Smarting Up the Impulse Table with a Title that While Selling Elsewhere, is a bit of a Laggard at Boswell

Like all other independent bookstores, and who knows who else, we get this monthly newsletter from Carl Lennertz at Harper Collins. He's been doing this off and on for a long time, and though we also get a weekly missive by email, it's nice to get something in print form. It's a free form survey of what's happening at Harper Collins, and this month he mentioned that the backlist title How to Talk about Literature like a Professor had taken off again, with major increased sales levels.

We'd sold the book well at Schwartz for a long time, and I'll bet Next Chapter in Mequon is still blowing it out, because two of its biggest fans were Dave and Susan, who now work there.

On the other hand, we at Boswell haven't sold a copy since we opened. Our two copies have been sitting there for a mighty long time--one of the two copies is from the previous Quill edition (see accompanying photo). Every so often, the folks at Harper Collins like to rebrand a line, and the Quill paperback line, inherited from William Morrow, was rebranded Harper during one of these brainstorms.

I think we can sell the book well off our impulse table, making a nice counterpoint to zombie books, mini vegan cookbooks, and Little People in the City. Let's see how we do.