Rick Simonson

Transition Time 2
October 5, 2007

Where has this week gone?

'Tis no great mystery. The days have been rep appointments for winter (or spring) lists - Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Random House Blue (today). There was also a nice, lunch-hour reading by Usula Hegi for her new novel The Worst Thing I've Done (Touchstone).

The evenings, those have been the story. The colleague nearest and dearest in helping navigate Elliott Bay through all of these is away a few weeks. Besides becoming the recipient of her voluminous, forwarded-along email, this is the time of year when many authors are here and about.We've had authors reading and talking in-store all week, but it's been to me to tend the out-of-store ones. So, in a sequence of nights it's been Zakes Mda with his wonderful novel, Cion (from Picador, a beautiful paperback original ... more was being written about him when the blog gods zapped what was written ... there'll be something more on him, his body of work, and Picador's good work in publishing and now more visibly promoting him soon); John Bowe with Nobodies (Random House), an important work of investigative journalism that drew a good audience and lively discussion; and Peter D. Ward, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington who seems to write a serious, thoughtful book a year, doing the power-point and casting the bleak picture on global warming with Under a Green Sky(Collins).

Tonight, it's Jeffrey Toobin visiting with The Nine (Doubleday), with a large crowd anticipated, and ditto for tomorrow afternoon when Jonathan Kozol returns with Letters to a Young Teacher. I have a feeling I'll be on familiar terms with handtrucks more than anything or anyone else. Next week? Don't get me started. If there's no word in here, Garrison Keillor, Walter Mosley, Sherman Alexie, and Ann Patchett may have something to do with it.

Meanwhile, word drifts around that the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association are doing their annual gathering this weekend. More and more as this (the Northwest) also becomes that (Bay Area, northern California), reps who see us and worked the PNBA show a few weeks ago, are down and doing that. Word is out from bookseller friends that a good (many more than came here) number of New York friends are attending. Maybe they felt the Bellevue, Washington locale of PNBA (across Lake Washington from Seattle) too easy to associate with Manhattan's Bellevue. No, San Francisco is fun - the city I most which BEA would return to.

Surely in the air down there this weekend is the feeling of survival, transition, and celebration for all that has happened for the people of Publishers Group West, including its client publishers. Based in the Bay Area, they have been through the year. A week ago, the procedures and legal doings were resolved so that they could fully re-inherit the Publishers Group West name they never quite let go of. As much as we booksellers were trained to have this Transition Vendor entity (suddenly Samuel Beckett, Sherman Alexie, Dave Eggers, and Lucia Perillo became Transition Vendor authors) in our systems and payments, the PGW folks always held on - their email addresses, the catalogs. You weren't sure what time or year it was this year when you saw a PGW catalog - that's for this season? At our place, I made the pre-emptory move, early in the morning, of having Elliott Bay's system moved over to the Publishers Group West name again - without telling anybody. When I arrived, somewhat along in the day, I heard that people attempting to place a backlist, a readings order, and special orders had all been puzzled. Where did Transition Vendor go?

There is a story yet to be told about the re-occupation of another familiar publisher name as things move along, but the winter PGW catalogs do give glimpses of new/old Counterpoint Press. Jack Shoemaker, who helped found Counterpoint back as the seed to what has become the whole Perseus enterprise, has come back to the imprint that dismissed him less than ceremoniously (but as such things are done) a few years ago. Now Charlie Winton is re-assembling things, connecting Richard Nash and his Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press with Shoemaker and what he most recently was doing at Shoemaker & Hoard, along, presumably, with some of the authors inherited from Counterpoint's most recent regime (editor Amy Scheib and others). It's good to see what will be coming - more, in time, but special words of enthusiasm for a Counterpoint title listed for January, Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning. I think Counterpoint is laying some subtitle about language and ecology on, which is okay, though the original, Canadian edition, a beautiful book put out by Nova Scotia's Gaspereau Press (everything they do is beautiful) has the simple subtitle, 'Thirteen Talks.' They are talks, were orally given. Anyway, as is said, more in time. But it is a fabulous book - passages if not whole pieces on what it is to 'read,' on vocation (vs. job), on poetry, language, mythos, place.  

Also now transformed, officially, is the Transition Publisher that presented itself at PNBA as Weinstein Books/Miramax. The latter gave way to the former October 1. Their most prominent current title, Vincent Lam's excellent, award-winning book of stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, already carries the Weinstein name. But now the email addresses have changed: so it is really official.

Lastly, usually season-conscious Mist Place missed noting the official transition to autumn nearly two weeks ago. I'm not sure where we were or how we missed that, but the oddest thing around Seattle since that time is that what is usually a serene transition into autumn - still-warm sun with longer, cooler shadows, the last smell of ripe, unpicked fruit, the drier shushle of leaves in a breeze - instead seemed to give way to an instant round of late November. The temperatures dropped, rain fell in quantity, and the sky lowered. You start remembering that you have this developed vocabulary for the word 'gray' - its many shades, layers, aspects. Instead of little vests and light jackets, people were digging out coats.

Yesterday brought out hints of what we're more used to: the sun burst out brilliantly, albeit alternating with fast-moving clouds, giving the city a golden glow - much of the gold from the trees, some still green, some a flaming red. Mountains with new snow peeked out. And water, wherever you saw it glittered.

So much for the seasoning: now it's time to look up numbers for Random Blue later today. Three Rivers, here we come ...  
 

Posted by Rick Simonson on October 5, 2007 | Comments (1)