New Displays--Martin Luther King Day and William P. Jones, Lincoln and Jennifer Chiaverini, Barbara Pym and Recommendations, plus Diets and Mr. and Mrs. Guilt.

Post-holiday season, it takes a lot of work to reset the store. We've replaced four displays to date, with more to come. A Martin Luther King/Civil Rights display went up, in part to promote our event with William P. Jones, author of The March on Washington, who is visiting Boswell on January 20. This replaced the football table. I know the Packers are in the playoffs, but the books have all been there for months and if we get a pop on a Packers book, it will be an instant title when they win some sort of title. We'll just keep that one at the front counter somewhere.

On the back table, the Kennedy table was replaced with a Lincoln table, celebrating his upcoming birthday and our event with Jennifer Chiaverini at the Brookfield Public Library, also on January 20, for Mrs. Lincoln's Rival. Lincoln fever has abated a bit, with the high-profile window waving to us in the rear-view mirror. We had a number of both adult and kids' books for the table, but it was hard to find a good basic bio beyond Team of Rivals. I decided to reorder Ronald White's A. Lincoln, just so we had something for adults that went beyond politics and the assassination. And of course we have Jennifer Chiaverini's Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmarker featured as well.

I made a pronouncement that we would not do a "new year, new you" display. I consider them a bit tired, and we generally don't sell much off of them either. That said, Jason noted that we had more diet books that we could display in the section, and so we decided to do a diet-focused one*. It features the caveman who invented the paleo diet. You didn't think we could track him down, did you? Right now, we're selling a lot of Wheat Belly and it's not connected-but-clearly-related-in-spirit Grain Brain.

We had a great time at our Barbara Pym birthday last night. Four inches of snow during the day and the threat of sub-zero temperatures at night couldn't keep 20 Pymites (or is it Pymians?) from celebrating the evening with some short talks, a few readings, and a showing of the Pym promotional video from Open Road. As Jane noted, most followers tend to discuss how they discovered her and which editions they have. There's not a lot of talk about  which Pym is best because most agree that the one they've just read is their favorite. And since Jane and Anne came up with a nice checklist of what to read after Pym, which we turned into a bookmark, it seemed appropriate to keep the love going with a small display. We've done our part--now someone has to reissue Quartet in Autumn.

*And then I realized that a modified self-improvement display would be great to feature both Malcolm Gladwell and Michio Kaku. But that's for next week.