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'Cause that's what we do around here.

* In the New York Times, an interesting article on how small-scale and niche manufacturing in Brooklyn is prospering even as larger concerns suffer in the economic downturn:

Many business owners interviewed said they were staying strong in this market by employing few workers and keeping their products specialized.

“They tend to be very nimble, even in the downtimes,” said Mr. Kimball. “They can make it through a difficult stretch easier than the bigger players.”

The Web was first seen as a radical alternative to the bricks-and-mortar world, but the truth, it turns out, can be more complicated.

“The original idea of the Internet was to get away from physical geography,” Steven Johnson, a 40-year-old Brooklynite and the author of several tech-related books, said as he sat in the Dumbo loft that serves as the office to Outside.in, a Web site he helped to found two years ago. “The dream was that everybody would be able to telecommute from Wyoming.”

Yet, the Internet has also had the opposite effect by helping to connect people more closely to their physical and political surroundings. And for New Yorkers, whose surroundings are more complex than most, this effect can be particularly powerful, enabling them to take on the long-anonymous, too-big-to-fight city.

Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse wrote a stunningly dumb article for the WSJ in which she argued that the only way for publishers to survive is by throwing lots of advance money at projects they hope will be bestsellers. Happily, people more eloquent than me have done the necessary debunking, criticizing, and introducing of logic.

Okay, I'm foregoing my usual link madness to get a little wonky this morning. Sarah Rettger at the ABA's Omnibus blog had a great link yesterday (what are you doing working Sunday, Sarah??) (Update: while Sarah noticed the link, it's Dan Cullen who deserves credit for posting on Sunday) that I think deserves some analysis and some action.

The link is to a site called Copyblogger, which has columns and advice about how to be a better blogger or online marketer. This particular column, "How to Change the World Using Social Media," seems especially timely after an exciting presidential election that used online media and social networking to make great things happen. It also has a lot to do with my optimism schtick around here, and I think it has the potential to be an inspiration to independent booksellers.

The key term here is social proof, which Wikipedia defines as "a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed."

Translation: people are likely to do what they think other people are doing.

There are some fascinating examples of this: the Werther effect, in which a rash of suicides followed Goethe's novel of a suicidal hero The Sorrows of Young Werther in the 1700s, or the fact that if there is only one person on the scene when another person needs help, they're more likely to do something than if there are several people around, in which case they'll wait to see what other people are going to do, which is likely nothing.

The most relevant example for us, though, goes like this:

A well-intended statistic states, "42% of college graduates never read a book again.” (Dan Poynter’s ParaPublishing)

What people hear is “I don’t enjoy reading, and I’m in a lot of good company.”

I'm reading Francine Prose's wonderful novel Goldengrove, in which the main character's sister has died. She describes the recurrent sensation of remembering the terrible news over and over, after somehow forgetting.

The last couple of days feel like the opposite of that. I keep remembering something wonderful has happened. Zan at A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny describes the almost silly sensation of joy: " Oranges look oranger. Sweaters feel warmer. Rain? Who cares!"

I respect Barack Obama all the more for emphasizing from the very first moment that this only the very beginning of a very long, hard road. But it's good to bask in the glow of something good for a moment. There has been dancing in the streets! I feel like my Pollyanna-ish optimism is suddenly in fashion again.

There is much good writing and reflection about all this, and one of the best (and briefest) is the New York Times' poetry op-eds. My favorite is Joshua Mehigan's, which I've taken the liberty of pasting below. It reminds me of the homely belovedness of my own polling place, PS 282 in Brooklyn, and the simple/complicated goodness/absurdity of American democracy.

The Polling Place

Same place as four years ago. The people arrive
tired by daytime. Nighttime is ten after five.

The flag is lit, and the sculpture of who knows who.
Here’s the fire door, wedged open with Voting and You.

From inside, a floor-wax smell. Shy people come after.
I walk past them into bright light and social laughter.

This could be Bingo. It could be a twelve-step meeting.
It could be a bake sale. I could be home eating.

The bathroom is closed to all but volunteers.
Democracy is slow. It can take many years.

Somebody’s take-out cancels the floor-wax smell.
I could be eating and doing laundry as well.

Suppose the will of the people was as heavy
as our bag of laundry out in the back of the Chevy.

Measured on that scale the will of the person counts
a fraction of a fraction of an ounce,

and if that’s correct my will is not very strong.
Still, if the right one wins I was right all along.

The bathroom is closed to all but the volunteers.
Three tons of dirty laundry is made in four years.

Note: At last weekend's meeting of the board of NAIBA (the regional booksellers's assocation of which I am an executive board member), secretary Eileen Dengler "comissioned" a piece for the upcoming NAIBA newsletter. This is something I've had on my mind lately, so it was a great motivation to write out my thoughts, and Eileen graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here. Your comments are most welcome.

Bookstores in Bad Times

At this particular moment, it’s a challenge to be an idealist and an optimist: two labels I’ve embraced as I’ve found my calling as an independent bookseller. Newspaper headlines, daily sales totals, and our own tightening belts tell us that things are tough, and getting tougher. As we head into the holiday season, where most of us make 40% of our yearly sales, it can seem logical to throw up our hands and wait for the apocalypse.

But booksellers are tough, and relish a challenge. And somehow I keep finding reasons to be optimistic.

For example: if our memories are long enough, we can remember that at least through August, US Census numbers (as reported in Shelf Awareness) showed that bookstore sales continued to rise month by month over last year’s numbers, even as retail sales overall were stagnant. That seems to suggest that bookstores may be more resilient than some other segments of the economy.

And economic hard times can actually be pretty good for purveyors of books. Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly quoted Random House founder Bennett Cerf in her October 6 column: in his 1977 memoir, he asserted “The publishing business has always been rather stable. It doesn't soar when things are going crazy and people with a lot of money are spending it. . . By the same token, when everything goes to hell, books become one of the cheapest forms of pleasure.”

You’ve probably already heard the formulation “Books and Booze”: the two commodities that continue to sell when folks have little money to spend. The 15 or 25 dollars someone spends on a good book represents an investment in pleasure, entertainment, and escape that lasts a lot longer than a movie, and costs a lot less than an iPhone or a Blu-Ray player. (And if you’re selling wine or beer in your bookstore, you’re doubly insured.)

And we have the advantage of being on Main Street, not Wall Street. We’re not answerable to jittery stockholders who demand impossible quarterly growth; we are the ones we have invested in, and we’re in it for the long haul. I think more consumers are starting to understand the benefits of that. Now is the moment when the message of shopping locally to support your local economy is more resonant than ever. We have the marketing tools of IndieBound, as well as our own local first organizations and publicity efforts and personal relationships, to get that message across, and people are listening.

If we are heading into another depression – well, we’ve been here before. The publisher returns system was implemented during the Great Depression of the 1930s – so in a way, our industry has a safety valve built for just such an economic environment. As CEO Avin Domnitz of the American Booksellers Association reminded us in his open letter, now is the time to take advantage of that system, and make sure our inventory is serving us well.

Avin is a pragmatist, as are most booksellers, and I’m grateful to them for reminding me when it’s time to face hard facts. But to quote Avin himself, “Now is the time to look at your business carefully, to first identify trends, and, then, to find ways to enhance those that are positive and to soften those that are negative.”

To me, looking with all honesty at the reasons to be optimistic is one of the ways to enhance positive trends. While we work on controlling our inventory, payroll, and cash flow, we booksellers would all do well to remember the good stuff. It’s never a bad time to get inspired, to be hopeful, to remember what we have to offer, and what we have to rely on, even in tough times.

One of my fellow NAIBA board members passed along an article describing the economic downturn as an approaching storm. It’s scary, and it could get ugly.

But independent bookstores are a port in the storm. We sell a product that people can feel proud – and smart – to spend their money on. We create spaces that offer a welcome third place (and that doesn’t have a two-drink minimum). We offer human connection, and free conversation. We have “one of the cheapest forms of pleasure”, and one of the richest sources of community. We are what people are looking for.

So I’m still an optimist. And like all of us, I’m an idealist. We can and should be savvy business people (so we can keep doing what we’re doing), but we’re never going to make a massive fortune as independent booksellers, no matter how good or bad the economy gets. That's not why we do it. We do it because being an independent bookseller is one of the great good things one can do in the world. And our stores are islands of hope and perspective in scary times. We’ll be fine, because what we have to give is just what is needed now: Community. Ideas. Stories. Shelter from the storm.

For every story like this:
"A Thirsty Mind bookstore/wine bar in Lakeway, Texas -- an affluent suburb of Austin -- is closing March 28. The store was opened in November 2004, and co-owner Pam Headrick said that while Thirsty Mind broke even each month, it would've taken another year for the store to become profitable. "With the economy as bad as it is, we just didn't have the luxury to put more money into the business," she said....Headrick said that opening a combination bookstore and wine bar posed unique challenges....there were the ‘regulars.’ “Some customers would come in each afternoon for a drink,” said Headrick. “This meant that almost every afternoon I was hosting a party. There days you just don't feel like it.”

... there's a story like this (thanks to Shelf Awareness for the link):
"Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery....Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "Ours is a walking neighborhood," she explains. "People are going to other shops and restaurants, the movies. I don't know that there are that many places like that any more around the Los Angeles area."

On the one hand, an unexpected clientele and general economic squeeze puts the kibosh on one bookstore; on another, a great location and supportive neighborhood mean another one is expanding.

And, despite gloomy economic forecasts, there's also this:

"Bookstore sales in January started off the new year nicely, rising 4.7% to $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in January 2007, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. By comparison, total retail sales in January rose 3.9% to $343,938 billion."

Okay, it's not so fair and balanced -- I'm firmly partisan on the optimist side of the aisle. I think one day we might even get a majority. Congratulations, bookstores -- keep up the good work!

It's not even blogging day (but I was gone Monday at the NAIBA meeting), so here are a few quick make-up links.

According to Shelf Awareness, "Bookstore sales last December were $2.113 billion, up 2.7% from $2.057 billion in December 2006, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The year ended on a good note, with sales at $16.768 billion, up 1.1% from $16.589 billion in 2006. During the first half of the year, sales were below the previous year's levels, but stronger results in the second half of 2007 helped pull bookstore sales into the black for the full year." Hooray!

And yours truly is beginning a series over at the Bookshop Blog, telling the story of this crazy dream of opening an indie bookstore. There's lots more going on at BB, so if you get bored with the story of my life there's plenty of links, advice, and personality to keep you there.

I'm off to a morning meeting, then I gotta do some grocery shopping for V-Day dinner with the ALP. If you're in the city and looking for something to do tonight, making books is a nice (free!) option. Insider tip: collage is one of our book decorating options, and I've repurposed a bunch of beautiful publisher catalogs to be snipped up for the purpose. Should be fun. Enjoy the day, however you spend it, and happy reading!

Can I rant for just a tiny minute?

I guess I must have been actually reading back posts of my favorite blogs, because I came across this one on the blog of Lance Fensterman, conference director extraordinaire (BEA *and* Comic Con -- that's right, baby!) and generally funny and observant guy. He's got a link to this story in the MinnPost about Birch Bark Books in Minneapolis, owned by well-to-do and respected author Louise Erdrich but apparently not doing terribly well financially. Here's the opener:

Welcome home from Winter Institute, booksellers! From all I've heard already, this year in Louisville was just as invigorating a session as last year in Portland. Here's where you can find out more:

The lovely Lori Kauffman of Brookline Booksmith was live blogging from WI3 on her blog, Brookline Blogsmith; check it out for some impressions of Danny Meyer's opening presentation on hospitality vs. service, Gary Hirschberg's bit on saving the world while making a living, some bookseller/librarian conspiring, and Lori's pick of the galleys. And I suspect there's more to come -- the intensity of the programming can make it impossible to find time to blog, so sometimes it's all about the recap afterward.

Dan Cullen of the ABA was also live blogging on the ABA blog, Omnibus, and has posted exhaustive coverage of the whole thing, Thursday to Saturday, plus lots of pictures. Dan humbly admits the difficulty of finding time or a single perspective on a weekend that includes "24 educational sessions, 12 rep picks' sessions, 3 keynote addresses, an author reception... and a closing reception", but he also does a killer job of capturing a weekend of "flow", that state of concentrated bliss when you're working so well on the work you love that time doesn't seem to exist. (Here's one of my favorite pictures, of three of my Emerging Leaders Council cohorts: Susan Weiss, Sylla McClellan, and Sweet Pea Flaherty. I know Megan Sullivan was also there; can't wait to hear all about it, guys!)

And of course, today's Shelf Awareness has the first in a series of articles recapping the experience and lessons of WI3, written by John Mutter and Susan Weiss. Looking forward to vicariously absorbing those lessons through them.

(And yes, incidentally, there is a little bit about yours truly and my terrific Wednesday night in there too... thanks for the mention!)

Again, I'd love to get a bookseller or two to write here about Winter Institute: their overall experience, a specific session or topics, or even the people you met. Send me an email or leave a comment if you'd like to be a guest poster.


In the meantime, I was surprised and gratified to read an article in the New York Times this weekend that actually rebutted the "no one reads anymore" opinion -- in an article reviewing the Amazon Kindle. Apparently about two weeks ago Steve Jobs of Apple made an already infamous statement when asked about the Kindle and whether Apple would be looking to get into the e-reader business:

"�It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

In the Times piece, Randall Stross politely but thoroughly demolishes this absurdity, and ends with a challenge for those of us in what we now call "the book business". Here's the passage -- I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.

Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.

One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?

A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.

In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.

If a piece of the book industry’s $15 billion seems too paltry for Mr. Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently. Last week, Apple reported that it posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to December 2007, its best quarter ever, after $24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.

But as recently as 2001, before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was a niche computer company without a mass market hit. It was badly hurt by the 2001 recession and reported revenue of only $5.3 billion for the year. This is, by coincidence, almost exactly what Barnes & Noble reported in revenue for its 2007 fiscal year. In neither case did the company owners look at that number, decide to chain the doors permanently shut and call it quits.

Amazon does not release details about revenue for books, but books were its first business. And Andrew Herdener, a company spokesman, said that Amazon’s book sales “have increased every year since the company began.”

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

Okay, I really intended to try to write up some book reviews today (it's been a long time, have you noticed?) -- but that may have to wait until next week, as time is of the essence as usual. But I can't resist pulling this data from today's Shelf Awareness:

Bookstore sales in November were $1.186 billion, up 7.5% from $1.103 billion in sales in November 2006, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. For the year to date, bookstore sales have been $14.654 billion, up 0.8% from $14.532 billion in the first 11 months of 2006. This marks the fifth month in a row that bookstore sales were up over the same period last year--and the second month in a row that year-to-date sales have topped last year's comparable figures.

I just want to say thanks to all of those who have responded -- in comments, in emails, on the phone, and in person -- to my rather sad end-of-the-year post, and who have said, in essence, Buck Up. Reading's not in decline... you've done so much already... a bookstore is worth waiting for... you'll do it someday... etc. You're all awesome.

Your enthusiasm and optimism, and your confidence in me, is like fuel to a fire. It's so good to have that encouragement -- better even than money. Aside from finally getting over a lingering stomachache I had over New Year's, your comments are the only thing to which I can attribute getting out of the blue funk I've been in. I'm excited again, and ready to roll up my sleeves.

I've just rediscovered an old favorite, Arts & Letters Daily, that great clearinghouse for the ideas being tossed about in the world, and I'm adding it to my Google homepage. Serendipitously enough, today there's a link to the British periodical New Statesman, and an article titled "Why life is good." I'd like to give it to you, as a gift, returning your own encouragement. It's only occasionally about the book stuff, but it is totally about the need for both optimism and working together. You can read the article for the supporting studies and statistics, but here are some excerpts for the jist:

People are not generally negative about their own lives... In contrast, we are unduly negative about the wider world. As a government adviser, I would bemoan what we in Whitehall called the perception gap. Time and again, opinion polls expose a dramatic disparity between what people say about their personal experiences and about the state of things in general.

While we apparently thrive in our own families of many shapes and forms, as social commentators we prefer to look back, misty-eyed, to the gendered certainties of our grandparents' generation.... What is true for families is true for neighbourhoods: we think ours is improving while community life is declining elsewhere. We tend to like the people we know from different ethnic backgrounds but are less sure about such people in general. We think our own prospects look OK but society is going to the dogs....

And yet. There is a different story to be told about our world. It is a story of unprecedented affluence in the developed world and fast-falling poverty levels in the developing world; of more people in more places enjoying more freedom than ever before.... When you read the next report bemoaning falling standards in our schools, remember the overwhelming evidence that average IQs have risen sharply over recent decades. If you think we have less power over our lives, think of the internet, of enhanced rights at work and in law, or remember how it was to be a woman or black or gay 30 years ago....

Self-actualisation is the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There is evidence that more of us are trying to climb that hierarchy. It is in the crowds at book festivals and art galleries, in ever more demanding consumerism with an emphasis on the personal, sensual and adventurous. We want to enjoy ourselves, to be appreciated and to feel we are growing from the experience....

Today, there are signs of a yearning for new ways of working together. There is the growing interest in social and co-operative enterprise and the emergence of new forms of online collaboration... Despite the huge impersonal forces of the modern world, people are prepared not only to believe in a better future, but to work together to build it.

This is what we've got: in our indie bookstores, in our communities of readers. Ways of working together. The possibility of "self-actualization." An alternate story about the world. A good neighborhood. A better world.

(If you'd like more of that sort of thing, you might consider stopping by the bookstore to see Frances Moore Lappe on Monday night -- she's pretty compelling on that optimism and the working together stuff.)

Just when I needed a bit of cheering up about the ol' "decline of reading" hobbyhorse, my friend Mark sent me this great bit of opinion from John McWhorter's column in the New York Sun:

America in 1907 read more than most of us. But did America of 1907 read smarter than us? Transported back to America in 1907, would we savor a book culture less dumbed down than ours? Well, let's take a look at the bestselling fiction of 1907. All 10 were potboilers unknown today. The top seller was "The Lady of the Decoration" by one Frances Little. Others on the list included the likes of "The Port of Missing Men" and "Half a Rogue."

I've been feeling like a bit of a bad blogger lately. As my RSS feed clearly indicates, the blogosphere is filled with retrospectives, best-of lists, summaries of the year in reading, analyses of the state of literacy, bookstores, publishing, etc. in the year that's just ending. Last year I posted a list of all the books I'd read; this year I can't even do that, because I've lost track. (Resolution #1 for 2008: write down all books read, preferably on paper, so I can look back at them.)

While I find myself unable to offer a sweeping, overarching point on the year in books, I have been having, rather typically, some personal year-end sorts of thoughts – about where I (and things) have been, where we're going, why are we doing this again, etc.

(As Little Pete from Pete & Pete, the cult TV series of my youth, says in the New Year's Eve episode, "Everybody gets all wiggily on New Year's Eve thinking next year they're going to be better. But every year it turns out they're just a bunch of feebs." His frustration, if I recall, stems from his thwarted resolution to save enough money to buy a rocket pack, with which he planned to fly around and solve all the problems of the world.)

It's a tough time to be a dreamer. The vague somedays of your imaginings have suddenly thudded into the solidity of another year in which your dream has yet to materialize. All your momentum seems, if temporarily, to have petered out, leaving you, a little winded, wondering if it's worth getting up the energy for another run at it.

(In the world of bookstores, this may have something to do with the extraordinary amounts of energy expended in the leadup to Christmas, and the attendant stress and exhaustion, which can leave one longing to just get off the world for a while and let things take care of themselves.)

I'm thinking, a little, of Larry Portzline. As I've thought about his precipitous abandonment of the project of Bookstore Tourism – largely because he was unable to get funding from indie bookstores and trade organizations to fund his awareness-raising nationwide bookstore tour – I've come to somewhat agree with many of those who commented on my post on the matter. That is, it perhaps would have made more sense to seek funding from those with money to spend on cultural projects (for example "tourist bureaus and the Main Street programs" as Barking Dog Books suggests, or even benevolent corporate publishers, or traditional grant initiatives), rather than from the indie bookstores themselves, notoriously strapped for cash and hesitant to take a financial risk – or rather, another risk, since the store itself is a very risky thing to begin.

However, I sympathize a great deal with Larry's frustration and sense of rejection. To have put so much (unpaid) time into what is largely a philanthropic enterprise, and then to receive insufficient concrete support from those whom the enterprise is designed to benefit – it's enough to make anyone throw up their hands and walk away.

It's hard not to see myself in parallel. My own dream, of opening a really great independent bookstore in Brooklyn, seems sometimes further away than ever. I had formed a tentative mental timeline of opening by fall of 2008, but that's been scrapped in light of the ongoing, obvious problem of lack of start-up capital. (For the record, even if I win the grand prize in the wonderful Brooklyn Public Library competition, it won't be nearly 25% of my projected startup costs, the rule of thumb for personal assets required to get a business loan.) I do sometimes get frustrated at the world: that there's so much money out there getting spent on silly or failure-bound projects, but no one has recognized the inescapable genius of my idea and offered to pony up cash, no strings attached. More often, I get frustrated at myself. Something must be wrong with me, that I haven't yet found an investor I can work with, that I haven't been able to save up enough seed money yet to even ask for a loan, that I still have work to do on the business plan, that I'm spending my energy on so many other things rather than the one dream, that other people have managed to open bookstores and I haven't. Maybe I don't really want this enough; maybe it's just a prop to keep my pride intact while working in retail. Maybe I'll want it all my life, and never quite make it.

My last email from Larry was full of anger and frustration. On the one hand, it seems like a good thing for him that he's taking the time to work on a novel in progress, spend time with his newlywed wife, focus on other things. But he sounded hopeless about indie bookstores, and about booksellers, and about the future. He sited the NEA study about the decline in reading, and asked me how I could be among those to discount its ominous findings.

The world is full of problems, ain't it? And there are plenty of people and organizations and statistics and task forces to tell us what they are. There are those whose role it is to tell us what our weaknesses are, so perhaps we can combat them. There are those whose role it is to gather up the range of opinions and find a consensus, or represent the views of the knowledgeable few. There are those whose role it is to challenge our convictions, so that we're forced to think about what we really know and believe.

Turns out, I've staked out a little role for myself too. In the world of books, I'm not as important or influential as many of the people I've quoted and interacted with this year: as John Mutter, the editor of Shelf Awareness; or Judith Rosen, journalist for Publishers Weekly; or Avin Domnitz, CEO of the American Booksellers Association; or Lance Fensterman, director of Book Expo America; or Johnny Temple, director of the Brooklyn Book Festival; or Russ Lawrence, president of the ABA; or Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon; or Len Riggio, head of Barnes & Noble; or the owners of big, wonderful independent bookstores, like Carla Cohen of Politics and Prose or Rick Simonson of Elliot Bay or Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson; not to mention the authors who give us our work to do, this year, every year, like Michael Chabon of Yiddish Policeman's Union or Geraldine Brooks of People of the Book or Michael Ondaatje of Divisadero or Edwidge Danticat of Brother, I'm Dying or Kate Christensen of The Great Man, or….

I'm grateful to be able to talk to and read about and talk about these folks. Their art and their work have made a world I want to be a part of. Which is why I've taken on my little role, of being one voice of optimism about books and bookstores. There are plenty of voices talking about what's wrong, and why we must change, or even why we won't change or can't change. I want to talk about the joy and the hope part of things: the good things that are, and the potential for more good things on the horizon. It's not the whole picture. It's just the part I've got covered. No matter my occasional despair, I can't help coming back to the good things that I know and believe, from business success stories to wonderful reads to great technological developments to communities and relationships. It's one of the only things I know worth doing.

I certainly can't fault Larry in his decision to move on to other things – it seems to be the right decision for him, and he's planted the seed of an idea that is already bearing fruit through others who have picked it up.

But for me, I can't quit yet. Give me a day or two to catch my breath, and I'll be at it again. I want that bookstore, because I want to build something good and solid in the world. In the meantime, I can't help celebrating all the good and solid things that have been built by others. It's what I did last year. It's what I'll do in the year to come.

Maybe this year, I'll get a rocket pack. Either way, I'm going to keep dreaming. Luckily, there are a lot of other folks with rocket packs to cheer on.

Thanks for reading.

Forgive the lack of blogging around here lately. If you're a retailer, or a moonlighter, or a newlywed, you'll understand.

I'm working on Christmas Eve at the bookstore this year for the first time ever. Somehow, in seven years of working in bookstores in New York, I've always managed to get out of it, because I was flying cross-country to see family. This year it's the ALP and I in the city, so I'm on Christmas Eve shift.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday was nearly eight hours at the cash register, interspersed with running briskly with piles of books to restock in sections and tables. In the last hour and a half I started to droop a bit, but for the most part it was so fun. I've gotten some teasing for my incessant cheeriness, and for being the most "Christmassy" person anyone knows.
Apparently I'm a Christmas nerd as well as a book nerd.

I love looking forward to things. It's part of being an optimist. So Advent, the season of expectation, is my favorite. I'm looking forward to everything:

Today, Christmas shopping and a visit to old friends at Three Lives.

A few more days of chaotic, frenzied, joyful bookselling at McNally Robinson.

Sunday afternoon, talking with my mom and sisters in California, who will be celebrating their Christmas.

Christmas Eve, where we close the bookstore early when J.T. starts wandering the sales floor with a bottle of beer, to subtly give customers the idea that the holiday is beginning.

Christmas Eve service at our little Brooklyn church.

Christmas morning, and Christmas day with my adorable new husband.

Christmas night, joining friends in Harlem for a grown-up Christmas party.

And then a week of sweet nothing -- my first vacation since the wedding. Reading. Seeing movies (many made from books). Maybe even blogging.

What's not to love?

What are you looking forward to this holiday?

Johnny Hart, creator of the comic strip B.C., passed away on Saturday.

Click here to see the story from Johnny Hart's local newspaper in Binghamton, NY.

In a 1980 interview with Jud Hurd in Cartoonist PROfiles, Johnny said:
"...'cartoony' and 'simplicity' became very important words to me, and I extended them into every phase of what I do..."

And the result was some of the most beautiful linework ever to hit the comics pages. Johnny's work was simply amazing. His linework was sparce, but very expressive.
Simplicity has the illusion of looking easy. It's not. Try drawing a B.C. character with the expressiveness Johnny Hart could achieve with such few lines. It's not easy.

In the above story, Johnny's wife said he died at his drawing board.
There is something bittersweet about that.