Kinky 1

Joe Marchione, Allan's former partner at Valhalla Books, was inspired by the previous post to write:

While I try to keep my comments for this blog focused on various facets of Allan, one line you wrote got me thinking in more general terms about the future of bookselling ... need to purge by posting even though it's not done or I'll never get my Q3 sales tax done...

" ...how much second-hand bookselling...has changed in a handful of years."

On my good days, I read a comment like this one about Burgess and try to convince myself that if you think about it, things really are not *that* different now from the way they used to be. Authors come into vogue, slip back out, same as it ever was. I rationalize that every generation imagines themselves on the edge of something new, of some radical change that will fundamentally change an aspect of life that is important to them. No matter if that place is viewed as a cutting edge or a precipice, the tendency to believe that we stand on the steeply sloped part of an exponential curve at the moment we live in, here-and-now (whenever that here-and-now may be) could be a fundamental human trait and, in retrospect, proves to be illusion.

That's on my good days. I haven't had a lot of good days recently.

Earlier today, a fellow bookseller (brick & mortar, general stock, highly technophobic) who used to pick Allan's brain about 1st editions came in with a stack of books by mystery writer Kinky Friedman. At one time, these books would been worth something. Friedman was a mid-list mystery writer, always salable with a least one title that consistently commanded (and received) mid- to high- two figure prices.

My half-smile and shrug probably told my colleague all he needed to know but I went through the motions anyway, checking each title on-line for him. It turned out my indifferent shrug way overestimated value. The collectible market for Friedman had basically collapsed. He is still salable, but at reading copy prices -- meaning $10 or so -- for signed first editions. Mind you, he's still alive, writing and selling new books. What happened?

That illusion I was talking about in the first paragraph? Sometimes it's no illusion. I sit here composing this draft on Google docs, my efforts periodically and seamlessly saved to The Cloud. I am a click and a search from what most of us, 30 years ago, would have imagined as heaven ..., a bookstore in that same (OK, not really, but close enough) cloud, where a nearly unimaginable number of books proclaim their availability, needing no more than a click and a credit card to bring them to us. That technology has radically affected the supply side of the book marketplace need hardly be examined. A curmudgeonly rant about what we are losing might make me feel good but is, in the end, useless. Worse, the supply side of the equation is not what I am most worried about.

Are we a generation or two away from childhood completely without books? I mean the physical objects ... with covers and pages and smells and texture. And if so, what difference will it make? Remember, I'm not positing a world without stories. In fact I can imagine a child being every bit as enamored with Ferdinand the Bull as I was. The exact same story. But for them, the memory may well be of words on a computer screen, moving illustrations above the words, an actor's voice. Better? Worse? Probably neither. Just different. But twilight of the booksellers? Probably.

Comments

[Joe Marchione]

Had a photographer in the building this morning looking to fill out some story or another that may run on the bookstores in the building and, among other questions, he asked about the name of the store, Valhalla. (This, by the way, is very much a 'journalist' question... I think 100% of the journalists who have been through and contemplating a story have asked "Why Valhalla?" while [much] less than 10% of 'regular' folks have ever asked). I'd been thinking about the answer since the last time somebody asked (and yes, it was a reporter, Fang-Ling Jong, Chinese journalist and friend of the building).

Allan had come up with the name a couple of years before we made the move from Tall Stories. While doing a book fair down in Burbank, he had seen a street sign with the name "Valhalla" and thought it would make a good name for a book store. No deeper reason. It just struck him as 'right.' My rote response at this point in the 'why Valhalla?' explanation had always been the same: "well, I like a name with mythological overtones so it worked for me. Were I to do it over again, I might go for mythological overtones a bit closer to the beginning of the alphabet [insert rim shot here]."

But in thinking about the question, it occurred to me that in all the book fairs I had done with Allan down in LA over the years, I had never seen the street that inspired the name of the store. Cue Google Maps and the discovery that it's not just the name of a small street in Burbank off of North Hollywood Way, it's a sad irony and a freakin' metaphor for the whole damned used book business. Valhalla Drive, Allan's inspiration for naming the store is the entrance to a memorial park. May we all rest in peace.