Barnes and Noble Gets It Right.

My friend Anthony is–to put it mildly–a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she’ll get mad.   (That’s Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we feel about books, and why/if we are attached to the physcial manifestaion of words known as the book.  Anthony calls this the “book object,” and he’s even got a wonderful blog about his personal explorations into book objects (http://onbooksandbiblios.blogspot.com/).  Anthony and I sometimes wrangle about the future of the book.  I believe that there will come a time (behold it approaches) when we will get most of our words in some paperless fashion, and I do not lament the passing of the book.

The contents of a book excite me more than the book itself.  The physical book to me is more of an annoyance (but yes, I am a librarian) that you have to take care of, store, lug around from town to town.  Book objects are things that Thoreau would say are “easier got than gotten rid of.”

The book-object problem is accentuated, in my mind, by the dubious practices of the publishing industry.  Books today are designed to wear out, fall apart, and the crappy content that’s published in these book objects is not worth the CO2 released from the trees the book-objects are printed on.  (eg I saw a book at the Friends of the Library book sale today titled Jesus, CEO that purported to reveal the secrets of Jesus’ business management style).

Admittedly, I am a hypocrite.

I have felt that titillating surge—so much like an awkward and unexpected pubescent erection—when I walk into a massive bookstore. The smell of book objects. The racks and racks of books on every topic. The covers in colors or lacking colors, artful,sometimes playful. AND, most importantly, I have salivated over the amazing bargains. They buy one get one deal. The $1 Dover Thrift editions of the classics.

If the publishing industry has gone a-whoring, then the big box bookstores are their pimps. Sometimes, these corporate stores even get in directly on the whoring. Barnes and Noble is the worst offender. B&B cranks out their own editions, in disarmingly handsome hardback, of the classics. I admit to having bought a few of these over the years. And B&B’s sheer purchasing power allows them to discount their books at rates that make it hard to say no.

Yet, sometimes, they get it right. And this is a post about Barnes and Noble getting it right.

Every year, I can count on getting at least one B&B gift card for my birthday or for Christmas. One of the perks of being a librarian is that everyone thinks you always want books as a present (which isn’t too far off the mark, really). For the last two years, I’ve used these gift cards toward the purchase of quality hard-back fiction, mostly of authors who probably don’t sell that much hard-back fiction (btw, if you want to support authors and NOT publishers, then buy first-run hard-backed fiction. This is really where an author makes his/her money. The acid-washed paper-backed editions are a publishers wet-dream because this is where they can take someone’s intellectual property, crank it out quickly and cheaply, and rake in the profit).
Barnes and Noble has a program called Discover Great New Authors, and this is where they get it right. One of their picks for this year is Gin Phillips and her new novel The Well and the Mine. The rightness of this pick almost attones for their past sins.

The book explores the world of coal-mining Alabama in the 1930′s. Phillips narrates her tale through the shifting perspectives of members of the Moore family, a family living in the type of dignified poverty popular in seventies TV shows like the Waltons or Little House. There’s the strong, working-class father who is both rough and gentle. Mr Moore has that time of wisdom that sees it as nothing to bail out a colored friend, but who has trouble thinking on the deeper issues of racial injustice. Ma is that type of maternal figure who sacrifices all for her family and does so without quarrel, without question. She is the flattest of all the characters in the book. The children round out the Moor family: two girls and a boy. The oldest girl is the beauty. The youngest is the boy, Jack, who is the scion, the only son, and though he is the youngest, Phillips chooses to time-shift from time to time, as Jack picks up the story looking back over that time from his vantage point of middle age. Tess, is the middle child, not as pretty as her sister, but more spunky. One senses that Tess is Phillips favorite child, for she seems to get the grandest treatment in the story.

A story like this , with a cast of characters that leans so closely toward archetypal cliches, could easily get so syrupy that it sends one into a diabetic comma. Yet Phillips eschews oversimplifying the life of this family, and she does so largely by sticking to the facts. The narrative facts of the story, that is.Portions of the story where other writers might be tempted to moralize, Philips simply tells the tale, or rather lets her characters do the talking. Much like Harper Lee’s classic—one of my all-time favorites—there is a strong theme of maturation at work in the Well and the Mine. This is a family growing up in a difficult time. That is all. It is not a more difficult time than any other; it is not a more romantic age. It is simply a different time. The story a human story.

But to get back to my original point: the success of this book is made more astounding by the fact that, as wonderful as the story is, no major publisher picked it up. No Random House, no Viking, no Knopf. The Well and the Mine was published by Hawthorne Books, a independent publishing house in Portland, OR (http://www.hawthornebooks.com/). Hawthorne says of itself: “we’re serious about literature. We suspected that good writers were being ignored and cast aside as a result of consolidation in the publishing industry, and in 2001 we decided to find these writers and give them a voice.” Three cheers for Hawthorne: Hip Hip Horrah! Each of their books is printed in durable paper-back with handsome cover-art and book-marking flaps. Barnes and Noble’s pick of The Well and the Mine gives me a shred of hope for publishing and for the literary arts in general. It makes me feel that maybe book-objects are still a worthy obsession.

Your move, Anthony.