Spirit of the season: a group of book bloggers has founded "buy books for the holidays," a nonprofit project whose name says it all. The group will post essays "about why and how to buy books for the people on your gift list, shopping suggestion lists, information about reading charities and spotlights of independent bookstores." Indies can sign up through the site.

More on Robert Dike Blair, founder and longtime owner of the Vermont Book Shop, Middlebury, Vt., who died on Saturday. Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, remembers:

Dike hired me at the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, right out of college. I was hired to work down in the stock room while the regular guy worked through the holidays at a Christmas tree farm--making far more money than he would in a bookstore. Just as my stint was up, someone from the "shop floor" left and Dike asked me if I'd like to stay on. I leapt at the chance. I worked at the Middlebury store for almost two years and then ran the Waitsfield, Vt., branch for five.

The very first note of congratulations that I received upon being named the executive director of NEIBA was an e-mail from Dike. I felt like I'd come back home.

Dike was a gentleman of the first order and a great bookman.

Ron Suskind say this about What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse: “Many people talk about what they can do to reach across divides, to create a better world. The Rosens didn't just talk -- they plunged, headlong, into an extraordinary adventure of shared purpose and unflinching commitment. Michael Rosen takes readers on a death-defying journey -- gritty, surprising, funny and fiercely honest. What was defied? The death of hope. What we're now graced with? An inspring book about what one family can accomplish.”

In a new book I’m five chapters into writing, I say that Labor Day has long been my New Year’s Day resolution-wise. First, I hate New Year’s parties, but more important, the bittersweet transition from summer to fall always forces me to stop and prioritize, to gear up for a busy fall. (I’ll post the entire essay soon.) Not that summers are quiet anymore; this one has been especially busy as we kickstarted a slew of good books while planning the 2010 books and setting our priorities for the fall shows.

This fall, it’s another round of 9 regional trade shows, with which I have a love/hate relationship, but mostly love. They are hell to organize but the payoff is tremendous, especially as we bring authors and booksellers together, one of the best things we do. I’ll be at GLiBA and MBA this year, introducing a # of debut writers to booksellers, but also taking Garth Stein, Mike Perry and David Wroblewski on well-deserved victory laps. Our sales reps will showing the same love and care at their shows. I’ll be writing more about these shows in the coming weeks and giving thanks to the very forward-thinking and selfless reg’l execs.

And I do hope to get on track blog-wise here. Apologies, a wild summer: getting my daughter off to college (about which I wrote an essay for a father-daughter book coming out next year), editing a 172 page book of essays by booksellers called the Great Lakes Reader (to be ready by GLiBA; and 8 more regional volumes to come – booksellers, need more essays); teaching in Denver for a week; watching IndieBound grow and flourish; watching e-book sales grow faster than expected; reading great stuff on our fall lists; finishing edits on two winter 2010 original trade pb’s; launching a backlist-book-of-the-day blog with my associate Marcus; and finishing the last draft of Work 101, which Richard Hunt at Clerisy is going to publish. On the music front, my boomer5 blog is in full swing, if also slim for August, and I got to see the Subdudes, Tom Rush and Cracker in concert in cozy venues. (My summer anthem this year was Cracker’s Euro-Trash Girl.) I also accomplished the modest goal of not wearing any socks the entire month of August!

I am lucky enough to live on the same street I work, albeit six blocks away, and the street at my end is tree-lined, forming a shaded tunnel every summer. It’s a modest neighborhood, and in keeping with that, I heard a lone cicada walking home one night. I have never heard just one cicada and never one in the city. It was both a lonely and encouraging sound in an otherwise noisy August for this country. One voice, not raised, but I heard it perfectly. Is the cicada trying to tell us all something?

“It’s late September and I really should be back at school.”-- Rod Stewart

Labor Day is my New Year’s Day.

            The first Monday in September is a much more significant milestone for me than some arbitrary day in the middle of winter. I take stock at the end of each summer, make my resolutions then. We are sad to see a string of sunny days at the beach come to an end, but secretly, we look forward to a little more structure back in our day, and, admit it, seeing our kids off to the school bus again.

            As part of the catalog of tricks our minds play on us, recent years telescope down to a blur, but the distant time of our lives when things felt so dramatic and important remains crystal clear. For me, the memories of heading back to college are so vivid that September still holds the place in my annual rhythm as the time of new beginning, of new year. And nothing lingers in my synapses more, as signal and symbol, than the smell of fresh paint. That slightly stinky sting of paint fumes is forever melded in my head with the fresh start that college presented each fall, and with the four – okay, five - years that were at the center of my transition from teens to twenties.

Paint?

            Going as I did to a huge state school, maintenance was light and the chaos was heavy. It became standard practice, at least at that place in the early Seventies, for everyone to paint their rooms the first week back. Over the summer, an institutional pale green or yellow may have been slapped on, or not. Either way, we arrived with suitcases, records…and paint. I like to think we were just expressing our individuality, but mostly, we were just trying to impress the opposite sex. A really wild color could elicit much comment for quite awhile, often past the point where you got sick of living in a purple box.

            I was a dark blue guy myself. Something about sky and water. But we all felt cool and “individual,” all of us in our matching long hair, beat-up jeans, and wrinkled t-shirts, The Dead or Pink Floyd blaring out of most every open door or window.  Did I ever paint a heart or a girl’s name on a wall, then quickly paint it over? I don’t think so, but I can see the possibility in my mind’s eye and suspect that maybe I did. A deep sigh, an adjustment upwards of the volume knob of the stereo, and more paint to complete the fresh start.

            I may sound overly nostalgic but don’t be fooled. I love looking back but would never want to go back. Now, I have great family and friends, a job I love and a car that starts without drama. And a new smell rules my life -- the smell of books. Every day is a day of discovery, of finding words in a sequence I’ve never experienced before. And different from college, where everyone is off doing their own thing, I am in a community of like-minded book lovers, a place where everyone is teacher to the other. I am in school for life, and I am still learning, thank goodness.