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MIST PACE
April 30, 2007

The clip-clop of a week trotted by. There were great intentions of getting words in here all along the way. Mist Place is trying to learn the balance between doing, being done to (people do come in off the street), and trying not to overwrite in the head. Yes, many things have been 'written' for here, all to be evident were there time to type.

Space is a question. There's learning how to keep one story from becoming four, or four from becoming one that is very long (we found out the hard way that these posts have limits). This is challenging as Mist Place tends to blur things together, connect the drops, see connections.

There's also the matter of readers. There may now be five, or even six, of this wordage. Reports have come in. Contacts in various contexts has led to more things or concerns to write about.

To wit: one very pleasant evening last week was spent with writer David Leavitt and Bloomsbury marketing/sales director Sabrina Farber. They were making a few-citied rounds, doing the pre-pub dinner tour for David's forthcoming (and much-to-be anticipated) new novel, The Indian Clerk, due in September. Other bookselling colleagues were there, whom it is always good to see.

There's a whole other entry to do on the conversation with Sabrina - which touched on many things, but included Seattle (her first visit) and her sense of how rare it seems to be now as a book-inclined city, still fairly strong in the number of bookstores, etc. I went into my wayward citing of some of the reasons, some of which were around the table - the other booksellers (and our interdependent if competitive sensibility), Nancy Pearl, and our two primary daily newspaper book people, John Marshall and Mary Ann Gwinn.

It was the presence of the last two that we hone in on here. Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn turned out to have found/stumbled upon "Mist Place." Others went, who? what? I ssshhed her. Wait until this thing is a little more beyond crawling crawling, past sticking random items in its mouth. 

She then proceeded, some that night, more in subsequent email, to mention the National Book Critics Circle blog (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com), wanting to know if I knew there was such, and what it was up to. Its existence, yes, I said, I knew. John Freeman, who happens to be the NBCC president, I have known through his excellent and various reviews (and interviews, such as that in Poets and Writers last year with Jack Gilbert), and from our being on a BEA panel on short stories. Mary Ann then wondered what I knew, and thought, of the NBCC's campaign to save book reviews. I gave a general answer, knowing that is an issue, an ongoing one around the whole country. But, as is more and more apparent from the other emailed book news sources, and my own email last night (from John Freeman), there very much is a Campaign to Save Book Reviews under way, both general and particular, the particular being around Atlanta Journal-Constitution book editor Teresa Weaver's endangered job. Information and action (petition) is found on the above-cited blog - to which we will turn our attention once finished here.

That this came up at this dinner, however obliquely, was telling. And I realized, for the sake of the evening, the moment, a small opportunity had been missed. Besides being a city where there seem to be more bookstores (and libraries - to which we'd assert there is a connection) than in many others, Seattle is also a city that has two real, full-voiced daily newspapers. To have newspaper book reviews, you first must have newspapers.

Until about two weeks ago, there was serious question as to the existence of one of them, and, by extension, the nature of the existence of the other. For several years, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have operated on one of these landlord-tenant relationship-bases arrangements known as a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA). In Seattle's case, the Times has handled all the P-I's business operations, from printing to subscriptions to advertising. Many cities have had these arrangements; most have fallen apart, with one paper essentially going out of business (the arrangment was such that Hearst, owners of the P-I, would have received income even as they closed the paper).

The changing state of the newspaper business (demographics, web v. print, cost of printing and circulating) has been such that a process was launched which might have resulted in one of the papers' closing - by most reckonings, the P-I. On the verge of going through an arbitration process that would have assessed contested terms of the JOA in a binding way, the papers' owners came to an agreement, which in publicly stated terms allow the P-I to continue on at least until 2017.

Both the P-I's John Marshall and the Times' Mary Ann Gwinn can keep doing the things they do - which differ in many ways from each other. Both though, besides being themselves passionate, energetic, and committed to what they do (and to books and authors), also help serve as conduits to other writers on their papers where features germane to some subjects or interest areas can be pursued.

A raising of the glass, albeit a week later, to toast them and what they do, and that they may keep doing it. They are a vital part of the many-voiced conversation (it is no ONE thing, as some seem to wish/think) that help make books happen here to the degree they do. This is, or should be, true of wherever books are read, bought, sold, and borrowed (libraries).

Posted by Rick Simonson on April 30, 2007 | Comments (0)