A Few New Displays: Robot Science Fiction, Regional Selections, Penguin Beach Reading, Walter Dean Myers.

Tis time to walk around and give shout outs to various displays.

When I saw these tin robots in a gift catalog, I thought surely there is a display to be made from this.These are not the cutesy often plush robots that pair with children's books. No, this is for an honest-to-goodness science fiction display, and since Game of Thrones had finished airing, the timing was perfect.

Some of Jason's picks:
--I Robot, by Isaac Asimov
--Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson
--How to Build an Android: the True Story of Philip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection, by David Dufty
--Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
--Robot Uprisings, edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams
--R..U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), by Karel Capek.

As I mentioned previously, I co-starred in my fifth grade production of RUR. It was abridged. I played Alquist.

Summer is the perfect time for a regional table at the register, what with all the folks visiting town for various festivals and general summering. I was chatting with an FOB who moved to New York but comes back in summers to visit her mom who said that even our one humid 90 degree day was relatively painless, compared to recent heatwaves. And now we're back to the lower dew point averages that mean so much to us.

Our next regional event is Sandra Ackerman at the Milwaukee Public Library for Milwaukee: Then and Now, this coming Tuesday, July 29, 6 pm. We just booked Larry Widen's event for Milwaukee Rock and Roll on Thursday, October 2.

Another season, another tote. Penguin has a summer reading display that features mesh bags. There aren't that many in the promotion, so we're asking folks to buy two books off a pretty good list of titles to get one. Our only caveat is that they have to buy both books on one transaction, within our promotional period.

The qualifying titles include:
--Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes
--A Hundred Summers, by Beatriz Williams
--Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, by Jennifer Chiaverini
--A Tale fo the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki
--A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness
--The Silent Wife, by A.S.A. Harrison
--The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel Brown
--The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert
--Graduates in Wonderland, by Rachel Kapelke-Dale
--The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer
and a good number of other titles. How could you not find a couple of books on this list that you don't want to read?

We just get up our Walter Dean Myers table and it's time to say goodbye to Nadine Gordimer. We can really only keep three of these going at one time, as otherwise the store starts looking a like a funeral home.

We also have a back-to-school table, but the photo was a little blurry. We've put our 2013 backpacks, lunch boxes, and water bottles on sale at 25% off and our two 2012 items, a shark and an owl backpack, are clearanced at 50% off. That line in particular was beautifully made. I expect to see them disappear quickly, at least before our new items come in.

That's the trick with back to school. We start relatively late but the national chains schedule their sales for the earliest school years, which can be the second week in August.