Books

The new indie bookshop (which Gavin alerted us to the impending existence of back in February) has been open since July and it’s a testament to the extreme kind of summer and fall we’ve been having that we shamefully only made it by yesterday. Of course, if we’d realized before that it’s literally right across from the co-op… but regrets are for others.*

Anyway, yay for The Morris Book Shop**; we finally have a much-needed great, small indie to shop at. (Technically, the local behemoth Joseph-Beth is an independent bookstore, but it has operated increasingly like a Borders and there are about five now, so it doesn’t feel so local or indie anymore. Not that we have the hate for it, because we don’t, but it’s nice to have an alternative.) The selection was fabulous–top notch YA and SF sections (see camera photo I snapped in the kids/middle grade section’s cool little nook), and just a good range of books in general–and the space is lovely (it’s a former dress shop, but you’d never know it). We chatted with the owners, who were just exactly the kind of book people you want running your local book shop. We will be taking all of you there when you come visit–or better yet, schedule events there and come visit.

We bought: I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (me), The Good Thief (me), Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World (C, and it’s by a local guy), and The Haunted Lands, Book One: Unclean (C).

Long may it rein.

*Although I do regret missing the opening party, which featured a performance by Apples in Stereo leader Robert Schneider.

**Searching to see if the shop had a site, I found this tremendously charming commemorative booklet that was put together in 1912, on the occasion of The Morris Book Shop in Chicago’s 25th anniversary. It was like falling down a wormhole into a little-known pocket of literary history. Frank Morris, the proprietor, seems to have been universally loved, and apparently his shop, over several locations, was a nexus for a certain bohemian literati set (including Eugene Field). The writing in the commemorative book is thoroughly entertaining–equal parts ribbing of Morris and funny passion for books. Here’s a section by Wilbur D. Nesbit near the beginning that I particularly liked:

When a person goes to buy a book he isn’t in the mood he is in when he has to match silk or wants a package of breakfast food. He doesn’t want a salesman dogging his heels and telling him that here is something that is very choice this spring or here is something that is a great favorite with the best people. What he wants is to go a-booking. There is a fellowship with books which cannot be had with anything else that one purchases.

This is the third gem I’ve discovered via Google Books in the last week. All hail.

Updated: Ah ha — Wily proprietor Wyn Morris notifies me that The Morris Book Shop does indeed have a Web site now, and it’s filled with great pics. Isn’t it pretty?

For the intrepid Alan DeNiro has uncovered its successor, The Palinomicon:

I debated where I should blog about this or not, but here goes.

A couple of days ago I received a package from Juneau, Alaska — its ends taped over with duct tape several times over, my address written on a black magic marker, in a tight, clipped scrawl (without my name) and with no return address. The package smelled like bug spray. A little bit scared, I nonetheless cut open the package, and cutting into the layers it felt like I was back in 8th grade dissecting a frog. Anyway, inside was a modest-size, 3-ring binder from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, and in the binder were a series of photocopied pages. Maybe 40 or 50. I flipped through it and it became clear to me that someone had photocopied pages of a book — and a book of such design that even now, writing this, I am afraid to contemplate. The first page depicted a cover, and this one was the blurriest of them all, since it appeared the cover had bumps and ridges. On the cover was a single line of a text from an alphabete that I couldn’t decipher, almost looking like cyrillic that had sat in the sun too long and melted a little. Rather helpfully, though, a post it note — also part of the photocopy — explained that “See here!!! it says ‘The Palinomicon.’”

Though the very thought of actually holding this book in my hands filled me with dread, even flipping through a copy of the book — a ghost of it, if you will — still greatly unsettled me. The book was a cauldron of alternating English and the aforementioned script, each page containing verses (spells?) and paeans to barely discernible, devilish forces that the author of the book somehow took to be, at times, angelic and beneficient. I could not think of a more terrifying cosmological thesis to structure one’s mad inhabitations of language.

Please, please, do yourselves a favor and go read the rest.

The insanely talented Adrienne Martini has a piece in the Baltimore City Paper about the prevalence of science fiction and fantasy in YA and why it does so well, for which she interviewed the likes of Scott, Scalzi, Colleen and me:

Unless they are forced to do so, most adults don’t wander into the kids’ section of any major big-box bookseller. For your average science-fiction reader–a book shopper who gets itchy even around the "normal" fiction–the back of the bookstore isn’t on their map, as if they fear falling off of the edge of the world if they cross over its threshold. Which has been a puzzle, frankly, because most science-fiction readers cut their teeth on young adult fiction long before it existed as a marketing category. While Robert Heinlein is known for his adult fiction, like Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s his earlier works that were aimed at early teens, such as Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Citizen of the Galaxy, that many current SF readers cut their teeth on.

Check it out.

The truly and outrageously fabulous Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, aka Book Nerd, gets profiled in the New York Times in support of her dream project, opening an indie bookstore in Brooklyn:

A competition, a party, overflowing community support, celebrities of a sort, an energetic young woman prone to saying plucky things like "All I had was my ambition and my passion" — these are the ingredients of a story of someone realizing a remarkable dream, like crossing the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. That opening a humble local bookstore in New York has more in common with that kind of improbable adventure than, say, opening a dry cleaner is, in its own way, a depressing sign of the times.

"Maybe I’m an optimist, but I see the other side of it," said Ms. Stockton Bagnulo. "Which is that only a bookstore can inspire this kind of passion."

A whole bunch of cheers for Jessica, whose fantastic voyage toward her goal can be followed at her auxiliary blog, A Bookstore in Brooklyn. And if you’ve got a pile of money laying around, send her a donation.

Greg Frost has a thoughtful and necessary essay up at the Wild River Review, about having his new book, Lord Tophet*, shunned by one of the big chains (it could happen to you):

A few weeks ago, I found out that my latest book would not be carried by the Borders bookstore chain. Anywhere. At all. Worldwide. Not a single copy. Lest you think that the book did something bad to earn this treatment, the novel, Lord Tophet, is a lead title from Random House’s fantasy/science fiction imprint, Del Rey Books, the sequel to Shadowbridge, a novel that Borders did carry. In fact, Shadowbridge received glowing reviews and went back to print twice in its first six months. You might think, “Say, that’s kind of impressive.”

You might.

The reason Borders decided not to carry the new book is that, according to them, its predecessor didn’t sell "as well as anticipated." It sold; it just didn’t sell enough for Borders. What’s enough? I have absolutely no idea. Nobody else seems to, either.

He goes on to talk about the larger implications of such a system. Go forth and read it. Then, buy Greg’s book. (I just started Shadowbridge, and am greatly impressed thus far.)

*Yes, I realize the irony that I’m linking to Amazon, but I frequent our brick and mortar indie and Amazon alike. Your mileage may vary. And I fully support ordering from Powell’s or your local bookstore, but if you want an immediate impulse buy, the links are above.

PW has an excellent story about Small Beer’s formal expansion into the world of children’s books (I count Travel Light!) with October’s release of Joan Aiken’s The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories. (Squee. Four unpublished stories, and Andi Watson illustrations. Can’t wait to see this!) You can download a free preview chapbook of one of the new stories here.

And more goodies to come:

In addition to reissues, Small Beer plans to publish original children’s fiction and has already signed two new titles, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories by Holly Black and The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. It will begin small as it did on the adult side by publishing one children’s book a season; now the company publishes five or six adult books a year.

The piece also talks about Kelly’s marvelous forthcoming YA collection Pretty Monsters, which features beeyootiful illustrations by Shaun Tan. (Via the horse’s mouth.)

Rosamond Purcell, aka my favorite living photographer, has a new book coming out (with an introduction by Bernd Heinrich, no less). The pub date is October, but Amazon’s listing it in stock already. And Egg & Nest sounds divine:

The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.

Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and René Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us.

Purcell will speak and show slides on Oct. 7 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

No, not here, over at John Crowley’s blog. In the comments section to one of his posts, he responds to a commenter:

I do allow as how the Evanescent Universe actually more easily admits of a creator (or Creator) than the old rocks-and-stones one, though the rocks-and-stones and made-of-mud one is where a lot of believers in a Creator reside. As to the necessity of a creator I am still unconvinced. God remains for me the Name of the Reason Why there is Something and not Nothing, and the rest is silence.

Don’t expect this kind of high level philosophical debate around here, kids.

Jeff VanderMeer has solved this whole "how to write a novel" problem:

Okay, I’ll admit it: work on my new novel, Finch, is going well because every morning my long-suffering yet often amused wife Ann hides the router box and my cell phone. I get up around 7am, I have my breakfast and watch something innocuous like BBC News or Frasier for about half an hour, and then get down to work. Around noon I take a break to get some lunch, then go back to it, usually at that point editing or organizing notes. Around 2:30 I call Ann on our landline and she tells me where the router box and the cell phone are (it has internet access on it) so I can finish up the afternoon with necessary emails and other work, before going to the gym.

Hee.

Ed has done a truly wonderful job of celebrating this fabulous writer, and lamenting the fact that he’s left this planet far too soon. See his own remembrance, and those he collected from others yesterday (including me). (Skip the first entry, or feel your stomach turn, but the others are lovely.)