SHOUT

There is very little celebrity or fame in the world of book design. Chip Kidd is the one big fish and even he is known mostly to collectors and book geeks. So it was with some surprise and a great deal of excitement when Tom realized that the jacket art on David Benioff's "City of Thieves"(which we've both hand-sold for years) and Eowyn Ivey's "Snow Child" was done by the same person.

Alessandro Gottardo creates art under the pen-name or alter-ego SHOUT. His work is well-respected in several areas of the design world. He combines clean work and simple lines with some playfulness.

Just last week Tom showed me another book in a catalog for next Fall that seemed to be done by SHOUT but we couldn't find any info in the catalog and I, of course, can no longer remember the title.

In a similar vein, we've noticed lots of birch trees on book covers. Coincidence? New marketing trend? Who knows. One we've had displayed on our front table of late is Ramona Ausubel's "No One Is Here Except All Of Us".

Swings and misses

It's fairly easy for stores to look back once a year comes to an end and see the things that worked. We all want to see those things and pat ourselves on the back a little. Harder to see are the mistakes--those things we tried and that failed. Maybe a book didn't get the media attention that was anticipated. Or we didn't display it properly have someone hand-selling it. There are a lot of factors that come into play for the hits and misses. Here's a sampling of the ways in which I made a mess of things in the last six weeks of 2011. I own all of this--no blaming sales reps or publishers.

There are two books that I didn't buy enough of. "Leaving Atocha Station" by Ben Lerner is a book we started to sell fairly well right out of the gate. But it wasn't going bonkers. Then some wild reviews hit from some biggies--Jonathan Franzen and James Wood, to name two--and we ended up chasing stock on this for the rest of the season. Lesson: I had an inkling this could do well but no idea how well. Listen to gut.

The second book was "Twelve Owls" by Betsy Bowen and Laura Erickson. To be fair, I couldn't tell how great this book was going to be until I first held it in my hands. Seeing it in the catalog didn't do it justice. It had many things working in its favor. Priced just under $20, two local artists working with a local topic and something that hadn't been done before. It was unique. Once we started selling it I was overly cautious and didn't do what I should have done. I should have simply ordered 75 copies and rolled with it. We did really well with this book but could have done much better. Lesson: Cautious is often good but sometimes foolish.

I had the opposite problem with "Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade" which was a boxed-gift edition of the famous Nabokov work. Published by Gingko Press and priced fairly, I thought, at $35. Our sales rep, Tim, has always helped decide what books of theirs to go for. They do great art, design, grafitti, urban studies. We agreed that I was being sensible in my order. We had, after all, done well a couple years back with another Nabokov book("Alphabet in Color") done by the same people. We had it displayed it and didn't move. Lesson: I'm not entirely certain. Possibly, never be certain.

Finally, and this is admittedly the toughest one to gauge, I didn't have enough remainders(sale-price) books in the store. The ebb and flow of these sales are determined, I'm convinced, by rising tides, voodoo and unicorns. There is no telling. One simple fact is that more people in the store equals more sales of these books. How many more is harder to figure. Our business was up in 2011 and we definitely had more foot traffic in December. The mild weather was a major factor in that. By the time I realized we were selling so many sale books it was too late to get more in time. These books aren't shipped via UPS or Fed Ex and seem to come by slow boat. So we were basically stuck around the 10th or 12th of December when I saw what had happened in the previous two weeks. All in all it's a decent problem to have but I wish I would have ordered more different books and a larger quantity of the things we had. Lesson: Pray to the snow gods and know we will sell whatever quality discount books we have.

Talking about being smart is well and good, but learning from my mistakes is better for me, Micawber's and our customers.

List #36 Greg Danz

Greg Danz: Zandbroz Variety. Fargo, ND. 58102

1. The English Patient -- Michael Ondaatje
2. The Things They Carried -- Tim O’Brien
3. Ursula Under -- Ingrid Hill
4. Independent People -- Halldor Kilijan Laxness
5. Baltasar and Blimunda -- Jose Saramago
6. Orlando -- Virginia Woolf
7. Time and Again -- Jack Finney
8. The Sea, The Sea -- Iris Murdoch
9. Collected Stories of Lydia Davis -- Lydia Davis
10. The Heart is a Loney Hunter -- Carson McCullers
11. Mating - Norman Rush
12. Geek Love -- Katherine Dunn
13. Dalva -- Jim Harrison
14. My Dark Places -- James Ellroy
15. Crazy Woman -- Kate Horsley
16. Suttree -- Cormac McCarthy
17. Slaughterhouse-Five -- Kurt Vonnegut
18. To Kill a Mocking Bird -- Harper Lee
19. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor M Dostoevsky
20. Rabbit, Run - John Updike
21. Herb ‘n’ Lorna: A Love Story -- Eric Kraft
22. White Teeth -- Zadie Smith
23. Accordian Crimes -- Annie Proulx
24. The Lost Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse -- Louise Erdrich
25. A Life of Her Own - Emilie Carles
26. Antarctic Navigation -- Elizabeth Arthur
27. Middlemarch -- George Eliot
28. The Book of Disquiet -- Fernando Pessoa
29. Collected Poems -- Philip Larkin
30. New and Selected Poems Vol. 1 & 2 -- Mary Oliver
31. The Best of It -- Kay Ryan
32. Waterland -- Grahm Swift
33. The Collected Stories of Russell Banks -- Russel Banks
34. Miss Lonelyhearts -- Nathaniel West
35. The Runaway Bunny -- Margaret Wise Brown
36. Jacob Have I Loved -- Katherine Paterson
37. Adam of the Road -- Elizabeth Janet Gray
38. Undiscovered Country -- Lin Enger
39. The Unbearable Lightness of Being -- Milan Kundera
40. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption -- Laura
Hillenbrand
41. Peace Like a River -- Leif Enger
42. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories -- Flannery O’Connor
43. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater -- Kurt Vonnegut
44. Pierre: A Cautionary Tale -- Maurice Sendak
45. Franny and Zooey -- J D Salinger
46. How I Work as a Poet -- Lew Welch
47. Siddhartha -- Hermann Hesse
48. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse -- Peter Matthiessen
49. Death Comes for the Archbishop -- Willa Cather
50. And the Pursuit of Happiness -- Maira Kalman

Minnesotans have dealt with the blessing/curse of the Coen bros. film since 1996. And we take heat for talking funny. But Fargo is a really cool town and Zandbroz is one cog in that wheel.

Kids, YA, Poetry, Cookbooks and Gift

Kids
1. The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson
2. MN Hidden Alphabet by David LaRochelle
3. Press Here by Herve Tullet
4. I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
5. Every Thing On It by Shel Silverstein
6. The Construction Alphabet by Jerry Pallotta
7. The Chronicles of Harris Burdick Edited by Chris Van Allsburg
8. Big Little Brother by Kevin Kling
9. Kiki's Hats by Warren Hanson
10. Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site by Sherri Rinker

YA
1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Wildwood by Colin Meloy
3. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
4. Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney
5. The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan
6. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
7. The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak
8. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
9. The Inheritance by Christopher Paolini
10. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Poetry
1. The Superior Life by Jean Larson
2. Invisible Strings by Jim Moore
3. What Work Is by Philip Levine
4. Yellowrocket by Todd Boss
5. Low Down and Coming On edited by James Lenfestey
6. Pretend the World by Kathryn Kysar
7. The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtromer
8. The Best of It by Kay Ryan
9. The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Transtromer
10. What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Cookbooks
1. The Splendid Table How To Eat Weekends by Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift
2. How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
3. Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois
4. Cooking Up the Good Life by Jenny Breen and Susan Thurston
5. Essential Pepin by Jacques Pepin
6. Trout Caviar by Brett Laidlaw
7. Rotis by Stephane Reynaud
8. Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger
9. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman
10. The Northern Heartland Kitchen by Beth Dooley

Gift and Misc.
1. Go The Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach
2. F in Exams by Richard Benson
3. Pocket Neighborhoods by Russ Chapin
4. Once There Were Castles by Larry Millett
5. Everything Is Its Own Reward by Paul Madonna
6. The Twin Cities Bike Map
7. All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen
8. Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
9. The 50 Funniest American Writers edited by Andy Borowitz
10. Drink Me from Potter Style

The bestseller cont

Paperback Fiction

1. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
2. Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
3. True Grit by Charles Portis
4. Vestments by John Reimringer
5. Mr. White's Confession by Robert Clark
6. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachmann
7. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
8. Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
9. All the Living by C.E. Morgan
10. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
11. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
12. In Caddis Wood by Mary Rockcastle
13. The Room by Emma Donoghue
14. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
15. Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr

Paperback Non-Fiction
1. Through No Fault Of My Own by Coco Irvine
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
3. The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
4. A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink
5. Cleopatra by Stacey Schiff
6. The Tiger by John Vaillant
7. The Grace of Silence by Michelle Norris
8. Sheepish by Catherine Friend
9. Just Kids by Patti Smith
10. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
11. Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
12. At Home by Bill Bryson
13. 1491 by Charles Mann
14. Wicked River by Lee Sandlin
15. The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

2011 Bestsellers by Category

Hardcover Fiction
1. The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin
2. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
3. Gryphon by Charles Baxter
4. Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
5. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
6. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
7. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
8. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
9. The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
10. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
11. Open City by Teju Cole
12. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
13. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
14. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
15. Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Hardcover Non-Fiction

1. The Social Animal by David Brooks
2. In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
3. Twelve Owls by Betsy Bowen and Laura Erickson
4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
5. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
6. The Greater Journey by David McCullough
7. Bossypants by Tina Fey
8. Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean
9. Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard
10. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
11. 1493 by Charles Mann
12. Blood Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
13. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
14. Blue Nights by Joan Didion
15. Voyageur Skies by Don Brenneman and Mark Seeley

Out with the old and in with the very old

Tomorrow I'll be posting our bestselling titles from 2011 as we're finishing off inventory and year-end miscellany today. However, on Monday the 2nd of 2012 we had a customer redeem a gift certificate that was issued on 12/19/1997. That's almost six years before we took over this store. And over fourteen years past the issue date.