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blog | blog_5_1 | You dont want a small debut. You need to hit them over the head right away. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Arthur Phillips, a Minnesota-bred Gen-Xer, earned a similar sum with his debut smash, Prague. And the youngest recipient of publishings new largesse, local poster boy Jonathan Safran Foera 26-year-old Princeton grad living in Jackson Heightsreceived a clean half-million from Houghton Mifflin (not to speak of a very quick $925,000 for the paperback rights) for his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The magnitude of Safran Foers advance, combined with his tender age, drew so much attention it served to demonstrate to publishers just how powerful a marketing tool the advance itself could be. The larger the advance, the louder the publishers declaration that this is the book the house is gambling on this season. |
blog | blog_5_1 | While the Kontoleons don't actively peruse auctions and yard sales much anymore, they say they are still open to buying rare items. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It is near the end of the day and Ms. Lyons has one minor task to complete before going home. All she has to do is hand a brochure to a professor and thank him for using Norton textbooks. Afterward, she'll grab a quick dinner and begin the 90-minute drive back to Amherst. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "You can only write for five or six hours a day," he says, "so you have to find something else to do the rest of the time. For a lot of writers, it is either alcohol or family breakdown." Or both, one assumes. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Lyons is here to do. She makes a base salary of $28,000. But depending on her sales numbers, that figure could climb much higher. |
blog | blog_5_1 | This peculiar marketplace entrance-performance is something that everybody has to do now. William Faulkner didnt go around and meet ten publishers, who then participated in a heated auction that was publicized by Keith Kelly in the Post the next day. Another publisher is even more blunt: The writer has got two or three years to make the money back. If he doesnt, that big advance might be the last nickel he ever earns in the book business. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It's just something we don't talk about anymore. I don't think she would change her mind. But she's delighted by all these goings-on, and she's very supportive. I got an e-mail from someone who said, 'I don't understand what such a young man would want with a 70-year old person.' I guess you'll have to read the book. |
blog | blog_5_1 | PWD: This book came out of a writer's group. JJ: I didn't intend it to be a book; I was just going to make vignettes. It was terribly embarrassing for me--I'd have to leave the room and go for a walk. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "And I was a little worried about, you know, how you were actually going to be able to eat and digest a shoe. I didn't even know what kind you were going to choose. So I had a friend of mine . |
blog | blog_5_1 | On any given Saturday, a Costco outlet can expect to turn $500,000 in sales. One of the managers told me he sold a $53,000 diamond the previous day. Products from lawn chairs to multi-packs of burritos tempt buyers-in-bulk. A woman strolled by (without buying a book, I might add), and in her cart were a giant bag of lemons, a smaller bag of giant mushrooms - and a 27-inch color TV. Did she go to get lemons, then decide she might as well get a new TV, too? |
blog | blog_5_1 | Lyons, you've been on the job for less than a month. At 23, Tessa Lyons isn't much older than the undergraduates she passes in the hallways. Professors often mistake her for a student. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It gave me courage to go ahead and just write about the sex part and not worry about how badly I was going to surely do it. PWD: You're writing another book about teaching. JJ: It's tales from my classroom. I've been a teacher for 40 years. |
blog | blog_5_1 | PWD: Are the men you're involved with involved with other women? JJ: Some are. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "You've torn the bar code off! We need that to sell the book! Even cookbook authors must -- literally -- cook up interest in their books. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Three days later, Koppelman received a reply on solemn gray stationery that started, Yes, you are a real writer . And so Koppelman pressed on. |
blog | blog_5_1 | An encouraging sign is the recent influx of youth into the business. Traditionally the province of antiquaries and literates of the pre-computer age that is to say, older people used-book stores are now increasingly owned by people in their 30s and 40s. |
blog | blog_5_1 | She was homecoming queen at Red Bluff High School. In the photograph taken moments after her coronation, her smile is both pleased and amused. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It wasn't until his teen years that he began wanting to write, and it was only at the last moment that he decided to study English lit rather than math at Oxford. "A narrow escape," he now thinks. Even so, he periodically has to nourish the scientific part of his brain. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Silverblatt is fond of Cambridge Bookshop on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood he likes to buy a book there and then go sit in Lulu's and drink coffee; but then who wouldn't? and Arnold M. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It all started with one barn in New Hampshire. Jim, then a station manager at WGGB in Springfield, was feeling the stress of his job and its new responsibilities, which included giving on-air editorials. One weekend, the Kontoleons took a drive up to New Hampshire to get away and stumbled on a yard sale of sorts inside an old barn. Minutes later they emerged with a bag full of old children's books (Jeanne's favorite) and the rest was history -- literally -- as the Kontoleons began to amass a giant collection of old books which they kept in a spare bedroom. |
blog | blog_5_1 | http://www.dailynewstribune.com/news/local_regional/newt_store07162003.htm Wednesday, July 16, 2003 NEWTON -- It's an inventory that would make any literary historian drool. A French thesaurus from 1757, pages yellowed but still intact. A gold-leafed volume of poetry from 1845 with a personal inscription on the inside cover. |
blog | blog_5_1 | A consortium of Warner Bros./Heyday Films/Brad Pitt and Brad Grey have bought the film rights and are in the process of negotiating with Steve Kloves (screenwriter for the Harry Potter films) to write and direct. After nearly 20 years writing and illustrating children's books, churning out television scripts, papering his walls with his own unpublished novels and firing his agent, Haddon has become an instant success. "I have this fantasy that someone in that office has been beaten heartily on the bottom with a copy of this book," he says about his former but unnamed agent during an interview on a hot summer day in the Toronto offices of Doubleday, his Canadian publisher. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Top performers in the industry earn six figures. Consequently, if Ms. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It was one of the biggest debuts in publishing history. The cry from every publisher in town was Get me the new Charles Frazier! Suddenly, literary fiction was no longer thought of as a high-prestige but low-profit venture in an industry largely propelled by cookbooks, self-help tomes, and pulpy thrillers. Of course, literary authors like Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and John Updike were guaranteed generators of revenue, but they had built their reputations over a course of years. |
blog | blog_5_1 | But I have an agent, and she likes it. PWD: What does your son think? |
blog | blog_5_1 | "I really want you to notice, Tucker, that this is a wingtip. It's a right-wing wingtip," Clinton said to laughter from the studio audience. |
blog | blog_5_1 | area. Although they tend to occupy low-rent districts, they exist in virtually every corner Hollywood, Van Nuys, Thousand Oaks, Silver Lake, Westwood, Glendale and in dizzying variety. They cater to chefs (Cook's Library on 3rd Street in L.A.), photographers (Dawson's on Larchmont in L.A.), astrologers and soul-searchers (Bodhi Tree used book annex, on Melrose in West Hollywood). |
blog | blog_5_1 | Buyers are there from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Thursday. End of the road Enuf already. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Enraged, she agreed to speak to her husband's Rotary Club as a substitute speaker. Over the years, she was reunited with several of the people whose lives she saved. |
blog | blog_5_1 | It is one of Father's. His face was drawn but the curtains were real. I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Haddon's solution is "wholesome outdoor sports" and painting with acrylics so that the canvases are dry before his toddler, Alfie, comes home from nursery school. Haddon obviously doesn't suffer from a problem such as Asperger's, but there is lot of him in Christopher -- the love of math, for example, and also his need for solitude. "I was always one of those outsider kids," he says. He read gobs of science as a kid, avoiding fiction like a contagion. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Apparently John Clare, the English Romantic poet, ended up in St. Crispins Hospital, and so did Robert Lowell, the modern American poet, after suffering a manic episode when he was passing through. "That's the end of Northampton's link to world literature," Haddon says with a laugh. Now happily living in Oxford, Haddon, 40, has big muscles from his penchant for marathon kayaking on the River Thames. |
blog | blog_5_1 | The classic has raised $10 million for The Children's Hospital in its 13 years. Call 303-456-9704 for info. ... Oscar-winning documentary-film maker Donna Dewey slings drinks at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place, from 6 to 7 tonight to help renovate the club. ... |
blog | blog_5_1 | I'd known these people for 15 years. Eventually, I stopped taking it to them. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Then the question came up: 'Jane, what were you doing 'til you were 67?' PWD: Your thirtysomething niece was upset about you getting involved with a man more than three decades younger. Have you patched things up with her? JJ: Well, yes. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Mainly that's because Haddon has chosen to tell the story in the voice of Christopher John Francis Boone. He's a 15-year-old kid who finds his neighbour's black poodle stabbed to death with a garden fork in the middle of the night and sets out to find the murderer. Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Still, Book TV can be informative in a spinachy sort of way, and even enjoyable, as long as you remember not to watch it. I spent a whole Saturday cleaning my apartment with the set tuned to C-Span 2 and seldom needed to glance at the screen. Even at its best, American TV regards reading as an elevating exercise we must be coaxed to with proffered snippets of Hollywood glamour, lurid teasers or appeals to our civic spirit. To find the reader's life depicted as rich, fun, varied and even hip, you have to partake of BookTelevision, a 24-hour digital cable channel headed up by Daniel Richler (son of Mordecai) and available only in Canada. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Winning Aragis approval in itself is a benediction of sorts. Ive heard some very nasty accusations from people, then you look at their work and think, Well, theres a reason fifteen rejections are sitting in your box, Aragi says. Im very cruel about that, though, so Im not going to start sounding like an old bitch. There have always been bean-counters in the industry, because its a business. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Then Reifler signed on with Leigh Feldman, the agent who sold Arthur Goldens best-selling Memoirs of a Geisha and Cold Mountain. Feldman sold Reiflers first collection of storiesSee Throughto Simon & Schuster, albeit for a sum that would barely be large enough to buy a new replacement for her 1987 Toyota Camry. |
blog | blog_5_1 | She wanted to buy the movie rights and Whoopi herself wanted to play the lead. For Lansens, the deal meant another six-figure sum, not to mention an unimaginable windfall of publicity for the book, now in paperback. |
blog | blog_5_1 | As Jim's job changed, the couple, who met at Syracuse University, moved from Massachusetts to Florida to Connecticut, each time hauling all their new collectibles. During one move from New England to Jacksonville, the load was so heavy and the streets so hot that the truck blew five tires on the way down. "Each time we moved, it was always tremendous because we had all of our stuff and a book store," said Jeanne. During the couple's final move, to New London, Conn., where Jim was starting up a television station, the collection was already quite serious. |
blog | blog_5_1 | In the world of textbook sales, that's not unusual. (Just ask the Norton representative who covers Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska.) Logging that many miles would wear on anybody. But for Ms. Lyons, there is an added complication: She tends to nod off behind the wheel. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Write a column three days a week for 16 years and people barely blink. Write one best seller and, suddenly, you're an Author. Granted, an author who spent last Saturday at not one but two Costco stores, signing copies of "Murder at the Brown Palace," the runaway best seller about a 1911 shooting at the luxurious hotel. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Because before you get too hopeful about the state of civilization books are, let's face it, on their deathbed. As an art and a business, they're obsolete. |
blog | blog_5_1 | But believe me, Little, Brown is sitting there saying, Whoa, we better hope we can pull a rabbit out of a hat. Lansens felt the pressure as she scrambled to find a suitably marketable topic for her second book. After this big deal happened, I guess we did all have expectations, she says. It was frustrating, because nobody could really answer why. |
blog | blog_5_1 | So she moved to New York City and took a low-level editorial position at Norton. James and Patrick work for Houghton Mifflin. |
blog | blog_5_1 | She had the engine rebuilt at 400,000 and gets the rust treated every couple of years, but, she says, "it really looks good. "I intend to keep it until I die but, then, I'm in my 70s," she says, quickly adding, "We're both in good health." Around Denver Still openings for the 162-mile Courage Classic bike ride taking place Saturday through Monday. |
blog | blog_5_1 | PWD: You got a marriage proposal. JJ: And I turned it down. I'd have to give up too much; I assume fidelity is part of the contract. |
blog | blog_5_1 | A Mouthful of Air was published in April, and the New York Observer was quick to call it an exquisitely dark debut novel. It is only now that Koppelman can pause long enough to contemplate the bigger question: Was it all worth it? I got a $3,000 advance for the book, she says. Im not even sure that covers the postage on the queries I sent out. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Although she neither studied literature nor attended any writing programs, Lansens decided to attempt a noveleventually titled Rush Home Roadchronicling the relationship between a black grandmother in an Ontario trailer park and the abandoned white girl she adopts. The writing went surprisingly fastthe first draft took her about a year. I had read in some book that five to ten thousand dollars would be an average advance on a good book, Lansens recalls. And that was if, as was my dream, it was published at all. |
blog | blog_5_1 | The novel has a deceptively simple surface. Underneath, though, it is quirky and complicated, both graphically and textually. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Six weeks later, she and William Opdyke were married. He died in 1993. |
blog | blog_5_1 | At Doubleday, we believe in investing in a career, insists Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Random Houses Doubleday Broadway group. That gets harder to do with the money thats being thrown around these days. Its closing your eyes and praying. And that can hurt the writer. |
blog | blog_5_1 | But there are plenty of puzzles. In fact, the novel is a giant question mark about making order out of chaos. There's Christopher himself, of course. He's the one who's been labelled and who goes to a "special needs" school. |
blog | blog_5_1 | I do think, sometimes, people die early, they sort of give up on everything. |
blog | blog_5_1 | ''Nonfiction,'' in its eyes, consists almost entirely of ''Dad books,'' weighty tomes on American history and the lives of Great Men that make serviceable presents for your father when you just can't give him another tie. ''Booknotes,'' C-Span's author interview series presided over by the network's founder, Brian Lamb, epitomizes this preference. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Concerned that the 12 Jews with whom she had worked in a laundry would be taken away, she decided to hide them in a cellar under a gazebo. They remained a secret for eight months, when the major discovered the Jews. |
blog | blog_5_1 | And I stopped writing it as a novel, because it was a really bad novel, it was so phony. I named myself Nora. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Life of a Saleswoman By THOMAS BARTLETT Willimantic, Conn. At the moment, Tessa Lyons is lost. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Reifler says with a shrug. Its a crazy way to live. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Almost instantly, the big New York houses were squaring off over the world rights. The deal happened within a day, Lansens says. I was meeting my agent at another publishers office in midtown Manhattan, and she stopped me at the door and said, We cant go in there. |
blog | blog_5_1 | But while writers like Mary Morris consider the blockbuster mentality something of a sickness in the book business, others insist its a measure of health. Some of the worst cynics tend to be people who maybe are never going to get published for a reason, says Nicole Aragi, the superagent-of-the-moment who brokered Jonathan Safran Foers handsome payday. Aragi embodies the blockbuster mentality better than most. She claims not to bother with midlist clients and takes on at most one or two new authors a year, and then only the superhot (she also represents Junot Daz). |
blog | blog_5_1 | The middle is falling out, but the financial upside is far, far greater. Its exactly whats happening in Hollywood right now. But whats good for the authors bank accountand the publishersin the short term is not necessarily best for his career in the long term. |
blog | blog_5_1 | But just before Lansens became a casualty of publishings new economics, her luck turned violently, again. Hotchkiss, in New York, got a call from Whoopi Goldbergs production company. |
blog | blog_5_1 | For some, the new equivalent of a writers apprenticeship seems more like a hazing ritual. Novelist Mary Morris is something of a Mother Superior to Brooklyns exploding writers scene. The author of thirteen highly readable midlist books, Morris presides over an exclusive writers group, which meets weekly in her Park Slope brownstone. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Norton & Company. Another is trying to make intelligent conversation about Wittgenstein one minute and plate tectonics the next. It can become overwhelming. Especially if, like Ms. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Lyons persuades a professor to go with Norton instead of Houghton Mifflin, she is taking money out of Patrick's pocket, and vice versa. And there's nothing funny about that. Patrick suggests that they "do lunch" sometime. When the pair is out of earshot, Ms. Lyons wonders aloud whether it's possible to "do lunch" in a college cafeteria. |
blog | blog_5_1 | I'm not taking this too seriously, it seems to say. She has tried to maintain the same aplomb in her new position, but it hasn't been easy. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Across the way was an endlessly repeating video for Oxi-Clean, a miracle if ever I saw one. Of course I watched. Scientists have proven that if there is a television turned on, a guy will watch it. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "No, wait. Science is over there." She sticks the map in her coat pocket and takes off in a new direction, the suitcase rattling at her heels. Her confusion is understandable. |
blog | blog_5_1 | For almost 30 years, she never spoke of her actions, even to her daughter. Then, in 1974, when she filled in for a canceled speaker at her husband's Rotary Club, the story tumbled out. A write-up about her speech in a local newspaper caught the eye of a rabbi, who persuaded Opdyke to tell her tale to the world. She agreed, embarking on a new career. In the ensuing years, Israel honored her as a "Righteous Gentile"one of thousands of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. |
blog | blog_5_1 | JJ: He's terrific. He said, 'Go get 'em, Mom, it's your turn.' But he's not going to read the book. PWD: The New York Times ran a Styles section profile two weeks before publication. JJ: And I went up to the mountains. |
blog | blog_5_1 | So the question is a good one and, in all honesty, sometimes, I do have difficulty, and say: 'Come on Jane, simplify your life.' But who I would say farewell to? PWD: Would it be nice if all three lived in Berkeley? |
blog | blog_5_1 | When I was growing up, I was supposed to behave myself. I told my great uncle at a family gathering, 'You look just like President Truman,' and I was sent away from the table. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Acres has, by a conservative estimate, 750,000 books on its bowed, rotting shelves (the number probably is closer to 1 million). "More books than anybody in their right mind needs," acknowledges Jackie Smith, who has worked in the store since 1976 and now owns it (her husband's grandfather opened it in the 1930s). You'll find everything from Kakfa to books on games to play with your cat, studies of Mesopotamian sexual practices to the early novels of Henry Fielding, and in every condition from mint first edition to dog-eared and ragged. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Mr. Thomas E. Bonsall, Baltimore, Maryland, for his work-in-progress, Lilac Time Ms. Martha Crites, Seattle, Washington, for her work-in-progress, She Who Listens Ms. |
blog | blog_5_1 | If you look at Jonathan Safran Foer, no one said, Well, this is a difficult postmodern novel by an unknown writer, were not going to get involved. Everyone bid on it. |
blog | blog_5_1 | This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Chicken feed to Nancy Camp. She bought her Ford half-ton pickup new for $4,200 in 1972 and the odometer just zipped past 562,300 miles. |
blog | blog_5_1 | I did it because I didn't think anybody would believe if I told the facts. [One of the men] said, you have got to write this as nonfiction; he had read a couple of chunks. PWD: You dedicate the book to Gene. |
blog | blog_5_1 | (Just over a month after her visit to Eastern Connecticut State, Ms. Lyons will resign from Norton and move to Los Angeles.) "I'm pretty sensitive, you know, and when someone is mean, it kind of hurts inside for a few minutes. |
blog | blog_5_1 | And in doing so, he provokes his parents into modifying their own crazily self-destructive behaviour. Haddon, a soft-spoken Englishman, was born in Northampton, "the jewel of the Midlands," he says dismissively. "I always joke that there are only two literary links to Northampton, and both of them are to the same psychiatric hospital." |
blog | blog_5_1 | Forster's words from "Howards End" perhaps ringing in their ears: "Only connect....only connect." The proximity of the present to the past of life to death in used-book stores is electrifying. In a pre-digital electrical way. Take the Eclectic Collector, a dark, breezy hole in the wall just off the pier in Hermosa Beach. Presided over by Tom Allard, a Barnaby Rudge-type who can usually be found outside the shop in a Hawaiian shirt, smoking, the Collector is usually empty. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Thompson Bookseller, on 3rd Street in West Hollywood, for 30 years. Thompson said that the huge market for libraries in Southern California may help business in the short run, but it has taken a lot of books that would have been bought and sold repeatedly out of circulation permanently. But he added that the mega-bookstore trend has not affected his business adversely. But many experienced proprietors seem hopeful. |
blog | blog_5_1 | The participants always talk about the book in terms of how it makes them feel, a perfectly valid topic but not an especially interesting one when the feelings belong to someone you don't know and will never see again. The author, brought in to answer questions, invariably is asked, if the book is fiction, how much of the story is autobiographical and if there are plans to make it into a movie, or, if the book is nonfiction, how much research went into it. Fair enough, but that doesn't account for the generally deadly nature of Book TV's programming. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Their reading remains as varied as ever, from academic tomes to light novels. They haven't kept count, but they have read an estimated 1,000 books each -- just for the group. That doesn't include books they've read on their own. |
blog | blog_5_1 | (Available at better bookstores everywhere.) Anyway, there I was at the Park Meadows store, seated at a table between men's striped dress shirts and washable suede jackets. Just down the aisle was a large stack of plums by the crate. I had some down time. |
blog | blog_5_1 | No hard sell. Some professors seem happy to have a visitor. |
blog | blog_5_1 | I appreciate that, senator." Afterward, Carlson acknowledged to us that he won't get away with eating a cake shoe. He's going to chew and swallow a real shoe -- probably a loafer. "I'm screwed," he explained. |
blog | blog_5_1 | Why, Sam: Johnson's Bookshop on Pico, of course, where the owner, Bob Klein, a literature professor and novelist, will even deign to discuss the Doctor with you. This being Los Angeles, of course, most stores abound in movie star biographies, self-help guides and Buddhism. Automobiles and art books often show up in force too.Still, some proprietors are not sanguine about the future. |
blog | blog_5_1 | PWD: He was the only one you were in love with. JJ: I know, but I can get over that, too. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "As I grew up, I heard about my aunts and her childhood in Poland all the good stuff," her daughter said. But not the rest. "She told me that when she came to the United States and saw the Statue of Liberty, she said, 'I'm here in a fresh country to make a new start.' To do that, she had to put up a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on her memories." In the 1970s, Opdyke, who was working as an interior decorator, became aware that revisionist historians were questioning whether the Holocaust happened. |
blog | blog_5_1 | There must be more "classic" vehicles on the road than I thought. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a mini-pickup with 400,000 miles on it. This, of course, led to a reader calling with a Subaru that logged 484,000. |
blog | blog_5_1 | As Daniel Masons agent, Christy Fletcher, puts it: Its like credit. Its better to have no credit than bad credit. |
blog | blog_5_1 | "It's an incredible story," he said. "At first, it pained her, reliving the intimate details of her life." But once she got a taste of public speaking, "She couldn't stop a star was born." Despite failing health in recent years, Opdyke kept a busy schedule until she broke her hip April 12. |
blog | blog_5_1 | The handful of BookTV tapes I've seen contain the expected talk show, but also news and magazine programs featuring stories about everything from government confiscation of underground comics to the ascendancy of fast food (pegged to Eric Schlosser's ''Fast Food Nation'') and a behind-the-scenes look at the tough-guy filmmaker Bruce MacDonald creating a ''tribute literary video'' to the poet Ann Carson. The producers go on location to Milan to interview the editor of Italian Vogue, and to Turkey to talk with writers who have been harassed by the government. All this is inventively visual, with the dead spots trimmed out and the rest spiced up with archival footage, evocative graphics and energetic music. |
blog | blog_5_1 | And don't forget the Frank Cotton Memorial Oddball shelves, named for the late head clerk of Acres, who until his death in 1988 functioned as the store's only computer. There, you find a volume titled "14,000 Things to Be Happy About," and another called "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics." Along with these testaments to the misguided history of human curiosity, there are any number of misguided, curious humans to be wondered at, shuffling along with that awkward sidelong gait particular to creatures used to over-tight bookstore aisles. Pale and near-sighted from years of 50-watt bulbs, they gaze up at titles mostly long forgotten, at authors mostly dead and buried, E.M. |
blog | blog_5_1 | I want to say 'Please be nice, this is my job.' But you just have to -- " she doesn't finish the thought, dismissing the rest of the sentence with a quick wave. The two professors are finished talking and it's time for her to go to work. |
blog | blog_5_1 | He talked to six people for half an hour and sold five books. Then he helpfully took the shrink wrap off the remaining books and signed them. The clerk was aghast. |