change about the entire mess the book world is in it would be this: backlist. That important, but so largely ignored, part of any great publisher. These are the hits and misses of yesteryear. The gems that maybe don't have huge text adoptions or sell 2,500 copies a year. It costs money for publishers to keep things in print and warehoused. But it also costs something else--care, attention, willingness to concede that sales numbers are not the only way to judge the success of a book.

And if you want good backlist New Directions has it in spades. I'd also like to point your attention to this article I found about these good book people. What is not to like? They have fruit trees on the terrace in the middle of New York City. So for their new books(check out Cesar Aira) and their dedication to their older books and their baking of pies I wish blessings upon them.

Big thanks to Aaron, Judy, Karen, Johanna and the unnamed intern who joined me on this excursion. It was great fun.

Spoiler alert*
The images(from l to r) are: James Laughlin(founder of the press), William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, W.G. Sebald, Tennessee Williams, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Roberto Bolaño, Clarice Lispector, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges.

Whales

One of the wonderful things that books, and reading, can do is to take us on trips through a particular category. I recently went on a whaling spree(via books) and I've written about it here.

The blog this piece is posted on is run by a wonderful sales rep named John Mesjak. His love for quirky and intelligent and outside-the-box reading is contagious. I always find some great things I didn't know about on his site.

One little book that could...

University Press books are often lumped into categories like: academic, obscure, expensive. And that certainly can be the case but is by no means an accurate assessment of most books printed by Univ. presses. Mara Faulkner, OSB, has written a fine book that is part memoir of her father's blindness, a look at retinitis pigmentosa(which she, too, has) and a larger meditation on blindness in the many forms it can take.

Here is the publisher's page. I'm also going to link to an interview she's done with Luke Mancuso where they discuss not only her book but a new course she's teaching entitled The Past, Present and Future of the Book. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the audio. It is an hour long piece and I found it to be enlightening--a discussion with two people who greatly love books but also aren't willing to stick their heads in the sand.

"Going Blind" discusses a great list of other books that deal with blindness. More than anything else I could say, I should simply state that it is a book filled with grace in both its language and its treatment of the people within. It should not be limited to an academic or niche audience. It has loads of potential as a general interest book and for book groups. It is memoir without the fireworks or madness nearly required by its categorization. It's just good.

Up-front: The book I'm discussing is by a former college professor of mine. She was a marvelous teacher and mentor. But the truth is that I know a lot of people with books and I don't go around pimping just anything.

What we've been doing...

The last week has been an eventful one here at good old Micawber's. The building we're in is old--1890's--and it has its share of quirks for both better and worse. As the pictures above show pretty well, we had some severe leaking from both ice dams and a broken pipe in between our ceiling and the floor of the apartment above us. With luck, only three books* were lost but a tremendous amount of water came into the store. So that kept us both busy and worried.

A customer mentioned to me that the only thing worse than water is fire and that very same day we found out that two local restaurants and a gift shop had burned to the ground in Minneapolis. So it was hard to feel too bad for ourselves.

On the plus side, we hosted a book launch event with 'Speaking of Faith' radio host Krista Tippett last night. Her new book "Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit" is out today. It was a great event in all terms. She was extremely interesting and the Q&A was much more than the usual banter. We had a packed house and it reminded me, again, that events like this are about so much more than book sales.

Now that the water has stopped dripping I'll get back to posting about book stuff.

*Anne Tyler's "Digging to America" and Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" were lost. As was a very nice Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of "Huckleberry Finn" which, oddly, looks even prettier with a bit of water damage. Apologies, Mr. Sam Clemens.