Yes, a significant slice of yearly book sales take place from Thanksgiving to the end of the year, and publishers push out a lot of flashy co-op and displays. But booksellers surveyed by PW plan to handsell beyond the hype even in this busy time.
Wallpaper Pro Gets Hang of
Historical Fiction
Think Lawrence Cirelli's Harvesting Ice (Town Book Press, Sept.) is one of those titles in the hot arctic adventure category?
Think again. Cirelli's novel is set is against the historical backdrop of 1927 Prohibition-time Manhattan, with its main character, unlucky in love Mark Lerner, at one point readying an upstate New York inlet for an ice harvest in idyllic days before the stock market crash.
Grace V. Roth, manager of the Town Book Store in Westfield, N.J., made the decision to publish Cirelli as the first adult fiction author through the bookstore's two-year-old Town Book Press line. "We love it, both for the wonderful writing style and captivating story and because the author is relatively local--and has a full-time job hanging wallpaper," said Roth, obviously eager to play fairy godmother.
Town Book Store has booked Cirelli, who began his novel in a writing class, for some local book signings at area Barnes & Noble and Borders stores. Nearby indie Clinton Bookshop also will hold an event and is already recommending the book in its newsletter. Town Book Store itself, no surprise, is featuring the book for its own book club in February.
Town Book's promo budget d sn't include too much travel, although Roth has ideas to attach to Cirelli's vacation travel, any outlying wallpaper hanging gigs as well as upcoming ice harvest festivals going on this winter. The press is certainly committing to this novel--it's done a healthy 4000-copy print run on the trade paperback release.
Santa Stays Alive for
Shadow Mountain Press
Like the Town Book Store, Mormon chain bookstore Deseret Books also has its own publishing line, Shadow Mountain Press.
And this holiday season, the press is saying "Bite Me."
Don't Bite Me I'm Santa Claus (Shadow Mountain Press, Oct.), that is.
Sandi Palmer, who works at Deseret's Layton Hills, Utah, store recommends this book, written by German-language professor and memoir writing instructor Tom Plummer, "as a nice and relaxing break from the rigors of the holiday season."
Instead of children's letters to Santa, Plummer compiles letters from adults, interspersed with his own memories of Christmas. These letters are "both touching and insightful as one gets with age and wisdom," said Palmer.
As for the origin of the title, it comes from Plummer's recollection at age five of a Santa backing away from his dog-guarded door, saying just that.
Teen Angst in Perspective
Errol Lincoln Uys's Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression (TV Books, July) is the companion volume to the 1997 award-winning documentary film made by the son and daughter-in-law of Uys, a former international editor-in-chief of Readers Digest and previous author of a historical novel, Brazil.
But nominating bookseller Jill Carpenter of Sewanee, Tenn.“based Jill Carpenter Books, hadn't seen the theatrical, television or current video release of the documentary.
"I am not usually a fan of companion volumes, but this is a memorable book in its own right, well written, with gripping subject matter," she said. Instead she was impressed by author Uys's synthesis of the thousands of letters from "boxcar boys" and boxcar girls," his more than 500 interviews and the book's stunning photographs by Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange.
Bringing Out the ER Prose P t
"It's not an easy book to describe, but one which is proving an easy handsell," says Hungry Mind Bookstore's Christopher Hubbuch about Frank Huyler's The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine (Univ. of California Press, Sept.).
The hardcover's reasonable $19.95 price point helps, noted Hubbuch, but 32-year-old p t and physician Huyler's prose--called "justifiably Chekhovian" by medical journal The Lancet--is the real draw.
Thanks to PW's August 30 starred review of the book, the press has already upped the initial print run and is sending New Mexico-based Huyler on tour. Huyler was already appeared on NPR's Fresh Air, and an excerpt was just prominently featured in the Washington Post.
A Stocking Stuffer of Celebrity Encounters
"It really showcases everything that's weird and strange about living in Alaska," said Cook Inlet Books Company bookseller Lynn Dixon about the show put on by tuxed d comedian/pianist Mr. Whitekeys at Fly-By-Night Club in her hometown, Anchorage. One part of that act is asking contributions from the audiences about any brush--and we mean any--with celebrity; those stories are collected in Whitekeys's Elvis Presley's Pharmacist Was My Sunday School Teacher (Alaska Northwest Books, Oct.), a small-sized book that's "a perfect quirky stocking stuffer even if you don't live in Alaska," Dixon said, who shares with us that she was once "almost kicked in the head by David Carradine" at a kung-fu demonstration banquet.
Wo d by Woodcuts
"A little secret of a book that kisses you while you sleep, wake, dream" is the provocative teaser from Looking Glass Bookstore's Lance Popoff for In a Japanese Garden (Council Oak Books, Sept.). The text, by Charmaine Aserappa, begins with a city dweller's lament of a confined and hectic life, and then her "waking dream" where she finds elements of the traditional Japanese garden. Original woodcuts by Akiko Naomura take readers through the elements of pebble, lantern, leaf, lily pad, frog and butterfly. It's a book "that fits comfortably in your hands and seems to return your gaze with an invitation to peer beneath the cover woodcut and discover what gold it is to be beneath the surface, between its covers," said Popoff.
A Tree Tale by a Persun
"This has been met with both positive and negative comment," said Washington State-author Terry Persun about his choice of narrator--yes, a tree--in his novel The Witness Tree (Implosion Press, 1998).
But a key positive response has come from Leslie Oleson, who works in Barnes & Noble's Bellevue, Wash., store.
"Since discovering it a couple of months ago I have been recommending it to those who ask. I haven't had a person turn it down yet," she told PW. Persun's story is of the Marshall twins, artistic painter Lewis and pragmatic business man Jeffrey Marshall, but the 100-year-old oak tree that grows near the boys' childhood home actually "tells" the story of the twins' struggle and reconciliation by tapping into "common thought," the higher intelligence Persun believes permeates nature.
"In less capable hands, this story line would come off as hopelessly silly," said a Small Press Review earlier this year. "But Persun manages to suspend disbelief as he weaves an imaginative tale exploring the complex relationship between art and madness."
Call It 'On Amish Mountain'
A recent favorite in Fort Dodge, Iowa's The Book Shelf bookstore is Among the Lilies by self-published Kansas City-based author Mary Adriano and Mary Bruno (Lily Publications, Aug. 1996). Set in the time period following the Civil War, it follows the trials of an 18-year-old Amish girl, Rachael, after she marries an unbaptized "outsider" with a dark past.
"Our customers report sleepless nights while tackling the 712-page book and every one of them strongly recommends it to others," said The Book Shelf's Terry M hnke. "We feel this is a sleeper that will connect everyone during the Christmas season and we will display it prominently in the store."
Western Boyhood
"It has hard times, good times, moments of absolute hilarity, rattlesnakes, bobcats and a crusty grandfather," said Tattered Cover's Gayle Ray about Gary N. Penley's Colorado boyhood memoir Rivers of Wind (Filter Press, Oct. 1998).
Local Flavor
Beth Buchwach is a general manager of Borders, North Pittsburgh, Pa. But her December staff selection pick, Cooking Fearlessly (Fearless Press, Nov.) comes from an Austin, Tex., restaurant called Hudson's on the Bend, which she has visited.
"I always like to have an unusual cookbook to recommend to customers around the holidays since so many are buying gifts for cooking enthusiasts and cookbook collectors," she explained.
This one fits the bill nicely. Recipes "are expertly explained creations with just enough chatty advice." Regional cuisine "gets its due--rattlesnake cakes in a pistachio crust!--but this is anything but stereotypical Tex-Mex." There's even "a meringue dessert that's a tribute to Ann Richards's hairdo. You get the idea."
Thanks to enthusiastic handseller Buchwach, indeed we do.
