Quality Over Quantity?

Sorry to have anemic posts this week, folks. I just returned from a trip to Orlando with Dylan and Becky to celebrate a five-year-old about to turn six. Fun with Becky’s sister, free food at the Club Level of the Hard Rock Hotel, and free passes to Universal Studios. I was dropped off at Books & Books just in time to switch my Bibliovore t-shirt from Unshelved for a sweaty, crumpled guayabera from my luggage - the saving grace of said guayabera being its lack of smoothie wiped from Dylan’s crusted lips – splash some water on my face, and join the fun of Algonquin Night.

To sum last week up…

My closet began leaking again, but I caught it early enough to save my clothes. The landlord had re-tarred the roof by the time I returned.

The pool at the Hard Rock has speakers which let you hear music underwater, pool-side food and beverage service, a volleyball court, two hot tubs, gazebos, a fake beach area, and a 240-foot waterslide. The lowlight of the stay was seeing a Poison video, but I had their cassette tape so I can’t complain too vehemently. I rate the hotel 5 power chords out of 5, plus a glory note for the free wine bottle and birthday cake.

Becky’s sister just bought a house, and we stayed there as well. I used an allen-wrench drill bit to assemble her dining room set and shattered a chair leg. In response, Becky’s sister made me coffee and eggs. Enough said.

Not only were both Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure deserted because everyone was at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but the Hard Rock room key also acts as a fast past. The Hulk, Dueling Dragons, Spiderman, Revenge of the Mummy, Jaws, Men in Black - it’s all a lot more fun when the ride lasts so much longer than the wait to climb on board. Love the world of Seuss Landing. Love the heroes of Marvel Superhero Island.

Half the people at the park at any given time were crammed into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Trying to navigate the mass of bodies was like trying to push your way through a house party to reach the keg, only this keg was all over the place. There were lines for the gift shop, for Christ’s sake. Seeing Hogsmeade, with Hogwarts looming above, is priceless. But once you’ve seen the view, don’t go through the entrance, because Universal blew it; The Wizarding World should have been its own separate park. Instead, it’s a festival of waiting.

We caught Mat Hoffman's jaw-dropping Aggro Circus at Universal. Mat Hoffman was only part of the show on video, but we ended up seeing him at breakfast the next morning, two tables away. First Watch, delicious, delicious First Watch, when are you coming to Miami?

Tuesday: Angel Face
One thing about the birthday celebration; the cool little kid we brought to Orlando to have fun with on Tuesday was replaced with a spoiled brat on Wednesday who none of us could stand.
Wednesday: Snurt Face
Becky seemed worried that I’d have doubts about us moving in now that I’ve seen the Dylan’s dark side. Really, it means he’s more comfortable around me, and he’s testing his boundaries. Or so I’m telling myself.

After one good day and one bad day, Thursday was a tug of war. At First Watch, Dylan kept hitting my arm. I asked him why, and he hit me some more. I told him if he wanted to express affection, there were much better ways of doing it. He stopped hitting me, thought about it, then stood up and gave me a big hug around the neck.

The good stuff is so worth the bad.

Algonquin Night II: Be There or Die Regretful

Abe Froman works for Edward Mckay in Greensboro, North Carolina.  The other day he told me he was disappointed he wouldn’t be in town for Algonquin Night because, “If it’s Algonquin, you pretty much know it’s going to be good.”

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill is a small press based in North Carolina which sets the tone for a lot of marketing at larger publishing houses.  Email newsletters are commonplace, but Algonquin’s is one you look forward to seeing in your inbox.  As booksellers across the country buzz about the conversational tone, humor, and solid recommendations of the Algonquin Annotations (or Workman Off the Shelf, or Workman Unbound, or whatever they want to call themselves), a the big publishing houses are attempting to mimic the format.

Booksellers may not be the brightest lot – we are rearranging the deckchairs of our favorite titles on the sinking Titanic of an outdated retail model, after all – but we can still smell bullshit.
The Big Six throw hundreds of titles at the wall and see what sticks.  They ride huge mega-sellers until they’re dead, push them for a while, then drag them another few yards.  The Algonquin philosophy is no less aggressive, but a little less frantic; they publish a few fiction titles a month, and they believe there is no backlist.

In other words, they push just as hard for Roland Merullo's 2007 Breakfast with Buddha as they do for Jay Varner’s Nothing Left to Burn which comes out in six weeks.

Algonquin is like that favorite friend or bookseller who you go to time and again because their recommendations are so great.  That and the “no backlist” rule are important parts of Algonquin’s mystique, but I think what really sets them apart is how their titles turn readers into evangelists.  Ask Darby C. about Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife.  Ask Debra L. about Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.  Ask anyone who has read Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. You’ll see a look come over her face, a shine in her eyes that says, this book took me somewhere special, and part of me never left.


Me?  I’ll rave about all three of those greats, plus Jack O’Connell's haunting, imaginative The Resurrectionist, Hillary Jordan’s mighty, stark, dazzling Mudbound, and Brock Clarke’s* microscopically precise character portrait An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England.

The book industry gets criticized for gripping practices which have been in place for seventy years, for refusing to adapt to how the buying public wants to read.  Like the rest of the industry, Algonquin will need to get serious about digital formatting, but in the meantime they represent all that was right with the book business in the 1940’s.  Writers got small advances, not so much that they threatened the financial stability of the entire publishing house, but enough so the author wouldn’t starve.  The books were much more likely to make these modest advances back.  Success, even as defined by not losing money, allowed the author to publish another, to grow and develop his or her craft.

That’s why Algonquin sets the tone for publishing today.  People say, “I love John Irving” or “I loved The Historian,” they don’t say, “I love Random House” or “I love Little, Brown.”
Well, I love Algonquin.  And the more people who love them with me, the better the future of storytelling will be.

* If Brock Clarke sounds familiar, it might be because of this post, which I wrote before I knew he was coming.  Stop by Books & Books of Coral Gables Thursday at 7pm to see him present Exley, which goes on sale for the rest of the country in October.  But for you?  Thursday.  If you like a good buzz with your book, you can also catch co-authors Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch as they present The Wine Trials and The Beer Trials.

You Have to Read it, It's a Classic

Friends chide me for never reading the classics. I have copies of Slaughter House Five and 1984 on my shelf that were purchased for me by friends who were appalled that I’d never read them. Purchased, as in, believed so strongly that I needed to read a book that they pulled out their wallets, spent their hard-earned cash, and put the books in my hand.

Okay, Moya bought me a $7.99 Vonnegut paperback at a 30% employee discount and Abe Froman handed me a stripped copy of Orwell he’d rescued from the trash, but it’s the effort which matters, the love of reading which is so strong it can’t abide someone calling himself a reader without having experienced these particular titles.

If I read everything I should’ve read if I took more English Literature in college, I’d have no time left for anything new.

Which dodges my real problem. Patton Oswalt, in the glorious, buy-it-now-if-you-haven’t-heard-it comedy concert Werewolves and Lollipops, does a bit about the Star Wars prequels. “Do you like Angelina Jolie?” George Lucas asks. “Well here’s a picture of Jon Voight's nutsack.”

“I don’t care where the stuff I love comes from,” Oswalt raves, “I just love the stuff I love.”

A few times I’ve tried to discover where the stuff I love comes from and it’s ended in tears of boredom. Akira Kurosawa's “Seven Samurai” comes to mind. The first disc was fine, but not fine enough for me to ever put the second disc in and see how it ended – particularly not after having seen so many decades of derivatives that the ending was never in doubt. The second disc sat on my TV stand for weeks before I admitted to myself I’d never watch it. Besides, I had another classic in my queue, just waiting to ship. “Dawson's Creek,” or something.

I went through a noir phase with mixed results. “The Third Man” blew my hair back, for sure, but “Laura” was only decent, and “The Big Sleep” put me to sleep. Twice.

When it comes to books, I balk at going back. Reading The Old Man and the Sea didn’t make me want to read The Sun Also Rises. I loved Pride and Prejudice, but not enough to pick up another Jane Austen. Put all the zombies and sea monsters you want in there, I still ain’t biting.

I imagine I’ll read Bleak House one day, and I’ve always planned on reading Great Expectations (although knowing everything which happens in the latter will surely dampen the reading pleasure), but… when? I could bust out a shelf of books in the time it will take me to slog through a Dickens, regardless of the fact that he’s the favorite author of two of my favorite authors (Stephen King and John Irving). Woolf? Dostoyevsky? The Great Gatsby? All gathering dust on my shelves while I read the next stunning / original / mesmerizing voice of his / her / our / generation.

It’s just no fun recommending a classic. Suggest Tolstoy (no, I haven’t read him) and it's like saying Meryl Streep is a good actress. Well, no shit. Thank God I asked you for help, bookseller. I think I'll just go home and wait for Oprah's next book club title.

Ah, but when you can sort through a glut of new titles and match one to its reader, you have power.

Amazon Enjoys Tossing Bovine Salad

A lot’s been written about the evils of bullying, hateful, baby-barbecuing Amazon (or not).  But lately they’ve been doing something more insidious, and I don’t see a single word about it.  Instead of a retailer, Amazon is becoming a wholesaler.

I’m not talking about the deal Andrew Wiley signed with them for exclusive rights to audio versions of his author’s books, a much-derided (and even parodied) decision which makes them a publisher, or even CreateSpace, their self-publishing arm.  I mean that sometimes at Books & Books, we have to order from the A-Word to make our customers happy.

To clarify for non-bookies, there’s a difference between a publisher and a wholesaler.  Publishers put a variety of authors into print, distributing them to bookstores, retailers, and wholesalers across the world.
Wholesalers carry a variety of publishers.  Let’s say you’re a bookstore, or a retailer that sells books, and you want to carry Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky because it rocks the socks right off your feet.  Basically, you can order it directly from the publisher for a better discount, or from a wholesaler if you need it fast.

Books & Books orders from hundreds of publishers.  Although several warehouses which were operating when I started bookstore life have closed, there are still half a dozen we order with regularly.

In February, Nicholas Sparks published Last Song in paperback on a Tuesday.  Thursday, we couldn’t get it.  Hachette (the publisher) and Ingram (the biggest wholesaler in America) were both sold out.  In fact, none of the wholesalers had it – not Baker & Taylor, not Southern Book Service, not Partners East, Partners West, or Bookazine.

Lately, this is happening more as publishers play it safe with low print runs.  Demand for a new book exceeds what they’ve printed (or an author dies, or wins a Pulitzer) and we end up waiting weeks for a reprint.  But Nicholas Sparks?  Come on.  Hachette would not be caught by surprise that a best-selling author is in demand.

Meanwhile, Amazon had plenty of Last Song in stock.  I had a choice.  I could send my neighbors’ dollars to this online retailer in the Northwest, or I could disappoint the Books & Books customers who had ordered the book.  I tasted bile in my throat when I sent Miami money 2,700 miles from my community.  To add insult to injury, we got a 42% discount and free 2-day shipping, the same terms we’d get from a wholesaler if they had it in stock.

How in holy hell do you compete with that?

Before you start shouting about free market and competition, please understand we pay publishers much more per book than Amazon, so we simply can’t offer the same discounts. Sorry.

Amazon did the same thing with S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. The New York Times Book Review salivated over it and Amazon bought every printed copy available, effectively making themselves the exclusive distributor. This has happened with two other titles lately, but I can’t remember those titles because we didn’t actually break down and go A-word.

It’s useless, but I can't help getting all bent out of shape about giving our hard-won sales to the biggest online retailer on the planet.  When they’re so proud to buy at their local independent, how would our customers feel if they knew?

Divorced

Last week I was very excited to have scheduled a date to sign my divorce papers. As a matter of fact, I was happy about it right up until the night before. Of course I also felt nervous to see Andi.

Cruising the internet a while back, I saw a video of her performing with Exit 19. The sound quality was shit, as sound on phones and digital cameras always is, but that wasn’t the problem. Even with poor sound, I would have been mesmerized if we’d still been together. With the months apart, it was like looking at a stranger.

Along with my heart, she broke my love goggles.

I once used the metaphor of an athlete being confined to a wheelchair to describe what losing Andi was like. That felt right for a while, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m up, I’m moving forward, and being with Becky is the best kind of freedom.

Now I feel happy and sad at the same damned time. There’s the person who promised to love Andi for the rest of his life, who meant it with all his heart, and who expected to die in her arms. Well, he did die. He died alone (more accurately, surrounded by friends, but not the one friend he expected to be with) and I don’t mourn his passing, but I mourn his innocence, his world view, his absolute self-assurance in matters of the heart.

Clearly, I needed to be knocked down a peg.

I miss our friendship, but looking at her fills me with sadness. The undying lover has been replaced by a man who wishes her nothing but the best, and means it with all his heart.

The home I shared with Andi in Oasis Condominiums only exists in my memory and in some great pictures, but it will never be again. While I mourn the official end of this era in my life, I’m also looking forward to what happens next. I feel pain and excitement, sadness and relief, regret and love, all jumbled together.

Becky and I have picked a place in the Gables, where our studios will share space, where Dylan can have his own room and attend an amazing school, where our family has room to grow. Like Oasis, the Gables home with Becky only exists in my mind, in pictures, and in dreams, but it’s no less real.

I still don’t have a word for all these emotions; it’s just what happens now. Close one book and open a new one. Let one thing go to pick up another. Say goodbye to the defining relationship of your life to make room for the love of your life.