We Interupt This Month Of Bookselling Lore... For James Ellroy, Perveted Pooch

To bring you some video footage of James Ellroy. Oh yes, Jason. This is what you get for being late. You will now have to follow James Ellroy being his bizarre, perverse and wonderful self.

Yes, that is a masturbation motion he makes. And yes, that is a panting noise he makes. Yes.

Thanks to Lauren Fernstrom for sending this my way. Back in December Playboy Magazine (of the insightful journalism and short story publishing fame) ran a selection of James Ellroy's forthcoming book, Blood's A Rover. The third in his American Underworld Trilogy. They then went on to publish a series of autobiographical sketches of Ellroy's often perverted sex life. Top shelf stuff today, people. Top shelf...

Ellroy for those of you who have not cracked open one of his hard-boiled, noir-updates is a very good writer. His prose is as terse as it comes and for every wide-grinning genre machination there is a counter of head-shaking, sweaty-palmed conspiracy theory (or not so theory, depending on your outlook) that transforms the books into intellectual fare. Where Hammett and Chandler wrote aiming for slick fun, Ellroy writes with a zeal for slandering idols and figureheads.

In the American Underworld Trilogy (I highly recommend you pick up American Tabloid) Ellroy takes a not so unrealistic position of displacing major moments of U.S. polemics with sawed-off shotguns, devil-deals and innocence never owned. Ellroy opens the book with a short prologue about how America was never a virgin. No, "she popped her cherry on the way over." Indeed.

Howard Hughes, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa, and many others are portrayed in the trilogy in not-so kind lighting. Add one of fictions most endearing badass(s), Pete Bondurant and some other slick types and you have a dark yarn that you will keep pulling despite the blood wetting the fibers.

It is truly a "brilliantly unpleasant" experience as William T. Vollmann called it.

That's enough of that. Time for the show. Ladies and gentleman, James Ellroy. American author.

People at work, you are going to playboy so be wary of your overzealous IT professionals. James Ellroy's LA Tour people. Enjoy..

How To Open A Bookstore In 10 Steps (The Wolfgang Method)

In coming up with ideas for my contributions for the Devil’s Accountant, I realized that I could go on and on about things like inventory selection (like I did last week), in-store events, community involvement and all the rest of it, but I have come to realize that my primary objective here should not be telling you about how I operate my bookstore.

At this time, which is undoubtedly a troubled time for independent stores of any type and for book stores in particular, I feel that this is not the best way to use this forum. So, instead, I would like to tell you how to open a bookstore. Or, at least ten points to get you started. Next week I will give you ten reasons why you should open a bookstore.

1. Sell used books. While there have always been secondhand bookshops, the used book industry has exploded since the internet came onto the scene. Independent bookstores need to recognize this and get on board. Right now book buyers can buy books on the River and from the big b’s, but many times they can’t buy them from their local bookshop. And we all know where book buying dollars go that aren’t spent in local bookshops (in case you don’t, they do to the huge, sterile warehouses and deathly corporate parks that house our nations largest “booksellers”).

2. Sell new books. Used books are great, and you’ll generally make a better profit on them than new books, but you have to sell them on their schedule. With used books, if you sell out of Slaughterhouse-Five, you can’t sell another one until a copy comes your way. With new books, you can have Slaughterhouse-Five come your way as many times a month as you need. New releases, displayed well in the store, are important, as is developing your backlist titles. Additionally, new books allow an independent store to create its identity because buying decisions are made in house rather than in a far away office. Every big b store is the same. Be different.

3. For new books, set up accounts with distributors as well as publishers. Distributors will get your orders to you quickly – mine usually arrive the day after I place the order. The minimum ordering requirements are reasonable, so you are able to fulfill customer orders quickly. Publishers offer you better discounts and are helpful with promotional materials and advance copies. Use them both wisely.

4. Don’t close at 5 pm. When my wife and I travel, we always try to stop at any independent bookstores in the area. Nothing is worse than discovering that a store closes before dark. When a store closes early, it cuts out everybody who works during the day. That may used to fly, but these days it doesn’t, because your competition will be open late. Plus, bookstores should be open at night – it’s a law of nature. If you don’t want to work late, that’s fine, because there are plenty of other careers that let you leave early in the evening.

5. Don’t open a store in the woods. Or anywhere else where people don’t walk through to shop. You have to remember that books are relatively inexpensive, and it will be rare for a single customer to make your financial day. So the more people you have in your store in a day the better you will do.

6. Get people in your store. It is not enough to buy the books and create the space. You need to actively recruit people to fill it. Book groups, author events, dramatic readings, poetry nights, whatever. Do it. And, quite frankly, this is another bookstore law of nature. Your town or city may have some great clothing shops or home decorating stores, but those places don’t create community. Bookstores do.

7. Get to know other bookstores and booksellers. Along these lines, join the American Booksellers Association, which I put off doing for too long. There are also regional organizations that you can join. There are times you will feel like you are on an island. These people help.

8. Do your homework. Learn your bookselling and publishing history. This will help in so many ways that I cannot list them all. There are a lot of great books written about bookselling. Check out Rebel Bookseller by Andrew Laties first. Then there’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future by Jason Epstein, Andre Schiffrin’s the Business of Books, and the endlessly entertaining The Mathematics of Bookselling by Leonard Shatzkin. These are just a few. There are many more.

9. If you can, own the building you operate out of. I’m learning this lesson now. This isn’t an easy money business, and owning your space will help out in that respect.

10. Call if you need me. I mean it. If there is ever anything I can do to help you open up an independent bookstore, please call Wolfgang Books and ask for me. I would be happy to help.

Wolfgang Books: Handcrafted Bookselling

The most common question I get at Wolfgang Books is how the inventory is chosen. The short answer is, “Carefully.” There is, of course, a longer answer.

Wolfgang Books sells used, collectible and new books. The balance is pretty even between secondhand copies (used and collectible) and new books, at least as far as the number of copies of each segment of the inventory is concerned, and second hand and new books are shelved side by side.

The Wolfgang Books used books experience is different from a lot of other bookstores. Our shelves are not overflowing with books, there are no stacks on the floors, and you won’t find a single copy of Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele on our shelves. Alternately, the books are not all behind glass and you don’t have to ring a bell to be admitted into the shop and handle the books with white gloves.

I do not have the space to pack in tens of thousands of books for my customers to sort through, and I do not have the priceless inventory that would require white gloves and buzzers. If either of those were the case, I still don’t think I would do things differently. Wolfgang Books is clean and well-lighted, and it is also well-organized.

I personally do not like to have to sort through piles and piles of ratty romance paperbacks to find a good book or two, so my store is not organized that way. One challenge, though, is recognizing that part of the charm of secondhand books is finding a book or an author that has been forgotten or overlooked, either by an individual reader or by the wider literary world. The possibility for hidden treasures in secondhand bookstores is as important as a robust inventory of the classics.

How then, does a bookstore make sure that hidden treasures make it onto the shelves? Well, at this point I would imagine that you may share my belief that the staffs of independent bookstores are frequently more…aware than the staffs of the macrobookstores (I will touch on this further in an upcoming post, so check back). This awareness allows us at Wolfgang Books to sprinkle our shelves with hidden treasures.

For instance, I know that Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were published by Charles Scribner’s Sons throughout their careers. So, when I come across one of their forgotten contemporaries published by Scribner’s, I will often pick it up and shelve it as I am generally confident in what was the publisher’s vision. And then if I come across a Viking title from the 1940s, especially if is still has its consistently artistic dust jacket, and a blurb from fellow Viking author John Steinbeck, I can be reasonably sure that the book might have a little bit to it.

There are other signifiers as well. George Salter was probably the premier dust jacket artist of his time, and has truly iconic work to his credit. But for every Atlas Shrugged jacket he designed, there were at least ten that have been forgotten over time. Let’s put Salter on hold for a moment and turn to H.T. Lowe-Porter. Ms. Lowe-Porter was the sole translator of Thomas Mann’s work from German into English for many years, so appointed by Alfred A. Knopf. Now, let’s say that I come across a book that I know very little (or nothing) about, but I notice that Ms. Lowe-Porter translated the book from German into English, and that Alfred A. Knopf, who knew a thing or two about book publishing, published the book. And then I check the dust jacket and immediately see the distinct style of George Salter. This is a book that is going to end up on the shelves, a hidden treasure perhaps, because one of the greatest publishers of the twentieth century thought enough of it to put his top German translator to the task and, as if that weren’t enough, he went out and got the top jacket artist of his time to help sell it to the public.

An understanding of publishing is key to the Wolfgang Books version of hidden gems. This isn’t to say that I don’t have collectible, interesting or cheap editions of the established books and authors in stock, because I do and I should. But a good secondhand bookstore should represent the history of publishing and literature along with having the books on the shelves that should be there.

New books are also chosen with care, but in a much straight forward way. Initially, new books were brought in to fill the gaps of used books. For instance, we could never keep used copies of Kurt Vonnegut in stock. People would ask for Slaughterhouse-Five all the time, but each time we got one in it sold within a day. So, we brought in new copies of all of Vonnegut’s novels so that we always had them in stock. This continued on, and still is more or less how new book decisions are made.

We do carry new releases, but don’t focus on bestsellers, per se. I’d be as happy as the next guy to take a preorder for Dan Brown’s new book, but I would be much happier to sell you a copy of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, Mary Robison’s One D.O.A. One on the Way or Richard Price’s Lush Life.

In many respects, Wolfgang Books should never be identified as a new bookstore or a used bookstore, at least not by us. I don’t need the distinction, personally – I am much more comfortable with Wolfgang Books being thought of as the type of store that always has Vonnegut, Hemingway, Cather, the Brontes, Toni Morrison, Ryszard Kapuściński, Tom Robbins and the rest of them in stock.

Open Book: New LinkTV Documentary Series Explores The Role Of Place and Story Within Literature

Before I introduce you to Open Book I want you to know that Wolfgang Books will resume their month of posts this Monday evening. That said, let's get to the matter at hand.

Let's start with some sight and sound.

Open Book TV: Ishmael Beah from Open Book TV on Vimeo.

Books and authors have for a good part of this and the former century wrestled with their image. The rise of pop music and rock & roll has forever left the poet outside the house of fame or, worse still, having to borrow from the ephemeral fashions of music and movie.

Norman Mailer tried his hardest to be hip and virile, in a conflicting and ever-alternating attempt to wax Hemingway (Mailer loved to pretend to box) and to seem "down" with beatnik politicos like Abbie Hoffman. The only bookseller's conference I went to back when I was in the bookstore business left me with a comic image: A sea of corduroy jackets. Old and young alike. Corduroy as far as the eyes can see.

They're known as a signifier, and for a male bookseller it is the corduroy jacket that is donned to announce your status as a literary man. If you are a hipster, in love with your growing collection of Ikea furniture, well, then it is your clever tattoos, and carefully disheveled skinny jeans that announce to others where and what you are.

What does this have to do with Open Book? A lot. Open Book is the new LinkTV documentary series (from which the Beah clip above is drawn from) that deals with books and writers in space but not time. Location plays a pivotal role in Open Book's format and this is a wonderful thing.

The driving concept behind the show is to successfully consider the story behind the book as much as the role of the storyteller. In its first installment, Open Book plumbs the host's (Ina Howard-Parker) beloved Fort Greene, Brooklyn. New York is obviously a city with a epic literary reputation, but by putting the focus on one region we receive a provincial education of who and what are/is being created where. Is though, can be too limiting. The aspect of Open Book that I find most striking, and which directly relates to the goals of this blog, is that the show concerns itself with the has as well as the is to form a concerpt of are.

So while Open Book considers hypermodern voices and forms like the defjam poetry of Suheir Hammad and the newly percolating project of best selling novelist, Jennifer Egan, it also pauses to consider Richard Wright and Walt Whitman. Two literary legends who called Brooklyn their home and wrote of its place.

It is important after all (you knew I would take that tone at some point), to consider what has been as well as what is being now. To flavor these literary flashbacks the show calls on the concept of storytelling, borrowing the talents of actors like Jeffery Wright and native Brooklyn artist Carl Hancock Rux to lend a modern and assuredly hip (down to the nuanced cigarette smoking, which Rux has apparently practiced for years) quality to these old, true words. It works wonderfully, if at times maybe a little too Brooklyn for someone from Philadelphia.

I look forward to seeing where the show will go from this first episode. The pilot is set in possibly too familiar ground. Brooklyn has such a potent taste that someone familiar with it might be easily swayed to excess. In this sense, I am very excited to see what the show can do in a city ignorant of New York nuances like Philadelphia or Minneapolis or the harder to define spaces, like the Mississippi river or the great writers of the American plains.

In any case, Open Book does much to enlighten its viewers of what has and is happening where. It is a beautifully shot, informational new series that is a much needed help in keeping literature at a status it deserves.

Here is a link to the press release as well as sample clips from the pilot. And here is a link to the Open Book website. The show premiers today on LinkTV.

Jason Hafer's Mission Statement - Impressions, Editions and Primacies

My bookstore, Wolfgang Books, is on the second floor of an old Odd Fellows building in downtown Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Wolfgang Books sells new, used and collectible books of distinction, with a strong literary focus. The collection is general, but generally literary, which means that I may have a sports section, but you are more likely to find George Plimpton in it than a ubiquitous Bo Jackson memoir or the latest chronicle of steroids in baseball. I happily carry classics (established and emerging), even if I only sell one a year, and I feel genuine embarrassment if I don’t have a good book in stock when somebody comes looking for it.

I tend to hold bookstores up to a different standard than other businesses. A bookstore should be a place of inspiration and illumination, and on its best nights (nights, always) a bookstore should be a place of magic. At the front of Wolfgang Books, overlooking the street, is a sun porch that is generally referred to as the Reading Room, and I want novels to be written, great problems tackled and poets to fall in love in the Reading Room.

Inspiration, Illumination, Magic, Romance. These are the concepts at the top of my business plan. Stock turn, merchandising, pre-release promotion, discount structures, and store marketing are all concepts that have a role in a successful bookstore, but if the magic isn’t there, and the romance isn’t there, or if they aren’t at least sought after, a bookstore becomes just another retail establishment, and a bookstore should aspire for more than that.

With a bookstore, once you take away the romance and lose the magic you have begun to disrespect the books themselves and the authors behind them and the people who read them, centuries of them, a whole tradition and history boiled down to a nonexistent share of a company, a lifeless thing with no soul, no heart, that you can buy for around the price of a hardcover book on the New York Stock Exchange.

Above all else (and there is a lot else) it’s the emptiness of a chain store, the hollow feeling caused by the sameness and weak-minded reverence to stock values and fear of making a statement or taking a risk that keeps me away from them and their mission. They are retailers. I am a bookseller.

What’s more, I am determined to think this way. I am by nature a problem solver and a planner, and I do enjoy those parts of the business, but I find myself constantly working towards my idea of bookstore pure. I turn to Sylvia Beach’s memoir about her life within her great Shakespeare and Company bookstore for inspiration. If I don’t know how to handle a situation in my store, I think about how Sylvia would handle it (or at least the Sylvia I have created), and I act accordingly. This allows me to serve the books and their readers rather than the other way around.

This may all sound heady or self-congratulatory, but that is not my intention. I am idealistic to a genuine fault, but at a certain point I decided I would no longer try to corral that and would instead embrace it and see where it takes me. Right now it is taking me deeper and deeper into a lifetime of bookselling, and I look forward to sharing some stories and perspectives with you over the next few weeks. I thank the Accountant for the opportunity to share these things.

Wolfgang Books Runs The Show

First some announcements. We have a winner in the poetry contest. I will be contacting them directly and if they like, the winning line will be shared with everyone here.

Second announcement: More like a thank you than an announcement. I would like to thank Steve May of Plan B Press for taking the time to share some of the poets published by his firm. I highly recommend the work of Plan B and if you are in the northeast then you should look up when one of their readings is taking place. Plan B poets are known for being good readers as much as they are good writers.

Finally the matter at hand: This is the first of what I hope will be a long standing tradition on the Devil's Accountant. Every month of May I will have a independent bookstore take control of the DA and over the course of the month's posts explain their story and bookselling philosophy.

It is only natural that for this first installment that I would reach to my former business partner, Jason Hafer and the bookstore he and I co-founded, Wolfgang Books.

I left Wolfgang Books in January of this year for a myriad of reasons. One of them was not that I did not feel the work was important. Like small press publications, independent bookstores (perhaps even more so) are the true stewards of the literary world. The New York Review of Books and other major publications may make themselves out to be the Atlas of the literary realms but I would ask them to walk, just for one month, in the shoes of a bookseller. A true bookseller. The kind of bookseller you'll find at Wolfgang Books.

All this month there will be links to Wolfgang Books and opportunities to support this award winning bookstore. I implore you to take the time and effort to make a order, whether via the phone or from Wolfgang's eBay or ABE listings. I know some of you are familiar with Wolfgang's and I welcome you to join in the discussion.

So, starting tomorrow I will leave you in the capable hands of Jason Hafer, bookseller.