One of the things I like best about owning a bookstore is getting galleys in the mail. I never know what lovely discoveries await in the boxes. Sometimes, galleys come with things. Once books were wrapped in feathers (not my favorite galley mailing, as they seem to have disintegrated during shipping). Sometimes galleys come with chocolate, always a staff favorite. Usually though, the mailings are not useful, until the galley for Susan Beth Pfeffer’s The Shade of the Moon came last week from HMH.

I have to confess that the arrival of this galley actually caused me to do a little Snoopy dance. I just love this series, it started with one of my favorite books, Life As We Knew It. The concept is so simple: what would happen if the moon were struck by a meteor with such force it knocked it off its orbit? Lots of things happen. Things that make the reader want to stock a survival kit in the basement and ensure they have lots of firewood for the weather-related almost-nuclear winter that ensues.  All the books in the series are just as compelling as the first, and if the first 100 pages of the new book are any indication, this is going to be another winning entry.
The galley came in a small box with the book and a survival kit. At first I thought, really, a kit? And then I opened it. How practical is all of this stuff? I live alone in the country, and this is all very useful. The Clif bar is always helpful when I forget to get food, or eat breakfast. The whistle, well, that can scare bears, right? Matches are always helpful when the power goes out. The first aid kit is fabulous and chock full of things to help me when I do something silly, like burn myself with the matches during the blackout. Then there’s hand sanitizer which is also useful when there’s no power and there’s no water.
And the best part about this kit is the book, which I cannot put down.

You know how life is full of loose ends that never get tied up? Well, the other day, I received the most incredible letter, one that tied up a loose end from almost a decade ago — tied it up not just with parcel string, but with the most glorious big red bow, and I wanted to share it with you all.
Some backstory: several years ago when I was an as-yet-unpublished MFA student, I wrote a picture book manuscript about a little girl who uses her nearsightedness to solve crime. It was called Iris Spectacle: Accidental Private Eye, and I had a deep, amused attachment to it. It skewed old for a picture book, especially these days, with 1500 words and a main character who was eight or nine years old. Still, the story had a certain something; it won a blind picture book manuscript competition that Candlewick Press (not yet my publisher) sponsored through Vermont College. But Iris didn’t sell; at the time, I just wasn’t able to either trim the story to make it younger and drop the crime-solving plot, or expand it into a chapter book. So she sat in a file.
A while later, a librarian on a children’s literature listserv I subscribe to put out a call for books about girls who love their glasses. I sent her a copy of Iris to share with her patron. I never heard whether or not the child liked the story. In fact, I suspected that perhaps Iris hadn’t resonated with the young reader and the librarian just hadn’t had the heart to tell me. Over the years, from time to time, I wondered about the little girl with glasses — the only child who had ever read Iris.
Fast forward almost a decade to the other day, when the most spectacular, funny, beautifully written email arrived in my inbox from that little girl, now seventeen years old. Here is what she wrote (reproduced with her permission):
Hello!
I’m not expecting you to remember me at all, so don’t worry if you don’t. I’d just like to start with that. Anyway. When I was eight I had already spent the previous six years of my life unable to see more than one foot away and even then not very clearly. With some great technology and fabulous doctors I was given these enormous larger-than-harry-potter glasses that barely fit on my face. And I could see, which you think would get me leaping for joy at figuring out the sky is blue, and that there actually is a sky, and all sorts of things. But I was terrified. The world was too big to fathom and I’d rather just make myself a small nook and stay there forever. And then I learned to read. Reading was perfect because I could be in a giant world at the palm of my hands. And I was happy, which I mean was more of a confidence booster to my parents who had this weirdo kid depressed about seeing.
(I’m getting to the part where you come in soon, just hold on.)
Soon I started to love my glasses and being able to see so much that I would not take them off at bedtime until my eyes were closed tight. But as I kept reading with my new-found vision I ran into a problem. There were great children’s books about girls and how great they were and there were great books about boys with glasses and how great glasses were, but nobody seemed to have combined the two. Being an avid fan of both girls and glasses I begged my parents to get me books about girls who had glasses AND loved them, like me. Of course, my parents are not literature experts and had nothing for me, so I enlisted the help of one extraordinary world-class children’s librarian Charlotte Rabbit.
(Okay now I’m getting to your part.)
Mrs. Rabbit found me what was about half a dozen published works that to be honest, eight year old me found really really REALLLLLY REALLLLY boring, as only eight year olds can. So then Mrs. Rabbit sends me something that most definitely isn’t a book. It’s a bunch of white paper clipped together. She told me the book hadn’t been published but I got to read it early. This being the coolest thing that had ever happened in my eight years (besides the whole being able to see thing, which had gotten kind of old at this point) I read Iris Spectacle: Accidental Private Eye about three times in a row. And I loved it. And I brought it to school and bragged about my connections in the literary world and basically felt invincible. Hopefully you remember the book but if not, you wrote it. Anyway finally I had written proof of how cool girls with glasses are. And also a good starting point for my two year detective/spy phase, but that is a whole other story.
Now it is almost ten years later and after some handy dandy googling, I found you and I had to email you to thank you. Even though I guess the story never got published, that’s the least important thing in my mind. Because even if I was teased for having four eyes or I couldn’t make friends because glasses made me look weird, I had that book to read when I got home and know that glasses were good and the world knew it, even if the third grade didn’t know it. Now I am a rather confident high school junior President of a slew of clubs including theatre, and the leadership team, and captain of my ski team. I am a confident actor and very happy in my weird glasses-wearing skin. And I owe a lot of that to you. You and Iris Spectacle were my first friends who didn’t mind the glasses and I can’t thank you enough for that.
Anyway now my long lame-o story is over and I really appreciate that you took the time to read this. And I hope you know that your book, published, unpublished, whatever — it made a difference in my life. Which is all you need to take away from this. If you don’t remember eight year old me or Mrs. Rabbit or that manuscript I stole, it doesn’t matter. This is just a simple thank you.
Thank you.
–Sylvia

********
(Now back to me, Elizabeth.)
Isn’t Sylvia fabulous? This is a kid with moxie, and a way with language. I fully expect to host her at an author signing at the bookstore some day. And if that happens, I will still be glowing from this gift of a letter.
I can’t tell you what it means to an author to hear that her story has helped a young reader in some small way. This is the privilege of writing for children — the joy of connecting with the best people on the planet, through stories and humor and our best attempt to share our hearts on the page.
Thank YOU, Sylvia, for taking the time, all these years later, to find and write to a stranger who once sent a bunch of white paper to a librarian and a little girl far away, and wondered about her. And thank you, Universe, for tying up one of your loose ends.

I’ve danced around this topic in other posts, but I just need to come out and say it: I miss seeing sales reps. I email with them, we talk on the phone, etc., but I find that my ordering is scattered at best without actually sitting down and seeing a rep. I know it’s unrealistic to think I can actually see a rep for all my book ordering, but boy, it would be great.
I know with the evolution of on-line ordering, reps are probably far busier than they used to be, but I’ve discovered that frontlist ordering isn’t as successful without me interacting with a rep. Sure, I can do online ordering and read all the notes and the supplemental material, but it takes five times longer than just flipping through a catalog and making notes. What I miss about the meetings are the conversations that begin with, “Let’s go back to page 37. There’s a great paperback original about the relationship between two sisters in New Hampshire that I think your customers would love.” The computer doesn’t speak just to me. The computer doesn’t know my store. My rep does.
Reps are vital to the book business. And a good rep can really help a store if you’re paying attention. I love listening to a good rep (there are bad ones out there, though there seem to be fewer of them out there) talk about the books on the list they love. While I might not agree with all of his or her choices, I love that they have strong opinions about books.
Meeting a rep is a richer experience than sitting at the computer looking at entries. The face to face meeting allows a chance to get to know each other and make each other laugh. Frankly, anyone I’ve laughed with is already way more fun than ordering online. Reps have heart and they love books as much as bookstore staffers do. This love cannot be underestimated. Reps and bookstore employees do not make a lot of money, we all know this. When I walk a rep back to her car and she opens the trunk to reveal a season’s worth of galleys (always try to get a meeting early in the season) and starts handing me things, I get excited about all the possibilities.
Meeting a rep for a meal and then placing an order always seems to take less time than the whole computer order. Maybe that’s because it’s harder to eat and order on the computer than it is in person. Books, while a solitary experience, are also a shared one. We read a book and then give it to our friends and urge them to hurry up and finish it so we can talk about the book with them. Reps are just like that. They encourage us to try new books, to read galleys we might have skipped, and to trust them. It’s the trust that is the cornerstone of the relationship.
And as handy as the computer might be, I’d still always rather sit with a person and talk books.
 

Every year, I like to resurrect at least a few favorite older books to recommend for summer reading.
The 21 Balloons by William Pène du Bois (Viking) is a perennial favorite because it includes a hot-air balloon wreck at sea, diamond mines, an exploding volcanic island, and best of all, scads of whimsical inventions in the houses of the secret civilization on Krakatoa, where the shipwrecked main character washes up.

The author was also an incredible artist, and his depictions of inventions mesmerized my sister and me when we were kids. We were fascinated by the living room with chairs connected to overhead electrical grids so they could zoom around the room, and beds whose sheets could be wound to new freshness on a big roll (like old-fashioned cloth handtowels that used to be in public restrooms), and the clever balsa-wood items that replaced regular items too heavy for hot-air balloon travel. The book has a slow beginning, especially for 21st-century attention spans, so I let kids know that ahead of time, showing them some of the great illustrations, and reassure them that once the Professor gets up in his balloon, there’s clear sailing ahead — for the reader, at least.
I also have been on a roll recommending Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake (HMH). It is a perfect summer story for grades 4-6. I read this book several times as a child, and although I still don’t remember much of the actual plot, what drew me to it time and again was the appeal of having a place of one’s own. Two cousins, a boy and a girl, are on summer vacation with family when they discover a little ring of old houses around a lake. No one lives there except two adorable little old people, who befriend Portia and Julian, and invite them to choose any house they like to explore and make into their own clubhouse. There’s something pleasingly, not frighteningly, haunting about this vanished summer lake, something out of time. Pretty much all you have to do to get a kid (at least a girl; I’m not sure I’ve handsold this one to boys, but will see what happens) interested in this book is to mention the hidden lake and the kids getting to choose a whole house of their own, and they’re in.
Finally, Rebecca Rupp’s absolutely charming Dragon of Lonely Island (Candlewick) is always, always a hit with kids ages 7-10. It combines everything you want in a summer story: adventure, humor, the sea, and of course dragons. Well, one glittering golden dragon with three heads, who is quite old and sleepy, but kind. It befriends the three children who discover its cave, drawing them in with riveting stories about past adventures from its 20,000 years of life. While the children get a taste of ancient China, at sea in 19th-century England, and a plane crash in early 20th-century America, they also realize that someone else has discovered Fafnyr’s den and wants to kidnap their dragon friend.
There are so many others I could write about: Edward Eager’s Magic or Not?, Anne Lindbergh’s Worry Week (Josie’s favorite summer book to recommend to ages 7-10), the more serious Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, and on and on.
What backlist books about vacations, adventures, sand, sea, and sunshine put you and the kids you recommend to in a summer mood?

My bookstore is in the country. As spring finally takes hold we’ve got flowers, grass and buds on trees. It’s all just so lovely. Except for the flying bugs. These bugs range from tiny and irritating when out walking because they form a black cloud that usually causing me to jog through it, to the larger, slightly ominous stink bugs that alternately delight and terrify small children. See the photo to understand why. They move slowly, which belies the speed with which they can fly.
I was working on Saturday when a very earnest four-year-old girl came up to me asked, “Have you seen the bug?” I’m not a fan of bugs and tried to hide my discomfort as I looked around for a bug large enough to cause a young child to talk to a stranger.  The fact that she referred to it as “the bug” (not “a” bug) felt to me like she was on the hunt for something massive. Something that could lift up a bookcase with its wings.
We looked for it. Well, she looked and stood behind me, hoping not see it first. She saw it and excitedly pointed it out. “Okay, now what should we do?” I asked. This kid was like a junior game warden. “Get a cup and a piece of paper.” I jogged to the back room and got a clear plastic cup which is very helpful for bug catching — this way you can see that bug is safely in the cup before you proceed. Because honestly, there’s nothing scarier to me than almost catching a bug and then having it fly at you when you didn’t even know it could.
We trapped the bug in a cup and then slid the paper between the floor and the bug. The little girl directed me well and was a very calming voice amid my slightly growing panic. I should have used cardboard, not regular paper. There was no firm seal on the cup and the bug was on the move.  We hustled out of the store and set the bug free.
Feeling proud I stayed on the deck and watched him only to see him land a bush and then fly right back towards the store. I kept the cup close by the rest of the day.

My Dearest Publishers, Editors, Jacket Designers, and Marketing Folks*:
We need to talk again about how you can make booksellers and librarians and — most importantly, your kid customers — extremely happy. Every week, we booksellers spend a lot of time with your series books: shelving them, tracking them down for customers, restocking them, and looking up the on-sale date of the next eagerly anticipated volume. All this serial contact means encountering certain frustrations again and again, and there are a few very simple things you folks can do to bring joy and delight to the land:

• Standardize your title/series treatment with Bowker, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, etc., so that when we fetch new titles into our systems, they don’t need editing. You would not believe how many variations of book and series title treatments we see. Titles might show up with or without the series name; if the series name is part of the title, sometimes it precedes, sometimes it follows, the individual book title. Sometimes the series title is abbreviated. Sometimes the numeral (e.g., Book 5) appears; sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not entirely certain that this is completely under publisher control; it’s possible those companies specify different preferences or make their own edits. But I suspect it’s more a case of lacking a single style sheet through the years. if that’s the case, then please, for the love of all things holy in publishing, standardize your in-house format for series. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent editing our own series titles so our staff can find books quickly and easily. When a child says, “I need book 16 in the Magic Tree House series,” or “What’s book 9 in the 39 Clues?” or “What’s the next book after Scorpio Rising in Alex Rider?” etc., we want to answer them right away from our impeccable, easily searchable inventory records.

• List your series numbers on the spines! There is nothing easier you can do to help customers, booksellers, teachers, and librarians — and yet there are STILL holdouts. I cannot think of any positive reason to omit this very simple and helpful piece of information from a book’s spine. And please make it easy to read, as high contrast as good taste allows.

• Please list the entire series, in order, in a list in the front matter of the book. Parents spend a lot of time hunkered down in the fantasy section, flipping frantically through books trying to find the magical list of what’s in the series. (Obviously, those lists in the early volumes will be incomplete as each new volume comes down the pike, but they could conceivably be updated with subsequent printings.) Oh, and that antiquated convention of omitting the title of the book you’re holding in your hand from that front-matter list of the books in the series does not serve your readers. Include all the titles, and please do so in a way that makes it crystal clear what is the order of the series.

I think if the publishing folks who work on series titles spent a week (heck, even one afternoon!) working at a bookstore, you’d quickly understand the day in, day out, non-stop demand we have from customers, both kids and adults, needing series help.
Thanks for listening! Enjoy the gorgeous weather.
*Marketing folks — We know you’re not responsible for any lapses in series design efficacy, but you are included here in the hopes that you will use your prodigious influence to encourage change where needed!
 

Perhaps it was the 76-degree weather today, but I started thinking about the summer. Our Vermont location often finds visitors from all over the world during this delightful, and short, season. Often these visitors are authors, traveling with their families. Know that we are always thrilled to meet authors; without you, we would have nothing to sell. It’s embarrassing to get blindsided and get caught with low stock that we would love to have you sign. Below is my wish list for all the traveling authors who like to visit independent bookstores.
– If you know that you’re likely to visit a store, give us a call and introduce yourself. Tell us when you’re going to come by and that you’d love to sign stock. Most bookstores need a week to get stock. Two weeks gives us a chance to order from your publisher and get a better discount.
– Customers who might have an author staying with them: please pop by the store and let us know. We had a lovely customer interaction a month ago. A good customer came by the store and told us that Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife, was going to be visiting him. She didn’t want to a full-on store event, but wanted to sign stock. The customer gave us a month’s notice and we got a case of the book for Paula to sign. Less than a week after she signed there are only three signed books left.
– If you just happen to pop by wanting to sign stock, please don’t be disappointed if we are out of your book. This happens and being scornful (as has happened, in the past) is not helpful when there’s nothing to be done. We are keeping track of around 30,000 books we stock in store on any given day.
– Please don’t get mad if we haven’t heard of you and have yet to stock your book. All stores are bound by space and time limitations. Tell us about your book and then let us decide if it’s a good fit for our store.
– Please carry your favorite pen with you. Bookstore pens are forever running out of ink at the most inopportune times. I hate the furious scramble behind the register while everyone looks for a Sharpie that has ink.
– If you’d like to do an in-store event while you’re here, please don’t call two weeks before you arrive. Good events take six weeks to plan correctly. The schedule can be moved up, of course, but less time means less marketing and that usually translates to fewer attendees.
– Allow us a moment to gather ourselves. Every once in a while some one comes to the bookstore who is a staff favorite. We get a little breathless when this happens. We do pull ourselves together, eventually.
–

E.L. Konigsburg had a glorious mind and she wasn’t afraid to use it. I was an advanced reader at a young age and drank in her smart, unusual books like refreshing, even necessary, water. She was brilliant, her characters were smart and/or interesting without being precious, and her stories carved out new territory time and again. Like Ursula Le Guin, Natalie Babbitt, Lloyd Alexander, Richard Peck, Katherine Paterson, Madeleine L’Engle, E.B. White, Kate DiCamillo, and a few other fine, unique writerly souls our nation has produced, Konigsburg’s work spoke to childhood fascinations and concerns, both subtle and plain, with a rare wit and a surprisingly supple creative genius.
Her books have woven a path throughout my life, as they have for so many readers. My first Konigsburg was Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, and I read it several times, a little prickled/haunted by the shifting friendship dynamic in the book and the mysteriousness of Jennifer’s witchiness. It was a book unlike any I had read, and I loved it. From the Mixed-Up Files was next, and it knocked my ever-living socks off. I was a kid growing up in Arizona at the time, far, far away from the Metropolitan Museum, and yet I was Claudia. At some point later on, I discovered the beautiful (and less well known than it should be) The Second Mrs. Giaconda, a gentle speculation about the model for the Mona Lisa. I loved Konigsburg’s more obscure books, too; George and Up from Jericho Tel, and Father’s Arcane Daughter. I loved that she wrote about Jewish kids and families, something that was almost unheard of in books when I was growing up. As a school librarian, I taught a little medieval history to sixth graders through the fabulous A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and The View from Saturday still recalls our first year of bookselling at The Flying Pig; Ms. Konigsburg helped connect us to many a child (and teacher) that year. I can’t think of a five-year span in my life where I wasn’t moved or inspired by at least one of her books. She has wowed me for forty years; there aren’t many authors with that kind of longevity and a perpetually high bar, a quality that never wavers.
If you’re a fan, try to get your hands on a copy of TalkTalk: A Children’s Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups (Atheneum, currently OP, I think). It’s a collection of nine brilliant, articulate speeches Konigsburg gave over the course of nearly four decades of writing. Her breadth of knowledge is so evident here; she was a wondrous light in children’s literature.
Somewhere in my own mixed-up files is a handwritten letter from Ms. Konigsburg in response to one I wrote her back in the early 1990s. I had intended to write to her for many years, but what finally spurred me to pick up my pen was not a literary epiphany, but the fact that Jell-O had finally created a flavor (I think it was cranberry) that one of her characters thought up in one of her books. I thought she might like to know, before I proceeded with the fan content about her writing in my letter, that she was also a crackerjack food innovator.
So many people and publications have written tributes about Elaine Konigsburg this week. For more personal anecdotes, my friend and colleague Sharon Levin posted a charming memory in her brand-new blog called Life, Literature, Laughter about E.L. Konigsburg’s kindness to her as a child. And the Horn Book posted this article, which also links to thoughts from Roger Sutton. Publishers Weekly’s informative obituary is here, Rocco Staino’s School Library Journal tribute is here, and the New York Times’ obituary is here.
I am sad that she is gone, and grateful that she left behind so much richness. To celebrate E.L. Konigsburg’s life, I am going to re-read at least one of her books this week. If anyone else is doing the same, which will you revisit, or set out to discover for the first time?

Like many people, I was glued to my television Friday morning with the live coverage of the manhunt for the remaining Boston Marathon bomber. I don’t normally watch TV in the morning, but it was riveting, alarming, and downright scary.
About the time the CNN reporter said, “We’re going to delay coverage, so what you’re watching isn’t happening live, it’s on a delay.” I realized that the S.W.A.T team on a roof looked poised to kill someone (which did not happen). I sat there drinking my coffee mystified and scared that they were going to show someone being killed on live television.
My phone rang and I muted the TV and remembered that a fourth-grader was supposed to call to interview me about being a stand-up comic. His librarian shops at our store and suggested he call me to learn more about stand up for his research paper. I answered the phone and a clear, piping voice said, “This is Jeff. May I ask you some questions about comedy?”  I was immediately struck by several things: this ten-year-old was poised and he loved comedy.
For the next 20 minutes he asked me great questions. Where does the funny come from? That was harder to answer than I would have thought and I fear I rambled a bit, but he was a pro and just followed along with me. We talked about comedians we liked. He asked how I got started: Elizabeth made me promise the first New Year’s we were friends, in 1993, that I would stand up once, anywhere. And that’s all it took. Jeff was riveted. I think he couldn’t imagine someone doing stand up for twice as long as he’s been alive.
His enthusiasm was infectious. I turned the muted TV off halfway through our call. It just seemed wrong to have the possible carnage on in the background while having such a lovely, innocent call. Jeff likes to sing and he is a fan of Weird Al Yankovic and we talked about the skill needed to craft parodies of songs. I ended the call by telling him that he might want to take a stand up class over the summer because he should pursue his passion.
I could feel him beaming through the phone, and that helped me all day as my return to the adult world was full of news of lockdowns and shootings.
 
 
 
 
 
 

I couldn’t resist diving right into the ARC for Kate DiCamillo’s new novel, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, even though it’s not coming out until September and I have stacks of ARCs from more recent months waiting to be read. This isn’t going to be a review of the book, yet; I’ll save that for closer to the pub date. However, even just a few pages in, it is clear that, once again, Kate DiCamillo proves herself to be one of those rare authors who write up to children, understanding that kids’ intelligence, curiosity, and ready sense of humor will be piqued by encountering a wide range of characters, experiences, and lively, rich language.
Nothing flattens a book more than the attitude that children shouldn’t encounter words they don’t already know — which, if you think about it, is a pretty silly cul-de-sac to drive down. Some years ago, when my younger nephew was five or six, I met the family for dinner at a restaurant. When I walked in the door, my little guy ran over, gave me a big hug, and said, “Auntie Boo, you look pulchritudinous this evening.” (Then he asked me if I knew what the word meant. That was pretty adorable, too.) He and his mom had been reading a Dick King-Smith chapter book, and my nephew had absorbed new vocabulary with delight.
I suspect it can be be hard to get words like “pulchritudinous” green-lit for the 6-8 crowd, and I understand there are some good reasons. Fancy language that draws attention to itself in a way that distracts from the story being told is a nuisance. But no one takes as much joy in delicious words as a child. When I travel to schools as a visiting author, one part of my presentation to elementary school kids is a slide of words I love, “catawampus,” “deliquescent,” “discombobulated,” and a couple dozen more. This is always a place where kids start reading the words aloud, rolling them around to see what they feel like.
Along with Kate DiCamillo, M.T. Anderson and Polly Horvath are contemporary American authors who don’t pull the plug on their vocabularies (or ideas) when writing for children.
Who else, dear Readers?