The Poster, The Poser.

A. Nick and I have been talking about doing an event poster for some time now. A talented artist, you've seen his illustrations gracing his rec cards, and he also recently did a cover for Alcoholmanac magazine. After our first attempt with Jasper Fforde (the best laid plans...), Nick struck event poster gold with his second, a beautiful rendition of Peter Heller's The Dog Stars.

The Dog Stars was one of our favorite novels of 2012, and we're just thrilled to be hosting the author for his paperback tour on Wednesday, June 19, 7 pm. Our friend Kate laid it out for us--we bettter do a good job, or else. I wonder why more publicists don't use that sort of argument?

We started off by giving Heller an opening author in Ethan Rutherford, whose new collection, The Peripatetic Coffin, has several booksellers in ecstasy. Now we've got several folks helping out in Team Heller (and what do you know, Kate and Ethan once worked together, and that was totally not on purpose).

And then Nick and I started brainstorming again about a poster. We really want to put posters up in alternate venues, but we wanted something that was not our run-of-the-mill event poster. Don't get me wrong, I love our posters! It's just that this is a work of art. More on this as the date draws near.

B. After a lovely day driving around with Elinor Lipman for The View from Penthouse B, I'm feeling like everything should be downhill from here, but it wasn't exactly, as tonight's event with Fiona Maazel was lovely, and at Stacie's suggestion, we presented her with cheese curds as a thank you for visiting on her Woke Up Lonely book tour.

The Lipman lunch was lovely, by the way. So many devoted readers, and at the end of the day, we went to dinner at Wolf Peach with our old friend Nancy, who ran around the hall handselling copies of Lipman's essays, I Can't Complain.

I was asked to introduce the author, and being that this wasn't just an evening at the store and my two sentences, I actually wrote something out, but of course there was also a bit of improv too. My thought was that so often what we remember most about authors is not their work but our relationship to it, how we came to read it, what affect it had on us. This theory was borne out with several discussions that Lipman had with her fans.

For me, I remembered how our colleauge Jeanne was obsessed with Then She Found Me and called into a radio show to ask Lipman a question, after the other authors started hogging the airwaves. I remembered that I met Lipman at a pub party for The Way Men Act, and she first came to Milwaukee for Isabel's Bed, and I should note, returned for every novel since.

A few weeks ago my friend John posted a twenty-year-old picture of me reading The Way Men Act, which I always thought was a funny photo, as I have never really figured gotten a handle on that statement. But I also thought it would be nice to revisit the novel, and while I always tell folks that we never have time to read at work, I should note that it was the end of a long day and I was off the clock.

I tried to remember what book matched up with which adventure. The bookseller dinner at Mader's. Another at Bartolotta's with Anita Shreve. The Bacchus lunch. Events at the Shorewood, Brookfield, and Mequon Schwartz stores. But after that first visit, I only remembered our ribbon cutting with Shreve and Mameve Medwed, after which the three authors went out to dinner with my celebrating family. But I'm counting on someone to chime in and much up the other visits.