Rick Simonson

New Year, New Where (and Back to There)
January 8, 2008

SEATTLE, Thursday, January 3

A year ago and this, making the transition into what will surely be a busied, frantic first few months as easeful and breathable as possible. Some of it is trying to snatch the quiet some others had amidst the holidays while we did the raucous hauling and lifting of retail. What to do but try and start gently and, perhaps, if briefly, get away.

A year ago, 2006 seguing into 2007, I thought to start the new year off with a rep and an appointment I always look forward to - Cindy Heidemann with Publishers Group West - followed by a quick, late-in-being cooked-up trip to New York. The latter is something that's nice and useful to do sometime early in a year. There was some reckoning as to when: things looked to be too frantic to get back east until the end of March, if then. Then there would be BEA right there, then again. So, on fairly short notice, a quick New York trip.

The book part of that first appointment with Cindy I recall as being pleasurable - all of those publishers and imprints - Grove Atlantic, McSweeney's, Nation Books, Shoemaker & Hoard, SoftSkull, our local Sasqutach, and others among them to talk about and anticipate. But the book part and all others were overshadowed by the news that had literally just come down, of PGW's owner, AMS, declaring bankruptcy. Many of us, even involved at the more removed level of bookstore, can somewhat track the ensuing year by all the machinations: PGW to Transition Vendor to Perseus owning some and making arrangements with others for a company some called PGW but others didn't quite, and so on. That first appointment with Cindy, everything felt spooky and up in the air ... and carried unanswered questions throughout.

With Cindy and with most other reps where most of a day is worked, we have lunch at a wonderful little neighborhood spot, Cafe Paloma. It's two blocks away from Elliott Bay, tucked around a corner, a street leading down to the nearby waterfront, an intimate spot that Turkish owner Sedat Uysay and others there have always made friendly and welcoming, with good food and drink to boot. Book folk are there with some frequency - including the Shelf Awareness clan, whose office is literally right above Paloma.

Things were such at that lunch that when it came time for the check I made an offer to pay; would she, as usual, be otherwise be reimbursed? Out of a point of pride, I think, Cindy insisted. I never have known if she ever got expenses back from that time. It was not good.

The trip I did then was good, a mix of relaxed visiting people in New York publishing, and some general walkabout time, getting perspective. There isn't that much travel with what I do - not relative to many others who work in publising, nor with many others I know or see pass through Elliott Bay, where books about distant places are bought with great regularlity. When I do get away, it generally helps the day to day be seen, a brief bit of the bird's-eye view before landing back in the nest.

Coming now into 2008, there was another early appointment to anticipate with pleasure, to be followed in short order by travel that has come as total surprise.

The appointment, actually done on New Year's Eve, was with old rep friend George Carroll, and would, we knew, this first day, be about Oxford University Press. Safe to say, no AMS-type shenanigans or problems there. George was talking, speaking of travel, of a spring trip to England to see Shakespeare ... and drop in on the Oxford home office. The book part, and the book talk part - all always part of our days - were good, a nice seeing out of one year and into another.

The reason for the New Year's Eve appointment, unusual for either of us, had to do with the nature of my surprising trip. Someehere around Thanksgiving, an inquiry had come along - if it comes through, would you be interested? - almost benignly, wanting to know if I'd have interest in attending the 2008 Beijing Book Fair in early January as a guest of China Publishing Today - a publication akin to PW here. A small group of US booksellers (and UK ones, it would turn out), and a few librarians, were to be invited - if it all worked out.

It all did work out to the degree that a final ok came along, and those booksellers invited - Karl Pohrt of Shaman's Drum, Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson, Allison Hill of Vroman's, Paul Yamazaki of City Lights, and myself - all did a December whirl of getting papers processed, tickets booked, January calendars rearranged, book-reading piles re-prioritized, and, in the case of a few of us, procuring outerwear suitable for temperatures below twenty degrees F.

This is where I was on this day, January 3, getting ready to fly to San Francisco, to fly from there with Paul Yamazaki to Beijing, a nonstop flight. 

Before that, though, there had been the good end of day, end of year visiting with George to savor, which had including musing on his trip and on mine. We had finished our appointment and were treating ourselves to extra glasses of midday wine. I don't know if I mentioned the year-ago comparison - that it was Cindy and I in this same relative position having had the early appointment and then lunch (George and Cindy are also good, longtime friends), but I know it came to mind. I remembered the lunches, the visiting, and last year's New York trip, which followed. I thought of what part it played - perspective, if nothing else (it did help result in Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino coming in the spring, I recall) - in the year that would come. I could wonder whatever might come in the wake of this still-surprising trip to Beijing.

Whatever I can, and do imagine, I've been at and around this all long enough, to also keep in mind the perspective that in less than two weeks' time, airline gods willing and trusting there aren't problematic situations with authorities overseas - I will be back at Paloma for lentil soup and pita bread, perhaps the gorgonzola panini, perhaps (depending on what is ahead in the day) a glass of wine. It will be Kurtis Lowe, probably between Workman and Quayside, it will be John Dally with Houghton and Beacon (and that whole situation, with Harcourt), it will be Karen Pennington and Random Green.

The going, the coming ... we'll see.

Posted by Rick Simonson on January 8, 2008 | Comments (0)