All posts by trav

At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.
Book Talk, Events, News, On the TV

Watch the National Book Awards LIVE

Leave a comment

This year’s National Book Awards will be broadcast live over Facebook (as well as on their website) on Wednesday, November 15th, starting at 6:20pm CST. But then they’ll roll pre-recorded videos of the finalists reading, during the dinner portion of the gala, and then pick up the live broadcast when they’re done eating to begin handing out the actual awards.

Last year’s awards were fun to watch, with Colson Whitehead winning the 2016 fiction prize for The Underground Railroad, and this year’s evening looks to be brimming with more bookish greatness.

It looks like all you have to do is click over to the National Book Foundation’s Facebook page to watch the event. I watched last year on the foundation’s site, but this year it looks like they’re going after a more social-share plan. They even made a PDF ballot to download so you can play along at home.

They are @nationalbook on Twitter and they are using #NBAwards as the official hashtag for the 2017 event.

Hopefully it’ll work. It’d be fun if people outside of the industry started tuning in and looking forward to these awards.

There are four awards being handed out, one for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and young adult literature. I’m anxious to see this year’s winners as out of all 20 books nominated – I have only read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. And if one of the other fiction finalists is deemed better than that one (which was a great read, though I appreciated her Men We Reaped more.) I certainly want to read it!

Hope you get to tune in next Wednesday night, starting at 6:20pm CST, for the 68th year of the National Book Awards. Here is the slate of finalists for this year’s awards:

Fiction

Non-fiction

Poetry

Young Adult

Book Column, Book Talk, Books About Books, Recommendations

Week 2: Book Pairing #nonficnov

9 Comments

This week’s host for Nonfiction November 2017 is Sarah over at Sarah’s Book Shelves. This week all of the participants are to “pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title”. As best as I can tell this is not limited to just books we’ve read in 2017.

So. . . we’re going to dig deep into the blacklists, blow the dust off some covers and recommend two reads that I think most any bibliophile would enjoy reading.

First up is my fiction pick with John Dunning’s BookedTo Die. This book hit store shelves in 1992 (so you can find a cheap paperback these days) and is a mystery read through-and-through. But it’s all about books and first editions and libraries. It’s hard to beat a good bibliomystery and Dunning’s book is a good one. It’s the first in his Cliff Janeway series. Janeway is a Book Scout and spends his days going through book stalls, stores, thrift stores, yard sales, and trash bins trying to find books he buy for a quarter and sell for $200. His eyes are always peeled for that “lost” first edition treasure while he’s appraising people’s private book collections. Lots of fun and solid (real world) facts about book collecting. So if you like Raymond Chandler-ish reads with a twist, you might want to check this one out.

A nice follow up to a bibliomystery about rare first editions is Nabokov’s Butterfly by Rick Gekoski. Gekoski is a real life bookman and makes his living in the world of rare manuscripts and antiquarian books. At under 250 pages, his book is an easy read. It shares some amazing stories about rare editions, publishing lore and backstories on a few famous authors. Many book collector’s and sales folks have written of their journeys, but where Gekoski’s excels is that he focuses more on the books and less on his career. Which is nice. So where Janeway is trying to track down old books, Gekoski has probably bought them, held them and sold them again. It’s a fun peek into a world many of us book lovers don’t get to participate in.

So that’s my pairing, one fiction and nonfiction read for folks who love to read about books.

I’m anxious to click around the blogs and see what other pairings people are putting out there this week.

Book Reviews, Book Talk, Books About Books

Book Review: A Great Bookstore in Action

Leave a comment

A Great Bookstore in Action is a slim 32-page volume printed in 1939. It’s a record of a speech given by Adolph Kroch (here is a detail rich obituary), who was a very successful Chicago-based bookseller, active in the 20’s and 30’s.

In just these few pages, Kroch comes across as a like minded soul that I’d love to have had coffee with. The book starts up with his recounting how he got started in book selling and ends with his sharing ideas of how to fix all that was broken with the bookselling industry.

I have to admit that it was fun to read his thoughts, from my 2017 armchair, and have the luxury of looking back to see what all has changed and, sadly, what things have not.

Appreciating the value of a good book while realizing the amazing event that takes place when a thoughtful bookseller connects the right book with the right reader, informs every page. Even today, this idea of a local community bookstore being able to guide its surrounding neighbors to worthwhile books is a lofty service.

He was an advocate for professionally training booksellers and publishers in some way. Thankfully we have much of that covered these days between what’s offered at the Denver Institute and all the classes the ABA have.

Kroch rightly saw the implications of good books over the cheap fluff that some publishers and sellers were pushing. He was very concerned about successful authors that were able to write a book a year. He was not happy about the growing number of books publishers were cranking out each year either. But even that what not a new concern in 1939. Here’s a poem he shared from the 1600’s:

Can you imagine what he’d think of the industry today?

He also offered up a few sentences about the trend in the reading public to pull away from books and look to the growing movie scene and music for entertainment. Imagine how flustered he’d be today with every prospective reader having the entire internet in their pocket.

This book certainly isn’t a “must read” for folks, but it’s a wonderful peek at what the book industry was like in the 1930’s in the United States.

I’m giving the book 3 out of 5 stars and recommend it to anyone interested in the history of bookstores.

Bibliophile Travels, Book Column, Bookstore Tourism, Bookstore Travels

The Booklegger -Huntsville, AL

2 Comments

I found a fantastic used bookstore in Huntsville, AL while on a recent trip. My time at Booklegger Used Books (4001 Holmes Ave NW; Huntsville, Alabama 35816) was way too short. This small shop is worth visiting if you find yourself in the Rocket City.

As soon as you walk in, you can tell you have entered a book lover’s world. Most of the books I picked up were good-condition hardbacks and priced in the $5-$8 range. The shelves and bookcases all go 8-feet high and they are fully loaded. Even though they are stocked full, they are well tended to and organzied. It’s was fun to meander throughout the bookshelf-lined aisles.

Once you enter, the non-fiction is mostly in the room to your immediate left. Those topics run the gamut. It’s all there. If you’ve been in many bookstores then you know it’s a special thing when to find one with so many sub-categories clearly marked and stocked well.

But the non-fiction I was most interested in was straight ahead – “Books About Books”, plus shelves & shelves of Literary Critcism and Essays. It was amazing! I’ve found very few bookstores (new or used) that had essays like this, much less have them in hardback (plus, a whole other shelf over in the “paperback” room).

From the front door, fiction starts off to the right and runs on into the “paperback room” off to the right just past all of the new comics.

They must do a constant business at Booklegger Used Books. The phone was ringing throughout my visit and I bet a dozen folks were in and out during my all too short time there. All that to say, I think it’d be worth it to check the “Newly Arrived” wall (just inside the non-fiction room) every visit. One can tell that these shelves have yet to be picked through, but the turnover is quick.

After a quick conversation there it sounds like they only buy hardbacks for around $1 per book, depending on demand. They will buy paperback books but for store credit only and the do limit how many “Walmart bags” you can drop on his counter during a week. Which is a pretty great metric to use for a used bookstore.

My one complaint is the way they manage their $1 Discount Books. Every book available for $1 is marked with an marker across the top with an X or O or XO. I totally get why they do this. When you buy as many used-books from patrons as they do, it doesn’t work to keep buying the same books that don’t sell. Plus, it helps with inventory and so forth and so on. I get it. I really do. It’s just always better to have books without those permanent markings. But for $1 per book, they’ll never hear me complain. 😉

Days and times of operation change, so I’d recommend giving them a call as I can’t find a good online presence for them.