Miscellaneous

Affirmations For Booksellers Who Do Too Much

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by Jas Faulkner

A little over a year ago, I sat down and created a list of guidelines for dealing with misconceptions the public has about what writers do. It was directed at the newer members of the writing pool at another website.  Last week I accidentally emailed it as a file to Sam and Tab, my bookseller buds down in Mississippi.  They made me aware of my mistake and told me that with some small variations, the list could actually apply to booksellers as well as writers.  Tab told me she read the list aloud and both of them more often than not shouted “YES!” or “AMEN” after each entry.

So, my Third Day of Christmas gift to the booksellers who read here, is your own list.  I did this to let all of you know how much I appreciate that I can still go somewhere and find a store full of books to browse and buy.

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That Best Book Feeling

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Best book feeling No. 1

There’s nothing like the excitement and anticipation when a long sought book arrives in the mail. I had two gems stuffed in the mailbox within days, and a third as a bonus. When the books are vintage children’s illustrated ones, the thrill of cutting loose the tape (usually with anything that seems remotely sharp, like pens, keys, nail files, because the scissors are too far away for my impatient fingers), ripping the tough cardboard, unwrapping the newspaper or other protectant and finally touching the front boards, is exquisite. Since I’ve ended  jewelry making and turned to selling digital downloads, I’m allowing myself purchases of illustrated books that normally would have been passed by, because the artwork within wouldn’t register small enough for a pin. Nothing extravagant, my budget ranges from 10 to 28 bucks-tops. Usually on the lower end, because it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of dough on a book if you cannot reclaim it through sales. Naturally, I convince myself the only reason I want these particular items is for the business, not for the sheer pleasure of owning them.

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Words That Don’t Fail

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by Jas Faulkner

The night that Susan Smith confessed to killing her two sons, I had drawn the short straw and was working the front desk and crisis line instead of my usual eight to sixteen hours behind the double layered locking steel doors that kept the rest of the world separated from my adolescent psychiatric clients and vice versa.  I watched the bright red sunset over West Nashville fade into the comforting  night that seemed to becalm the small hospital that had been rocking and rolling with code after code all day.

And then the first call came in.  It was a man and he was sobbing.

“I just want to know why,” he managed to choke out his question.

“Why what?”  I shifted into de-escalation mode without even thinking about it. “Talk to me and we’ll see what we can do to make this better.”

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Revisiting Old Friends

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by Jas Faulkner 

Every book feels like an unopened door. Every page turned is another step that could lead to high adventure or bittersweet romance or tutelage in a Platonic cave of our own making.  This is why it is so important to keep reading and also why there are books that we may, for whatever reason, decide to revisit.

All kinds of circumstances can precipitate picking up a book that may no longer serve the function it once did, but still serves as a memorial touchstone. Where were you when you read Old Yeller?  What music was playing when you were in the book shop when you first picked up a copy of  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or The Colour of Magic?  Sometimes you can remember and sometimes it’s a trick of the mind.

You might have picked up the book because you wanted to be seen picking up the book, only too conscious of the music and whoever else happened to be wandering around and might see you with evidence of your intellectual acumen conveniently in hand.  Other times, the music fell away, the odd sweet stink of the incense from the

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Pinning Books

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One of the Christmas books available on a Pinterest board

I suppose this is a good tool for online sellers. After all, even the bookshopblog has a spot where you can ‘pin’ what you see. ABE sent another one of their cool little articles, and I thought I’d be seeing a nice ditty on holiday books, the why, wherefores, etc. No- after I clicked-a Pinterest board popped up filled with sunny sideways and front covers of Christmas titles.When you click on Santa, a page full of  the edition displayed  and the various booksellers who have it for your buying convenience, appears. Why should this bother me? It shouldn’t–and it doesn’t when booksellers are touting their wares. It seems odd, but then so does the entire internet, but I’ve gotten used to it the way an old person gets used to new fangled ideas.

What drives me to distraction, is once an image is ‘pinned’ it is there for eternity. No matter what you may do, say, remove the book from sale, or in my case, make my entire flickr account private–tons and tons of my personal images that I worked on to restore, are pinned and re-pinned and re-pinned for the next millennium, and  there isn’t a darn thing I can do about it. Ask for them to be taken down, you say? Yeah, that’l happen–they could care less about public domain images taken without permission from a public site, even if it isn’t public anymore. Apparently once it is pinned, that generates an entirely new self reliant image–that’s the best way I can describe it, having no understanding of these things. So although a ‘link’ is supplied back to the source–(a tiny lip balm for a monstrous gash)–doesn’t matter if the link no longer works and the image now private–it’s still up on a person’s board. And will be taken and re-pinned again and again.

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Laughing All The Way To The Remainder Table

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Look on the lighter side? Tardar Sauce would rather not, thank you.

William Zinsser once described the humour section of any given bookshop as the most depressing place in the world to contemplate the state of arts and letters.  When Zinsser wrote that essay in 1966, much of the humour section consisted of anthologies of comic strips, bound editions of comic book story arcs, and ‘ slight parodies based on trends that were long on booger jokes and bathroom humour  and short on actually literary merit.

With the advent of National Lampoon as an outlet for humour writers who had outgrown their incubation space at Harvard and other college-based humour magazines, trade paperbacks featuring cartoons and parodies began to scoot Charlie Brown and Pogo Possum to the edges of the shelves.

The 1970s’ was a time when the elevation as the comic and humourist from a gadfly observing from the edges to an icon and spokesperson made a significant impact on pop culture.  Situation comedies centered around comedians (rather than entertainers who do comedy) began to dominate the network schedules, especially in a culture that had wearied of titillation and violence as prime time mainstays.   The close of the decade saw NBC’s Saturday Night Live , with its Second City alumni-heavy cast peppered with contributions from the BBC’s Monty Python crew  dominate and reshape the genre in television, cinema, and print.

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The Hannah Interview

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by Jas Faulkner 

Sam was laughing when I answered the phone.

“Open your email,” she said. “it’s not one of those screamie video things, I promise.”

Suffering for your art? Hannah knows better. She has  already figured out having written is better than writing.

It was a picture of a hand printed sign that taped to the front door of the store with a My Little Pony sticker.  It read: “Book sighing at the back of the store.  Free cookies with book.”

Tab’s niece, Hannah, was staying with her favourite aunts and it looked like she was back in business.  Whenever Hannah’s parents work took them out of town, Hannah packed her suitcase, filled an old knitting bag with her latest sketchbook, lozenge paints, brushes and her latest journal and supplies for her guinea pig, Darla Hood, Darla’s cage and carrier and head over to her aunts.  She found her parents’ penchant for digging up stuff to be tedious and preferred the glamourous world of books.

However, she was having none of this retail or struggling author stuff.  Her goals were twofold: she wanted to reopen Meg Ryan’s bookstore from “You’ve Got Mail” and she wanted to be a rich and famous writer of books with purple covers.  For those of you playing at home, Hannah is precocious eight-year-old.

“We had a signing last Friday.”

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Suicidal Heroines

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Crushed by steel wheels.

Anna Karenina has been made into a film. Again. I’m not certain how many times this new production makes, but in my opinion, it’s too many times. There is a finite

Drug overdose.

amount of women committing suicide as a legitimate solution to their problems, I can take. Romanticizing the taking of one’s existence is ingrained into society’s fabric. If the people doing it are beautiful and in many cases helpless women. Greta Garbo standing on the edge of the railroad platform ready to dive, may seem like a

dramatic and tragic ending, but in fact, if viewers were to see her remains after said train’s vicious steel wheels crushed her beautiful face to pulp, and her gorgeous costumes were clotted with skin, bone, and brain matter, how romantic would her death then seem? Sure, she had abandoned her child and husband for a lover who then tosses her aside. And the punishment for those sins in that period of history? Social disgrace, maybe even being thrown on the streets with nothing. But why must the cost of a woman’s independence in the books of that era, always seem to be death?

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