Sure, book-selling is a business. But it’s also a passion. You don’t open a bookstore for the joy of tracking inventory or filling out tax forms. You don’t get into publishing, except perhaps at the highest corporate levels, for the fun of squeezing the product line for just a few more pennies of profit.
At the heart of book-selling is a very human act: One friend says to another, “Look at this book I just read. It’s great. You’d like it.”
In the book business, this is known as hand-selling.
“Hand-selling is the best part of being a bookseller,” says Linda Bubon, co-owner of the Women & Children First bookstore at 5233 N. Clark St. in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. “It’s just the most satisfying thing I do. I literally wake up at night and think, I need to recommend this to X.”
In college, Bubon initially thought she would become an English teacher, steering students to great writing and helping them understand its value.
“What I’m doing now is so much more immediate and so much less academy-bound, not limited to a certain set of acceptable authors,” she says. “I can recommend a bold new voice, a 27-year-old, say, or this new writer who’s publishing her first book at 71 years old.
“I’m very persuasive, but I don’t think I could sell anything else. There isn’t another product that I could believe in strongly enough. I couldn’t see selling a pair of shoes or a beautiful dress.”
Melissa Beacom, a veteran bookseller at the Book Stall in Chestnut Court, 811 Elm St. in Winnetka, has hand-sold hundreds of copies of “The Quiet Eye” (Regnery), a 74-page collection of art reproductions and quotations compiled by Sylvia Shaw Judson, a sculptor. Initially published as a large-format art book in 1954, it was re-issued in its present smaller size in 1982.
As the title suggests, it’s a gentle, understated book, meant for reflection — the antithesis of a modern best seller.
“People will not come in and ask for `The Quiet Eye,'” Beacom says. “What people do is come in and say: I have a friend, and I don’t know what to do for her — she’s in the throes of an illness or is having a difficult time. And I’ll say: I’d really like you to look at this.”
“The Last of the Curlews” by Fred Bodsworth (Counterpoint Press) is a 174-page novel about birds that Beacom’s boss, store owner Roberta Rubin, has been hand-selling since she discovered it for herself about five years ago. “It’s a love story of two curlews,” Rubin says. “It’s beautiful writing. It has the elements that, I think, are generally loved — the nature, the poetry, the love story, the survival question.”
To promote the book, Rubin “faced it out,” which means that she put it on the store’s shelves with its cover, rather than its spine, facing out. She also put a “shelf-talker” near it, a small handwritten note about the book’s virtues, sort of like an extended version of one of those blurbs on the covers of paperbacks. And she spotlighted it in the store’s monthly newsletter.
As a result, she says, “We’ve sold a couple hundred in hardcover, and now we sell both the paperback and hardcover.” But there’s a sense of waging a lonely battle on behalf of a much-deserving book. “I have the feeling,” Rubin says, “we’re the only store selling it.”
Not every book that’s hand-sold is obscure.
In fact, publishers sometimes try to hand-sell a particular title to the hand-sellers. One way is to send authors on book tours to make appearances in stores, not only pumping sales for a single day but, the hope is, pumping up enthusiasm for the title among the store clerks.
Little, Brown employed a more unusual approach a year ago to promote Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Turning Point,” an examination of epidemics in social behavior. Prior to the book’s publication, the publisher flew him around the country to sit down at dinner with key bookstore owners, including Rubin. And, according to Rubin, it worked. “It brought the book to our attention.”
Back in Andersonville, Linda Bubon says she doesn’t just hand-sell the books she loves. She has to be ready with recommendations for a variety of needs and interests. “They’ll come in and say: I need a book for a plane ride. I need three paperbacks to take on vacation and they need to be lightweight in size and tone. Or they’ll ask: Is this a good laugh-your-blues-away book?”
In recent months, though, Bubon has been tireless in boosting a book she does love, Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, “The Blind Assassin” (Doubleday).
“The experience of reading it was full of discoveries, and I literally went, `Oh, no!’ — out loud — at some points in the story when things were revealed,” she says. “After reading the first 60 pages, I was already starting to sell it. When I finished it, I just sat and wept.”
In hand-selling the book, Bubon had many points to make in the book’s favor: “I told them it made me feel really smart, that it’s a wonderful historical novel, that it was, by turns, funny and poignant and clever. And I told them it taught me more about the Depression than I had ever known.”
And, after Atwood’s appearance at a store-sponsored reading in November, Bubon had additional details about the author and her own ideas about the book.
But Bubon also had some caveats.
“I would tell them this is a book for serious readers, and I would say it took me two weeks to read it,” Bubon says. “And I would say it’s a better book for the morning rather than late at night.”
It was the sort of advice a good friend might give — from one book lover to another.
