Holiday Gift Guide News.

So by now most of you have received your holiday gift guide in the mail. If you haven't, it either means one of four things, provided you do shop with us at all.
a. You do not use our Boswell Benefits program
b. You didn't spend enough on the program in the last year to make our 4200 address cutoff. Just saying, that didn't involve spending that much, about $50, not including your first sign-up purchase.
c. The address we had for you was wrong. Either you moved during the year, were temporarily away, or we could not read your handwriting.
d. The USPS carrier was being cantankerous. Every year we get back a few (note: very few, but still a positive number) newsletters where the address is right in every way but they are still rejected.

If that the case, there are two things you should do:
a. Come in and pick up the seafoam green holiday gift guide which is waiting for you at Boswell
b. Fix your address in our system. There should be at least one bookseller on call at any time who can do this. 

Many of you have been asking about the cover image, line drawings of most of the booksellers (alas, not including three of our newest arrivals, Phoebe, Barb, and Josh). They are done by Peter Feix, an artist who you may know as both a long-term Starbucks barrista and also a short-term bookseller earlier this year.

And now for the twin sons from different mothers department. Lauren Fox came in to do a reading for her next book as part of a shopping day and we looked at her paperback of Friends Like us and I saw the resemblance immediately. The mailed newsletter was actually cream, and only the pick-up ones are green. And of course it's a clearly different artist. But if you want to say we stole the idea, I can show a promotion for one of our rep nights at Schwartz from close to ten years ago which has line drawings of all the reps participating. In other words,Vintage must have gotten the idea from us!

I was chatting with Lauren Fox's editor at Book Expo, and she told me she is very excited about the next novel, which is coming in August 2015. I'm sure you'll hear more about it in the upcoming months.