A rainy Saturday

On Tuesday, amid news that other bookstores were closing, we began a new era at Green Apple with the installation of an entirely new (to us) point of sales system. While there are sure to be some frazzled nerves and confusion, we're certain you'll be pleased with all of the features we've added to help you find whatever it is you're looking for.

Now I'm off to shelve some books. In the spirit of Roman's post from long ago, here are some songs about books.

The Power of The Handsell

Probably the best thing about being a bookseller is the chance the be an evangelist for a book one loves. This is known as The Handsell. (I'm sure car dealers and pet shop owners do handselling too, but sharing a favorite book somehow seems more.....lofty).

The most recent issue of Filmmaker Magazine (the magazine of independent film) has a profile of "A-list hollywood scribe" Leslie Dixon (Mrs. Doubtfire, Outrageous Fortune, etc.) and her forthcoming film Limitless. Here's the part of the story that caught our eye:

"That Dixon...would have a problem scoring gigs writing darker, yet still mainstream, movies seems a bit crazy, but that’s today’s Hollywood, where writers are ruthlessly compartmentalized based on gender, age and past credits. Of the edgier material Dixon delights in as a viewer, “I don’t think people will offer me [these films],” she says. “But needing work is not where I am in my life right now. What turns me on is more important.”

"Looking for something that turned her on was how Limitless got started. “Every so often I get depressed by the things people are developing,” she says, “and I go to the Green Apple bookstore in San Francisco. I ask them what’s good just so I can cleanse my palette.” The store recommended Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields. “I wasn’t looking for a novel to adapt,” she says. “But halfway through I got a weird tingling feeling that ‘this is mine.’”

“The premise of the novel was good,” Dixon says. “What if a loser slacker guy gets a smart drug? I knew an actor would want to play that part. It would be fun to watch out-of-shape, crappy-clothes Bradley Cooper have his girlfriend dump him because he’s a loser and then three weeks later he’s in a fancy suit bamboozling Robert De Niro.”

Read the whole article here.

The above handsell must have taken place a few years ago (unless it was a used copy), because the last time we sold a new copy of that book was in 2006. Before that, we'd sold some 500+ copies off of the staff favorites display. It has been out of print for a while, but it will be reprinted in March with the movie cover, all because a bookseller here at Green Apple Books read a book and loved it enough to handsell it. Watch the trailer here.

Indie Booksellers Meet President Obama

Lo that Green Applers were not among the lucky few to meet the president, but the glow has warmed our cheeks somehow. Here's the story, courtesy of Bookselling this Week, a publication of the American Booksellers Association.

On Thursday, January 20, the ABA Board of Directors met with President Obama in the Oval Office for the presentation of the ABA White House Library, a selection of current titles given to each presidential administration since 1929, for the reading pleasure of the First Family. The White House visit occurred in conjunction with Winter Institute 6 and the Board’s winter meeting.

The Board was accompanied to the White House by ABA CEO Oren Teicher and Barbara Meade, co-owner, with the late Carla Cohen, of Washington, D.C.’s iconic Politics and Prose.

Sarah Bagby, ABA President Michael Tucker, Ken White, ABA Vice President Becky Anderson, Barbara Meade, Beth Puffer, President Obama, Tom Campbell, Betsy Burton, Dan Chartrand, and ABA CEO Oren Teicher at the presentation of the White House Library.

Books presented to the President, including YA titles for his daughters, were:

• Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester (Harper); presented by ABA President Michael Tucker, Books Inc., San Francisco, California
• A Nest for Celeste: A Story About Art, Inspiration, and the Meaning of Home, by Henry Cole (Katherine Tegen Books); The Candymakers, by Wendy Mass (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); and Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper (Atheneum); presented by ABA Vice President Becky Anderson, Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, Illinois
• Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (Random House): presented by Barbara Meade, Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.
• Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (Knopf); the winner of the 2010 Indies Choice Book Award for Fiction, presented on behalf of the entire group
• Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak: A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Pantheon); presented by Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books and Cafe, Wichita, Kansas
• Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); presented by Betsy Burton, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah
• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau); presented by Tom Campbell, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina
• Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman, selected and introduced by Robert Hass (Counterpoint); presented by Ken White, San Francisco State University Bookstore, San Francisco, California
• Storyteller, by Patricia Reilly Giff (Wendy Lamb Books) and The Danger Box, by Blue Balliett (Scholastic Press); presented by Beth Puffer, Bank Street Bookstore, New York, New York
• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House); presented by Dan Chartrand, Water Street Bookstore, Exeter, New Hampshire
• Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press); presented by ABA CEO Oren Teicher, Tarrytown, New York

Roussel!

February, according to Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry

Maybe it's impolite or bullying to pick on the most diminutive of months--as if February doesn't catch enough flack already, what with its Valentine's day and its imprecision (is it a leap year? Am I the only one who can't keep track of this?)--but I'm ready to kick the month to the curb. Sure, I can't complain about the weather in San Francisco. I don't have to shovel snow or salt the sidewalk and there's little chance I'll lose my dog in a snowdrift (I don't have a dog, I'm daydreaming), but that doesn't mean I'm not sick of whatever passes for winter here. As it is, everyone is achy and coughing and sniffling and dripping and oozing... winter is just about as unflattering as horizontal stripes on a fat man.

One of the things getting me through the rest of this dreadful and snotty season are piles of publishers' catalogs, treasure troves smelling of warm Spring and Summer days. In particular, I'm really, really excited about the fact that 2011 is shaping up to be, at least as far as I'm concerned, the Year of Raymond Roussel.

Roussel (1877-1933) was an eccentric, to say the least, one whose self-published works were met with at best quizzical reviews upon their initial publication, but that have grown steadily more influential--possibly more so due to their cult status--among artists and poets over the years. Admirers include(d) Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, and Harry Mathews, among others. Michel Foucault even wrote a study of Roussel. (That is available as both a paperback and a Google eBook.)

While Roussel's work has previously been published in English translation, at the moment all of his work is currently out-of-print in the U.S. Until March, at least, when Princeton UP will publish a new translation of New Impressions of Africa by Roussel biographer Mark Ford.

In the months following, British publisher Oneworld will release for American fans of the avant-garde both Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa, and in August (I can almost feel the sand between my toes), Dalkey Archive is publishing super-translator Mark Polizzotti's new edition of the aforementioned Impressions of Africa. I don't often get excited about publishing "events," and perhaps I'm a party of one in considering this an event, but I cannot wait to get my hands on this book.

Until then, I'll keep plugging away at Thomas Bernhard, adding misery to February misery.

Notable Texts on Art and its Relation to Propaganda and Political Bodies

-The Situationists and the City, a collection of writings from Situationist International edited by Tom McDonough.
-Art and Text, edited by Aimee Selby with a font on the cover that takes me back to way back when and some other strange places as well.
-Color: A Natural History of the Palate by Victoria Finlay, which I have discussed before.
-Danzig Baldaev's Drawings From the Gulag is a bleak journey into a historic institution designed for punishment and torture, and a strange account of art's existence there.
-And of course, my nonfiction 'book of the year' from last year The Great Debate About Art by Roy Harris.

Book stuff on technology blogs?!?

If those blogs are BOINGBOING or Laughingsquid, then of course books. . . I check-in with both of these sites daily, and they never fail to amaze me. Every day. Amazed!

In fact, boingboing and Laughingsquid are huge supporters of books and bookish things, as exemplified by the following two posts, from yesterday and today. One showcases how the book can evolve into a unique object of art, and the other is a gentle plea from graphic-novel guru Alan Moore on the importance of libraries.

Two sides of the same coin, and both stirring examples of how important physical books are to a culture, to a creator, and to our minds.






Thanks boingboing and laughingsquid for making the internet a safe and free haven for book readers!

Foursquare offer at Green Apple!

Do you remember Little Bee by Chris Cleave? It was a Green Apple Book of the Month and the subject of one of our most successful (and dare we say hilarious) videos ever? Well, to celebrate the release of Chris Cleave's Incendiary, Green Apple has teamed up with Foursquare.

New to Foursquare or unsure how to take advantage of the offer? Please allow my 4-year-old twins to help.



So what's the deal, you ask? Here's the deal:


So stop by Green Apple in the next week or two, check in on Foursquare, and pick up a copy of Incendiary and your free Little Bee (which would be a generous gift if you've already read it, right?).