Last weekend I missed the Seattle Public Library Book Sale. This weekend, I’m missing the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair.
I’ve made it to a few Southern California Friends of the Library book sales in the last few weeks. None of them approach the size of Seattle’s hangar-filling sale, but I’ve picked up some solid stock. I haven’t seen as much aggressive behavior down here. I’ve been skipping the preview sales which tend to be more cutthroat.
My family and I will be staying in Los Angeles, in the Silver Lake neighborhood, until mid-December. My online book business is on hiatus while I’m here, but I’d like to stay in the business, see what other people are doing, and pick up a couple of paychecks. I’m looking for: short term book business openings, occasional bookstore shifts that need to be covered, or tech-related contract gigs (FileMaker or Access database setup, web programming and design, EDI implementation, or general computer help). Here’s my resume (PDF).
Barring any of that, I’d be happy just to meet up with other book dealers in the area for a coffee or beer.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
Briefly, some highlights from my 2005 reading: Baudolino by Umberto Eco, A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene, Things That Fall from the Sky by Kevin Brockmeier, On Board Noah’s Ark by Ludwig Bemelmans.
As for business, it’s been a difficult and sometimes rewarding year. The hardest lessons continue to be about what doesn’t sell. My current project is weeding some of those lessons out of inventory to make room for new books.
I haven’t handled multiple copies of many titles. Of the few that I have, the bestsellers were The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. I came into a pile of assorted editions of The Conscience of a Conservative as its profile was being lifted by two recent books that referenced it in their titles — David Brock’s Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative and Zell Miller’s A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat. Goldwater’s book was also noticed by BookFinder, which ranked it as the second most searched for out of print book in the Society and Culture category. The Four Agreements, a self help book based on Native American philosophy, sells steadily at a modest price.
By volume, my bestselling categories were Fiction, Biography, History, and Religion. Based on percentages (the number of books sold weighted against the number of books stocked in that category), Fiction was one of the worst performing categories, and the bestsellers were Audiobooks, Folklore & Mythology, and Self Help.
I’m looking forward to 2006 (and am hoping to get more reading in than I did this year). It’s going to be a big year for me and for Using Books.
Have a happy New Year.
With the simultaneous arrival of the holiday rush and some unrelated projects, posting here will remain infrequent.
Over on the commerce site, I’m running a series of specials through the end of the year. The current sale is “Buy 1 Book, Get a 2nd Book of Equal or Lesser Value for 1/2 Price”. It’s a good deal, if awkwardly phrased. The details are here.
To soften that blatantly commercial plug, I’ll pass along this link to an archive of recordings of writer interviews by CBS Radio’s Don Swaim. These are 20-60 minute recordings from 1982-1993 that were originally edited down to little two-minute radio segments, so they include some ice-breaker questions and occasional unguarded comments. I haven’t heard anything too controversial though, unless you count Jonathan Raban loading his pipe.
Did I mention free Gift Wrap Service?
The new Using Books logo was designed by Phil Scroggs, a talented designer and illustrator whose work can be seen on his website, Phillustrations.
I replaced my TomFolio provided site with a Chrislands-based setup last week. I’ve been experimenting with the new site’s coupon feature by offering a discount on my personal blog.
I’ll extend the discount here as well: During checkout, type “BEANS” into the coupon field. You’ll get a 20% discount (excluding shipping charges). The discount expires on August 31, 2005. You can access the site at usingbooks.com or start a search using the search form on the right side of this page.
Partway through this post about movies and books, long time Beans for Breakfast commenter Klondike Kate, has some nice things to say about a recent Using Books order and about the speed of the postal service.
Using Books begins it’s first big advertising push today. I’ve invested $10 in a small ad on The Comics Curmudgeon. Okay, it’s not exactly the Super Bowl ad, but at least it will run for longer than thirty seconds.
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