There’s writer’s block and the information overload of a too tightly packed RSS reader. There’s making sure there’s time for life, remodeling, and short vacations. Those things and the day-to-day business of running an online book business have kept me from this weblog and the other one.

This weblog should be a bigger part of my business though. It could be a better forum for communicating with customers and other people in the business though, for sounding out different ideas, and for shameless self-promotion.

I’m going to plan on posting at least one new entry here every day until Friday the Thirteenth. The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair is on the 14th and 15th. I’ll be exhibiting there — my first big offline bookselling experience. I’m nervous, intimidated, and excited. So I should have something to write about for a couple of weeks and that will give me some writing momentum after the Book Fair.

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I wanted to make note of this article on Jackson Street Books from the Seattle Times’ Sunday magazine section. Jackson Street Books is one of those places that I saw and wondered, How did that get there? The answer, of course, is Because someone wanted to open a bookstore, dummy. One of the store’s owners also manages the Seattle Mystery Bookshop.

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A cut-up experiment in The Stranger brings to my attention The Galosh, a recent collection of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories. I loved the Zoshchenko collection Nervous People and Other Satires when I read it a couple of years ago, though I found some of the humor puzzling. I was never sure which jokes came out off key because of (what seemed to be) a sometimes awkward seeming translation and which were just posed in some higher level of irony that someone who never experienced Soviet Russia could know.

There’s a more sober review of The Galosh here. This is one that I’ll want to read unless I’m hit by a bus tomorrow.*

Found while digging for reviews of The Galosh: Elephant Walk, The Overlook Press weblog

* My attempt at a Zoshchenko ending

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Here are a couple of highlights from the selection that I’ll have on hand at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair next weekend, October 14-15, 2006. Both are comic strip collections by authors who are better known for their work in children’s books.

Crockett Johnson wrote and drew Barnaby between 1942 and 1946. Mr. O’Malley was young Barnaby’s Fairy Godfather, and while O’Malley paid Barnaby plenty of attention, it was often in pursuit of his own Quixotic agenda: ridding a condemned house of a gang of criminals (black marketeers skirting wartime rationing laws) so that O’Malley’s ghost friend, Gus, can haunt the house in peace, or getting himself elected to Congress without being seen by the public.

Johnson passed the strip on to other hands in 1946 and returned to draw the final episode in 1952. Barnaby was revived twice in the ’50s and ’60s. Johnson was, of course, the author of Harold and the Magic Crayon and many other books.

I’ll have copies of Ballantine’s first three Barnaby collections, which reprint roughly half of Johnson’s strips, and three issues of the nearly forgotten 1945-’46 Barnaby Quarterly magazine.

Daniel Pinkwater cites Terry and the Pirates, Li’l Abner, and Pogo as inspirations for Norb, the newspaper strip that he produced with illustrator Tony Auth in 1989-’90. Norb was a scientist and adventurer who battled cavemen, bad poets, and a now dated parody of Michael Jackson. The comic was an adventure strip with a continuing storyline. “This sort of thing is out of favor these days,” Pinkwater wrote, “but we figured it was due for a comeback.” It wasn’t. While the strip is said to have received fan mail from Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok, it received little attention from the public and was quickly dropped by most of the papers that were running it. Pinkwater and Auth ended the strip quietly after it had run for a year. A few months after the strip’s demise, a cheaply produced collection of Norb dailies was printed in a small run by Mu Press. I’ll have a copy of this unappreciated classic at the Antiquarian Book Fair.

About half of the books in the Using Books booth will be comic-related. Tomorrow I’ll preview some of the non-comic books.

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I’m busy cataloging books and getting ready for the busy weekend, but have made time to preview another book from the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair:

Squeeze Play by Paul Benjamin [Paul Auster]
The early publishing history of Squeeze Play — Paul Auster’s attempt to make a quick buck with a commercial detective novel — could almost be the basis of its own detective novel. Its publisher printed the book but wasn’t able to distribute it, and when Auster found a paperback publisher to reissue it, he was contractually obligated to split the small advance with the original absentee publisher.

Auster is dismissive of the book’s merits. He writes that, “As an example of the genre, it seemed no worse than many others I had read.” But Squeeze Play is genuinely interesting — as a meta-source for his books’ recurring themes of identity and authorship, and as a satisfying detective story. Even with it’s hard-boiled overtones, it would fit comfortably into a collection of The New York Trilogy as Volume Zero.

This is a later edition, published in 1990 after he’d found some success, but before he outed himself as the book’s author in 1997. The author’s note reads, “Paul Benjamin is the pseudonym for a celebrated contemporary American writer.”

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A preview of a Northwest book that I’ll have at the Using Books booth at the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, October 14-15, 2006 at Seattle Center:

The Friendly Mountain
by E. B. Webster, Illustrations by Annette Chaddock Swan, Port Angeles: The Evening News, Inc., 1921. Second Edition.

An appreciation of Mount Angeles:

“It is a peculiar feature of mountain climbing that, as one ascends, the surrounding country appears to draw nearer. The city of Port Angeles gradually draws nearer until one can pick out the individual buildings, and can almost see the people walking along the streets. The government buildings in Victoria, eighteen miles away, are plainly seen. With a glass, one can make out the guns at Fort Worden, near Port Townshend, forty miles distant. The surf breaks along the beach at the mouth of the Elwha, or off the Dungeness spit, though something like ten and twenty miles distant, respectively. One can count every skiff in the salmon fishing fleet off Ediz Hook, seven miles distant. Every ship in the strait is plainly visible. The ranches from Port Crescent to Sequim are easily distinguishable. One is amazed to see how large a portion of the country always thought of as timbered is really under cultivation.”

And from the Miscellaneous shelf:

The Art of Bundling: Being an Inquiry into the Nature & Origins of that Curious but Universal Folk-Custom, with an Exposition of the Rise & Fall of Bundling in the Eastern Part of No America
by Dana Doten with Drawings by Lee Brown Coye, New York: Countrymen Press and Farrar & Rinehart, 1938

A study and defense of the 18th Century American practice of bundling, or sharing beds:

“Thomas Jefferson praised the virtures of country life, planned for an America unsullied by urbanism, free, happy, and rustic. The society which Jefferson hoped to perpetuate, dreamed of perfecting, was, among other things, a bundling society. We no longer bundle. Nor do we win Revolutions and produce Thomas Jeffersons.”

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The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was only a modest success for me financially. But it served as a confidence boost and reinforced notions I’ve had that I need to be better connected with the larger bookselling community.

My booth mate was Michael Kerstetter of Tall Tales. Michael has an impressive stock of signed first edition science fiction hardcovers. He is a true pro.

Jerry Shepard and Jay Chee were a steady source of conversation. I only chatted briefly with the guys at Modlitbooks, but I admired their eclectic, yet still coherent, collection.

The Old London Bookshop’s booth had some beautiful books and I hope to visit their shop sometime to look through their treasures and pick up some John Buchan.

I didn’t have a lot of time to browse, but would have liked to have a better look at the travel and exploration books at the booths on the back wall of the front room.

I also chatted with non-exhibiting booksellers Catherine O’Toole and the folks behind Brick Road Books, and was happy to have a good conversation with Jamie from Twice Sold Tales.

I owe thanks to the show’s organizers, my neighbor Louis Collins and my neighbor at the Fair David Gregor. I’ve heard good things about David Gregor’s bookselling seminar and hope to take it soon.

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I just picked up the last issue of Comic Art Magazine and wanted to recommend it for the booklet that accompanies it, Forty Cartoon Books of Interest by Seth. Seth’s selection of noteworthy books from his collection includes a few relatively well known titles, but it’s largely made up of forgotten masterpieces and interesting failures: a collection of comics from a Hardware Store trade magazine, obscure early graphic novels, and unusually structured children’s books.

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I’ve been to enough Friends of the Library sales that I’m not usually surprised by the agressive tactics some dealers use to get an edge. But I was stunned by what I saw at the Friends of the Kirkland Public Library’s book sale on Saturday.

I arrived half an hour before the doors opened, earlier than I’d planned. There were a dozen people in line, most of them dealers and book scouts who I recognized. One group of four dealers were chatting together over the stacks of postal tubs they’d brought for hauling books.

A few minutes before opening, the sale’s organizer stepped out of the library (accompanied by a uniformed police officer) and explained the rules of the sale. Dealers should fill one box, he said, then pass it to one of the volunteers before starting on another box. He passed out some labels for people to use on their boxes and went back inside. The doors were opened in short order and everyone rushed into the small meeting room where the sale was being held. Then in a carefully organized fashion, the four dealers who I mentioned before each scooped up a boxload of books from the choice non-fiction tables and shouted, “Full box.” They handed off their filled boxes and, barely glancing at the spines, dumped the next pile of books into their next four boxes. “Full box!”

I’d say that at least two-thirds of the sale’s books were claimed within three minutes. It was entertaining.

After things had settled down, I wandered over to the fiction section — always more hit-and-miss than most non-fiction genres and therefore less appealing to the organized group — and picked out a few books. I noticed that most of the books were almost brand new — published in the last couple of years. This may be a reflection of this affluent suburb’s donor base. Most of the books were likely bought new from end of the aisle displays at Barnes and Noble, read once and donated. (This may be an unfair demographic generalization.)

One of the slash-and-burn dealers (who works at a respectable store in my neighborhood) came over to browse through the fiction. She immediately snipped at a commodity dealer who was hunkered down over his barcode scanner-enabled cell phone scanning ISBNs without glancing at book covers. “You’re the rudest person I’ve ever encountered at one of these book sales,” she said to him. “Me?” he asked, apparently bemused.

This was a bad scene. I paid for my little pile of books and headed back to my side of the lake and made it to the Edmonds Library Book Sale.

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Here’s an oddity that I haven’t seen in awhile. A copy of this 1978 poetry book passed through my hands at the Amazon warehouse years ago. I couldn’t let it go without first photocopying the cover and taping it to the side of my computer monitor. The photocopy went with me as I moved into other roles at Amazon, always hanging over my desk or hanging outside my cubicle, sometimes raising eyebrows. I’m told that after I left in 2000, my friend Mari found my photocopy and hung it at her desk for a time.

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