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Coherent Thoughts and Russian Literature
I am finding it difficult to put together a coherent blog post, or even two thoughts, with a newborn in the apartment. She's up at all hours of the night, short-circuiting my brain functions. The...
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Slicing and Dicing the Orders
I am not very good at doing things in secret. Usually, like right now, I announce my new projects or new ideas (wonderful or awful) on my blog. Twittering, with it's tiny 140-character entries, has...
View ArticleTo Go Where No Buyer Has Gone Before
I got a glimpse into the future this week when I bought the HarperCollins children's and the Penguin adult hardcover lists using the electronic catalog Edelweiss instead of the paper catalogs provided...
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Changes Here, There and Everywhere
Avin Domnitz to Leave American Booksellers AssociationI was quite surprised by the announcement last week that Avin Domnitz would be leaving his post as Chief Executive Officer of the American...
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Cutting the List of Nominees
A few weeks ago, I got one of the more surprising calls of my bookselling career. The caller wanted to know if I'd be interested in determining the nominees for the Indie Choice Book Awards. At first,...
View ArticleI'm Tweeting My Life Away
Tweeting is what you do when you are on the social network website Twitter. I'm not sure why it isn't twittering, I'd prefer twittering. It sure feels like I'm twittering (to speak rapidly and in a...
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The Self-Published Man
The following story is reprinted from an article I wrote for the Boulder Weekly. Robert Dresner is signing at the Boulder Book Store on Wednesday, Feb. 25th at 7:30 p.m.Everyone Agrees Robert Dresner's...
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Musings about eBooks.
The launch of Amazon's Kindle 2 on February 9th has released a torrent of discussion about the future of ebooks on television, in newspapers, in the pages of national magazines, as well as online...
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Hachette: From Boom to Bust
Hachette Gets Cheap, Real CheapDuring the deluge of bad news that has pounded the publishing industry in the last six months, one company, Hachette Book Group, has emerged unscathed. Thanks to the...
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HarperCollins' Loss is Our Loss
The best sales rep I have ever worked with in my 12 years of buying will be retiring later this year. HarperCollins' John Zeck was not planning to retire so soon, but when the publisher offered early...
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Needing Great Fiction
The ExcuseI've taken a brief respite from Kash's Book Corner. The sheer exhaustion of trying to get a five-month old to sleep every night should be enough of an excuse for neglecting the blog. We spent...
View ArticleImpressions of Book Expo
Just What is BEA?The annual Book Expo America has been many things over the years in addition to being an industry-wide celebration. Politicians including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have used the...
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Random House's Hail Mary Pass
I've had my head buried in the Random House Fall catalogs most of this week. It's a wonderful place where fine literature is abundant, and intelligent history, science, and current affairs books are...
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Let the Great World Spin
My uncle Nick died yesterday. It was sudden and completely unexpected. He was trim and fit and seemed to be in the prime of his life though he was in his mid-sixties. I expected another 20 years of...
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Even on Mars, We Are Who We Are
The following review is republished from the September 3rd issue of the Boulder Weekly. Back in February, I wrote a feature about Robert Dresner and his failed attempts to get his novel The Astral...
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Does Dan Brown Hold Bookselling Key?
This morning, I was expecting 492 copies of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol to arrive with our UPS order. I greeted the driver at the door with a big smile and eagerly helped catch the boxes. My grin...
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The Evolution Revolution
I have an article about the book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails) by Paul Strode and Matt Young in the October 8 issue of the Boulder Weekly. The pair are coming to speak at the store this...
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The Youngest Book Buyer Ever
In a shocking development, Boulder Book Store hired 11-month old Martina Kashkashian to join their book buying department last week. She is the youngest buyer in North America and perhaps the world,...
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Some Recent Favorites
My reading has taken some strange twists and turns this year. Instead of ingesting my regular dose of contemporary poetry and new novels, I've been downing Is Your Mama A Lama almost every night before...
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Escape from Zombieland
I gave up on the publishing industry for a month or two there. The piles of reader's copies stopped speaking to me. The gleaming jackets of the new novels did not beguile me. The letters from...
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Devastating Secrets
Secrets and the devastation that they can cause families are at the emotional core of Melissa Newman’s powerful and evocative debut novel Sister Blackberry. Her posse of strong female characters are...
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Hellhound on His Trail
Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Hampton Sides, the author of Hellhound on His Trail, in Sante Fe at a bookseller lunch. Before the meal, I had no intention of reading Sides' account of Martin...
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ReGenesis: God is Movement
Here's a reprint from the Boulder Weekly of my review of ReGenesis, the concluding volume of Robert Dresner's The Astral Imperative trilogy. I met Dresner when he was painting my house and we began an...
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Christmas Season is a Bear
This is my favorite time of year to be a bookseller. The hours are long, the store is crowded and it can be frustrating when everyone wants the same book because they heard about it on NPR. However,...
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The Absurdity of Twain Fever
Mark Twain is the hottest author in America right now. The Boulder Book Store along with just about every other bookseller in America can barely keep ahead of the demand for the recently released...
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