As Elizabeth mentioned this week, BookExpo has become less about book discovery for booksellers and more about other kinds of business conversations. Partially because I have been trying to mix it up between conferences—especially with Children’s Institute in the rotation—I’ve missed BookExpo the last couple of years, but I enjoyed being back. Coming to New York always offers the value of meeting more people from the home office, so I took advantage of the chance to set up some business meetings. I also walked around and had some first-hand conversations with smaller presses and graphic novel imprints. You know, one thing I find challenging as a buyer is to differentiate true YA-appropriate graphic novels from those that are really for adults in some of the mixed catalogs, especially when they aren’t sold in by graphic novel specialists. (Make a kids and YA Edelweiss catalog, Diamond Books!) So I took the chance to make the rounds and ask all my questions, which was great!
While there’s certainly less book discovery at the show now, I still always leave with my thoughts focused around at least one book that I really want to tell people about, and this year, that was the remarkable Pet by Akwaeke Emezi. Set in the near future, Emezi depicts the utopian aftermath of a righteous revolution in which a group of legendary “angels” has rooted out the “monsters” of society and eliminated evil wherever it lurked—in government, law enforcement, or behind closed doors at home. Now, in the idyllic enclave of Lucille, residents rest easy, secure in the knowledge that the monsters are forever gone and everything has changed. Continue reading →

I got an unusual, bittersweet but wonderful phone call six weeks ago from a kindergarten teacher at Rumford Elementary. Rumford is a mill town about 40 minutes from Farmington. Rumford Elementary has two kindergarten classes with a total of 48 students. It turns out that the teacher had been curious to know how many of the children had ever been to a bookstore. The answer turned out  to be none.
She had called me in the hopes of rectifying that sad fact and we arranged for an official field trip to our bookstore. Friday, May 17th was a rainy day and we were excited to see a yellow school bus appear in front of DDG.
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My mother, who is 92, lives in a nearby assisted living residence, and I visit her in the mornings on my way to the bookshop. We sit together at her breakfast table with three other ladies, and while they eat (cornflakes or oatmeal, followed by scrambled eggs and toast, or pancakes on Tuesdays and Thursdays) I drink my coffee and jot down my staff projects list for the day. I share tales of store events and funny customers, and they give advice about store layout (too many places don’t have enough chairs, or good light) and staff attire and shelf height and well… everything, including an admonition to “put on a little lipstick, dear, before work.”  I sometimes tuck a new impulse item or two in my bag for their amusement, and leave behind both publisher swag and puzzles with damaged boxes that are headed for our clearance rack – new puzzles are very popular in the activity room, and those shiny padded envelopes that some publishers use for ARCs are just perfect to recycle to mail packages for great-grandchildren’s birthdays.
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I think I’ve only missed two or three BookExpos — that former lion of trade shows for the book industry — in 23 years. Held every spring, BookExpo was the arena for serious bookseller education, for us to see all the upcoming fall books, socialize with colleagues from around the country, meet with publishers and publicists, collect some prized autographs from authors and book-writing celebrities, and attend dinners and parties held by publishing houses celebrating their star book lineup for the fourth quarter. We can still do much of that BookExpo, but it’s become a shadow of its former self for many booksellers.
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Our weekly story time and preschool activity schedule (This Is the Way We Sweep the Floor) has a new addition this year, and it’s been such fun to implement that I wanted to invite you to play along, too. On Wednesday mornings we are now hosting “Stories and Play,” a 30–45 minute session devoted to the literacy of games, introducing preschoolers and their parents to the value of table games. The idea for this session began during last holiday season, when our staff noticed that games for the five- to eight-year-old set we selling briskly, but those games targeted for younger ages of two to four were not turning as well. We began to talk about all of the pre-literacy and verbal skills that are strengthened and supported by these types of games, and how easily we could incorporate game play into a story time, just as we now use art and music. As an easy-to-plan and even easier-to-run summer programming idea, I’m sharing the dice and spinners with all of you, too.
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My favorite events these days are the ones involving collaboration with partners. Those events offer a variety of venues, audience members, and excellent causes. Recently, I was lucky enough to be part of a lovely, lively event created by several community partners. Kids, families, and teachers who participate in our local Champlain Valley Head Start program were invited to a celebration to kick off a “1000 Books Before Kindergarten” initiative, and it involved six organizations creating the party, including Head Start, the University of Vermont’s ‘Kiddie Cats on the Move’ Program, the Vermont Department of Health, the Children’s Literacy Foundation, Burlington’s Fletcher Free Library, and Sherpa Kitchen, a local Nepalese and Himalayan restaurant.
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Now that the fall buying season has begun in earnest, I once again brought a big stack of picture book samples to our biweekly BookKids team meeting to see what people gravitated to. Now, this batch only reflected a handful of recent mailings, so it certainly doesn’t represent anywhere near everything on the fall lists, but we had a lot of fun diving in! So what does it sound like when a bunch of booksellers tear through a table of new picture books? Well, there’s a lot of page turning, punctuated by effusive, declarative statements, such as “I LOVE foxes.” But it’s the spontaneous read-alouds and debates that we’re all really in it for.
The biggest hit today had to be Pokko and the Drum. I only got as far as the first page before I demanded people drop everything and listen. It’s a fantastic first page.* “The biggest mistake Pokko’s parents ever made was giving her a drum. They had made mistakes before.” You see, Pokko’s parents have a history of buying regrettable gifts for their cherished frog daughter (the llama was particularly ill-advised). They’ve stupidly done it again, and now they’re stuck with the ear-shattering consequences. As hilariously matter-of-fact statements chronicle each new development in their family drama, Matthew Forsythe keeps it deceptively simple in the art as well, letting his expressive froggy faces do the humorous heavy lifting.
Illustrated details throughout add to the fun, showing the parents’ squashed legs sticking out from under the llama that has destroyed their house or depicting their double sided family bed, with their pillows at one end and Pokko’s at the other—which is where she would sleep, if she weren’t marching about on top of their shared coverlet, banging on her drum. I also loved the sly moment where one of Pokko’s band mates eats the other, where we get a glimpse at the casual savagery all too common in the eat-or-be-eaten world of children’s books. The difference here is that Pokko will have none of it, stopping the action on a dime to boldly berate the perpetrator before continuing on, business as usual. All in all, it’s an unpredictable delight from beginning to end. Continue reading →

Awareness of bias adds a subtle undercurrent of tension to one’s reading experience. In the case of As Many Nows As I Can Get, a YA debut by Shana Youngdahl which is coming out this August from Dial, the danger came in the form of positive bias. Shana is a professor at the local University of Maine at Farmington. Even worse she is a long-time customer, and a decidedly good egg, who I know and like.
My predisposition to like the book was strong. It is also true  that I was shamed and embarrassed to have had the existence of the book first brought to my attention by a third party: Summer, during our interview with her two weeks ago. The need for me to take strong steps toward critical objectivity was obvious at this point.
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Our 2019 summer reading program enrollment opened a few weeks ago, but this week and next are the busiest for sign-ups, as the Memorial Day weekend approaches on racing wheels (it’s Indy 500 weekend, and all things zoom toward Sunday at 225 plus MPH). Our schools finish this week and next, and the neighborhood swimming pools open this Saturday, provided the rain ever stops and the high school lifeguards pass their certification classes. Our summer program has been tweaked a bit over the years, but with 1400 annual participants or so, it is now a regular fixture in the community, and seems to just unfold every year like the towels on the pool deck.
Our program is mostly free to join — we do require the purchase of one book of any type or price range to sign up for each participant (so yes, we sell LOTS of books just by announcing the program) and is open to readers and pre-readers through adults. We group our readers by the type of program they wish to enroll in, not by level, which makes the program more open-ended for both kids and adults. Here’s how it works:
Reading Buddies
This is our program for pre-readers, or those children who are enjoying picture books read aloud by their parents, older siblings, or caregivers. We ask that these readers produce a picture or some piece of artwork (we’ve received dioramas, clay models, Lego creations, and have heard original songs) about the story that we can display on the walls of our store. For three-dimensional work, we take a picture and print it, posting these contributions with the book title and author/illustrator indicated on a sticker in the bottom right corner. As the summer goes on, first the doors, then the back wall, then the side walls of our store become covered in pictures in crayon, markers, colored pencils and paint. Some kids dictate a brief review, and some label their pictures with character names, usually added afterwards in pencil.
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My favorite conversations in the bookstore are the ones in which I’m not involved, but happen to overhear in the aisles. This week has been a busy one at the shop, as our schools are finishing up the year, and there’s lots of present buying for both graduations and teacher gifts. The final big “invite-everyone-in-your-class” birthday parties of the school year took place this weekend — no Indy mom schedules a party on Memorial Day weekend, as we have THE RACE — so the gift shopping is brisk as kids will have two and three celebrations each day, it seems, in the month of May. There has been lots of bustle and chitchat in the shelves, so I’m sharing a sampling of my eavesdropping with you:
Between a four-year-old and his mom:  We need to get a gift for your friend Thomas. What does he like? He likes me. And jelly beans. Yes, and it’s his birthday, and we will take a present to his party. What should we get? Lunch. I think we can go home and eat right after we buy a gift. Can you help me pick out a present for your friend? No, he really likes playing with my things, so we can just get something for me, and he will be a sharer. 
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