On Buying Dani Shapiro's New Book at Brookline Booksmith, so I Can Be Better Prepared for the JCC Jewish Book and Culture Fair

So I'm in Brookline with my mom, and of course I do what I do whenever I'm in Brookline--head to the Brookline Booksmith. As a good indie bookseller, I try to buy something. This time I picked up Dani Shapiro's Devotion; Shapiro is the opener for the JCC Book and Culture Fair, which runs throughout November.

All events take place at the Harry and Rose Samson JCC
6255 N. Santa Monica Boulevard in Whitefish Bay.

Monday, November 1st, 7 PM
Dani Shapiro, Devotion, a memoir.
My friend Fran at the Hickory Stick in Connecticut tells me Dani Shapiro is just a wonderful speaker. More on this when I finish the book!


Wednesday, November 3rd, 7 PM
Myla Goldberg, The False Friend.
Dorene at the JCC has been reading this and loves it. And who didn't love The Bee Season?

Wednesday, November 10th, 7 PM
Joel Hoffman, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning.

Thursday, November 11th, 6 PM
Laurel Snyder, Baxter, The Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher.
Stuffing yourself with kosher pickles and challah might do the trick...

Monday, November 15th, 7 PM
Lousia Shafia, Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life.

Wednesday, November 17th, 7 PM
Daniel Levin, The Last Ember.
Jody tells me this is a very good thriller, perfect for Daniel Silva fans.

Sunday, November 21st, 7 PM
Joel Chasnoff, The 188th Crybaby Brigade: A Skinny Jewish Kid from Chicago Fights Hezbollah.

Tuesday, November 30th, 7 PM
Thanassis Cambanis, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah's Leginos and their Endless War Against Israel.

Tickets for all events are $5 and are available pre-sale JCC or at the door. Such a deal!

Larry Ashmead, 1932-2010

When I was working at Warner Books in the mid 1980's, an editor named Larry Ashmead was hired. It was rather rare to get new blood at that time, but he came with a storied past, which means he had lots of stories.

Of course he acquired many books in his tenure, but what I most recall was his picking up the mass market rights to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, in 12 volumes. Not the sure-fire hit you say, particularly as it was still available in four trade paperback volumes? No worries--those were the days when the mass market channel could take on anything. I'm not sure it took on Powell that well, though I did get my Mom and my sister Merrill to read the entire cycle (I never did). Larry's secret, which I now pass on to you--start with volume 3.

He told me how to publicize a few other books (I was a publicist) to no avail; I wasn't exactly cut out for that life (my stomach was constantly in knots) and I moved to Milwaukee to sell books.

I crossed paths with Larry again when I was at Schwartz. He was an editor at Harper now, and had pretty much launched Simon Winchester in the United States with his acquisition of The Professor and the Madman. He hit it off with John, our other buyer (someday I'll describe the complicated by balanced way that we divided up the buying in the mid-nineties) and for years afterwards, John would receive his annual collection of funnies.

The funnies were photocopied cartoons, in shorts, and silliness, sort of a pre-internet precursor to that aunt who puts you on her forwarded joke list. Come on, you have one!

I never got on the list, which sort of made me jealous. Then Bertha Venation came out. Then I read about his passing in The New York Times. Then the memories came back, like you've lost a bunch of files and then someone pulled out a drawer and they all fell on the floor and now you're putting them back and saying, hey, you had an effect on a lot of people. I guess that's the way things go. You'll be missed.

It's Local History Week at Boswell!

It took a writeup by Roberta Wahlers in the Journal Sentinel for me to figure out that we were cohosting two local history events in one week. On Tuesday, Megan Daniels is discussing Milwaukee's Early Architecture at the Rare Book Room of the central branch of the Milwaukee Public Library. And on Wednesday, Erika Janik is at Boswell to talk about A Short History of Wisconsin.

Another upcoming event where the associated book hit our bestseller list is James South's Mad Men and Philosophy, his co-edited collection of essays on the hit A&E television show. Hey, another good gift for Claudia, my sister who I just visited (see previous post). It's the only show she watches, aside from Top Chef (we're both upset about the most recent person losing, by the way). When my other sister Merrill finds out we're having an event with South on Tuesday, September 28th (at 7), she'll want to extend her visit.

Our paperback nonfiction bestseller list for last week (excluding a large school order)

1. Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer (just out, on our new paperback table)

2. Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell (a book club is reading this and I hand-sold one!)

3. Milwaukee's Early Architecture, by Megan Daniels

4. A Short History of Wisconsin, by Erika Janik

5. Mad Men and Philosophy, co-edited by James South (yes, I know there is another editor, Rod Carveth, but he isn't the department chair at Marquette.)

6. Are You There Vodka? It's me, Chelsea, by Chelsea Handler

7. Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer (working better for us in paperback, seemingly)

8. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (Riverside Theater event on 10/23. Tickets at the box office or on the website.)
9. Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, by Timothy Pauketat*

10. American Heritage Dictionary (rack size edition, could it be a school is requiring one?)

*I think Conrad is recommending Cahokia. If not, I should get him to read it. The ancient city was on the site of St. Louis, which is almost local. Well, more so than Florida.

Updating the Blogs that I Follow

It happens. Blogs burn out. Mine hasn't--I assure you that before I stop this thing, I'll move to a once or twice a week schedule. Currently I have enough to yabber about that I can post daily.


But other bloggers move on. One blog I followed moved on to Twitter. Another stopped to write a book. But where does that leave me and my iGoogle page (where the blogs I follow show up)?

So I've gone back to the well to find some interesting book blogs that I previously was not consulting regularly.


Here's what's been added to my home page:


The Green Apple Core, from the Green Apple bookstore in San Francisco. Recent posts on the San Francisco Borders closing, the release of Freedom, and locating a copy of The Elegance of the Hedgehog when a customer told them it had an animal in the title.


Between the Covers, from Denver's Tattered Cover has a post on the new feature in Poets and Writers' September-October issue. I feel like last season's Miss America passing on her tiara.


The New York Times Book Review's Paper Cuts. A recent post is on the new edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

A visit with my Sister Claudia, and a Look at her New Chinese Textbook Tells me That I Brought Her the Right Gift.

I'm off to visit my mom in Massachusetts, and though I'm rather adept at taking public transportation from the airport, I was lucky enough this time to be picked up by my sister Claudia. We had a very nice lunch at the Sichuan Gourmet on Beacon Street, where we had very good dumplings, string beans, and eggplant, and an ok chicken dish.

After a few errands, we wound up at Mom's place where we looked at her new Chinese textbook, The Routledge Course in Modern Manderin Chinese (there's also a workbook*), written with Baozhang He, Pei-Chia Chen, and Meng Yeh. We played with some of the exercises on the accompanying website (it's got a randomized password, so you really need the book in order to get on), and I was quizzed on character recognition of the numbers one through ten, and tried to recognize whether the voice in an exercise was that of a student or teacher.

Claudia's Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar has been successful enough to go into a second printing, and her new supplemental Chinese guide, Chinese Demystified, is coming out in October. There's also The Lady in the Painting, a reader that my niece Jocelyn also worked on, and of course Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar, which we carry at Boswell.

So it makes sense that my gift to Claudia was Deborah Fallows' Dreaming in Chinese: Modern Lessons in Life, Love, and Language. In short but insightful chapters, Fallows looks at how Chinese culture has affected the spoken and written language of Mandarin, and vice versa. Pleases and thank yous, for example, are almost obligatory in English usage, but they create distance among the Chicnese. It can sound harsh, but repeating words, it turns out, can soften the blow.

Other chapters cover Chinese names, the direction/time connection, compound words, and of course Chinese characters. Fallows has a Ph.D. in linguistics, she came to this project during the three years when her well-known husband James was posted in China.

So I know that Claudia will find it interesting; many of our conversations over the years reminded me of Fallows' writing. Therefore, my only regret is that Claudia didn't write the book first!

*The book is available in simplified and traditional character formats. Simplified is more popular, and has the additional advantage of having key color shading for certain concepts.

Display Rotation or...We Don't Want the Store to Get Boring

I keep buying a lot of goofy office stuff. I don't know if it's appropriate for every cubicle, but it certainly can work in the home office. We just got in the blue dog stapler. One compliment, no sale yet.

Book club display is up at the front desk for our fall picks. I did a test run of my presentation for a local AAUW group. Did I mention this already? It seemed to go well. My presentation will be on Friday, September 24th, along with one of my picks, Eric Puchern, who will be talking about his novel Model Home, coming any second in paperback.

Owl display is in progress. Surprisingly enough, we were out owl bookmarks and journals. I had just gotten in an order (my first tableware) of mugs, appetizer plates, and napkins. I'm a little wary about tabletop, but I had a couple oohing and ahhing over it, and it gave me the chance to start selling Wesley the Owl again. It was doing well on our bird display last fall, but then sort of died.

More Tees from Out of Print

Lose a sale to ebook, make it up in tee shirt?

I don't know if that's going to keep us going (inappropriate humor--we're doing ok), but we did have a good initial sale on the book-related shirts from Out of Print, so we brought in some more styles, including 1984, Naked Lunch, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

What's Selling at Boswell?--Lots of Hardcover Mysteries

Our hardcover fiction bestseller list for last week could have almost been from a mystery bookstore. With six of our top ten titles being either mystery or mystery crossover (we originally put Stieg Larsson in fiction and there he still stays--almost all of his copies are sold out off table displays and our Boswell's Best section anyway), we're seeing the pop of handselling (both Robinson and Lippman had great recs from Anne and Sharon), and our popular new-and-noteworthy mystery case. This was actually suggested by several customers including a former bookstore owner. Thanks Pat V. and Carol H.

1. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson
2. Bad Boy, by Peter Robinson

3. I'd Know You Anywhere, by Laura Lippman

4. Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson

5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

6. Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith

7. Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen

8. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender
9. Faithful Place, by Tana French

10. City of Veils, by Zoe Ferraris

I had missed that amazing review from Francine Prose that also put Death of the Adversary on our paperback fiction list. I had to get a reminder from our buyer Jason and our rep Anne. Here it is, if you haven't read it. To pretty much quote, the books are masterpieces and Keilson is a genius. Quite compelling!

In my trip to Salt Lake City last week, it became clear that we are simply selling whatever my friend Miriam is interested in. She had just finished Martin Cruz Smith's newest (with raves) and was in the middle of David Mitchell.

Our bestselling hardcover fiction title last week was not on this list. It was Mockingjay, which was reported on the kids' list. However, next week's winner will surely be an adult book--we had a very good first day on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.