A weekend night in the Slope presented a delightful dilemma: which fabulous restaurant to favor with our trade?  That’s not a problem we’re having here in Riverdale.  Our well-run building sits at the peak of a promontory overlooking the Hudson.  We have views, outdoor space, hills, switchback roads, tennis courts, a pool, a gym, reserved parking; and a 1,146- acre green park with lands scarred by the rout of the Stockbridge militia, but not a lot of good restaurants.  Or even any, really.  But we’re mobile.  We can troll for restaurants on the Upper West Side; in Inwood and throughout Westchester.

What I really miss are neighborhood bookstores. Riverdale has none. Park Slope, and vicinity, home to half  of New York’s writing and publishing community, offered the restless reader many choices. The Community Bookstore is what used to be known by the archaic term a “carriage trade” store, connoting the gentrified clientele who rolled up in posh conveyances and expected white glove service.  A more literal description for today’s customers  might be “stroller trade,” but the service is no less white glove.  It is hard to get around the double-wides parked in the narrow aisles, but it’s well worth it.  We ambled to the Community Bookstore for its convenience, and its always helpful staff.  Can’t find what you’re looking for?  We’ll order it and give you a call when it comes in.  Here’s your “frequent flyer” discount.

A really great bookstore will make you say, “I wish I had a shopping cart and a barrel of money.”  Book Court in Boerum Hill is just such a shopping cart-worthy store.  The merchandizing and shelf appeal is dazzling to the eye, stimulating to the brain.  The experience is akin to a diving-into-chocolate fantasy of glorious excess.  It is  a Thanksgiving dinner of a bookstore.  Say, “open sesame,”as you cross the threshold. In Book Court,  I am Scarface sitting before a mountain of white powder.

As  Joni Mitchell once  sang, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”  My move away from  bookstores gives me a glimpse into what all our lives would be like without our precious indies.  A little less rich; a lot less stimulating.

This year, I’m buying all my gift books (and the ones I gift myself) in other people’s neighborhood bookstores.  I’ll be on the Express Bus to find them or taking a sentimental journey back to Park Slope via Subaru.  I’ll even venture out to Books & Books in Westhampton to support my habit, and  Denise Berthiaume and Jack McKeown in their new enterprise– a  bold, gorgeous indie bookstore.

So let’s buy books this Christmas– lots and lots of  books– and let’s support our bricks and mortar bookstores like never before.

Happy holidays from Launchpad.

One day, Dan took us to the little town of Williston, ND so we could walk around a nearby “big town.”   The antique store was charming but I didn’t see anything I liked that would  fit into my carry-on bag.  Dan and I scooted downstairs to play “guess what this old farm tool was used for” while my husband got talked into buying a $20 spoon with “Montana” engraved on it.  Would’ve been nice if we collected them.  We don’t.

A revelation was the second hand shop across the street.  It reeked of basement and looked like an old army surplus store.  Dan led us  to an enormous room full of nothing but books.  It had once been a library, and now all the books were for sale– literally, by the pound–and for pennies.  We wandered through the stacks.  I   marveled at what was a veritable museum of book jacket art from the nineteen forties on.  Wow.  The type faces.  The authors!  Since the books came from an old library, there were multiples of whatever was popular. Clearly Morris West was the bestseller machine of his day.  Shoes of the Fisherman. The Devil’s Advocate.  He was huge.  Does anyone read him now, I wonder.

The swirls and slashes of the seventies types looked as foreign and ancient as hieroglyphics until I started to see the very first books I worked on in my publishing career.  There was the original hardcover of Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz.   My best friend, then Harmony Books and Ad/Promo Art Director, Ken Sansone and I  worked on the jacket when the Crown art director threw his hands up after the fiftieth rejected mock-up.  Kenny, (who died in 1995) and I were asked to step in and went on the shoots as Judith Krantz continued to reject gorgeous blonde top model after model; design after design.   Finally, she approved and we had our Daisy.

I looked at the flaps not recalling if the editor or I had written the copy.  Who could remember?  Then I saw the line: the story of a princess who loses her fortune and finds…herself. It was as if I recognized my own decades old signature.  Yup.  Ken’s design; my copy, circa  1980.  How very, very, odd to see our collaboration, sitting in a basement in North Dakota.  We traveled long and far, it turns out.  And still together.

Around the corner, from all the dust and memories , sat a brand new, fabulous bookstore, called Books on Broadway (no web site yet) beckoning  like a farmer’s market for local malnourished readers seeking  rich, fresh, juicy, reading selections  not found at the town Walmart.  The books were gems, the store cozy and welcoming, and the local western writers, such as Thomas McGuane and Ivan Doig were well represented.  Independent bookstores are opening all over, it seems, even as some of our most cherished ones close.  Congrats to Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting on the opening of Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. From east to west, things are looking up.

So off to the movies we went to see Julie & Julia, the movie about the chick who blogged about Julia Child’s The Art of Mastering French Cooking for a year.   I tend to agree with a lot of the reviewers.  Meryl Streep is the best thing about the movie, of course.  In fact, they couldn’t, in my opinion, have made the movie if Meryl didn’t exist.    Anne Hathaway or Hilary Swank could not have done it.  The movie made we want to read My Life in France by Julia and made me feel positively ashamed that I don’t have a hardcover copy of The Art of Mastering on my cookbook shelf.

The idea of a book from a blog was new when Julie & Julia, the book, was published.  Now editors frequently troll the blogosphere hoping to find The Next Big Thing.   Movie producers do too, I  imagine.   Note to Dan: (my son who is working in Montana for Americorps) keep that blog up!

July 22, 2009

Craig Nelson, a friend, colleague and now bestselling author, gave a talk based on his new hit book Rocket Men at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side on Monday night.

It was like a family reunion as a bunch of us who had worked with Craig when he was a star editor at HarperCollins cheered Craig on:  Rick Kot, from Viking is Craig’s friend and editor, Brenda Marsh and Steve Sorrentino, now with BN corporate sat nearby, as did Susan Moldow, and Rose Carrano.  Erin McHugh who was with Harper’s advertising agency and is now an author was there for him —as was his agent, Barbara Lowenstein, and his proud father, all the way from Texas.

Craig is a lively and unique speaker, bringing his obvious enthusiasm for the subject of the historic moon landing to infectious life from the podium.  I remember watching the landing on (black-and-white) TV with a bunch of friends when it happened.  We were blasé, if not downright scornful at the time.  It was more saber rattling and we were in the midst of an unjust War as it was.  We hated that War, Nixon, and what seemed like a huge waste of money, spent on Space while some Americans lived in dire need.  Human history was being made, but we weren’t as interested as we would be the following month when we made history ourselves at Woodstock.

Craig and his wonderful book tells that generation and all of us what we missed in an entertaining, informative, eminently readable fashion.  The critics agree as the  the Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, and starred Kirkus and PW reviews demonstrate.

The book is selling like mad.  Rick Kot told me that the Viking publicity department is doing a great job, (NPR, CNN…) and that Craig hired an outside publicist who has ties to the appropriate museums nation-wide to hook him up with speaking engagements at the right venues.  Kudos to Craig for the right kind of creative thinking. That’s how authors help to make bestsellers!

From the moment we arrived on the conference floor we could feel the excitement and sense the collegiality of the attendees.  AgentFest, a major feature of the 2009 ThrillerFest held by the International Thriller Writers (ITW) in New York City’s Hyatt Hotel near Grand Central Station, was in full swing.  Unpublished writers lined up to pitch their thriller ideas to waiting literary agents.  What a great idea and what a fantastic opportunity for everyone involved.

If meeting authors didn’t still give us a huge sense of elation, we wouldn’t still be in this business, and at ThrillerFest we got to see so many at once.  We chatted with Gayle Lynds, and MJ Rose, and met with Steve Berry, Jon Land, Kathy Antrim, Joe Moore, Douglas Preston, David Hewson, and James Rollins.  There were lots of other author faces we recognized from jacket flaps.

In the bar on the Conference Floor level we caught up with Matt Baldacci, newly promoted Associate Publisher at St. Martin’s Press, and Andy Martin, Publisher of Minotaur Books.

All in all a great but exhausting day.  Betsy and I enjoyed the good vibes and upbeat congeniality of all the authors.  We’re looking forward to ThrillerFest 2010.