Our Customers Love Us!

The maxim in retail is that you only hear from your customers when they're unhappy. Which is a good thing- we definitely want to hear from people when they feel that they weren't treated well at the store, or if in some other way they were somehow let down by their pals at Green Apple. But sometimes people write to tell you how much they like you. And sometimes they go even further. We've had people bake cookies for the staff, or drop off baseball tickets because they know there are a lot of Giants fans here. The above paint sample collage was sent to us by an appreciative neighbor as a token of her affection for the store. It is now affixed to the wall of our stairwell, a place of high honor. It is lovely, and we are honored.

Nicest Author in the World?

Working in the book business, we have pretty special access to authors. Between trade shows, book tours, drop-in visits, and just plain old customers who are writers, we meet dozens of authors every year. And, of course, we booksellers think of authors like some people think of movie stars or popes. The authors vary, of course, in their level of success, from self-published scribes to Pulitzer Prize winners. And they vary, of course, in how they treat booksellers and the general public.

Some swoop in with an entourage (like Maya Angelou did a few years ago). Some sneak in under the radar (like Oliver Sacks did with actor Robin Williams once in my early days of bookselling). And some try to steal their own books. Well, OK. One tried to steal his own book. But that's another story.

This winter, I was invited to a publisher sponsored dinner with Howard Norman at a book industry trade show. Alas, at the last minute, he canceled--a combination of his mother dying and crazy winter blizzards kept him from coming. Understandable, right? Sure, I was disappointed. I LOVED the Bird Artist and his short story collection Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and very much liked The Museum Guard and and The Haunting of L and enjoyed his most recent book What is Left the Daughter (coming this summer). But when your mom dies, all bets are off, right?

So it surprised me to get hand-written card in the mail about a month later apologizing for missing the dinner, thanking Green Apple for its support over the years, offering to come by in August when he's in the area, and giving me his snail mail and email addresses.

A real mensch, I say.

Any other nominations for nicest author ever?

Poem of the Week by Joseph Noble

Happy Monday. Here's your weekly dose of poetry. This week's poem is by Joseph Noble from An Ives Set (Lyric & Press, 2006). Enjoy.

PS. Something's wrong with our web site. We DO have a copy of this book on hand.


calcium light night

to sing and to speak
the alphabet begins
fife type tones bones
signals with hat in hand
thinking in the cell
tramp tone
makes you free
sound round
the few days
we shall breathe

Local Author Honored

Congratulations to Richmond District resident and young adult author (and regular patron of Green Apple) S. Terrell French, who is in Washington D.C. at this very moment accepting the Green Earth Book Award for her novel Operation Redwood, which came out in May of last year. One of our bestselling young adult novels of the year, Operation Redwood mixes fast-paced adventure with an environmental message, as a group of San Francisco youngsters set out to save a redwood grove from the clutches of a large corporation intent on clearcutting. Here is a recent profile of the author from The Examiner.

Sarah Palin and Green Apple team up to save the wolves!

When Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, came out back in November, we at Green Apple thought it would be nice to put the proceeds to good use. So we decided to donate 100% of the profits of the book to The Alaska Wildlife Alliance, an organization that works to prevent aerial hunting of Alaska's wolves, among other good causes. It also worked out to be a pretty good publicity stunt (see here and here and here and here). In the end, we sold 12 copies. Several people who bought the book from us told us that they were buying it as a gift, but that they were glad to be able to buy it from a place where the money would do some good. One customer even wanted to buy the book and not take it with them- we just told her to make a donation directly!

So a big thank you to Green Apple customers who bought the book from us. Today we cut a check to The Alaska Wildlife Alliance for $139.15, and maybe there will be one more wolf roaming Alaska than there otherwise would have been.

Alpha-bet : the Best Bet

It's time, internet and fellow booksellers, for me to confess something: I have the alphabet stuck in my head most of the time. Anyone else? No, really? I didn't think so. But after a day of shelving books, maintaining a section in detail, or scanning the shelves in a frantic attempt to find an author with an ambiguously hyphenated last name, it just seeps in there, a constant stream of relating one letter to what must come before or after it.

This may effect me more than most, due to a condition remarked upon by all who know me called an Uncannily Precise Recollection of Every Sesame Street Routine Aired Between 1985 and 1991. I don't know why I developed this, but as evidence I recently identified a co-worker's old favorite short based only on her vague description of a particular rain boot. I think that those fragile sponge-y years during which public broadcasting was my only televised input used up my entire memorization capacity, and while my relationship with subsequent learning suffered for it, it has the lovely benefit of providing many different tunes for remembering where letters go while I'm shelving books at Green Apple.

Long story short, this post is dedicated to the alphabet, and this month is dedicated to poetry, and so I give you this:

Ron Silliman's The Alphabet is a wonderful example of how the simplest units of our strange and baffling language can be stranger and baffling-er than you ever thought possible. At a whopping 1,054 pages of poetry and narrative verse, it's a gorgeous beast of a thing, a compilation of twenty six smaller volumes published over the years in various journals and magazines, each dedicated to a letter of the alphabet. It's no simple read, best suited to live on your bedside table for a while be chiseled at gradually, but there are lines in there that will stop you cold and make you want to go back, understand how you got there and figure out where the heck you're going. So if you're looking to draw out National Poetry Month into several months, or if you really have absolutely nothing to do until May, then this book is the perfect celebration of all that poetry can do and undo.

But if you need a simpler alphabet story, or perhaps you need help navigating Green Apple's (ahem) flawlessly alphabetized shelves, allow me to share my favorite for making the process a little more wonderful, albeit with questionable depictions of traditional African garb. A, Amazing.

Book spine poems

A new floor is being installed on our mezzanine today

We usually try to create original content here, more or less, instead of just pointing you elsewhere on the web. But with our kid's section torn up for two days for new flooring, and in celebration of National Poetry Month, we gleefully steer you here and here to see "book spine poems," like the ones below.

Katrina's

Ms. Kelley and Ian's


Stone Arch Books Blog

Good stuff, eh?