Bookselling Crusade for St. George's Day

My entire professional life I've been involved with some form of bookselling.  I've lived and breathed books, even opting for that new paperback rather than buying groceries back when I was barely making ends meet.  Yet until two years ago I'd never heard of St. George's Day.  My guess is that most people in the United States haven't.  That needs to change.



BookPeople's 2009 display

 Two years ago a savvy marketing person working on the upcoming release of a The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (author of the wildly successful The Shadow of the Wind, too) sent out advance reading copies to booksellers that included a small card describing St. George's Day.  A holiday in Spain that involves giving a loved book to a loved one--a cause I could support.  The Angel's Game featured a place called The Cemetery of Lost Books, and the story goes that a reader wanders the labyrinth of books and finds the forgotten story that calls out to him/her.  Book lovers everywhere are captivated by the sense of mystery and discovery, the possibility that the books in their hands are future loved objects, stories that could change their lives.

Gianna and I started to play with the idea of St. George's Day.  There is an International Day of the Book, but no one in the US seemed to know about it.  Why isn't St. George's Day celebrated here?  We happened to be compiling material for a business review at BookPeople in Austin, Texas, at the same time, and on a lark threw together a handselling contest for the BookPeople booksellers playing with the St. George's Day idea.  We challenged booksellers to pick a favorite "forgotten" book--one that had stopped selling at the store (or had never sold)--and then see who could sell the most copies of these books over the course of April.  In 2009, fourteen booksellers participated, fourteen books were selected.  None of these books had sold more than five copies in the previous year.



BookPeople hadn't carried this book
 before 2009; and now they've sold
 111 copies (and counting).



At the end of April, 2009, all fourteen books had sold copies. We awarded a prize to the winner.  The store was pleased and so were we. 

I'm a numbers nerd, though, and I continued to track the booksellers' picks, even after the St. George's Day contest had long passed.  The books just kept selling.  And selling.  We ran the St. George's Day promotion again in 2010, and this time 21 booksellers signed up, and again the books sold--hundreds of them.  And again I tracked the numbers.  In the last two years, the 35 books featured for St. George's Day at BookPeople have sold over 1,000 units.  This is huge, particularly when one considers that these books were basically dead on the shelves.  This is an age when an article comes out every month declaring print books dead.  These are books that have found new readers, new lives. 

In 2010, we expanded our St. George's Day promotion beyond just BookPeople, and this year we are working with our Random House colleagues to (hopefully) begin a national groundswell of support.  The US needs a St. George's Day to remind people of the joy of discovering a great book.  Reading makes people smarter, reading expands our internal boundaries and challenges our preconceptions, reading entertains us.  Help us spread our love of great books, even the forgotten ones.  Celebrate St. George's Day on April 23rd by giving a book to a loved one.

The 2010 St. George's Day display at BookPeople.

Well I Never!

It's been awhile. I beg forgiveness. Gianna is working on something for the blog that involves her tendency to scatter underwear like Johnny Appleseed across hotels far and wide, and I do hope that I'm earning double Hilton Honors Points every time I pass through a hotel where Gianna has previously stopped. It seems only fair considering what I might find.

Anyway, recently I've been playing with an idea that popped up when Doubleday announced the publication of THE ANGEL'S GAME, the new book by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He's the guy who wrote SHADOW OF THE WIND, and I know there are a ton of fans for SHADOW. I've actually never read the first book, but I did read and enjoy ANGEL'S GAME. It's published in June and should be humongous. The book, like SHADOW, is set in Barcelona and is full of book lover delights like the cemetary of lost books, a catacombs of books left and taken. You bring a book to leave, you take one that calls to you. It's a great idea. Here's another great idea: Spain has a holiday, La Diada de Sant Jordi, or St. George's Day, where it is customary to give a book and a rose to a loved one, on April 23rd. We need this holiday in the US! Gianna and I have been playing with this idea of lost books and rediscovering books that aren't lauded on Good Morning America or Oprah here and now. How great would it be if every bookstore in the US set up a display for this St. George's Day, and sold their favorite books to give to loved ones? It's like Christmas, except in my case I'd get something I actually want.

All of this lost book thinking led me to all of those books out there I've never read. For example, in the last few months we've started selling to a terrific mystery book store in Houston, Murder By the Book. I actually haven't read many mysteries in my life. As a kid I read mostly American lit classics because those were the books I could get in podunk East Texas without a bookstore or Amazon. In college I focused mostly on the English masters and came late to the wonders of contemporary literary fiction, which is one of my two book passions. While I enjoy mysteries as movies (and the darker the better), I'm just now coming to the genre in book form. I've read read Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or James Cain. I just last week read my first James Ellroy book (BLOOD'S A ROVER, which releases in fall 2009). In the last year, with Stieg Larsson's amazing thriller GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and a book about to come out called THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, I'm really starting to embrace mysteries into my literary comfort zone.

There are other authors whose company I have yet to keep. There's a new biography out called CHEEVER, about the life of John Cheever, and though I should have, I've never read any of his stories or novels. In fact, many of those masters writing between World War II and, say, 1990, are new to me. I think I was born too late to read them on release and too early for them to be taught in my college classes, so there's a gap. I've read some Updike, but not the Rabbit series, just the last few novels. I've never read CATCH 22. I've read more of the women writers from that time, and Joyce Carol Oates, Muriel Spark, and Margaret Atwood are some of my favorite writers.

This St. George's Day, I'm going to celebrate by giving a book to a loved one (me), and reading one of these books that I've missed thus far in my journey. I don't know what yet--I'm willing to take suggestions. Maybe I'll read one of Gianna's favorite books, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. It's supposed to be terrific. Never read it.

Random sighting while traveling in Lewisville, Texas, yesterday: I passed an out of business barbecue joint called Sugar Babies, which looked like a barn and featured a morbid, cartoon pig feasting on a rack of ribs (isn't that cannibalism?) on its sign. Sugar Babies also had one of those marquee signs where you can advertise specials. The specials were still posted, and the first was "'Sonic' like ice, only 99 cents!" So, the best lure this restaurant could come up with was that they had an ice machine that spewed crunchy ice like that found at Sonic Drive-Ins? No wonder the place went under. Awesome.