Bookselling

Primarily Basic Readers

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Vera Stone (later Norman), one of the most prolific reader illustrators of all. From "Bob and Judy Reader", 1936. Illustrated by Vera Stone Norman.
Vera Stone (later Norman), one of the most prolific reader illustrators of all.
From “Bob and Judy Reader”, 1936. Illustrated by Vera Stone Norman.

By Kathie McMillan

I did not set out to collect primers. It began quite by accident when I found Friends from the Children’s Own Readers series, which was illustrated by Marguerite Davis,an illustrator I had never heard of. I was rummaging around in an unlikely flea market here in my own small rural town with the vague notion of finding material suitable to post on flickr.com. I had stumbled upon a community of people who posted vintage images from the early twentieth century, a period that I had always been interested in. I was very smitten by several contributors. When I had collected a few images for use in crafting, I decided that the least I could do was give back by posting a few images of my own. After all, I had spent hours back in those very early days of the World Wide Web searching for fairy images from the early twentieth century; and here they were all grouped together, like a giant picture book on my coffee table! It did not seem right to take and not to give back.

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The Deadly Percheron-Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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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.

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Edgar Award Nominees Are Announced

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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

Finding A Book In The Vast Tubes of the Net

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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?

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Why Masculine Pen Names?

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A friend of mine gave me a recent article revealing that women are still using male pen names, or initials to disguise the very fact they are women. The statistics show that men will invariably ignore anything that hints at a feminine hand, whereas women will read either sex. The publishing industry does nothing to encourage women to fight the trend, either. They ask or even demand that a science fiction or hard boiled suspense author write under initials or a male pseudonym. They claim they want to gain every reader, and if a man picks up a book in a typically masculine genre with a woman’s name on the cover, they are likely to put it right back down again, and who wants to lose a sale this way? Female authors wanting desperately to be published will give in to the pressure and the cycle continues. We all know the historical pen names–The Bronte sisters; George Sand–I couldn’t remember her real name if I tried;  Isak Dinesen–author of Out of Africa; E. Hinton is really Susan Eloise Hinton-surprise, she authored The Outsiders, a classic about teen boys that her publisher felt would never be accepted if her sex was known; and a more recent fraud, J. K. Rowling–if she used her real first name, her publishers contended, would a 12 year old boy have picked up the book? We’ll never know.

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Remembrances of Bookstores Past

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Myles Friedman’s excellent post about the lack of bookshops reminded me of all those wonderful bookstores I had the luck to visit during my years living in New York City. I took them for granted. It never occurred to me back then that bookstores were about to become extinct. If I happened by one, I’d go in. Simple as that. I seemed to find them easily, or they found me. I don’t remember the exact location of the original Murder Ink bookstore, but I do remember it was tiny, on a side street, and terribly intimidating. The only impression I remember was the owner wasn’t all that friendly. Apparently, that characteristic spread to many others who followed in the first Murder Ink’s footsteps. (The person I encountered was apparently the second owner, the original had already sold by the time I entered–20 or so years later, after many various booksellers, including myself, it closed. No, I wasn’t responsible for it going, ha. (maybe the last owner’s contempt of the genre he was selling had something to do with it–“After 10 years of owning Murder Ink, I was sick of mysteries, having felt as if I’d read every possible permutation of perfect crimes and brilliant, but flawed, detectives.”)

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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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Interviewing Dead Writers

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I’m struggling to find questions for those authors who are among the living, partially because I am woefully behind in reading current mystery writers’ work. It does take a modicum of knowledge regarding a detective series, or suspense novel which one can only really get from spending time trundling across the internet for tidbits, or cracking open and reading through a book. What I do

Erle Stanley Gardner who spent much of his time, alone, in the desert with not one, but three secretaries–all sisters.

have, is a ridiculous amount of dead authors books under my belt. It occurred to me that I have questions for many of those whose work lives on, long past their creators expiration dates. For example, Rex Stout. The man created an iconic character out of…? Did Mr. Stout dream up Nero Wolfe, the agoraphobic, beer swilling, orchid loving, gourmand after a indigestible meal? His cohort, Archie Godwin is more  typical of the genre, while Wolfe is decidedly a unique voice. Stout wrote other things before embarking on his best selling series. How and when did this inspiration hit him? I would think that a publisher being pitched the idea of Wolfe would have been skeptical at the very least. To Erle Stanley Gardner, the mastermind behind Perry Mason, I’d want to know why he couldn’t put pen to paper. He dictated his books to his, ‘secretary’.

A young Rex before the odd beard.

Quotations because he eventually married that secretary, finally, after the wife passed on. I’d also like to know how much or little real law is used within the books. When reading a Gardner, I’m struck by how Mason either eludes laws, or just plain breaks them and gets away with it. If, as a former lawyer, Gardner’s writing what he knows, did he circumvent the law while practicing?

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