{"id":25801,"date":"2018-05-29T07:30:02","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=25801"},"modified":"2018-05-29T07:30:02","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:30:02","slug":"the-lighthouse-keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=25801","title":{"rendered":"The Lighthouse Keeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0year and a half into sole ownership of the bookstore\u2014after twenty years with a co-owner\u2014I’ve found my business\u00a0behavior\u00a0transforming. Once, I was\u00a0a kind of groundskeeper with\u00a0four or five bookstore “gardens” to tend.\u00a0I’ve now become a lighthouse keeper, needing to shine\u00a0a beam on every aspect of the store in a never-ending revolution of shifting attention.\u00a0My gaze is steady when it\u00a0lands\u00a0on an area: bill paying, event planning, frontlist buying, budgeting, customer attention,\u00a0marketing, display, new programming, backlist restocking, returns, donations, and so on.\u00a0But then the lighthouse beam must move to the next area, leaving the rest in the dark until the light sweeps back in again. I have wonderful staff to help with these islands of store needs, but I have to gaze on all of them regularly in order to run a tight … lighthouse?
\nBeing a lighthouse keeper is at odds with the way our vendors are set up, of course.\u00a0The big\u00a0publishers have entire departments focused on a single mission, such as collecting payments.\u00a0We, on the other hand, have fifteen departments each managed by … us.\u00a0If we are a few days late with a $27 payment and\u00a0a credit rep calls in a panic, I chuckle to myself a little, because I imagine them thinking of a bookstore as a segmented business like a publishing house. I suspect they don’t\u00a0envision just how many hats\u00a0(to switch metaphors) we wear at once. So I’ll reassure them, reminding them that we’ve been good, reliable, paying customers for 21 years and don’t plan to stop now, that I’ll pop their check in the mail pronto, and I thank them for\u00a0their phone call, which\u00a0is a helpful nudge to get the lighthouse beam trained once again on the\u00a0check-drafting\u00a0portion of my job. (I feel it’s important to tell you that I\u00a0am usually prompt with my\u00a0bills and am foiled only when my revolving beam is snagged on a kraken or some such momentous distraction.)
\nIn honor of the lighthouse school of bookselling,\u00a0here are a few of my favorite lighthouse titles:
\n\"\"<\/a>Hildegarde H. Swift and Caldecott Award-winning artist Lynd Ward teamed up to write an endearing and enduring tale of the real lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge in New York City. Written in 1942, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge<\/a><\/em>\u00a0was a big hit, and when, just nine years later, plans were afoot to decommission the little lighthouse<\/a>, fans of the book were outraged and the lighthouse was saved. Hooray! I first discovered this book when I was librarian at the City & Country School in Manhattan in the early 90s. It was a favorite of the children’s and mine back then, some fifty years after it was written, and I’m sure it is still a favorite\u00a0at the school today. Customers who come into the store knowing the book are always delighted to see it on the shelf. I miss the beautiful hardcover edition, but, happily, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt\u00a0does keep the paperback in print.
\nThis April brought a\u00a0gorgeous new\u00a0lighthouse picture book, which also happens to be illustrated by a Caldecott medalist. Sophie Blackall’s charming\u00a0Hello, Lighthouse<\/em><\/a> (pictured at the top of this post) instantly became a staff favorite. Telling the story of a lighthouse through time, from\u00a0a new keeper’s first day through his last, it’s the kind of book children love, with appealing details of old-fashioned life, the\u00a0drama of danger at sea and the task of keeping it at bay, and the cycles of seasons and change over the years.\u00a0This book absolutely\u00a0flies off the shelf as soon as we restock it.
\nAnother favorite is Anita Lobel’s 2000 release, One Lighthouse, One Moon<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Greenwillow),<\/em>\u00a0which made our store’s annual top picks newsletter that year. Chalk up a third lighthouse picture book to a Caldecott (Honor)\u00a0medalist! (Note that the Caldecott awards and honors weren’t\u00a0bestowed on the\u00a0lighthouse books themselves, but I do think it’s interesting that so many fine artists are drawn to illustrating lighthouses.)\u00a0Lobel’s is a deceptively simple-seeming concept book in three parts that invites young children into a lovely counting book also involving seasons, colors, days of the week, and months of the year.
\nTwo adventure-filled lighthouse picture books are Birdie’s Lighthouse<\/em><\/a> by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Kimberly Bulcken Root (Aladdin), and\u00a0Storm’s Coming!<\/em><\/a> by\u00a0Margi Preus, illus. by David Geister\u00a0(Minnesota Historical Society Press). In the first book, tall and skinny like a lighthouse itself, a young girl keeps the\u00a0lamp\u00a0lit during a storm when her father, the keeper, is taken ill. In the second, a contemporary girl\u2014also the daughter of a lighthouse keeper\u2014notices nature’s small signs of\u00a0storm warning in the changed behavior of birds, insects, and even flowers outside, and must race to alert her father to the danger.
\n\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>
\nChapter book\u00a0readers can dive into the world of Cynthia Rylant’s Lighthouse Family series, which begins with The Storm<\/a><\/em>. Here, Pandora the cat becomes a lighthouse keeper and saves the life of a seafaring dog (appropriately named Seabold). The rest of the series follows Pandora, Seabold, and their little rescued mice family in further adventures. Adorable, especially with the pretty illustrations by Preston McDaniels.\u00a0\"\"<\/a>
\nJumping to the adult realm,\u00a0there’s a tie for first place for my favorite lighthouse novels:
\nOne\u00a0is Sena Jeter Naslund’s\u00a0Ahab’s Wife<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0which begins with the\u00a0protagonist in her teens, running away from a ruinous father to live with relatives in a lighthouse in New Bedford, Mass.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nThe other is Howard Norman’s fabulous National Book Award finalist\u00a0The Bird Artist<\/a><\/em>, in which a solitary 1911 Newfoundland illustrator of birds confesses to the murder of the lighthouse keeper.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\n(Stumper: There’s another one I loved but cannot find. When we opened the store in the mid-90s, we loved to recommend an adult fiction title that I could swear was about the real-life 19th-century lighthouse hero, Grace Darling, who was instrumental in helping to save the lives of shipwrecked sailors. I cannot for the life of me remember the title of that novel. Anyone? If it doesn’t surface, at least there is another novel about Grace D. coming out this October from William Morrow & Co: Hazel Gaynor’s The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter<\/em><\/a>.)
\nNo lighthouse roundup would be complete without Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse<\/em>, of course, but I have to confess that I have never read it. I don’t know how I can call myself a\u00a0former English major when that canonical novel eluded me, but\u00a0there you have it.
\nIt’s not surprising that there\u00a0are so many great stories about lighthouse keepers. What is surprising, however, is that they seem to sire only daughters. Has anyone written about a lighthouse keeper’s son?
\nWhat are your favorite lighthouse stories?
\nFrom my perch at the lighthouse lamp, here’s wishing\u00a0us all\u00a0a summer that looks more like this:
\n<\/a>
\nthan this:
\n

<\/a>

One of Jean Guichard’s amazing photos of La Jument in France. I used to have a poster of this hanging in my dorm rooms throughout college. \u00a9 Jean Guichard (click photo for his official website)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A round-up of favorite lighthouse books, in honor of becoming the lighthouse keeper of a bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}