Gayle's Weblog

Jon Krakauer benefit for Pat Tillman Foundation

Gayle — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:07:52 +0000

Last night I went to hear Jon Krakauer read from his latest book, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. He was funny, articulate and his story was incredibly sad. I was reminded once again about how senseless war is, how life is lost with not much gained and how our politicians who are invested in the war game will support it at any cost. The auditorium was nearly full and the questions asked and answered were amazing–personal questions about Pat Tillman’s family, questions about what it was like for Krakauer to be embedded with soldiers for five months in Afghanistan, and questions about writing and research. I hadn’t had time to read the book before the event but plan to start tonight although I’m not sure reading about war before falling asleep is a good idea for me.

I found this great review of the book. We have signed copies at the store if you couldn’t make it to Dobson High last night.

ALL BOOKED UP – Bob Stewart’s TOP 10 for 2009

Gayle — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:10:08 +0000

I am still connected to my high school English teacher, Bob Stewart, and each year he sends me a list of his favorite books. He’s an avid reader–I swear he reads a book a day–and has been reviewing for us for years now. He used to have a cable TV show sponsored by the public library in Show Low, AZ called Books with Bob, but unfortunately, due to budget cuts, they no longer have funding for his program. He’s not been well of late and I was so grateful that he managed to get me his Top 10 for this year. He uses a scale of 1-9 and getting a 9 from him is like getting an A on an essay in his class. I got them, but I really worked for them. Hope you enjoy his choices.

ALL BOOKED UP – Bob Stewart’s TOP 10 for 2009

Gone Tomorrow – Kluge, P.F. (9.0)
My Father’s Tears – Updike, John (8.5)
Red to Black – Dryden, Alex (8.0)
A Happy Marriage – Yglesias, Rafael (8.0)
Something Missing – Dicks, Matthew (8.0)
Spade and Archer – Gores, Joe (8.0)
Buffalo Lockjaw – Ames, Greg (8.0)
Plague of Secrets - Lescroart, John (8.0)
The Varieties of Romantic Experience: Stories – Cohen, Robert (8.0)
The Blue Star – Earley, Tony (8.0)

Fun, New Video Urges, “Keep It Local, America!”

Gayle — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:21:23 +0000

July 16, 2009 [from Bookselling This Week]

Tom Campbell and friends of The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, have created a campy, fun 1940s newsreel-style video with a serious message: Shopping local is green. The spot, “Just Around the Corner,” uses archival and newly shot video to dramatize how a book shipped from an Internet retailer rather than bought at a local bookstore ups the carbon load in the environment significantly. “How much fuel is required to make up the difference?” asks the video narrator. “Too much, chum!”

The two-minute video starts with the headline “Local Bookstores in Peril!” and the narrator suggests, “Consider your humble local bookseller the next time your order from one of the corporate giants. You may just be breeding an ecological disaster in your own backyard.” With footage of pollution-spewing trucks and planes and a chaotic packaging center staged in The Regulator’s storeroom, the video explains how much more energy is saved by buying books from the local bookstore, and how much carbon is spewed into the air by the alternative.

Campbell, who is a co-owner of Regulator Bookshop, got the idea for the video after he compared typical Amazon shipments of one or two books per package with the store’s own shipments, which averaged 24 books. “I realized there’s a whole lot more shipping and packaging involved getting books to people when they order from Amazon,” he said, adding that he figured it out to be about three times as much. “This means there are three times as many trucks on the road,” Campbell said. “And these trucks are coming from a warehouse hundreds of miles out of town.”

Campbell shared his idea for the video with Regulator customer Jay O’Berski, who teaches drama at Duke University and is the head of a local theater group. O’Berski, who got on board immediately, then recruited Jim Haverkamp, another teacher at Duke. With the help of 15 volunteers, they were able to shoot the video in an hour and a half. Campbell gave the volunteers gift cards, but added that they all said they didn’t expect anything. They just wanted to support their local independent bookstore.

Campbell is including the video in the store newsletter and is making it available to independent business alliances since its message applies broadly. He said, “Anything that uses any amount of packaging is going to be the same way.” Citing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (the book makes a cameo in the video), Campbell noted that if retailers had to pay a tax on carbon, most Internet commerce would “go up in a puff of smoke. It would be tough going if they had to pay for putting all that carbon out there.”

Check out “Just Around the Corner” on YouTube, and pass it along. –Karen Schechner

More news from Bookselling This Week:
http://news.bookweb.org/

Project Book Babe Benefit Event 4/4/09c

Gayle — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:18:02 +0000

Saturday, April 4, 2009 — 2-5pm at Marcos de Niza High School Auditorium, Tempe, Arizona — please see http://projectbookbabe.com for details.

See my note about this important benefit event on the date of Changing Hands Bookstore 35th Birthday celebration in my April letter.

President Carter Book Signing at Changing Hands

Gayle — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:01:31 +0000

Video courtesy Cable Muse Network. Read their article covering the event.

Terry Tempest Williams’ Moving Homage to Community

Gayle — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:55:25 +0000

Here’s a beautiful call-to-action speech of Williams — posted on Bookselling This Week’s site. A must-read for book lovers and local indie supporters, it speaks to the heart of our times and is prefaced with a poem by Marge Piercy — please go directly to http://www.news.bookweb.org/news/6605.html.

It’s Up to Us

Gayle — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:50:50 +0000

After showing the documentary, Paperback Dreams, at the bookstore last night [01/09/09], I found this note in an online journal. I had seen the film about the struggle of two Bay area booksellers before but I was struck once again at how oblivious most customers are to the perilous plight that their indie retailers are in, especially now that the economy is tanking. And it is no one’s fault, this lack of understanding that keeping money in the local economy feeds that local community and keeps it afloat. It is up to us to teach each other so that the lovely things in our lives remain and do not drop into the category of ‘fond memories’ as this writer suggests.

Indie Survival ‘All Depends Upon Us, the Consumers’
“These kinds of shops are facing a long, bloody battle–and one which, without significant reinforcements, they are likely to lose. As we hear of the travesty of another brilliant independent going down, we’ll mourn the loss, wring our hands and damn Amazon and the supermarkets and Waterstone’s. Yet perhaps the most important detail we’ll probably keep under wraps: the last time we actually spent any money there. Murder One closing its doors for the final time is undoubtedly a .38 shell for independent bookshops, but whether it’s body blow or a warning shot all depends upon us, the consumers. No one, no matter how iconic or established, can exist on fond memories alone: just ask Woolworths. Use these shops now, because it doesn’t take a master sleuth to deduce what will happen if we don’t.”
–Stuart Evers, writing in the Guardian about the closing of a legendary Charing Cross Road bookshop.

ABA President to President-elect: Make Small Business Survival a Priority

Gayle — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 14:32:54 +0000

Dec 23, 2008

Gayle Shanks

American Booksellers Association President Gayle Shanks, co-owner of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, has written President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team urging them “to ensure that the survival and long-range health of … independent, locally owned businesses are a prominent part of [their] economic stimulus package.”

In her letter, which was transmitted a day after the president-elect announced the selection of Maine venture capitalist Karen Gordon Mills as the new head of the Small Business Administration, Shanks wrote that “we must address the destabilizing combination of growing job losses, falling incomes, and shattered household wealth that has significantly damaged consumer confidence and short circuited the prospects for retail sales growth this holiday season and beyond.”

Highlighting the “central challenge” to independent, locally owned businesses as “access to capital,” Shanks called on the Obama/Biden administration to “work immediately to address the credit crisis that threatens U.S. small businesses by implementing steps … outlined during the campaign,” specifically:

Establishing a nationwide emergency lending facility for small businesses that can be run through SBA’s Disaster Loan Program;
Temporarily eliminating fees on the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 loan guarantee programs for small businesses, to help increase private lending for small businesses; and
Implementing a green economic stimulus package for small businesses focused on sensible steps to energy efficiency. This would pay dividends on Main Streets across the country far beyond the cost of implementation.

Reminding the incoming administration that locally owned, independent businesses “have a far greater economic impact on communities than larger, chain businesses; contribute more to local charities; and are largely responsible for our villages, towns, and cities retaining their unique characteristics,” Shanks wrote that “if the current downward economic spiral continues into 2009, the attendant losses of sales tax and other revenues will further widen the budget deficits of municipalities and states nationwide, which will only increase the demand for federal assistance in the face of spreading economic loss and pain.”

Booksellers who would like to offer input to the incoming Obama/Biden administration regarding necessary steps to address the current economic challenges can submit ideas at change.gov/agenda/economy_agenda/.

The full text of Shanks’ letter is available below.

Dear President-elect Obama:

I’m writing on behalf of the American Booksellers Association’s 1,700 member bookstores — now facing the worst economic environment in more than 75 years — to ask you to ensure that the survival and long-range health of these independent, locally owned businesses are a prominent part of your economic stimulus package.

You wrote in your wonderful book Dreams From My Father, “Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men.” In order to tend these communities, we must address the destabilizing combination of growing job losses, falling incomes, and shattered household wealth that has significantly damaged consumer confidence and short circuited the prospects for retail sales growth this holiday season and beyond. Given the enormous economic challenges the country will face throughout 2009, small businesses today are facing a potentially fatal environment. Locally owned, independent business is not only the web that ties our communities together but also the backbone of this nation’s economy. If we were to go, it would make the breakdown of the automotive industry pale by comparison.

Access to capital is a central challenge to small businesses, and the liquidity crisis has only exacerbated this situation. We hope that the Obama/Biden Administration will work immediately to address the credit crisis that threatens U.S. small businesses by implementing steps you outlined during the campaign, specifically:

Establishing a nationwide emergency lending facility for small businesses that can be run through SBA’s Disaster Loan Program;
Temporarily eliminating fees on the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 loan guarantee programs for small businesses, to help increase private lending for small businesses; and
Implementing a green economic stimulus package for small businesses focused on sensible steps to energy efficiency. This would pay dividends on Main Streets across the country far beyond the cost of implementation.

The continued financial success and growth of locally owned, independent businesses is important for many reasons, including the viability and health of America’s cities and towns. While small businesses like mine and other ABA members don’t have the resources to retain expensive lobbyists to plead our case, we do have a far greater economic impact on communities than larger, chain businesses; contribute more to local charities; and are largely responsible for our villages, towns, and cities retaining their unique characteristics. Small businesses are, as you so aptly wrote, “Places where families might invest their savings and make a go of business, and where entry-level jobs might be had; places where the economy remained on a human scale, transparent enough for people to understand.”

If the current downward economic spiral continues into 2009, the attendant losses of sales tax and other revenues will further widen the budget deficits of municipalities and states nationwide, which will only increase the demand for federal assistance in the face of spreading economic loss and pain. And, locally owned, independent businesses will begin to close at an alarming rate.

On behalf of ABA members nationwide — and tens of thousands of other locally owned, independent businesses — I respectfully ask that your administration move quickly and aggressively to address these Main Street issues.

Sincerely,

Gayle Shanks
President, American Booksellers Association
Tarrytown, New York

Co-owner, Changing Hands Bookstore
Tempe, Arizona

The 11th Hour Surprise of Gift Giving

Gayle — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:18:58 +0000

Happy Holidays to all of my blog readers. I just got a note from one of my colleagues that I thought worth sharing with you this Christmas Eve. It sums up my sentiments about books and those who give books as gifts to family and friends, too.

Gifts: The ‘Life-affirming Experience’ of Reading

“This week I have been reminded time and again of the experience that literature brings to life. You would think that in this 11th hour of holiday hubbub, shoppers would be frantic to buy whatever books remain on the shelf. But no, the readers who are giving books as gifts are very particular about the gift of language. They are calm and methodical in their quests for the perfect book, patiently listening to my staff about this storyline or that plot twist. . . . So in our busiest season, I’ve realized just how much literature has a calming effect. We read so that we can have the life-affirming experience that reading a book brings. And that’s why we give the gift of books.”–Sarah Bagby of Watermark Books, Wichita, Kan., in her store’s e-mail newsletter yesterday.

Roy Blount’s Holiday Message

Gayle — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:27:47 +0000

Many of you know Roy Blount from NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, but he’s also written dozens of books and is the president of the Author’s Guild. His latest book, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, … With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory came out in October. I thought you might like to see the holiday message he is sending to friends far and wide:

I’ve been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren’t known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don’t lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn’t in the cards.

We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let’s mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that’s just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children’s books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they’ll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: “Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see…we’re the Authors Guild.”

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Tony Hillerman — Walk in Beauty

Gayle — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:29:19 +0000

Tony Hillerman’s books have sold at CHB since we first opened the store in the seventies. He never came for a reading but always said he wanted to see our store. Told me once that bookseller friends had told him about Changing Hands and he would come as soon as he could. Unfortunately that day won’t come. This is a lovely tribute from writer, Craig Johnson that I thought you might like to read.

A tribute to Tony Hillerman, who died on Sunday, from Craig Johnson, author of Another Man’s Moccasins and Kindness Goes Unpunished, among other titles:

There was an owl on one of the teepee poles at my ranch last night and, if you’re lucky enough to live adjacent to Indian Country, you pay attention to such things. The Cheyenne see the owls as messengers from the other side, and I couldn’t help but wonder who it was that was sending something a little more than special delivery.

I always thought he looked a little like an owl, even before I met him. The way the tufts of hair perched up on his head and the pointed nose–but most of all, it was the eyes; not so much the eyes of an eagle because those carry a self-concern, but more like the eyes that see past self-interest.

He was 83, and he lived in Albuquerque with, in his own words “now-and-then rheumatic arthritis, in-remission cancer, a minor heart-attack, a mediocre eye, one tricky ankle and two unreliable knees.” He began teaching at the University of New Mexico in 1967 and, with a wife and six children, he struggled to make ends meet. The story goes that he was typing away in his office late one night and an associate enthused, “You must be the hardest-working professor we have here at the University.”

He looked up with the twinkle his eyes always carried, his glasses perched at the end of his nose. “Actually, I’m writing a book.”

Undaunted, the woman remarked. “How wonderful, what’s it about?”

“It’s a mystery.”

She was crest-fallen. “With all your knowledge of Navajo art, culture, society and history–why are you wasting your time writing a mystery novel?”

His response, like the man, was eloquent and authentic. “Because I want someone to read the darned thing, that’s why.”

I was fortunate enough to win a short story award in combination with the writing conference that is named after him and Cowboys & Indians Magazine. He’d written 17 books in his series when I met him, was a New York Times bestselling fixture, and had won every award you can imagine. I’d written one novel and was facing the daunting task of trying to write my second, so I asked him how you keep it fresh. He smiled the small grin that reflected the admiration, adoration, and respect that everyone had for him. “At the risk of sounding like a bad sports analogy, you gotta write ‘em one at a time–and just remember to tell a good story.” It is invaluable advice.

At a time when you usually have to beg most big-time authors to remember what it was like when they were climbing up the ladder, he wrote me a blurb for not only my first novel, but my second, because he said he’d enjoyed them so much. I still have the voice message on my answering machine where he read the jacket quote because his e-mail was on the fritz. “Umm, Craig, I can’t get this e-mail thingy to work, so I thought I’d just call you and tell you what to put on your book.”

One of the last times I saw him was when he was being feted at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. They gave him their Life Achievement Award, and the hall where he was interviewed was standing room only, and the line to have him sign his books was about a mile long. He was a storyteller whose owl-like eyes saw further than the genre and farther than himself.

Perhaps the best words to describe his legacy are those of his protagonist Jim Chee, “Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle effects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his horzo, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”

Op-Ed Columnist: Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet

Gayle — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:17:13 +0000

OPINION | September 21, 2008
By MAUREEN DOWD
What if Barack Obama turned to former President Jed Bartlet of the “West Wing” for some fatherly wisdom?

Appreciating Maurice Sendak

Gayle — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:57:00 +0000

Maurice Sendak is one of my favorite children’s book illustrators and authors. His enormous contribution to art and children’s literature spans 60 years and he has fans all over the world. In a sold-out event Sept. 15th at the 92nd St. Y in NYC, he is being celebrated as “the modern picture book’s portal figure”. Sendak turned 80 in June of this year and I wish him many more healthy years, many more wonderful books, operas, plays, ballets, films, and a year that is not filled with so many losses. Here is a link to an article that you might enjoy reading: Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are

Long-Live Our Local Indie: Happy 75th!

Gayle — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:42:02 +0000

This September marks a monumental event in the history of locally-owned indie businesses serving the Valley. On Sept. 22, Harkins Theatres celebrates their 75th anniversary of bringing the moviegoing experience to our community. In 1933, founder Dwight “Red” Harkins opened his first theater in Tempe. Red’s son, Dan, took the helm of the company in 1974 and has built the largest family owned theater chain in North America, entertaining more than 24 million people this year. Changing Hands offers our congratulations and admiration to this innovative indie on the occasion of their diamond anniversary.

Howard Zinn praises Living Broke in Boom Times

Gayle — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:58:44 +0000

Skylight Pictures’ latest release, recommended by Video Librarian for educational use, can enhance your in-class discussions of current debates on poverty in the U.S.

Living Broke in Boom Times spends a decade inside a poor peoples’ movement to end poverty in America and highlights the lessons imparted by their experience. Living Broke in Boom Times: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty follows the epic movement of poor Americans in the 1990s organizing to end poverty as documented in a decade-long journey by filmmakers Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates. This new DVD has condensed three groundbreaking Skylight documentaries spanning from 1989 through 1999 into segments of ideal length for classroom use, with new wraparound commentary from key activists who led the movement. These include Cheri Honkala, Willie Baptist and Liz Theoharis who discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the organizing and the lessons learned from hard-won experience

It is a wonderful documentary, heart-rending in its depiction of homelessness and desperation, yet inspiring in what it shows about the magnificence of people fighting back, organizing, refusing to accept their situation, trying to build a national movement. I found the close-ups of these people, their voices, their down-home eloquence very moving. I do hope this will be widely seen. I think it can play an important role in arousing people to action.

– Howard Zinn – February, 11 2008