Monday, May 5th, just past 1 p.m. Some email is being tended to as I hear the voice of David Glenn, our estimable Random House 'Blue' rep - various greetings and commentaries going on with my Elliott Bay coworkers. In short order, we do our own exchange of greetings - he gets the laptop out, plugged in. I wrap up email, check the catalogs I have stacked. All there? Including the ones sent out for more expert order-marking?

It's a newsworthy day, too - word of Peter Olson's impending, rumored or more-than-rumored, are in news reports. David says he hasn't seen them. Peter Aaron, our store's owner, gives him the New York Times piece.

A little musing - whatever this may mean - and we decide to get onto it. Sidetracking - getting on to other subjects will happen as a matter of course. For me this is the season opener, first pitch, first at-bat, opening ...Read More

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Last Wednesday's (April 30) note about Ursula Le Guin made mention of some other goings-on that same evening in Seattle. Not being able to be all places at once, I do make attempts at doting about.

Ursula's April 29 evening at Elliott Bay for her new novel, Lavinia (Harcourt), was compelling - and attended enough - that I did stay the course, being on hand as the signing wound down, chairs put away, sound system put in its place, people chatted with. An eye on the clock, though, I bid a somewhat early good night and thanks - there was still last stock to be signed - and set off I knew it was too late to check in on Alice Hoffman's reading at the Seattle Public Central Library - it had started thirty minutes before the one at Elliott Bay.

I did know there would be a chance of catching Pico Iyer and others at the reception for S...Read More

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Back in January, some readers of this space may recall, I was part of a small delegation of U.S. and U.K. booksellers and librarians who visited Beijing, attending a book fair, toured around, and participated in an 'East/West' bookselling dialogue. (Readers of this space may recall a partial chronicle of this journey, which had its definite moments ... the balance of the account is still pending, somewhere at sea, my own slow boat back ...).

There was a seeming randomness to who went there from here. Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson in New York, Karl Pohrt of Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Paul Yamazaki of San Francisco's City Lights, and myself, had all been drafted, almost on the fly, to participate in a panel on translated literature in bookstores that was at the Miami Bookfair in November. I could see why all of us were there, but could think of others who also would hav...Read More

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A busy author night in Seattle: Alice Hoffman, Howard Fineman, and Jen Sorensen were in town doing book tour appearances, Pico Iyer was holding forth before over two thousand in Seattle Arts & Lectures' season finale, some university lectures with booksales involved were happening. At Elliott Bay, we first welcomed debut novelist V.V. Ganeshnanthan with her intricate, strong tale set in the U.S., Canada, and Sri Lanka: Love Marriage (Random House). It was good and right as such debut visits go - some in attendance the author knows, but then others (to the author's surprise) that aren't known. Books are definitely sold, but you also know the real impact of the reading will come in time - the book going back to display or on shelves - signed copies, a 'recommended' note it might not otherwise have come by. Things will likely build from there. When there might be ...Read More

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If intentions are rightly kept, these will be but the first of many words devoted, in some time or another, to the writing of British Columbia poet, typographer, translator, essayist Robert Bringhurst.

There are various books to refer to, but to say that his collection of essays, The Tree of Meaning (Counterpoint), published here in the U.S. this past spring but in Canada by Gaspereau Press two years ago, is one of those few books of thoughtful writing that can genuinely re-arrange the way one reads anything, be it words on a page, a hillside, or the ways of the world. In the foreword to the U.S. edition by Jim Harrison, he cites the few critical intelligences where genius is applicable. To the names Roberto Calasso, Walter Benjamin, and George Steiner, he adds Robert Bringhurst. Jim Harrison is picky - this is a short list.

More of that, the bo...Read More

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The final sales appointments here for this long-wintered spring season were almost two weeks ago, when Actar and Taschen were done. But, buying appointments aren't really done until attendant paperwork is, and it was over a week in the doing. This past Friday then it was that a spring buying season that had started with George Carroll and Oxford on New Year's Eve, was now concluded.

A buyer friend at another store once told me she marked the end of a buying season with a raising of a glass in acknowledgement of such conclusion - I thought it apt. In my case this season, with things having started with a New Year's toast, it seemed right, on Friday, to do so at season's end.

Having done this for over twenty-five years, I have always liked it that books (most we deal with) are published in seasons. Those presented by month - mass market titles - ...Read More

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We don't always make it easy on people, including ourselves, when helping to present authors. This past Monday saw our store (Elliott Bay) presenting Jhumpa Lahiri at, and with, the Seattle Public Library for her exquisite new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf). We also had a supporting role (helping promote, selling books) for a simultaneous lecture tour appearance by Marjane Satrapi, ostensibly in support of the much-honored film of her work, Persepolis. 

The scheduling conflict (both share the same lecture agent, and both now share the same publisher) was not our doing. In the case of Marjane S., we were merely along for the ride. Both of these women are storytellers in a big way, carriers of imagination, bridgers of distance and time. One other thing in common, germane to those qualities, and also very particul...Read More

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There are days like this.

Spring in Seattle so far had been utterly cold and withholding, cruel, cruel, barely touching north of sixty degrees at any point. Then Saturday blossomed forth, heavenly manifestations at work, or something. The temperature in a single bound pushed 80. People in more southerly climes may take that in stride, but in Seattle it made for borderline delirium.

Everything seemed different.Three blocks south of the bookstore (Elliott Bay) where I work is a stadium which when full usually holds over 60,000 boisterous, loud, demonstratively bellowing people, more than a few alchohol-propelled. Instead, this providentially sunny day, it was 50,000+ all going in to hear talk - talk, not shoulder pads crunching - on compassion. It was part of a four-day gathering in Seattle, a "Seeds of Compassion" series of dialogues and con...Read More

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Sloane Crosley must be living one of the more confounding existences in the world of books these days, not that she'd complain. She is presently making the book tour rounds as the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake (Riverhead), a paperback original collection of essays and pieces that's been receiving strong reviews, word-of-mouth. Many of the pieces had originally appeared in places readers would find them - The New York Times, Village Voice, Salon.com, even Playboy (so I hear), where they'd been noticed, online versions sent around variously. The book's been selling, too, having a place on some of the lists.

Last night she concluded a two-day Seattle visit that had included reading at Third Place Books the night before. Both evenings were well-attended.

Everything so far could be said about any number of possible aut...Read More

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For those of us who do frontlist buying, this present patch of early spring is about the only part of a year that represents something akin to 'down-time.' We're talking relative here, knowing there is really no such thing. This is as close as we get, though. The break between fall lists and winter/spring lists is sometimes negligible, and in a store such as ours, blurred by busyness in August and September, there's that commotion to contend with. After the winter lists - forget it - it's all the fall season jockeying of what's coming in, what needs re-ordering, what will fare how for the holidays.

So now it is. The problem with such times, unless one's been pro-active and made getaway plans, is that other things tend to fill the 'voids.' Having had two big trips, on an invited basis, on short notice in the past six months, the idea of t...Read More

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There's still something to be written about Julie Bick's March 9 New York Times piece on the part that Seattle seems to play in helping shape the country's reading tastes (so asserted), by reason of Costco, Amazon, and even Starbucks (for its one-two annual book selections) - a piece which is still talked about around here - but that for another day. It was so ... far from coherence about what being here had to do with what they did, much less saying nothing of their impact in Seattle, itself that it's been hard to know where to start. That won't be tried here.

If one is to really look at Seattle, there's more than the 'local authors, abundant writing courses and robust independent bookstores' all mentioned in a single blow. (Again, we're not trying to sort for reasons here, only using this to get somewhere in particular.)

Of those elements, let'...Read More

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Last Tuesday's PW Daily (March 25) gave watch-for-arrival mention of the phenomena that has been Chinese novelist Jian Rong's hugely bestselling, hugely acclaimed debut novel, Wolf Totem (Penguin Press). Translated by Howard Goldblatt (a busy translating man these days), it merits whatever attention it can get, in this reader's opinion. I will certainly be putting it in people's hands.

Wolf Totem is vividly, almost viscerally set in place - wolves, horses, sheep, mosquitoes, dogs, and grasses populate it as much as Mongol herdsmen, women, and  incoming Han Chinese animate it. And, as much as it renders palpable this remote country few readers in the US would know, at times it feels it could be set simultaneously in time up in Alaska, or some time past, in Montana or Wyoming high country...Read More

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