I am not usually one who engages in delinquent behavior, but…. well…. my job has turned me into a graffiti writer. Seriously. Here is how it all began:

The women’s restroom at our store has three stalls. One of the stalls was, for quite some time, without an adequate toilet paper roll holder. The prongs that stick out from the wall were there, but there was no "crossbar" on which to slide the roll so that it would be suspended between the prongs. For a long time, we ladies would suffice with the toilet paper roll either awkwardly rolling, perpendicularly, on one of the prongs, or sitting on the toilet tank behind us. Since our bathroom isn’t open to the public, there was no real need to resolve this inconvenience, and we just got used to it, annoying though it was.

But that all changed the day some genius came up with the idea to use a PENCIL as the crossbar! It was perfect! A new pencil, already sharpened, turned out to be just the right length to be suspended between the two prongs. Problem solved!

Except that that pencil began calling to me. I would see it every day. Right there. Deprived of the opportunity to be used for its intended purpose. I would look at our yellowed stall walls, marred with shoe smudges here, scotch tape there, and see the same boring signs (do not flush paper towels) and posters (Bridget Jones’s Diary) that I’d been looking at for almost four years. I was suffering from stall monotony, as was the stall itself! I could hear it, calling out for change, just as that suspended pencil called out for use — for a pencil adventure! So one day, I brought the two together. I answered their twin calls with a call-related message of my own.

Giving a nod to traditional bathroom graffiti, I (it’s true) scrawled the following message on the bathroom wall: FOR A GOOD READ CALL (781) 431-1160. (The number being, of course, our store’s phone number.)

It took less than 12 hours for another note to appear alongside mine, this one a bold statement of the obvious: "Someone’s been playing with the toilet paper holder!" But wait! I recognized that handwriting — our assistant manager had written that note!! If SHE could get away with it, well…? That decided it. It was open season for graffiti in Wellesley Booksmith’s Women’s Restroom, Stall #1.

One bookseller wrote a question on the wall, asking which booksellers considered themselves feminists. (A heady topic for stall chatter, I thought.) As several stall users weighed in with their responses, the anonymous arguments got a little heated. I began wondering why we were having this debate in a bookstore bathroom stall, of all places. BOOKSTORE bathroom graffiti should be BOOK-related, I thought, so I wrote a book-related question that seemed, again, to give a nod to traditional bathroom graffiti topics: If there was a direct correlation between quality of writing and sex appeal, what authors (male or female) would you want to sleep with?

The response was great! The suggestions were hysterical! Clever! Such entertaining bathroom reading! They touched off a spate of bathroom graffiti that hummed along as we bookselling gals shared our entertaining opinions in anonymous fashion while putting that toilet roll holder to good use. We had to replace the pencil many times, because once you’d sharpened it a time or two it no longer suited its roll-holding function. But if you didn’t sharpen it, you couldn’t write on the walls, so…? We kept spare pencils on hand to suit either purpose, and the spare pencils could usually be found on the toilet tank. Where the toilet roll USED to be.

UNTIL THE DAY THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPENED. Someone installed an ACTUAL, proper toilet paper roll holder. And, I tell ya, the magic died. There are still spaces in that stall that are uncovered with bookseller scrawl, but the motivation to fill them has, well… vanished.

Which is why I am turning to you, dear ShelfTalker readers. Many of you have embraced my previous calls to sound off anonymously about book-related topics near and dear to your heart. Now I am asking you to sound off on the very same questions that have appeared (for several years now) on the walls of Wellesley Booksmith’s Women’s Restroom, Stall #1. Help us relive the glory days, would you? Remind us why we turned to such delinquent behavior in the first place.

We’ll begin with my first stall question — the one cited above:

If there was a direct correlation between quality of writing and sex appeal, what authors (male or female) would you want to sleep with?

OR, for those of you who’d prefer to take the author/reader relationship more slowly, here’s another variation:

If there was a direct correlation between quality of writing and sex appeal, what authors (male or female) would you want to flirt with shamelessly?

(Better?)

Ladies and gentlemen, start your pencils. As always you have the option of commenting anonymously.

Each time I think I know ABSOLUTELY what book or ARC I’m going to read next, another one comes along that is irresistible to me at that moment and replaces another at the top of my "READ THIS NEXT" pile. It’s a deadly cycle. Deadly, in that some of the books that were once my reading pile frontrunners eventually drop so far down as to never surface again.

What I rarely do, though, is stop reading one book in the middle in order to pick up another. I don’t do well with reading multiple books at a time. I like to give each one my undivided attention, from the first page to the last.

But every now and again, maybe once or twice a year, a book comes along that is just TOO irresistible — one that I just have to read RIGHT NOW. And today it’s the ARC for Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (HarperTeen, August 2008), which was just hand-delivered to me by my Harper rep. I’m stopping halfway through the adult book I’ve been reading (Stalking Irish Madness), because I JUST CAN’T WAIT to start this one!!

If you haven’t read Saving Francesca, you might not understand my unbridled Marchetta enthusiasm, If you have read it (or even Looking for Alibrandi), then you’re probably salivating with envy right now, wishing you could get your hands on Jellicoe Road too.

As soon as our lovely Harper rep, Anne DeCourcey, handed off the galley to me I opened it, read the first few sentences of the prologue, stopped, shook my head, made Anne and Lorna pause in their sales call, then read the prologue out loud to them. AND NOW… I’m going to share it with you. After reading it I’m betting you’ll want to read this book too.

My father took one hundred and thirty two minutes to die.

I counted.

It happened on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-La. We were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because I wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, “What’s the difference between a trip and a journey?” and my father said, “Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,” and that was the last thing he ever said.

We heard her almost straightaway. In the other car, wedged into ours so deep that you couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. She told us her name was Tate and then she squeezed through the glass and the steel and climbed over her own dead – just to be with Webb and me; to give us her hand so we could clutch it with all our might. And then a kid called Fitz came riding by on a stolen bike and saved our lives.

Someone asked us later, “Didn’t you wonder why no one came across you sooner?”

Did I wonder?

When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they’re some kind of garbage, don’t you know?

Wonder dies.

Want to read more? The first half of Chapter One (which appears to be the entirety of Chapter One in the Australian edition of the book, called On the Jellicoe Road) has been posted at Insideadog.

Last week in my post about the trend of using silhouettes and uninteresting stock photos (as opposed to interesting ones!) on book covers, I posted what I thought was the final cover for the paperback edition of Alabama Moon, which is being published by Square Fish this September. My assumption seemed safe, as the cover appeared both in the catalog AND in numerous places on the Internet. But as often happens in publishing, the word I took as "final" was anything but!

Having read my post last week, Liz Szabla, editor-in-chief of Feiwel and Friends, wrote me a VERY nice message with the happy news that the silhouette cover had NOT, in fact, been the final cover for the book. She attached the revised cover image to her message, and I am posting it here.

Those of you who have read Alabama Moon will hopefully agree with me that this is a definite improvement over the running silhouette cover image. And those of you who have NOT read Alabama Moon should be sure to do so, be it with this cover or any other. I’ve posted my original review of the book on ShelfTalker once before, but (once again), here are my still-true thoughts, as they first appeared in our store’s newsletter back in 2006:

There are some books that have all the right ingredients, all the right characters, and all the right outcomes: This is one of them. With the writing of his first novel Watt Key has softened the pluck and spirit of Huckleberry Finn, slipped them into the bones of a 21st century boy, and in so doing, arrived. Filled with spunk and fever and a wild, sweet goodness, Alabama Moon is a soul-satisfying, kid-centric story staged with pecan trees, pine logs, and a cast of characters you can’t help but love. Will kids like it? Oh, good heavens, yes. Scout’s honor. I predict that wilderness skills will soon be en vogue again and suggest that a special Moon badge be awarded to every kid who reads this book.

Keen-eyed Pat Pereira is one of the booksellers who keeps watch over all the goings-on in our store’s children’s section. Today she shared with me a rather interesting (and I think entertaining) phenomenon on the Stephenie Meyer front. Little, Brown recently published a hardcover "Special Edition" of Eclipse (the third book in Meyer’s wildly popular series) that includes bonus materials not available in the original edition, though (to Little, Brown’s credit) at the same price as the original, $19.99. The bonus materials include a full-color poster (printed on the back of the book’s dust jacket), two iron-ons, and the first chapter of the long-awaited Breaking Dawn, which won’t be released until August. Pat’s report to me today was that teenage girls are coming in to the store, picking up the new Special Edition of Eclipse, reading the first chapter of Breaking Dawn at the back of the book, then putting it back on the shelf and leaving.

My reaction: Who can blame them?? If you’re a Stephenie Meyer fan who already owns Eclipse in hardcover, how fair is it to expect you to buy it AGAIN, just so that you can get a glimpse of what’s coming in August? I personally believe it’s rather unfair. If Little, Brown (or Stephenie Meyer) wanted to insist on making money off Breaking Dawn’s sneak preview, I’d have preferred to see them put it on a secure website and charge readers some nominal amount of cash to access it. What I really would have liked to see, though, is everyone embracing the fact that teenagers are so OVERJOYED by this series of books as to just post that first chapter online for them to read FOR FREE. As for how that would affect the flow of cash into publisher/author coffers, I think the buzz that would have followed everyone’s free access to that first chapter would have sold enough additional copies of Breaking Dawn to more than make up for the "loss" of not having published its first chapter at the back of a "Special Edition" of the previous book.

I suppose this is very un-retailer-like attitude, but what can I say? I hate the idea of such enthusiastic readers (especially YOUNG enthusiastic readers) having to cough up the cash twice and walk away with little more than two copies of the same book.

I suppose that’s why I’m having a hard time mustering any discontent with the teenagers coming into our store and treating it (for brief stretches of time) like their own Stephenie Meyer Reading Room. If you’re an Edward- or Bella- or Jacob-loving teen without the available resources to purchase Eclipse a second time (or convince a parent to purchase it for you), AND the first chapter isn’t available for you to read online, AND all the new edition copies have been checked out of the library, well…? What’s a teen to do?

Bookstores to the rescue! I wondered if anyone had actually confessed online to this illicit in-store chapter-reading and, lo and behold, I found many, many Meyer fans who mention having done so. What’s pasted below is just a sampling.

When I read this one I had to wonder about the definition of "obscure bookstore" (hopefully not any independent bookstore that I know):

"I managed to find a copy of the Special Edition Eclipse in an obscure bookstore and I read the first chapter of BD while the person wasn’t looking =) that way I don’t have to buy it."

And here we have an argument against having comfy chairs in your store:

"So my sis in law TJ and I decided to go to Hastings and have some hot chocolate and grab a copy of the special edition of Eclipse that has the first chapter of Breaking Dawn at the end of it, and sit down in their comfy chairs and read it."

We’re going to assume this next blogger doesn’t live anywhere NEAR any independent bookstores:

"I really want to go into the Barnes and Noble there so I can read the 1st chapter of Breaking Dawn in the special edition of Eclipse."

The same goes for this one:

"While he was looking for a hat, me, Mom, Chantel and Ashley went across to the Books-A-Million to read the first chapter of Breaking Dawn in the special edition of Eclipse."

But this is the post that really summed up my thoughts:

"Yes, I sneaked a look at the Breaking Dawn preview inside the new "special edition!" of Eclipse – which is wrapped in plastic to prevent people from reading the preview without buying the book, but I did find one that wasn’t shrink-wrapped.

"That is a bad, bad thing to do to a devoted fanbase, especially a devoted teenage fanbase. Hardcovers are expensive enough without having to buy a book twice over, and Breaking Dawn may be coming out in August but since when are fangirls known for delayed gratification?"

Too true!

If you aren’t familiar enough with the Stephenie Meyer fanbase to fully appreciate the level of their enthusiasm, please do yourself the favor of watching this completely charming video on YouTube, in which a teenage girl who has just had a GLIMPSE of Breaking Dawn‘s cover proceeds to speculate about everything the cover image could possibly suggest. You go, fangirl.

Every time I see the title Curious George Takes a Train pop up in a sales report, I misread it as "Curious George Takes the A Train." (EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!) My brain then IMMEDIATELY begins playing a loop of Duke Ellington‘s "Take the A Train." The tune is a rather pleasant accompaniment to my work, so I don’t actually mind it, but I kick myself every time for not being able to read this title properly. I’m going to coin my own disorder here and say that I have swinglexia.

Last weekend when Gareth and I were in New York City visiting friends and attending MoCCA (more on that soon!),at one point we hopped a ride on the A train, and my brain immediately snapped to sounds of Duke Ellington and images of Curious George. I’m picturing a new ad campaign for the MTA…

Anything trip you up like this on a regular basis? Are there things you misread with regularity? If so, please share.

I’ve long thought I escaped conception without the girl gene that says  "PLAN A BIG THEME WEDDING," but I nevertheless gasped with enthusiasm when I saw a reference to a wedding with a To Kill a Mockingbird theme while poking around on the blog of potter Rae Dunn, whose work I enjoy. Rae created beautiful egg-shaped favors for the wedding’s guests. Wanting to imagine in what OTHER ways the bride and groom of this ceremony played off the Mockingbird theme, I did a little poking around, only to find that Rae was in EXPERT company on her work for this wedding. Yes, it appears as though only wonderfully artistic people made contributions to this affair.

Before I go into the details, let me back for one minute and address something first: when I say this wedding had a To Kill a Mockingbird "theme," I do not mean that the happy couple traipsed down the aisle in oversized ham costumes. Nor did they invite a silent and reclusive neighbor to attend or ask their redneck relatives to crash the party and hurl racial slurs. Race was not the topic of the day, nor was justice. But books and childhood treasures were. And family. And bird feathers and trinkets and, well… Can you imagine a book with a more perfect "spirit" to invoke on such a meaningful day? As one of Harper Lee’s number one junkies I’ll say I can’t.

But back to the talented people who contributed to this wedding, AND (by extension) to this blog post. For starters, there’s the bride. Viola Sutanto is a designer who lives in San Francisco and runs a business called Chewing the Cud, through which she designs logos and ad campaigns, books (for Chronicle Books) and clean, beautiful letter-pressed invitations and announcements for events such as her OWN wedding. Pasted here are a couple peeks at the invitations she and husband Phillip Ting came up with for their ceremony.

And then there are the photographs Anna Kuperberg took at the wedding. Let me just say right now that I’m a photo buff but I’m not often fond of wedding photography. I am using zero hyperbole, then, when I say that Anna’s photos are stunning. Truly. Her two photo blogs (Kuperblog, which features a wide variety of photo subjects, and Slobber Space, which features her photos of dogs) have become two of my most oft-visited feeds. Pair Anna’s ability to capture a beautiful ceremony with Viola’s ability to design one, and voila: you’ve got some serious wedding eye candy. All of the photos in this post were taken by Anna.

With Anna and Viola’s permission (thank you both!) I’m including photos here that offer you a taste of what Viola and Phillip’s wedding was all about. The text that explains what’s in the photos below comes from Viola’s captions on ChewingtheCud.com. Want to see more than what’s included here? Visit Anna’s full gallery of photos from the grand affair.

"The bird motif that initially appeared in their bookmark-the-date announcements fluttered in the afternoon breeze at the ceremony location. Guests [were] invited to write wishes for the couple on the bird cut-outs."

"Viola made a mini stack of books that the ring-bearer carried down the aisle and book boxes that held the bridesmaid bouquets. "

"Instead of seating cards, guests [were] invited to discover their names on colorful journals that nestled in the milk crates. The crates were hand-stained and decoupaged with photos of vintage food labels taken by the couple during their travels together." 

"The tables were named after characters from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and corresponding letter grades… Viola made a custom runner that adorned the head table as a gift for Phillip. She printed their vows and favourite poems and hand-drew playful illustrations throughout the piece." 

"The theme of discovery and childhood memories were carried through at the dinner tables where treasure boxes revealed photos of guests and childhood trinkets. The childhood photos of the couple and guests were a wonderful conversation opener. Menus with trivia questions kept the guests entertained as they awaited their entreés."

Of all the photos Anna Kuperberg took at Viola and Phillip’s wedding, I think my favorite is probably the one of Phillip reading his vows to Viola from a handcrafted "book." Both of them look so unabashedly happy. Which is how any wedding, with any theme, should make the couple feel.

So, wedding afficianados AND those of the just-elope variety, what do you think of To Kill a Mockingbird as a wedding theme: a good choice, or no? Is there a book that YOU think would be well-suited to such an occasion? How about the book that would LEAST well-suited to a wedding theme? What book-themed wedding would you be the most keen to attend and/or have for yourself and what details would you include to pull it off?

This past Monday, an article in the Rutland Herald entitled "Two Books and a Beach Towel" was referenced in Shelf Awareness. In the article, several booksellers and librarians were asked to imagine that they were being sent off to a deserted island this summer but that "each person is allowed to take only two books: one old favorite to reread, and one not yet read."

As Shelf Awareness noted, "Among the booksellers interviewed were Sandy Scott, Galaxy Bookshop, Hardwick; Stan Hynds and Erik Barnum, Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center; Dennis and Marsene Pryor, Annie’s Book Stop, Rutland; Lynne and Bill Reed, Misty Valley Books, Chester; and Claire Benedict, Bear Pond Books and Rivendell Books, Montpelier."

The challenges for me here are two-fold: the first is trying to figure out WHAT librarian or bookseller could take only TWO books on any outing that would last more than maybe three days!! (That’s where the whole premise of this challenge is insane, but we’ll forget that for a second…) The second is trying to figure out what books I would take in the face of such evil restrictions.

I decided to ask a couple of my colleagues for their thoughts. Like many of those quoted in the Rutland Herald article, our crew is definitely keen on packing the classics.

Lorna Ruby, my book-buying compatriot, says this *might* be cheating (meaning she’s just going for length here) but she picked The Complete Works of Shakespeare to reread and Anna Karenina to read for the first time. (She was tempted to include The Secret Garden instead of The Complete Works…, but if she’s got to choose something that will take her a while, that seemed unwise.) 

Ignoring the "choose a long book" scheme, I’m choosing to reread A Prayer for Owen Meany (which I’m due to read again) and choosing to read O, Pioneers by Willa Cather (which I’ve been hearing my 91-year-old grandmother talk about for years).

The lovely Lisa Fabiano (bookseller extraordinaire) says she’d reread To Kill a Mockingbird and she’d read… some classic she hasn’t read before (she’s still debating which one) as she thinks that would be a good opportunity to read and reflect on it at length. (And apparently being trapped on a desert island would be what it would take for some of us to FINALLY pick up the books we were never forced to read in high school!)

Elizabeth Wolfson, who was my delightful intern last summer and is now a Smith grad looking for a teaching job (anyone in Massachusetts hiring? she’s GREAT!) says she’d reread Matilda by Roald Dahl ("I’ve read it about 100 times and could just keep re-reading it!") and would like to finally try reading Pride and Prejudice ("because I’ve been hearing so many great things about it for so long").

Another of our wonderful booksellers (which describes all of them), Marilyn Lustig said, "I’d want to be writing and enriching myself," and with that in mind she’d reread her very own copy of Amy Krause Rosenthal’s An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life to which she’s been adding her own entries, making it a combination book and journal. As for what she’d read for the first time, she chose a dictionary! (Clever, clever…)

One little observation we’ve all made about this challenge: because you’re allowed such a small number of books, you could actually decide to make these two titles a reading/re-reading goal for the summer, whether or not a deserted island is available to you. (Though if it is, I recommend sending yourself along with more than just two books! Or, better still, taking me with you. I’ll bring enough books for both of us!)

Now it’s your turn. REMEMBER, you are allowed just TWO books! Two! One you’ve read and one you haven’t. What will you be packing?

I was both intrigued and entertained by Mike Meyer’s "Learning to Speak Olympics" article in the New York Times Book Review last week. In it, he talks about the English lessons Chinese school children have been receiving for several years now by way of an cartoon monkey. As Meyer explains, "Mocky is the poster monkey for the drive to have 35 percent of the population conversant in English by the Olympics."

As part of this initiative, the Chinese publishing industry has apparently been rolling out a VERY diverse array of English language books. Meyer describes their appearance in one bookstore this way:

With 230,000 titles on display, Book Mansion is China’s largest bookseller. Textbooks fill one of its five floors, each the size of an Olympic swimming pool. There’s an entire aisle of English-Chinese dictionaries and another filled with preparation manuals for English competency exams…

Book Mansion categorizes its manuals by category: leisure English, phone English, taxi English, job-hunting English, even badminton English. I opened one of the many books titled “Olympic English” and found this: “I have made a reservation for tonight through the telephone. My name is Cable Guy.”

The Chinese government has provided police with a book called Olympic Security English designed to educate officers in the conversations necessary for “Dissuading Foreigners From Excessive Drinking” and instructions on “How to Stop Illegal News Coverage.”

Meyer’s article is entertaining, interesting, and in places disturbing. I shudder at the thought of Chinese government officials selecting the necessary phrases to include in their police handbook. And who were the authors of Love English who decided to teach Chinese citizens that the words "I’m bored" mean "Do you want to have sex?"??

All of this, though, has me pondering what phrases and words I would put in an introduction to the English language, were I writing one specifically timed to coincide with this year’s summer Olympics. What sentence or idea do YOU think China’s citizens ought to learn before when the world shows up and tunes in this August?

Here’s a short t-shirt post to ease you back into my blogging routine, on the heels of the NINE delightful posts you’ve hopefully been reading the past few days, compliments of Josie and Elizabeth! How on earth they found nine chunks of time in all the BEA hubbub is beyond me, but I for one am SUPER grateful they did. Reading their reports was almost as good as being there!

THANK YOU, Josie and Elizabeth!!

And now… another book-related item, because so many of you seem to be enjoying these. This week’s wearable entertainment comes compliments of BuySomethingAwesome.com where you can (yes) buy this awesome t-shirt. But first tell me just what you think the HEMINGway is… Short sentences, maybe? Witty understatement? Hmm.