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Category: Bookselling

Published October 31, 2014

“A Literary Octopus with an Insatiable Appetite for Print”

In November’s Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy profiles George Whitman, the late owner of Shakespeare & Company — “the most famous independent bookstore in the world” — and his daughter Sylvia, the current owner of the shop:

It is not true, as the store’s workers have sometimes overheard passing tour guides proclaim, that James Joyce lies buried in the cellar. (If only. He was laid to rest at a conventional, non-bookselling cemetery in Zurich.) But the store’s roots do indeed reach back to the Shakespeare and Company that Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, owned in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. As every English major knows, her bookshop and lending library became a hangout for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain and America deemed it obscene. She closed up shop during the Nazi occupation and never reopened. But her mantle was taken up by another American, George Whitman, who opened the present-day store in 1951, just as Beat Generation writers were finding their way to the Left Bank. (The so-called Beat Hotel, which would become a Parisian equivalent to New York’s Chelsea Hotel as a flophouse for writers, artists, and musicians, was only a few blocks away.) Writers who logged time at the current Shakespeare and Company, sometimes even sleeping there—Whitman was possibly keener on extending hospitality to authors, lauded or not, than on selling their books—include Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, James Jones, William Styron, Ray Bradbury, Julio Cortázar, James Baldwin, and Gregory Corso. Another early visitor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founded his City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, as a sister institution two years after Shakespeare’s opened. William S. Burroughs pored over Whitman’s collection of medical textbooks to research portions of Naked Lunch; he also gave what may have been the first public reading from his novel-in-progress at the store. (“Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, whether to laugh or be sick,” Whitman later said.)

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Published January 28, 2014

Save the Rizzoli Bookstore in New York

The Rizzoli Bookstore is one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world and an icon of New York City architecture. Unfortunately the owners of 31 West 57th Street, the store’s home for 30 years, have recently announced their plan to demolish the six-story, 109-year-old building and replace it with a highrise “ultraluxury” tower.  The Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose mission is “to be responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings,” has declined to grant landmark status to the building on the grounds that the property “lacks the architectural significance necessary to meet the criteria for designation,” despite its apparent architectural and cultural importance. A campaign to save the store, and a petition to have 31 West 57th Street designated an individual and interior landmark have been started.

You can read more about the plans to demolish the building in The New York Times. While at The New Yorker, Jon Michaud wrote about his time working at the store:

Many of the things that Rizzoli offered its customers (and its staff) are now easily obtainable online: international periodicals, European popular music, and books in foreign languages. But there is nothing online that will replace the ambiance of the place. With its vaulted atrium, marble flooring, and wood-panelled shelving units, Rizzoli looked like the private library of a Medici prince, the sort of place where an Umberto Eco character would hunt down an ancient secret.

Please sign the petition.

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Published September 12, 2013

Sarah McNally in The Lab Magazine

The Lab Magazine interviews Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books in New York:

From Winnipeg, Canada, McNally was born to a bookselling family, but made her way New York-wards after college, eventually working as an editor at Basic Books – “I loved editing because I had never done anything deeply collaborative before, and to be trusted inside a writer’s vision of his or her art 
is a profound and moving privilege.” She then branched out on her own, and whether 
by nature or nurture, she’s clearly found where she’s meant to be. “I love bookselling because I can run around thinking about a million things, from the mundane to the transcendent, and it all matters… The dirt in the corner 
is my problem. What Proust’s birthday means in downtown New York is my problem. I have to walk through the store allowing every book 
I see, even if I haven’t read it, to resonate deeply within me, and if it saddens or irritates even the most inconsequential part of my soul, 
I have to take it off display.”

I miss being a bookseller. I really do.

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Published May 24, 2013

Another Hipster In The Business: God Help Me

CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition profiles Sarah McNally, owner of McNally-Jackson in Soho, New York:

McNally-Jackson opened in December 2004, just as mega booksellers Barnes and Noble and Borders were expanding and online booksellers were rapidly gaining ground. More than 1,000 independent bookstores stores, one in every two, closed down. But Sarah McNally was cocky and figured she could make it… The lessons Sarah McNally learned as a daughter of booksellers on the Canadian prairies continue to help her survive in the Manhattan jungle.

Listen to the audio.

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Published July 13, 2011

There’s No Place Like Here

Here’s a wonderful Etsy video about Brazenhead Books, a secret secondhand bookstore located in Michael Seidenberg’s apartment on the Upper East Side, New York:

(Thanks Kate!)

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Published January 28, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, Jan 28th 2009


John Updike (pictured) has died at 76. The Guardian and the New York Times look back at his life and career in pictures. Designer Observer points to ‘Deceptively Conceptual’ Updike’s astute 2005 essay on book covers for the New Yorker:

Publishing forms a minor branch of the entertainment industry, and book design is increasingly a matter of fashion—that is, of attention-getting. In the visual clamor of a bookstore, the important thing is to be different; a whisper becomes a shout, and the ugly becomes beautiful if it attracts attention. Yet an utter flaunting of conventional expectations may baffle and repel the public; when the title and the author’s name are left off the front of the book… it sends a subliminal message of contempt for the written word, the product being packaged.

Batman as jazz– Brad Mackay wins top prize for funniest headline of the week for his look at the reinvention of the Dark Knight and the genius of BatManga! in the Globe and Mail.

“Content is Free… But Curation is Sacred” — Peter Collingridge at Times Emit considers the implications of the Google settlement and what happens if/when we are flooded with unmediated free “stuff”:

[A]s the amount of content we are exposed to increases, without any discernible gauge of quality, it is the trusted curators of that content to whom we will choose to give our attention, time or money, rather then trying to filter it all out personally… the curator may be the bloke in the record shop who knows my music collection and recommends something new, the staff in my local wine merchant, or a particularly good blog I follow, my newspaper – anything. However, it is not Amazon’s recommendation algorithm; it is decidedly human, and, over time, a relationship of trust is built up. If it works, that trust leads to action, purchase, attention, refinement and more trust.

See the Web Site, Buy the Book: J. Courtney Sullivan looks at author web sites and book trailers for the New York Times.

Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publisher Weekly has been fired is “leaving as part of a companywide restructuring”. The indefatigable Sarah Weiman has a extensive round-up of the reactions in the blogosphere.

The fabulous Book Cover Archive have recently add a couple of lovely minimalist cover designs by Gabriele Wilson (pictured above). Nice.

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Published January 22, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, Jan 21st, 2009

The Books are alright — Montreal’s Hugh McGuire (of LibriVox and Book Oven) on the Penguin-sponsored BookCamp in London:

If the amount of thought and enthusiasm generated that day — and evening — is any indication, I think we’re going to be OK. The book is alive and well, even if defining “book” is becoming more complicated; and the publishing business, bracing itself for the biggest shake-up since the paperback, will come out the other end, transformed certainly, but alive nonetheless.

Cuts Were Necessary — The New York Observer on Marcus Dohle the new CEO of Random House (previously described as “dapper, but mildly off-putting”):

Now, the feeling among both literary agents and executives who used to work at Random House seems to be that Mr. Dohle inherited a rotten, bloated thing when he took over last May, and though one can wish it hadn’t gone the way it did, there simply was no reversing the damage done by his predecessor, Peter Olson, without forcing the publishers who’d survived his thoughtless 10-year reign to make some hard calls.

Rotten and bloated. Nice.

How to Publish in a Recession — a wide-ranging interview with Declan Spring, senior editor at New Directions, at Conversational Reading (via Ready Steady Blog):

We’re not beholden to stock owners, our overhead is pretty small, and we always count on just a pretty small profit every year anyway. Our staff has worked here for many years, mostly the same folks for twenty years, who are devoting much of their lives to the mission of ND. We see it as a profit-making business, but we are also realistic and dedicated to the cause. That makes it easier in this climate.

And speaking of New Directions… Any excuse (really) to post another book jacket by Alvin Lustig (pictured).

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Published December 11, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Dec. 10th, 2008

NPR’s Best Graphic Novels of 2008 include Josh Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Goodbye, and Alan’s War by Emmanuel Guibert (pictured). There’s an excerpt available of each book selected. Nice. (Thanks Ehren!)

A new way to express an old idea – An interesting interview with Canadian designer David Drummond at Books Covered (via Design Observer):

I tend to start with a list of words. For example I am working on a cover now that is about a dog but can’t show the dog on the cover. I like those kind of problems. How do you show this without showing it?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezo is PW‘s Person of the Year.

“Suburban surrender”: James Wood revisits Richard Yates’ blistering novel Revolutionary Road in the latest The New Yorker.

Little to do with books – The New York Times looks at the infighting and the politics of book groups:

Yes, it’s a nice, high-minded idea to join a book group, a way to make friends and read books that might otherwise sit untouched. But what happens when you wind up hating all the literary selections — or the other members? Breaking up isn’t so hard to do when it means freedom from inane critical commentary, political maneuvering, hurt feelings, bad chick lit and even worse chardonnay.

Russell Davies on “analogue natives”:

So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it’s hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That’s enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as ‘digital natives’ get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.

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Published November 11, 2008

Bracing for the Worst

“[E]veryone in publishing is bracing for a difficult holiday season while trying to remain optimistic about the enduring allure of books.”

Motoko Rich looks at the recent spate of publishing lay-offs, and what holiday season holds for the book industry, in today’s New York Times:

“I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent. “At some point I think people are going to say, ‘You know what, this is not nourishing.’ I think and I hope — and maybe it’s just blind hope — I think there is a yearning for authenticity out there, and people are going to go back to the things that really matter, and one of those things, I hope, will be reading books.”

Link

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Published November 5, 2008

Midweek Miscellany, Nov 5, 2008

Konigi has posted a ‘small’ sampling of international front page newspaper coverage of the US Presidential Election (pictured) .   The US Sources are here. It’s hard not to be swept up in the excitement today. Breathtaking. (via SwissMiss)

“Publishing: Media’s Last Diehard?”: James Bridle (apt/booktwo)  has posts his v. interesting notes from a talk at the London School of Economics given by HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley. More at The Bookseller.

“Seven hundred friends, and I was drinking alone”: Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki discovers the fickleness of Facebook friends in the New York Times (via DesignNotes).

Doubleday Dismissals Were Self-Inflicted: The New York Observer examines the recent lay-offs at Random House’s DoubleDay division and looks at the career of their publisher Steve Rubin (via Sarah Weinman).

Science Fiction and Fantasy editor Lou Anders interviewed on the Amazon blog Omnivoracious. What’s the hardest part of his job?

“Saying no to a piece of sheer brilliance because I know that the audience for it is about 200 people. I don’t for a minute believe that commercial and literary concerns are mutually exclusive … But not every worthy work has commercial potential. Trying to find books that fire on all cylinders means saying no to a lot of competent fiction that only fires on one or two. Being determined not to compromise on quality while still being commercially viable means that I am hunting in a very narrow bandwidth and have to read hundreds upon hundreds of submissions to find a very few prizes. I worry that a lifetime of saying no is bad for my karma, and have to remind myself that its the yes that the readers see and they are who I am serving.”

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Published October 21, 2008

On Being Skipped

GalleyCat pointed me in the direction of  a refreshingly frank essay by Andrew Wheeler, Marketing Manager for John Wiley & Sons, about books that are passed over, or  ‘skipped’,  by a bookstore:

“bookstores are businesses, not public conveniences. No store has the responsibility to carry every book published… I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero. The publisher’s sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller’s buyer to buy that book. In many categories… the chain buyers say “yes” the overwhelming majority of the time. But not all the time. Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.”

None of what Andrew says will be news to any one working in publishing — skips are an accepted, if unpleasant, part of the business — but, as Andrew notes, authors on the receiving end of skips are outraged by them, and I’m sure more than a few debut authors will be shocked to discover that there is such a thing and that it happens frequently enough to have its own terminology.

In most cases agents or publishers don’t discuss the possibility of skips with their authors before they actually happen — no one wants to be that pessimistic about a book’s chances! But that is not to say we should be less than forthright about the realities of business, or pretend that this doesn’t happen.

I recently had an exchange with a freelance publicist who told me with all confidence that he was going to book his client-author on national radio and television. Knowing the book, and having had some experience of the challenges of book publicity, I just about spat out my coffee. Charitably he was naively optimistic. Uncharitably, he was bullshitting me, and probably his client, to justify his hourly rate.

A publicist, however good he or she is, cannot guarantee an author publicity any more than the greatest sales rep can guarantee sales or prevent the dreaded ‘skip’. You can charm and you can twist arms,  but ultimately the decision lies with someone else — a producer, a book review editor, or a buyer — with a set of priorities different to your own. To pretend otherwise, leaving things unspoken  or offering overconfident assurances is a disservice to your author, and will probably bite you in the ass in the long run as a publisher (or freelance publicist).

Authors, unsurprisingly, have a tendency to be smart people. By and large they don’t want to be left in the dark, or have their hopes unrealistically raised. Sure they should take some responsibility — ask questions and educate themselves  — but we should  be honest and upfront about how the book business works, putting books in their proper context and giving an author a realistic sense of what is possible.

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Published October 14, 2008

Monday Miscellany, Oct 13th, 2008

A belated Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving and a belated Monday Miscellany (on Tuesday)…

An interesting  Q & A with George Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of Borders Group, on HarperStudio’s The 26th Story Blog:

“I do not agree that it’s all doom and gloom in the book business… I think people are always going to want books…they will always want to be entertained and informed by books and I do not see that changing.  It’s true that the format books take may change over time and evolve, and the places where people buy books and how they access them have changed over time and will change further, but books themselves will always be part of our culture and our world in my opinion.”

Marketing in Tough Times. The American Booksellers Association ask successful booksellers to share their advice on marketing  during the economic downturn.

Book-lined stairs (pictured) designed by Levitate Architects for a space-challenged London apartment, as seen on the lovely Apartment Therapy (via image bookmarking site FFFFound).

50 of your favourite words on the BBC online magazine (as inspired by Ammon Shea’s book READING THE OED). I’m rather partial to ‘metanoia’ – “the act or process of changing one’s mind or way of life” – myself…

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