Books & Mags

Sisterhood of the Traveling Rants: Handlers and Liaisons Speak Out

by

by Jas Faulkner

How would these guys handle Miz Eudora’s requests? (HBO Pictures)

 

I got the email from Sam and Tab shortly before the first of the month:

Can you come to Memphis?  It’s a coven meeting and you’re invited!

Why yes, that is coded speech.  Sam usually sends her invitations to coven gatherings via owl or white mice in a pumpkin.   But seriously, the girls are secretive about their professional gatherings and for good reason.  In the early days of the event, they were sometimes overrun by wannabe writers looking for that magic something that would get them published and readers seeking galleys before their favourite authors’ latest hit the shelves.  The attendees are all booksellers except for the occasional guest from the book trade or an author or a book jacket artist or somesuch person who shares their insight and experience and usually brings some very sweet swag.   In return they get a smallish honorarium and a long weekend at the B and B.

Read more

The Deadly Percheron-Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

by

The Deadly Percheron—John Franklin Bardin–1946–IP

I no longer am a bookseller, but that didn’t stop me from selling The Deadly Percheron when it was rereleased some years back. I was in my friend’s store, The Black Orchid, and when customers came in without a definite direction in genre or author, I naturally tried to sway them to a favorite title. When another bookseller first tipped me to this title, I wasn’t convinced to read it. It sounded, well, bizarre, to put it mildly. After finally giving in, and after finishing it in record time, I started looking for a first edition to acquire–the benchmark of quality for me.

Jacob Blunt visits a psychiatrist, George Matthews, with a tale of woes about ‘leprechauns’ who are paying him to do odd things, such as, whistle at Carnegie Hall and give money away. The stories alone can’t convince Dr. Matthews his patient is certifiably insane but the hibiscus flower Blunt wears in his hair just might. That and the fact that since he met Blunt, Matthews has been experiencing his own brand of questionable events. When Blunt is suspected of murder, the psychiatrist steps in to help the man he has come to, if not believe, then at least suspect is being used by others for unknown purposes.

Read more

Edgar Award Nominees Are Announced

by

Mystery Writers of America have announced this years nominees for the fantastic Edgar A. Poe Award. I’m familiar with Lehane, Mosley, Atkins, and maybe a few more, but their recent books haven’t been read by me. There was a time, long long ago, when I had read everything nominated, and if I hadn’t, I would … Read more

The Maltese Falcon–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

by

The Maltese Falcon—Dashiell Hammett–1930–in print

This book is such a given, I thought I’d already wrote my little piece on it–but no! Anyone who hasn’t heard of the book must be living in a sad place. If you’ve not read it, only heard of it, you are living in a grey place. If you’ve only seen the film, and not read the book, your world is overcast. Only if you’ve read the book can you claim to be of the living, IMHO. Ok, naturally that’s going a bit far. The Maltese Falcon is so pleasurable a read, and yet so influential in style, character, genre, that it’s taken for granted. I’ve reread it a couple of times, something unheard of for me, and each time is as satisfying as the last.

Read more

Finding A Book In The Vast Tubes of the Net

by
Finally found.

I have an illustration that I slid off of an eBay auction about a billion years ago, when you could still do that. I loved it so much,  I tried to make jewelry, print it, do various and sundry things, but as it goes, dpi is notoriously low on eBay and most of the world of eBay, because it doesn’t take much to render a picture pretty nice looking on your screen. A few other images were purloined that long ago day, but none of them did I remember to jot down title, author, illustrator, or publisher. I only remember I couldn’t afford the book with the super fairy tale picture, and that was that. Since then I’ve been sporadically perusing bookfinder, google, eBay, etsy, trying to locate the original source of the picture. The only clue I had were the artist’s initials and last name. F. S. Cooke. Not an individual I’d heard of, but then I have found through the years that there are far more golden age illustrators than just a few well publicized ones like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, the Robinson brothers, Jessie Wilcox Smith etc. Children’s book illustrators in the teens, twenties and thirties seem to be numerous–from pictures for school book primers, to endless renditions of Mother Goose, to magazine covers. A magazine cover of an odd thing called Etude, confirmed that a F. S. Cooke did exist, and had created an ingenious piece of artwork for a magazine devoted to high falutin’ music. A little row of houses in the shape of musical instruments in candy colors certainly catches the eye, and his Deco sensibility is exactly what I love. I realized then that I had a couple Etude magazines with front covers with his artwork. Inside the magazine there is nothing–well, nothing that I care about, I suppose music lovers would disagree, ha. So what else did this man, I assumed it was a man because it usually is, what else did he do?

Read more

Gently Used, Unfoxed, And Totemic

by

by Jas Faulkner 

It was one of those finds in the LitCrit section of McKay’s Books that looked like a good cold weather read.  Playing Joan is an anthology of interviews with actress who have played the Shavian heroine over the years.  The book looked like it was nearly new and had never been read.  At $1.50, it was a deal.  Then I noticed there was a name written on the title page.

Before I get into that, I need to make an admission.  I’m one of those people who loves finding old things in books.  By old things, I don’t mean the dessicated corpses of insects or antique Fritos.  I’m talking about postcards, invoices, ticket stubs,  newspaper clippings and class schedules.   They give me a clue about who read this book before it fell into my hands. I’m also a fan of old library book discards.  It makes my shelves feel well-traveled.  

Read more

Dear Reader: Give Plays a Chance

by

Looking at a shelf undisturbed by browsing hands, I wonder, “Why don’t people buy plays – or more directly, why don’t people read plays?” I suppose those of you in the bookselling trade know, and maybe have always known, that people don’t buy plays. I was warned by my senior advisor, Dennis Gavin, not to devote too much time and space to plays, and he was right. Today, two forlorn shelves of masterpieces sit untouched and unwanted in my store. But, really, can a bookstore cull Ibsen and Chekov; Tennessee Williams and Pinter; and, let lightning strike me dead, the Bard? No, I’d sooner go broke than admit to a customer that I have no space for Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward because room must be made for 65 Tom Clancy novels. Still, I ask, why don’t people buy plays?

Further Reading: Killing a Section in Your Bookshop

Saint Joan playHow often does the New York Times Book Review feature a new play? I don’t know the answer, but I read the review every week and I don’t remember many. I know that playwrights continue to produce plays and the Pulitzer Prize continues to issues awards, but there’s little attention paid to the published version of these works. This year the Pulitzer for drama went to Quiara Alegria Hudes for Water by the Spoonful but if you wanted to buy the book, you couldn’t; it hadn’t been published, at least not at the time the award was announced. The Pulitzer (and the Tony Award, for that matter) honor theater productions, not published literature; they provide no encouragement for readers who might want to consider buying the book. And when Hudes’ book was finally published in September, it failed to earn a book review in the New York Times. And the Times’ list of 100 notable books also omitted “Water by The Spoonful,” even though every other Pulitzer winning book (biography, history, non-fiction and poetry) was cited. Perhaps they just don’t consider plays books.

Read more

Can Digital Books Furnish a Room?

by

Manchester Last Lion with ReidIf I were to make a New Year’s resolution for 2013, it would be to read William Manchester’s Churchill biography, the last volume of which was completed by Paul Reid in 2012, nearly eight years after Manchester’s death. Of course, I don’t make resolutions since there are more than enough failures to tolerate in life without me adding to the list. But Reid’s story is almost as interesting as Churchill’s. Reid was a college dropout who went back to school in his 40s, and at 46 became an intern at the Palm Beach Post. It was through his newspaper work that he met Manchester, who was ill and dying and unable to finish the last volume. Manchester unexpectedly chose Reid to finish the third volume, even though Reid had never written a book before, let alone a biography. He wasn’t even a historian. Yet Manchester saw something appealing in Reid’s background and approach, something a more conventional thinker would have missed. For me, the subject of middle-aged career metamorphosis has a new relevance; I am often asked why, as old as I am, would I want to recreate myself as a bookseller. The answer, which is hard to explain, is that I just didn’t see it as a big deal. I never thought of changing careers as being that strange. And neither did Reid. He seems to have moved from one thing that interested him to the next, taking opportunities that presented themselves and not spending too much time doubting himself. So, that’s one book I hope to read this year.

On the subject of doubts, one that I felt gently tugging at my sleeve as I prepared to invest myself into this new business was my awareness of the steady migration of book buyers from paper reading to digital reading. It was hard not to take seriously the threat to hard-copy booksellers implicit in headlines like this from the New York Times from January 22, 2012: “Tablet and E-Reader Sales Soar.” The article reported that the number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January last year.

Read more