August 20, 2012
The King’s English Bookshop 35th Anniversary
My beloved local bookstore, The King’s English, is celebrating its 35th anniversary and asked me to contribute a piece to their newsletter, The Inkslinger.
I first met Betsy when I edited her book The King’s English for Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We had a feisty and passionate exchange on many topics, including religion, and women’s rights, and politics. There were many things we didn’t agree on and sometimes we wanted to strangle each other! When we were done, we had crafted her amazing book into something even better than we started with and I thought, “I like this woman. I like this woman a lot. I want to work for her.”
We define community in many different ways—community as part of nationality, or family, or neighborhood, or religious affiliation. We find groups of people we feel comfortable with, or where we feel like we belong or are understood or accepted or loved. Or we try to become part of a community in which we want all those things to be the case. But The King’s English booksellers, that lovely and diverse group drawn together through books, so far exceeds any expectations of what a loving and supportive community can be that working there as a bookseller changed how I look at my place in the world.
I’ve worked in just about every aspect of the book world—as an editor nearly twenty years, as an author of almost twenty books, and as a bookseller. I love books. I love the magical connection between a reader and the characters in a book, between a reader and the author, between a reader and all the other readers who love the same book. That’s the joy of a book group, of course, and that joy extends to and builds communities of readers to people you might never have known otherwise, to people around the world, and even to people no longer with us. It’s one thing I love so much about books—connecting to other people. And it’s what booksellers do best: form relationships between readers and books, between readers and booksellers, between readers and other readers. But the community of friendship bookseller to bookseller at The King’s English—the love and acceptance and support, the kindness and open arms I have received from the most intelligent, thoughtful, well-read people you will ever meet—I wouldn’t change that experience for anything.
August 16, 2012
Quote
"God created man and gave the storytellers the task of saying why."
—Elie Wiesel
August 13, 2012
Don't Worry about Things
“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you'll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving, and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow." —Ray Bradbury
August 1, 2012
New BabyLit Books!
Little Master Stoker: Dracula and Little Master Dickens: A Christmas Carol pub today. So excited! Dracula has this gorgeous black-and-white color palette with purple and a tiny bit of red. The illustrator used all these amazing textures in the art—it may be my favorite so far.
July 31, 2012
Rock Wall Climbing
Prince Charles and Me. I win!
