I was driving in to the bookstore on Monday morning when I saw ambulance lights behind. Noteworthy but not unusual. Then a series of more sirens from behind, ambulances, police cruisers, and fire trucks began to pass by in earnest. Maine Public Radio broke into Morning Edition to announce that a building had blown up in downtown Farmington and there had been a propane explosion. One firefighter was reported as dead and more injured. The thought flashed through my mind that the bookstore was involved, that the building had been my downtown neighbor, the House of Pizza, which has a row of propane tanks attached to it. We have had close calls along these lines before, smelling propane coming through shared ventilation into the bookstore and running over to the the House of Pizza before it had a chance to open and turn its ovens on. It was not the House of Pizza however. MPR  proceeded to report that It was the headquarters of a community nonprofit LEAP, Life Enrichment Advancing People, whose mission statement is Supporting people with developmental, cognitive and intellectual disabilities to be actively involved in their home communities.

There had been a strong propane smell in the building when LEAP staff arrived that Monday morning, and the maintenance person took action and evacuated the building while calling for emergency support. Most of the Farmington Fire Department arrived and, along with the LEAP maintenance worker, went over to the building to try and find the cause of the leak. The propane source exploded, destroying the building entirely, leaving nothing but rubble, debris, one firefighter dead, six more critically injured along with the maintenance worker.
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Oh, the joy of attending a book launch… that you didn’t plan, don’t need to manage, and can just hang out as an interested reader! No worrying about attendance, no stressing about the number of copies you ordered in, no last-minute calls to the author who is “on their way,” surely, but a little bit lost on the drive from the airport.
I treated myself to just such an event tonight, and wanted to bring all of you along, both to share our colleague Tiffany Phillips’ charming Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Indiana, and to highlight the launch of Brian Allen Carr’s newest book Opioid, Indiana. If you haven’t seen a galley (or as of today, if it’s not on your New Releases table), then that’s the first “to-do” item of your workday:

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Happy Guts Day, everybody!

In honor of the release of Raina Telgemeier’s new honest and endearing graphic memoir about gastric distress, anxiety, and therapy, I wanted to celebrate the many kinds of courage it takes to bring books into the world and into the hands of readers—all of which involve gastric distress, anxiety, and, ideally, therapy.
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The furor among independent booksellers following Amazon’s erroneous early shipment to customers of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments has not abated, fueled in part by ongoing confusion and frustration about laydown and publication dates (which are not the same thing, I’m learning). Most booksellers are trained to acknowledge the phenomenon of Tuesday releases… that rather random but magical day in our industry when new books are introduced. While there may be a myriad of attributed reasons for the choice of Tuesdays — from convenience to retailers for receiving, stocking and shelving… to a piece of shopworn historical lore that big box retailers prefer one day per week for all new media releases, and Tuesday is that day… to some complicated formula of how to best maximize bestseller data collection and maintain status in the top 10 for big titles that I can’t, for the life of me get to parse…. at any rate, as new booksellers we’re trained that “New books come out on Tuesdays, and that’s the day they hit the floor.”
Well, except for a few instances….
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BookPeople’s CEO, Elizabeth Jordan, recently announced her move back to her hometown of San Antonio to become general manager of author Jenny Lawson’s highly anticipated Nowhere Bookshop. It’s obviously bittersweet news for me personally because, while I know this will be a fantastic fit for Elizabeth, I’m going to miss her. Elizabeth has a long history with BookPeople, originally starting as a bookseller before becoming a sales floor manager. Shortly after I started at BookPeople in 2005 and became the children’s book buyer, Elizabeth became the adult book buyer (the grown-up yin to my childlike yang?), then eventually general manager, and then CEO last year. Over the last 14 years, we’ve shared a fair number of hotel rooms at conferences, many a bottle of wine, and a lot of really challenging and productive brainstorms. Long story short, we’ve spent a lot of time slinging books together. Honestly, she is one of the smartest people I know, and Nowhere Bookshop is lucky to have her.
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It is much easier to find young adult books set in Maine than it is to find books which feel like they really took place here. Julia Drake’s outstanding YA debut novel, The Last True Poets of the Sea, has, apart from all its other virtues, one of the most authentic Maine settings you’ll find in a novel.  The book follows Violet, a New Yorker whose great-great-grandmother Fidelia was the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the northern Maine coast. The redoubtable Fidelia swam to shore and remained there, founding the town of Lyric, Maine. Violet, in the wake of a family emergency in which she has played a critical, and disappointing role, is sent to Lyric for the summer, staying with her uncle. The search for the sunken vessel her grandmother arrived on, along with navigating the personal wreckage which brought her to Lyric, is the foundation of a book teeming with depth, romance, intrigue, and self-exploration. Resting on nuance rather than easy answers, The Last True Poets of the Sea delivers a truly exceptional reading experience. Given all its canny depths, dangerous undercurrents and the centrality of exploration in the narrative, it seems incumbent on us to find out a bit more. Fortunately Julia rallied round to answer a few questions.
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“Do you have the New Testament?” asked the customer on our first phone call of the day.
“We do have several children’s bibles, and some collections of stories from the life of Jesus…. is this a gift for a specific occasion?”
“No, no…. the Netflix series. The one that’s a book and all the girls look like nuns….”
“Ah, yes, we have Margaret Atwood’s new book. May I hold a copy or two for you?”
It wasn’t the first misunderstanding about a book title in our store this week, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. In this case, I just wasn’t thinking — how I could blank on THE TITLE of the week is probably due to an accidental decaf substitution at the local coffee shop, not an unclear request. Customers frequently ask for books that they distinctly remember, but can’t exactly name. Often, they also can’t name the author — although for some reason, the color of the cover sticks with them, as does a once-upon-a-time location in a display in our store. Booksellers often joke about the oft-heard “I don’t know the title, but it was BLUE…” but the real challenge as a literary shopkeeper is to keep a straight face when a customer butchers a title or author’s name, as well as to adroitly translate the malapropism, instantly producing the requested title.
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Our school year is just three short weeks old, and there are a few items I’d like to address with our educator friends. Before we get any further into the semester, this children’s bookseller would like to make a couple of changes to the curriculum — and perhaps alter some school policies, for the good of the students and the sanity of both parents and my employees. Just for this school year, perhaps we could do away with…
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Several of us on the ShelfTalker team have been reflecting lately about some of the intricacies of the bookseller / author relationship, and I thought it might be interesting to ask an author to weigh in. As it so happens, we have an author on our team these days. With over a decade of experience as an author and editor and now with just about a year at BookPeople, Leila Sales has worn a lot of different hats in the book industry, so I thought it would be fun to get some insight into her time on the bookselling side of the fence.
MG: What made you want to join the BookPeople team? 
LS: A reason to put on real clothes and leave the house on a fairly regular basis. Also, a community, colleagues, camaraderie. People with whom I can regularly talk about books and exchange ideas. Consistent access to readers, so I can see what they’re excited about and why. A place to bring leftover baked goods, or eat other people’s leftover baked goods. I could go on.
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Children in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade take an active interest in the real world. If you were to poll a group of fourth graders as to what books they were reading you would find nonfiction based series such as I Survived and Who Was/Is contending with the might of Wimpy Kid and Dogman for popularity. This is because middle grade readers are very interested and engaged indeed in clarifying the nature of things. Lucretius himself would find them estimable.
Having gotten the macro stuff, that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, dragons and trolls are imaginary, middle grade readers want to explore things with a finer lens. It’s complicated: for example, robots are real, but space robots visiting from other planets are fictional. Even their aforementioned guidebooks to the nature of the real world, nonfiction books are nuanced, and interwoven with fiction. The I Survived books insert the fictional element of child protagonists into their accounts, for example.
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