I was given at birth one of the greatest gifts a writer could ask for: Being born into a family in which no one reads for pleasure.

I’m exaggerating a bit. There was one book that was passed from family member to family member and that everyone—aunts, grandmother, both my parents—eventually read. Naturally, that was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, a book considered scandalous in the late 1960s but that now comes across as so tame (and wordy) I’m not even aware of efforts to have it banned.

I still read chapters of that novel from time to time. It evokes in me the same nostalgia for childhood that Harry Potter seems to evoke in the college students I teach.

The advantage, as I see it, in coming from a family in which reading was considered unhealthily sedentary and suspiciously effeminate for boys is that as an adult, I’ve been able to write whatever I want about or based on my family with no fear of recrimination or lawsuits. I am confident none of them will read it. Most importantly, as a result of the attitude toward books at home, I took refuge in the public libraries early and began a life-long love affair with them, one which has sustained me ever since.

The town I grew up in—a suburb of Boston—had many unlovely things. Pig farms and leather tanneries, to name two. The latter, in those unregulated decades, resulted in poisoned wells and multiple cancer clusters. (See A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr.)

In contrast, the town has a remarkably beautiful Romanesque Revival public library that opened in 1879 and was designated a National Historical Landmark in 1987. It was designed by H. H. Richardson and was the first of his many public libraries. It’s a true cathedral to books, built along a basilical plan and featuring many flourishes that would become the architect’s signature moves—vaulted ceilings, clerestory windows, an ornate exterior with a High Victorian tower, a tiled roof, and a fanciful skin of multi-colored stone.

As a child, I found it impossible to walk into the building without feeling embraced by the architecture and falling into a state of hushed reverence for books. I often went there two or three times a week, back in a period when children were allowed to walk places on their own. I went for the books, naturally enough, but also for the feeling of entering a different world, one in which there was unqualified approval of literary pursuits.

The love of that building carried over to a feeling of happiness upon entering almost any library, no matter how grand and imposing or small and unassuming. In the grand category, I’m thinking of the Widener Library at Harvard, built as a monument to a beloved son who died on the Titanic. In the unassuming, the public library in Woodstock, New York, a low-ceilinged wooden building with inadequate shelf space for the literarily-inclined population of that town and a strong smell of mold upon entering. I love them all.

Despite my attraction to these sanctuaries, it wasn’t until almost fifteen years ago that my writing life and my love of libraries became inextricably connected.

*

In 2009, after completing my sixth novel, I was given an opportunity to write (on commission) a series of novels set at a yoga studio in Los Angeles. Think Sex and the City but with namastes. The editor who proposed the project was someone I’d worked with previously. We had a shared love of yoga and had gone to classes together when I was in New York or she was in Boston. The commission came with two conditions: the books were to be published under a pseudonym, and they had to be written quickly.

Both conditions were fine with me, although the second was a bit worrying. Since my first book was published in 1987, it’s taken between five and eight years to produce each of my relatively short novels. In publishing, that’s a lifetime.

Literally so, apparently. In the late 1990’s, a friend sent me a clipping from a Chicago gay newspaper which stated that the reason I hadn’t released a new book in years was because I’d died. I was delighted to read the news. I immediately forwarded it to my then editor as an iron-clad excuse for demanding yet another extension on delivering a novel.

I assumed that I could drag my feet on the yoga novels as I had on the others. Surely “Rain Mitchell,” the nom de plume of my gender-neutral alter ego, could be as forgivably non-prolific as I was.

On that point, I was wrong.

Six weeks before the novel was due, I went to New York to have lunch with my editor and ask for an extension. I made the latter request over coffee. In response, the editor smiled faintly, folded her hands politely on the table, reminded me that I’d signed a contract and had accepted half of an advance. “If I don’t have a manuscript on my desk in six weeks,” she said, “the publisher will go after you.”

I told her I was surprised by the Tony-Soprano tone the conversation had taken. As a consolation prize, she touched my arm and said, “Don’t forget, it’s not you that’s writing the novel; it’s Rain Mitchell.”

On the train back to Boston, I calculated the number of pages I’d have to write daily (weekends included) to deliver a manuscript. The number was so daunting, it approached comedy.

I spent the next morning at my desk, attempting to conjure Rain Mitchell and begin composing this grand six-week soap opera. The effort proved pointless. I was surrounded by bills to pay, a bathtub that needed another scrubbing, food that demanded to be eaten, sweaters and fitted sheets that need to refolded for a fifth time. I was, in other words, way too present at my own desk.

In early afternoon, I sought a safe refuge. I went to the Cambridge Public Library, also a stone Romanesque building, although not designed by Richardson. As soon as I entered, I felt once again the acceptance for my pursuits that I’d felt as a child. In this place, books were books, even ones in which divorces, miscarriages, cat hoarding and lots and lots of savasanas take place.

I sat down at a desk and entered a kind of trance, one in which I left myself behind and fully embodied Rain. I found it effortless to write, and by closing time, I had produced ten pages of the novel.

I returned to the library every day for the next six weeks. I delivered the novel on time, and it was published with few editorial changes. It didn’t do as well as the publisher had hoped, but it was reprinted in fourteen countries, and I still receive royalty checks now and again, usually in the mid two-figures.

The experience of writing the novel introduced me to a side of myself as a writer I didn’t know, up until then, existed. Not necessarily a better writer—depending on how you feel about characters who tour with Beyonce and make love on deserted gondolas at a ski area in the Sierra—but at very least, a bolder, more prolific, less self-censoring side of myself. A side of myself I’m comfortable saying I would not have been able to access, had it not been for the refuge of the Cambridge Public Library.

When it was time to return to my own work, I made a resolution to abandon my desk at home and only write in libraries. And leaving aside a brief, pandemicky period, that is what I have done since.

Favorites among the libraries I’ve worked at are the converted 1860 Methodist Episcopal church in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This glorious space has views from the third floor of the harbor on three sides and a steady stream of tourists passing through to see the three-quarter-size model of a sailing ship in its center.

There’s also the ornate Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts (another Richardsonian Romanesque building, this one designed by William Brocklesby) and the Athenaeum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, built in 1871 in French Second Empire style that doubles as an art museum with an impressive collection of Hudson Valley school paintings. Even that unimpressive, moldy library in Woodstock, New York.

There’s something about each of these very different sanctuaries—with their noisy tourists, rambunctious schoolchildren, snoring visitors escaping the cold or heat, elderly jigsaw-puzzle aficionados—that allows me to leave behind the distractions of the world and my own self-doubts and believe that what I’m doing has some value.

Another way of saying it: whenever I go into a library with the intention of writing, I look around and inevitably spot—at a small desk in dark nook or large table with a view of the Atlantic—Rain Mitchell, my bold, prolific, library-loving alter ego, patiently sitting there, waiting for me. She hasn’t stood me up once.

I’ve never been more grateful for libraries and librarians than I am now, when many are under fire for making “controversial” books available to a wide range of readers. I know they’re helping book-loving kids all over the country. Kids who, like me, might never make it out of the valley of the dolls, except for the sanctuaries of their local libraries.

______________________________

You Only Call Me When You’re in Trouble by Stephen McCauley is available via Holt.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has devastated all aspects of life in the region.

The starving, traumatized survivors of relentless Israeli airstrikes spend their days digging through rubble with their bare hands. Health care workers and journalists are targeted by drone strikes and picked off by IDF snipers with chilling impunity. The region’s cultural sector, including its library infrastructure, has been decimated. Over 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and over half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Citrus trees, olive groves, and greenhouses have been obliterated. 30,000 people have been killed. 10,000 of the dead are children.

In this hellish climate—as the specter of famine looms and Israeli politicians continue to flaunt their macabre intentions without fear of repercussions, or even rebuke, from their US counterparts—it becomes almost impossible to imagine Gaza as a place where life, let alone culture, can once again flourish, but it’s important to remember that it can, and it will.

One of the people committed to that resurrection is Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet, New Yorker contributor, and founder of the first English language library in Gaza. (Abu Toha, as you may recall, was kidnapped by Israeli forces on November 19th while trying to enter Egypt at the Rafah checkpoint. After being beaten, interrogated, and stripped of his possessions, Abu Toha was released two days later, and he and his family eventually made it to Egypt on December 3rd.)

Tomorrow, January 6, in an event organized by Massachusetts indie bookstore Brookline Booksmith, Abu Toha and 24 other prominent writers (including Kaveh Akbar, Rabih Alameddine, Hala Alyan, Fatima Bhutto, Ilya Kaminsky, Eileen Myles, and Viet Thanh Nguyen) will stage a reading in support of the Edward Said Libraries in Gaza.

During this virtual event, which is free to attend and will be streaming on YouTube from 12PM EST, each writer will offer a short reading “in a show of solidarity with the literary and reading communities of Palestine, and a confirmation of the vital nature of literature and access to written culture.”

Brookline Booksmith will be running a book donation drive via the store’s website, and 100% of donated funds will be used to purchase and ship books to the Edward Said Libraries upon reconstruction.

If you can, please consider tuning in and donating to this very worthy cause.

My longtime girlfriend is a longtime bookseller. Her relationship with bookselling predates ours three times over. It is a surprisingly taxing career path—one that asks of the body, and of the mind. There are the bad days, where she brings home the classic bookseller gripes: failed hand-sells, disappearing stock lost to The System, rude customers, sad customers, drunk second-hand book sellers, slow days, long shifts, stiff backs. There are days when she must play the power-lifter, the bouncer, the therapist, the academic, the smooth talking car salesman; sometimes all at once

But then there are the good days, when her shop simply hummmms, her colleagues in harmony with one another, and with the local community, and with the history of literature and with the obligatory playlists of Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, and Mac DeMarco, days my girlfriend finds herself in what I imagine equates athletically to “being in the zone,” hand selling so well that a customer listens to recommendation after recommendation, buying them all, asking for more.

Bookselling is a polar, problematic lover, an insistent poly-amant shoving its way, tome by tome, into her and my monogamy. It is also a job that I have come to appreciate for what bookselling—even through a conduit—has taught me about books, about writing, about containers of literary creation, yes, but also as aesthetic objects in and of themselves, and still more, as sources of dense, talismanic energy that pulls a community towards a real, physical place.

*

My partner is the most recent in a long line of booksellers who taught me not only how to write, but how to keep physical literature alive. I do not have a formal creative writing education, but I did loiter (and sometimes live) in bookshops across the Old World and the New.

Recently I published my first novel and was sent on my first book tour, to do bookshop events across Europe and the UK. At a stop on the tour, I was met with a comment from an audience member that, “the writing seems good, for someone who didn’t do an MFA.” The commenter did not elaborate if this was meant as the greatest compliment or the most savage diss. However meant, it was nonetheless correct, and I was left to contemplate, in front of an audience, my alternative literary education.

Sitting next to me, moderating the conversation, was Terry Craven, longtime bookseller, co-owner of Desperate Literature in Madrid. Terry felt like a fateful presence in the face of such a statement. When I first moved to Paris ten years ago, Terry—then the manager of Shakespeare & Company—was instrumental in sending me down a literary path.

For a short time before he left for Madrid, I found myself as Terry’s assistant on his secondhand book buys. This meant invading mansion-sized Parisian apartments owned by the freshly dead, apartments filled with incredible book collections whose inheritors wanted nothing to do with their boxing up and schlepping (enter me). Rumor would go around that a new stash was up for grabs and Terry and I needed to get in before the hoards of other antiquarian book dealers descended to ravage the loot. It was all very Bolaño-eat-your-heart-out.

Terry would always give me “my cut” from a haul, usually some beautifully aged Penguin paperback like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, saying, “learn from this,” without elaborating on what or why. And by allowing me into his exciting, mysterious, and hectic existence, an existence centered around books, an existence I saw him allowing his customers access to as well, I not only learned from his book recommendations, but also from how his celebration of the theatrical, wilder-than-fiction bookselling image was an experience book buyers came looking for.

*

In the years that followed, as I moved around and tried to make my way in the world, I found myself under the tutelage of more and more booksellers, not only receiving their book recommendations, but also by trying to read the humanist lines running between them.

I am reminded of Karolina Brdak, Octavia Horgan, and Sylvia Whitman—the holy trinity of the Shakespeare & Company shop floor in the early 2010s—who, in managing a shop steeped in history, taught me both how to believe in literary legends and how, if I wanted to write, I needed to move beyond them. As booksellers drowning in Hemingway kinks and Fitzgerald fantasies, it was all the more powerful when they insisted I read writers like Ali Smith, Elena Ferrante, and Jennifer Egan.

I am reminded of the likes of Jacob Perkins and Matt Nelson at the sadly gone Mellow Pages Library, and Chad Bunning at the sadly gone BookCourt, both in New York City, where I ended up for a time after having my luck, and my money, run out in Europe. These three introduced me to the work of writers my own age, young people being celebrated—an act which not only removed barriers in taking my writing more seriously, but which also motivated me to take my reading more seriously, in search, thereafter, of younger writers writing ‘our time’ with prescience.

And I am reminded of the likes of Kevin Sampell at Powell’s in Portland, where I am from, and then Nina Hervé at Rough Trade Books and Gavin Read at Foyles, two crucial London booksellers who looked after me when I moved briefly to the UK, after starting a literature magazine with the English writer, James Bird.

All three of these booksellers gave our little magazine pride of place in their iconic shops, alongside other small, new, local projects. It was an act that taught me how highlighting your community, especially the next generations of writers and readers, can be just as important and just as profitable as serving your major publishers and distributors.

*

My girlfriend currently finds herself in a moment of doubt about her craft, about what will be asked of booksellers in the years to come.

On our downtime during our book tour travels, we often found ourselves in yet more bookshops, talking to yet more booksellers. Many of them were green literary entrepreneurs, part of the string of new independent bookstores to have flouted the industry’s grim projections and opened their dream businesses; a group that is growing in number in the U.S. and in the U.K. for the first time in two decades.

In meeting so many booksellers and seeing inside so many new shops, patterns began to emerge.

Most new bookshops are now also bars, or cafes, or community meeting places, or micro-theaters. New booksellers are now also bartenders, or artisan bread bakers, or grassroots organizers, or stage auteurs. Sometimes all four and more.

Natalie Magnusson, who owns Bokbar, a Nordic bookshop in Paris, has a growing Swedish bakery business, combining Nordic literature-in-translation with Nordic pastry-pairings for a growing number of Nordiphile Parisians.

To afford rising rents, bookshops are diversifying, some even beginning to publish books themselves, by writers from their community, published with their local customer-base in mind first and foremost.

Sam Fisher, one of the co-founders of Burley Fisher in London, has been publishing a new generation of writers through his own publishing house, Peninsula Press, which leverages his bookshop’s community to drive sales and engagement at a shop that is staffed by an ambitious team of booksellers directly involved with various cultural and political initiatives in London, who themselves manage a bare-bones basement bar out of a GDR fantasy, perfectly decorated for cultural and political debates.

And some booksellers are fighting to make the publishing industry itself match their more inclusive, accessible, communitarian image.

The aforementioned Terry Craven, along with Desperate Literature co-owner Charlotte Delattre, has founded the highly successful Desperate Literature Short Story Prize, which has quickly become an international stalwart for literary career launching, deftly linking writers, agents, workshops and residencies, shining light on promising stories and promising writers, and creating a system outside the standard academic, MFA churn, one that guarantees an alternative entry point into the literary ecosystem.

*

In reflecting on the booksellers as educators, it makes sense that they may be tasked with additional roles as our publishers and our publicans, but more generally as bastions of community in the increasingly lonely, increasingly anxious, increasingly anonymous social space.

With narratives providing their livelihood, booksellers begin to see which narratives their customers need, the needs changing over time, the needs contingent on the last narrative their customer consumed, whether that be literary, political, social or otherwise. And booksellers are aware of a need to attract and please new readers (of any age) and younger readers and infant communities and difficult customers, to win over trust, to found more human loyalties.

Booksellers understand the importance of maintaining mystery, in not always being so clear, in refusing to answer every question, so that readers are allowed to retain agency in their discoveries, so that readers can narrate their own fate, so that reading can retain adventures of the mind, a type of adventure that, when trained correctly, spills more often from the page into the real world and makes life more livable.

So it comes as no surprise, to me then at least, that in these uncertain times, by earning their livelihood in direct contact with society-as-readership, with readership-as-unfulfilled-customer, booksellers are better attuned to championing the sort of stories their customers need, promoting those stories in ways their customers will be more responsive to, housing those stories in the type of physical spaces their customers are desperate for. And then, when the time for books is over, who better than a veteran of fact and fiction, fiction and nonfiction, truth and beauty, to pull our coffees and pour our pints and listen to our everyday problems.

However much we may enjoy book shops taking on a bigger role in our lives, in our era of burnout epidemics and urban exodus, I do find it irresponsible of us to require so much extra from our already overburdened booksellers. Whether or not our bookshops and booksellers can survive if they fail to diversify is a harder question for another day.

__________________________________

Roundabout by Will Mountain Cox is available from Relegation Books.

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad year. For the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, here’s the second installment of the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. Have fun:

30.
The End of an Era for the Old Guard of Publishing

One of the many knock-on effects of Penguin Random House’s failed attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster was the acceleration of departures by a legendary generation of editors, the final act in an era of publishing upheaval that began with the COVID pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests of 2020.

Gone now are the likes of Daniel Halpern (founder of Ecco Press), Victoria Wilson (who worked with Anne Rice and Lorrie Moore), Ann Close (editor of Lawrence Wright, Alice Munro, and Norman Rush), Shelley Wanger (Edward Said, John Richardson, Joan Didion), Jonathan Segal (seven of his books have won Pulitzers), Kathy Hourigan (who worked closely with Robert Caro for decades), Wendy Wolf (Nathaniel Philbrick, John Barry, and Steven Pinker), Rick Kot (Barbra Streisand, Andrew Ross Sorkin, and Ray Kurzweil), and Paul Slovak (Amor Towles, Elizabeth Gilbert, and David Byrne).

Most of these editors and publishers took generous buyout packages from a company eager to trim its expenses. And as this expansive New York Magazine feature points out:

One thing that’s making it slightly easier for the old guard to say good-bye is their hatred of the work-from-home era. “It infuriates me to no end,” says one person who reluctantly accepted the buyout. The PRH offices in midtown remain empty as ever. “If you go in there, it’s quite shocking,” says an exec who dropped by recently. “You walk on to one of those floors and there’s literally no one there. Just books in boxes piled up. It looks like a storage house.”

Many of those listed above had versions of the kind of old fashioned publishing careers that remain dominant in the public imagination (three-martini lunches, extravagant expense accounts, glamorous book parties), a professional way of life largely unrecognizable to the majority of the thousands of lower level workers that actually get books published.

Nonetheless, the loss of so much brilliant institutional knowledge—and the well funded editorial risk-taking that so often went along with it—is a sad moment for literary culture.  –JD

29.
Reading became . . . cool?

Odds are that, if you’re reading this list, you know that reading is cool and probably have since LeVar Burton told you so when you were a child. But 2023 was the year that reading became Cool Again, according to the culture. LA is hosting pop-up readings in parking lots, “Literary It Girls” are now throwing the most exclusive of book launch parties, the Look Book photographed the attendees at Catherine Lacey’s launch event, you can buy a hat plastered with the name of your favorite (dead) author (they got rid of the living-author hats, which was probably for the best), Chris Pine keeps being spotted with bags of books in seemingly every city he visits…

Honestly, if you want a hot tip, we’re betting that next year’s big trends will be everybody ditching their phones to carry around battered Penguin paperbacks in their back pockets, from which they can and will read aloud at the slightest provocation. Also there might be more hats. Watch this space. –DB

28.
Caroline Calloway and Natalie Beach published dueling books.

Say what you will about Caroline Calloway: The woman knows how to capture a headline. Or, in the case of the well-timed release of her self-published memoir, Scammer, wrest the headlines from her best friend-turned-very public bad art friend, Natalie Beach. Beach’s memoir-in-essays, Adult Drama, which sprang from her viral essay “I Was Caroline Calloway,” was released on June 20 by Hanover Square. Calloway’s—originally slated for publication (by her, at the steep price of $65) in 2020, shipped that same month, guaranteeing that it would garner mention (at the very least) in any bit of publicity for Beach’s book.

Becca Rothfeld at The Washington Post had this to say of the dueling memoirs: “Beach is a talented essayist with a promising career ahead of her. Calloway is a lunatic who has already written a masterpiece.” Tyler Foggatt at The New Yorker came to a similar conclusion, writing “Beach’s book is less meandering than Calloway’s, and yet it is also slower and more unsure of itself.”

As you might expect from someone who built an identity from the fetishization of aristocracy, Calloway is an expert at dueling. She doesn’t even need a second. –JG

27.
World’s largest and worst bookstore, Amazon, gets sued by the FTC.

In what is probably the largest suit every brought against the world’s largest distributor of stuff we generally don’t need, the FTC—specifically chairwoman Lina Khan—is accusing Amazon of

…exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them.

That sounds about right. But why is this literary news? Most of you probably know that Jeff Bezos began his little experiment in online shopping with books, a gambit that turned him into the overwritten evil genius caricature he is today, and changed forever the way we buy books—for the worse.

Will this suit change anything? Probably not, but this is likely just the beginning of a protracted effort to rein in the company’s world historical monopoly on what people buy.  –JD

26.
Haruki Murakami published a novel (but English speakers did not get to read it).

In March we reported that there would be a new novel by Haruki Murakami but, alas and alack, English readers wouldn’t get to read it. The Japanese publisher pitched the 1,200 page book as: “Must go to the city. No matter what happens. A locked up ‘story’ starts to move quietly as if ‘old dreams’ are woken up and unraveled in a secluded archive.” OK! In April, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Machi to Sono Futashikana Kabe) was published.

The Japan Times described the book as a novel told in three parts: the “first of which is based on Murakami’s 1980 short story of the same title, which he considered a failed work and had hoped to return to one day. In it, a male narrator seeks out a girlfriend from his teenage years, and moves between the real world and a fantasy city surrounded by a very high wall. In part two, the protagonist leaves his job to work in the library of a new town, and in part three, the story returns to the walled city.”

Trolling Reddit threads and Japanese discussion boards via Google Translate, it seems the book treads similar ground as Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World but has been appreciated by fans for being a good example of Murakami’s signature style. According to distributors, the novel is the top-selling book across genres for the first half of 2023, beating out a guidebook for the latest Pokemon game on Nintendo Switch. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for the English translation before too long. –EF

25.
Wired published a pretty mean profile of Brandon Sanderson . . . and Sanderson responded.

Perhaps the fact that Mormon fantasy author Brandon Sanderson made $55 million in 2022 started things off on the wrong foot. For Wired senior editor Jason Kehe, that was the peg on which to hang a profile of the author, “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God,” which was published to . . . quite a bit of drama, it turned out, in March.

“How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?” he asked, embarking on a quest to Utah to find out.

The result is an author profile that is either incredibly mean or lightly elitist, depending on your interpretation of Kehe’s text, and your personal stance on the quality (Stanley Fish? Are you out there?) of Wheel of Time (Sanderson authored three books, and the series was adapted by Netflix), and his dozens of other works from the “Cosmere” and “Cytoverse” (worlds in which he is much richer than a magazine writer).

Does Kehe insult Sanderson’s writing, or Sanderson, or Sanderson’s Mormonism in this piece? Yes. All of those things. Some grabs from which you can make your own assessment:

“Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be.”

“…none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.”

“My god. Here’s a sample sentence: ‘It was going to be very bad this time.’ Another one: ‘She felt a feeling of dread.’”

This goes on and on. Kehe’s chief criticism of Sanderson is that the author is simply too prolific to be good (he notes a diagnosis of graphomania; a manic compulsion to put words down).

Breaking every rule in the author’s handbook (apparently, according to Kehe, not for the first time), Sanderson responded via Reddit, home turf for Wheel of Time fans, in a well-written and occasionally VERY SHARP yet kind response (this feels like the most “extremely Mormon” thing I can identify, if you wish to allow such rhetoric, and the best rebuttal, thank you Emily Temple, of Kehe’s critiques of Sanderson’s keyboard skills). Sanderson’s best “take” on the profile:

[Kehe] seems to be a sincere man who tried very hard to find a story, discovered that there wasn’t one that interested him, then floundered in trying to figure out what he could say to make deadline.

I would argue this was deadlier than anything in Kehe’s profile. So what was Kehe trying to do? Part of me wants to read the piece as a meta-commentary on the kind of immersive latter-day gonzo journalism that places the cynical journalist in the center of the story and the subject as the sidekick (“The Full Tatum”; “Can You Say … Hero?” (I liked both of these, but you know)), or perhaps it’s a meta example of the lamestream media ignoring, then “discovering” a story years later, or an intellectual look at the geography of power in late-capitalist America (San Francisco may have corporate campuses, but Utah has Goblin Valley!).

Or maybe we can take Kehe at face value and assume he pitched a story, went on assignment, then found very little to string together while standing at his desk in San Francisco in his Patagonia vest. (Still, the Dragonsteel conference sounds like something!)

Negative reviews and profiles are vanishingly rare these days, because, as people have noted, those trying to sell books and solicit blurbs are the same people writing reviews for the most part, so you can understand the thrill of publishing something willing to go against the grain (and to court those lucrative hate clicks).

Finally, I am sorry that Salt Lake City’s dim sum received such a beating, surely not deserved. –JM

24.
A romance writer who faked her own death returned to the Facebook group where it all began.

It’s a story worthy of a romance novel, or at least a soap opera: a self-published romance author who reportedly committed suicide in 2020 after being bullied in a Facebook group announced in January (on that same Facebook group!) that she had not in fact taken her own life! The story has plenty more twists (apparently she created a fake account and used that account to ultimately take over moderation of the Facebook group) and unsurprisingly the community didn’t take any of them terribly well. In the wake of these revelations, Laura Miller at Slate coined Meachen’s Law: “The longer a tightly-knit internet community exists, the more the likelihood that someone will fake their death approaches one.”

It’s easy to make light of this story (and certainly we expect to see some of its details powering the engines of pulpy plots for years to come) but once you push past the lurid details, it’s hard not to think poorly of everyone involved. The Internet, it seems, continues to bring out people’s worst behavior — whether that’s bullying, faking your own death, or otherwise trying to serve up what folks believe to be karmic retribution for perceived slights. And to think, this was the year I decided to start reading romance novels because everybody told me the community was incredibly supportive and kind! (Which, to be fair, they mostly are!) –DB

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 at any time day or night to speak with trained counselors.

23.
The Internet was convinced that Taylor Swift had written a book. 

In May, the Internet was in a furor over a certain, then-forthcoming nonfiction book, a 544-page memoir (including 40 full-color photographs) that was slated to be published by Flatiron on July 9th. Why? Because The Internet thought it was probably written by Taylor Swift.

It all started when the owner of indie bookshop Good Neighbor Bookstore posted a video on TikTok reporting that a major publisher had informed them of a secret book coming in July, and speculated that it might be by the singer, citing various Easter eggs and clues. The publisher quickly asked the bookseller to take the video down, but of course, nothing can truly be deleted anymore.

A screenshot originally posted to Reddit showed notes from sales rep Anne Hellman on Edelweiss indicating a few more hints: that the book had an announced first print run of 1 million copies, that it was “fun and NOT political,” and the title would be announced on June 13. Hellman also pointed out that July 9th—the worldwide pub date—was a Sunday, an unusual day for a book to be published, and that booksellers who wanted copies in advance had to sign an affidavit.

The Swifties, unsurprisingly, went deep. Some even theorized that that not only would Taylor be publishing a memoir, she’d be using it to come out. Alas (?), once actual publishing people got wind of the rumors, it was quickly confirmed not to be a Taylor Swift book, but rather, a BTS book. (July 9 being, apparently, Army Day.)

Did it sell like hotcakes, even though Taylor didn’t write it? It did indeed. –ET

22.
James Daunt puts the books back into Barnes & Noble, and it’s working.

I’m old enough to remember when Barnes & Noble was the big bad enemy box store, muscling into our charming little neighborhoods, taking all the business away from our delightful indie bookstores and our mom-and-pop coffee shops (I mean, they even made a famous documentary about it).

But then came the internet, and Amazon (see 27 above). So we realized that Barnes & Noble wasn’t exactly the enemy, and that for a lot of communities outside those charming, gentrified little urban neighborhoods, it served as both meeting place and starting point, for seniors in need of a place to read the newspaper, and for awkward teens looking for something—anything—to reveal a bit more of the world.

So now I find myself rooting for Barnes & Noble, and for former Waterstones CEO and bookstore whisperer James Daunt, whose tenure thus far as Barnes & Noble head honcho has surpassed expectations. The key to a successful bookstore, it turns out, is books. As Daunt told The Guardian in April:

[Now] you’re not seeing much beyond books. I mean, there are other things, but it’s unequivocally book-driven. Amazon doesn’t care about books … a book is just another thing in a warehouse. Whereas bookstores are places of discovery. They’re just really nice spaces.

This revolutionary focus on… books in bookstores has yielded very positive results. After having closed nearly 400 of its 1,000 US stores over the last decade, Daunt’s leadership has seen nearly 30 new stores open in 2023.

The margins for bookselling will always be tight, and there’s no guarantee Daunt’s initial successes can be sustained over time, but in a business accustomed to bad news, this is a nice change.  –JD

21.
Spotify makes its big move into audiobooks.

As I wrote way, way back in August, 2020, when it first became clear Spotify was going to move into the audiobooks space:

The biggest question (for me, anyway, as an audiobook reader and Spotify user) is how the hell Spotify plans to bring the one-price-for-infinite-songs subscription model to books. On the one hand, I imagine publishers are glad to see a potential and legitimate competitor enter the playing field to provide an alternative to Amazon’s incredibly aggressive contract stipulations (look, I love these guys, but I don’t think Bezos and co. are all that worried); on the other… UNLIMITED BOOKS WHAT NOW?!

Well, as of September 2023, Spotify is officially in the game, offering over 300,000 titles for purchase, a la carte. But here’s the scary new part: as of last month in the US, nearly 150,000 titles are available on-demand for premium members, just like songs or podcasts. And if you know anything about what Spotify has done to the livelihoods of musicians, this has to be scary as hell for writers. Maybe having everything you could ever possibly want available at any moment isn’t such a great idea?  –JD

20.
BookTok moved into publishing.

BookTok, eh? What’s it’s all about? How does it work? Why are its users so obsessed with Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles? I, a hapless luddite, still don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I do know that the subcommunity is a powerful new player in the literary landscape, and woe betide anyone (me) who doubts its ability to move copies and shake up our dusty old industry. Case in point: in July, the New York Times reported that ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) had recently filed a trademark for a publisher (8th Note Press), hired a romance industry veteran as an acquisitions editor, and begun courting self-published romance writers to join its stable. Given that ByteDance has direct access to an audience larger than any traditional publisher could ever dream of and therefore could, in theory, boost its own authors at the expense of all others, the question must now be asked: is it only a matter of time before the Knopf Borzoi, the Random House penguin, and the Simon & Schuster guy with hat are each forced to bend the knee in supplication to publishing’s new overlord? –DS

19.
When Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, horror followed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as intellectual property hits the public domain, it will be immediately twisted far beyond the creator’s wildest dreams. It’s hard to imagine how A. A. Milne would react upon seeing even just the trailer for Blood and Honey, wherein a forgotten Pooh, Piglet, and co. have gone feral in Christopher Robin’s absence and are… *checks notes* now slasher villains hunting Christopher, his girlfriend, and their friends. It sounds absurd, and it is! But honestly, it’s also a hell of a lot of fun! Proper B-movie slasher silliness, as opposed to the increasingly ponderous and altogether un-fun vibe coming off of basically every other long-running franchise that keeps going back to the same well instead of getting strange with their IP.

Combined with a burgeoning wider acceptance for fan-fiction in general, there’s palpable joy out there at seeing artists go to the mat with wild ideas that play in established sandboxes. Obviously it can go too far (the director of Blood and Honey has expressed interest in a childhood-horror ‘shared universe’ involving the Hundred-Acre Wood characters as well as at least Bambi and Peter Pan) but honestly, if Sherlock Holmes can fight Dracula, why can’t Eeyore take his rightful place upon a throne of skulls and cover all the lands in a second darkness? –DB

18.
Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After a decade near the top of Ladbrokes’ list of odds, 2023 was finally Jon Fosse’s year, with the 64-year-old Norwegian receiving his call from the Swedish Academy, rather fittingly, while walking alongside a fjord. Perhaps best known to Anglophone readers for Septology, a single-sentence, seven part, 672-page novel (deftly translated by Damion Searls) that combines the domestic and spiritual in incantatory prose, Fosse is possibly more famous abroad as a playwright, with over 1000 productions of his work to his name.

Interestingly, Fosse writes in Nynorsk—a standard form of Norwegian based on Norwegian dialects, as opposed to Bokmål, which is based on the written grammar of Danish. Between 10-15% of Norway’s 5.4 million citizens use Nynorsk as their official language, or roughly 800,000 people, meaning that this is the first time in several decades that the Nobel hasn’t gone to an author writing in one of the “major” languages. The Nobel might be the biggest literary prize Fosse can aspire to in this life, but there might be something greater waiting for him in the next. In 2012, Fosse quit booze and converted to Catholicism, something the Vatican itself seems to have noticed, with the Pope writing to Fosse in December and invoking upon him “an abundance of divine blessings.” –SR

17.
Michael Oher, the subject of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, filed a suit against the Tuohy family.

I’m not going to say anything here about Sandra Bullock and her acting chops, because my opinion on that matter tends to cause friction, but if you can remember the 2010 Oscars, the film The Blind Side was a big winner on the night, netting Bullock a statuette for best actress while the film itself won best picture. In broad strokes, it was a feelgood true story about how a white family (the Tuohys) adopt a young Black man (Michael Oher) from an impoverished background, helping him attend Ole Miss and eventually make it to the NFL.

But in court filings in Shelby County, Tennessee earlier this year, Michael Oher alleged that in February 2023 he discovered that he had never been adopted, but instead placed in a conservatorship, which allowed, and continues to allow, the Tuohy family to make financial decisions on his behalf. For their part, the Tuohy family maintain they never claimed to have adopted Oher—he was over 18 at the time the agreement came into effect, meaning adoption was no longer an option—and that the conservatorship was the most legally practical option at the time. As with Britney, a conservatorship is usually put in place when an adult individual has mental or physical disabilities, which was never the case with Oher. Oher asked the judge to end the conservatorship with immediate effect and asked for a forensic accounting of how the profits from his life story—developed by Hollywood into film that went on to make over $330 million—were dispersed. The matter remains before the courts.

So, how is this a literary story? Well, you have to wonder how much Michael Lewis, author of the book, knew about the finer details of this story, and perhaps also how much he stood to profit from the wheeling and dealing and percentages granted once his book was optioned. The story broke at around the same time Lewis’s highly-anticipated biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-convicted founder of crypto platform FTX, was ramping up its publicity cycle. There were angles of interest for those into biography-as-form and crypto-as-real in this book, as Lewis had been granted unprecedented access to Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas compound, and it had been reported that Lewis’s approach to biography was in fact something more like hagiography. To top it all off, the book (Going Infinite) was embargoed lest it affect the court case. Fast forward a couple of months, you have reports of Lewis sitting on the Bankman-Fried family’s side of the courtroom through the trial, but when the book came out, it received middling reviews, with Zeke Faux’s Numbers Go Up rating several mentions during the trial and emerging as the more authoritative SBF bio. –SR

16.
Everyone realized (finally, again) that Goodreads is terrible.

Goodreads is terrible. Everyone knows this. Amazon owns it! But because there’s no viable alternative, people just keep using it. Still, every once in a while, everyone remembers that Goodreads is terrible at the same time—this year it was because of the Elizabeth Gilbert thing, which you’ll find a little further down our list—and then we get a bunch of articles about it.

“The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry,” wrote Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. It can help a book succeed, or it can, possibly, destroy a book before it has even been published (that is, before anyone has actually read it).

What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. . . . When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles.

Over at Shondaland, Greta Rainbow called the site “beige in every sense of the word” and wrote: “A San Francisco couple initially built it for their friends to compare the popularity of Dune versus Pride and Prejudice. Now, ads for Prime shows splash on the home page. The algorithm gives Ferrante fans links to textbooks in Italian.” Useful!

“It is, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads,” wrote Tajja Isen in The Walrus. “You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you’re supposed to use it.”

Cool. But why bother, when it seems to bring out the worst in people—as evidenced by this recent story, in which a debut fantasy author with a two book deal admitted to “review bombing” other debuts and making fake accounts to give her own (unpublished) book five stars. She was then dropped by her publisher.

By the way, if you find yourself unable to understand why your favorite book has three stars on Goodreads, we have the answers for you. –ET

15.
Everyone realized (finally, again) that blurbs are terrible.

You know what’s worse than Goodreads? Blurbs. For some reason, 2023 was also the year we all remembered that.

“On their surface, book blurbs seem fairly innocuous, but in reality, they’re a small piece of the puzzle with a big impact—one that represents so much of what’s broken within the traditional publishing establishment,” wrote Sophie Vershbow in Esquire. “Blurbs expose this ecosystem for what it really is: a nepotism-filled system that everyone endures for a chance of ‘making it’ in an impossible industry for most. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare enthusiast Cher Horowitz, ‘Blurbs are a full-on Monet. From far away, they’re okay, but up close, they’re a big old mess.'”

It’s true. Everyone hates them—but authors especially, who are often either groveling for them or being groveled at for them, neither of which is remotely pleasant. And then there’s the fact that they’ve become more divorced from reality—and therefore pointless—than ever.

“Blurbs have always been controversial—too clichéd, too subject to cronyism—but lately, as review space shrinks and the noise level of the marketplace increases, the pursuit of ever more fawning praise from luminaries has become absurd,” writes Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. “Even the most minor title now comes garlanded with quotes hailing it as the most important book since the Bible, while authors report getting so many requests that some are opting out of the practice altogether.”

“Within the blurb ecosystem it is generally understood (perhaps cynically) that ‘blurbspeak’ is, as [David Foster] Wallace noted, ‘literally meaningless,'” wrote G.D. Dess in The Millions. “(And the jury is still out as to how much they actually help increase book sales.)”

Who will save us, then, from the tyranny of the blurb? (No one. The answer is no one. See you again in a couple of years.) –ET

14.
It was the Year of Judy Blume.

To be fair, it’s always sort of the Year of Judy Blume, because Judy Blume is eternal. But at the very beginning of 2023, we were treated to the first trailer for the long-overdue adaptation of beloved Blume classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it was clear things were going to be turned up a notch this year. Not only did we get Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (which turned out to be wonderful) in April, but also Judy Blume Forever, a documentary about the life and legacy of the 85-year-old writer, in addition to a healthy number of contemporary authors reflecting on the importance of her work, both personally and, you know, to the world.

“Judy’s writing helped me to honestly play a teenage girl because her books helped me become one,” wrote Molly Ringwald in her citation for Blume in TIME‘s 100 Most Influential People of 2023.

At a time when no one was chronicling the monumental minutiae occupying a young person’s brain—body shame, bullying, grief—there was no subject that Judy wasn’t up for exploring in her books. Even the most taboo subjects of the time—menstruation and masturbation—were examined, helping millions of young women to enter young adulthood a lot more informed and a little less afraid. Her books have been banned many times in various places over the years, since there are always people for whom the thought of an empowered young woman’s autonomy over her mind and body is objectionable. But good books will find their way into kids’ hands, and I’m so grateful they found mine.

Same! –ET

13.
So many beloved literary magazines closed. . . 

Let’s hope this isn’t a story we have to run every year. In recent times we’ve seen the shuttering and resurrection of The Believer, the loss of Astra Magazine and Gawker, and unfortunately 2023 was no different.

Across the pond, The White Review, founded across the pond in 2011 by Ben Eastham and Jacques Testard (who would go on to e-Flux and Fitzcarraldo Editions, respectively) finally reached the end of its financial tether, reportedly due to a combination of factors, including a declining appetite for literary philanthropy, and the non-granting of government funds on which the magazine had been reliant. It leaves a giant hole in the English literary scene, as a publication where many, many contributors were discovered by British publishers, and which from its inception had a commitment to authors beyond the anglosphere. Their last hurrah will be an anthology of translations by writers previously unpublished in English, to come out next year.

Here in the US, The Gettysburg Review fell victim to the ongoing (never-ending?) corporatization of American universities. Founded in 1988, the magazine had published writers like Rita Dove and Jeffrey Eugenides, but, according to Gettysburg College president Robert Iuliano, the $200 000 per year the college spent on it (Endowment: $409 million) can’t be justified because “its purpose is not the education of students.”

What are magazines for? –SR

12.
. . . but Bookforum rose from the dead.

But it wasn’t all bleak. At the end of 2022 when Penske Media added Artforum to its portfolio, the changes were swift and devastating. Beloved newsprint publication Bookforum was shuttered, and the publishing world lost its best outlet for long-form reviewing. There was quite a bit of manoeuvring behind the scenes, though, and in the end the mag was bought by The Nation and the entire enterprise returned in August 2023 to much fanfare. What can be great about one magazine acquiring another, as opposed to say, a hedge fund, is that you can reasonably hope that they understand the “business,” so to speak, of magazines. Bookforum was able to relaunch in the same format, with almost the same staff and list of contributors. That’s in stark contrast to parent pub Artforum, where longtime EIC David Velasco was fired for posting a pro-Palestine Open Letter on the magazine’s website, despite that month’s issue carrying an image by Emory Douglas for Black Panther magazine on its cover.

You can help keep Bookforum strong with a lifetime subscription, for only $500—which if you break it down, is pretty good value?

And, in breaking news at the time of writing, it seems Jezebel is to be resurrected by Paste Magazine. From the ashes! –SR

11.
Elizabeth Koch shuts down half of Catapult in aid of her “Perception Box.”

If this story didn’t involve a lot of good people losing their livelihoods, it would be funny as hell. Billionaire* heiress Elizabeth Koch, who up until February of this year was essentially the silent money behind the publisher Catapult, finally decided to step into the spotlight.

On the heels of shuttering the popular Catapult Magazine site, along with the organization’s online classes (a great side hustle for many a writer I know), Koch made the press rounds with something right out of Arrested Development: The Perception Box. Per this credulous, borderline sycophantic profile in the New York Times, Koch describes the box thusly:

We all live inside an invisible but ever-present mental box — a Perception Box. This box distorts our perceptions of everything and everyone around us. It distorts our ability to understand other people, to see them clearly, to connect with them. And it distorts our ability to really even know ourselves.

Most of the external conflict, messiness and miscommunication in the world — in corporations, in relationships, in families, in every aspect of our lives — is caused by internal conflict. And most of the internal conflict is caused by unconscious beliefs that we have been carrying around since we are very young — like zero to 5 — and that we project on everyone around us.

I’m not sure if this meaningless dorm room lunge at basic epistemic curiosity is worth breaking down, but I would suggest that the great majority of the “conflict, messiness, and miscommunication in the world” is, in fact, caused by the megalomaniacal greed of people like the Kochs.

Koch, who of course describes herself as “apolitical,” would most likely blame this assertion on the limitations of my own perception box. To which I say boooooo.

*All billionaires, by definition, are bad, but the Kochs are a particular level of evil reserved for only for the most special of billionaires.  –JD

And yet again, we’ve reached the end of a long, bad year. As is now our custom, for the sake of posterity, and probably because we’re masochists, starting today, we’ll be counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of 2023, so you can remember the good, the bad, and all the literary cool girls we met along the way. Join us:

50.
Edgar Allan Poe starred in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Competition was fierce at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, but I was particularly partial to Teya & Salena’s “Who the Hell is Edgar?”, which featured Edgar Allan Poe’s visage looming over the singers on stage and my favorite group dance since “Single Ladies.” Go ahead, give it a listen and see if you can resist singing “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe” ad infinitum.  –Eliza Smith, Lit Hub special projects editor

49.
Anne Carson re-entered The Discourse.

There was no prior announcement, but an assessment took place this summer on the internet of our collective worth, a kind of Internet Speed Test for our souls.

On June 5, New Yorker writer Hannah Williams posted a screencap of Anne Carson’s 2017 POEM “Saturday Night As An Adult,” with the caption: “Think about this a lot” (editor’s note: the choice not to include a period perhaps emphasizing the open-ended nature of this thought). The poem captures a series of disappointments at a dinner out with second- and third-tier friends.

Think about this a lot pic.twitter.com/UT7xSTl9ty

— Hannah Williams (@hkatewilliams) June 5, 2023

Like a weather balloon lofted into the sky, or a chubby wombat awakening with a new honing beacon attached to its ankle and rushing off into the bush, the scene was now set for The Study to begin.

By 10 a.m. EDT, June 7, Williams’ tweet had been retweeted 928 times, quote-tweeted 583 times, and liked almost 10,000 times, indicating 928 instances of people finding an outsized resonance in the original tweet, and 583 instances of people hoping to correct the discourse, which ran quickly off the rails into a series of what Carson might term “yell factions.”

Critiques of the short poem about getting dinner at a noisy restaurant and finding bones in your fish fillet ranged from “kill Anne Carson?” to “wow that’s crazy has the author ever thought about letting joy into their life.” Generally speaking, a common theme was “can’t we just have a nice dinner here on Twitter, Anne Carson?”

Critiques of the critiques argued for the salvaging of context amid anthropogenic context-decline. I note, for example, Carson’s formal choices around line breaks and choice in the poem to use the royal “we” to engage the reader (seemingly, it worked). The viral moment came as the government issued a Code Red for air quality across much of the Eastern U.S., and as scientists warned that Arctic ice-melt was approaching a tipping point.

“I think it’s about the Michael Cera movie,” said the internet in utter earnestness.

The conversation continued into June 7, showing no signs of letting up despite the orange skies over Twitter hotspot New York City.

“Anne Carson should go to therapy and work on setting boundaries” offered Lauren Oyler in presumed disappointment at the level of discourse we have to work with here.

Anne Carson should go to therapy and work on learning to set boundaries

— Lauren Oyler (@laurenoyler) June 6, 2023

As to Anne Carson herself, the prolific Canadian poet and classicist appears not to be on Twitter at all (you’ll have to follow @carsonbot instead, I suppose, or read this appreciation for Autobiography of Red).

In a good appraisal of the aptitude Carson’s poetry has for Twitter, Dirt’s Terry Nyugen wrote, “There seems to be a Carson verse suitable for any ruminative occasion (“Is it a god inside you, girl?”) or random outcry (“[scream] [scream] [scream] for my ruined city”). A line from An Oresteia can be repurposed into an ecstatic anti-work mantra: “Gods! Free me from this grind!” No other contemporary poet inspires such a rabid rush of retweets.”

In other words, this won’t be the last time we fail a simple comprehension test.

It’s possible that even Anne Carson has had enough of the Anne Carson discourse, writing in a new poem “No You May Not Write about Me” in the London Review of Books that:

                           I should go in. I go in. I say, You are the worst thing I know I
can’t breathe around you the world is more than this I am more than you put on your
black coat we’re going out. We go out.

With prescient timing, Carson obtained Icelandic citizenship last year, all the better to escape the encroaching QT-storm.  –Janet Manley, Lit Hub contributing writer

48.
Everyone on the Booker shortlist was named Paul.

Okay, sure, it was only 50% of the people on the Booker shortlist, but that’s still a lot of people named Paul. And surprise, surprise, one of them won. (This year, the bookies called it.) Read an in-depth feature on Paul Lynch, the Paul in question, here.  –Emily Temple, Lit Hub managing editor

47.
Tim O’Brien published his first novel in 20 years.

In October, Mariner Books published America Fantastica, Tim O’Brien’s first novel in twenty years. Arguably still best known for his 1990 story collection The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s new novel is a madcap road trip novel full of terrible people in a Trumpian America obsessed with “mythomania.” But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, O’Brien said it would be his last, “I think I’m probably done. I will be 77 in two weeks. I’ve got bad carpal tunnel [syndrome]—really, really, really bad. Typing is just a chore. I’ve got to peck it out with one finger. God, writing a novel that way—it’s hard to imagine doing that. I can’t 100% say I’m not going to write another book, but the odds are really, really slim.” To be fair, he said that about the last one too, so here’s hoping.  –Emily Firetog, Lit Hub executive editor

46.
Stephen Elliot settled his defamation lawsuit against Moira Donegan.

This endless debacle may now hold the record for most years appearing on this list: news of Moira Donegan’s “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet first circulated in late 2017, but became an international #MeToo sensation when Stephen Elliot decided to sue for defamation in 2018:

In a move guaranteed to offend pretty much everyone, including other people who were named on the list, Elliott in October filed a federal lawsuit against Donegan claiming defamation and seeking $1.5 million in damages along with information that would reveal who anonymously added to the spreadsheet or shared it.

Well, five years later, after much public whingeing from Elliot, he has settled his lawsuit for something in the six-figure range. It’s hard to say for sure, but given the overwhelming amount of support for Donegan during the trial—including free legal representation—one hopes that she hasn’t had to spend a dime on any of this.  –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub editor in chief   

45.
Internet sleuths wondered—and then discovered—who was behind the classic 1976 cover for Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

You probably recognize the iconic cover of the 1976 Dell edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, but have you ever wondered who illustrated it? This spring, artist Michael Whalen asked Twitter for help figuring it out, but for a while it looked like the mystery would be as unfathomable as the cosmos.

Finally, Amory Sivertson, the co-host and senior producer of the podcast “Endless Thread,” figured it out, as Amanda Holpuch reported in September. The artist’s name is Richard Bober, and he is also the creator of many other weird artworks, for Dell paperbacks and otherwise. The internet was useful for once!  –ET

44.
Mike Pence’s book became a best-seller . . . because his PAC spent $91,000 buying copies.

It is a time-honored tradition in American politics to beg, borrow, steal, lie, and otherwise outright cheat basically whenever possible. When it comes to stakes, best-seller lists might be relatively small potatoes when compared to, say, the authoritarian overhaul of our rickety democracy—but it turns out the main reason Mike Pence’s memoir hit the bestseller list is because he spent $91,000 of his PAC’s money to get it there. You’d think that would’ve earned a dagger on the list, or perhaps that the NYT and other list-makers would change the rules so that these bulk buys wouldn’t count! You would think.  –Drew Broussard, Lit Hub contributing editor

43.
A new forensic study found that Pablo Neruda was poisoned.

Officially, Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet who wrote that love poem you like so much, died on September 23, 1973 from prostate cancer, coincidentally just shy of two weeks after Pinochet overthrew the government of Neruda’s (democratically elected) friend, President Salvador Allende, in a military coup backed by the US. Not surprisingly, there have always been rumors that Neruda was murdered for political reasons, and this year, 50 years after the poet’s death, forensic experts have confirmed once and for all that he was poisoned, or at least that the toxin clostridium botulinum was present in his body when he died.

“We now know that there was no reason for the clostridium botulinum to have been there in his bones,” Neruda’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, told the Spanish news agency Efe. “What does that mean? It means Neruda was murdered through the intervention of state agents in 1973.” –ET

42.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused to remove references to racism from her children’s book.

Back in April, Maggie Tokuda-Hall tweeted a story that those of us who fondly remember our Scholastic book fair days were horrified to learn: Scholastic’s educational division had approached Tokuda-Hall about licensing her book, Love in the Library, for use in classrooms—but the offer was contingent upon Tokuda-Hall removing references of racism from her author’s note. Originally published by Candlewick, the book for six- to nine-year-olds was inspired by Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents, who met and fell in love in an incarceration camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II.

The author’s note introduces readers to the real-life Tama and George, and references “the deeply American tradition of racism” that continues today in the police murders of Black people, Muslim bans, children in cages at the border, and so on—all of which got a big, red strike-through from Scholastic.

Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer and sounded the alarm, and a public outcry ensued. Scholastic offered to publish the book with the original author’s note, an offer Tokuda-Hall refused, and the company paused production of the AANHPI narratives collection that Love in the Library would’ve been part of in order to evaluate their practices. One has to hope Scholastic will learn from the (extraordinary) mistake… but the top ten literary stories of the year reports otherwise. Stay tuned. –ES

41.
Michel Houellebecq filmed a porno . . . then had the Dutch courts suppress it.

It would be hard to find a literary news story in 2023 that was a greater source of delight to me, one of the few Lit Hub staffers who genuinely liked Michel Houllebecq’s early novels (he lost me with The Map and The Territory). As I wrote in March, somewhat breathlessly:

…defiantly unctuous French novelist-cum-provocateur Michel Houellebecq is having second thoughts about his whole “xenophobic libidinous creeper toad” thing—at least when it comes to doing it on camera with attractive young Dutch women. Allow me to explain.

According to Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), the idea for the “experimental porn” originated at a Paris dinner party in which Houllebecq’s wife, Qianyun Lysis, suggested to KIRAC co-director Stefan Ruitenbeek that her husband get naked in front of the camera to “counteract his gloom.” Houellebecq and Lysis were familiar with KIRAC because of an earlier film by the collective, Honeypot, in which Dutch extremist Sid Lukkassen becomes entangled with a comely young leftist.

Unsurprisingly Ruitenbeek leapt at the opportunity to film sexy times with the increasingly misogynistic, xenophobic Houellebecq. Lysis also told VICE that she told Ruitenbeek he’d “have to turn [her husband] into a porn star.”

So far so good! I guess! Maybe. Ugh.

Houellebecq went to Amsterdam just before Christmas and proceeded to hang out on a hotel bed and drink wine in his pajamas, waiting for one of the “many girls in Amsterdam who would sleep with the famous writer out of curiosity.” Amidst the hedonist reveries Houellebecq signed a release waiver in which the only limitation on filming was that “his face and genitals would not appear on screen at the same time.”

A few days after arriving in Amsterdam, though, Houellebecq walked off the set, accusing Ruitenbeek of “gutter journalism” and citing “radically opposed” artistic conceptions of the film. This, of course, was after Houellebecq slept with KIRAC collaborator Jini van Rooijen. According to Ruitenbeek, “It was incredible, they did all kinds of positions. He’s very good in bed.”

Fast forward a few months and Houellebecq has made attempts in both France and the Netherlands to block the film’s trailer and release, claiming, among other things, that it will damage his honor (lol). Houellebecq’s petition was denied in France, and only yesterday a Dutch judge declared that KIRAC has every right to distribute the film, despite the novelist’s protestations that he was “depressed at the time of signing the agreement and had drunk several glasses of wine.”

And no, I have not yet watched the movie, and likely never will.  –JD

40.
Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow sparked a debate about credit in fiction.

Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow which was published in July of 2022, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 33 weeks and sold more than a million copies globally. But earlier this year it sparked a debate about credit in fiction. TaTaT is a story about two video game developers and has a robust “Notes and Acknowledgments” section where Zevin “notes instances in which she referenced real games… and names half a dozen games that inspired a chapter called ‘Pioneers’ as well as their designers.” Missing from those acknowledgments is Brenda Romero, a game designer who read the book and saw the idea and structure of her board game Train, which she developed at MIT, is reflected in a key point in the book:

Regarding Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, my uncredited work is in the book. “Solution” is, by the author’s own admission, a take on my game Train. She uses the same theme, gameplay patterns, releases the game at the same location (MIT) … more

— Brenda L Romero (@br) March 22, 2023

As the Washington Post explains, “In the novel, Sadie designs “Solution” as an MIT student in the 1990s. It’s a “Tetris”-like video game taking place “in a nondescript black-and-white factory that made unspecified widgets.” The player earns points for each widget but is constantly interrupted by a text bubble, which offers information about the factory in exchange for points. Through this feature, players eventually learn that the factory belongs to the Third Reich and that they can choose to slow, or stop, making parts. High scorers who dismiss the bubble eventually see a message calling them a Nazi. “The idea of ‘Solution’ was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally,” Zevin writes in the novel. “Solution” bears a strong resemblance to Train, a game Romero created in 2009.”

Todd Doughty, Knopf Doubleday’s senior vice president for publicity and communications, issued a statement saying: “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a work of fiction and when crafting a novel, every author draws from the world around them. As Gabrielle Zevin publicly stated in last year’s Wired interview, Brenda Romero’s undistributed board game, ‘Train,’ which Zevin has never played but was aware of, served as one point of inspiration among many for the novel, including books, plays, video games, visual art and locales.

Do fiction writers need to cite their inspiration? Or is this more a case of stealing an idea? At least readers now know about Train. –EF

39.
Cat Person ruined “Cat Person.”

Ah Cat Person: The Movie, was there ever any real hope for you? The ill-advised Emilia Jones- and Nicholas Braun-starring adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s mega-viral 2017 New Yorker short story premiered at the Sundance Film Festival way back in January, and while initial reviews weren’t quite dead-on-arrival bad (nothing will ever top the The Goldfinch in that department), they were still pretty rough. By February, the writing was on the wall for Susanna Fogel’s film, and by the time Cat Person was released to the great unwashed masses in October, all remaining interest in the phenomenon had seemingly dissipated: the film limped to (a lot) less than half a million dollars (on a reported $12 million production budget) at the box office, and then disappeared. By the sounds of things, Cat Person wasn’t aided by its tacked-on horror movie ending, which The Guardian called “a bafflingly silly misjudgment with any of that previous, far scarier, unease replaced with in-your-face violence.” Meow. –DS

38.
Lydia Davis published a new book, only to be sold at indie bookstores.

New work from Lydia Davis is always cause for celebration—but this new collection of stories isn’t just a book. It’s also an experiment: if a book is published without being distributed to Amazon, will it still make a sound? (It’s being distributed only to independent bookstores and through our friends at Bookshop.org)

It’d be a worthy effort even if the book was second-rate—but happily, the collection is a delight through and through. Some of the stories are barely as long as their titles, many of them are lightly off-kilter in one way or another, and I found it best read like a poetry collection: dip in, dip out; read one every night before bed for a week, then put it aside and pick it up again later. A good read and a good cause—an experiment worth investing in. –DB

37.
Granta published a new list of the Best of Young British Novelists and not all men were upset.

Once a decade since the year of our Lord 1983, the good people at Granta magazine have anointed a new crop of emerging writers to watch out for in the future. It dubs these precocious wordsmiths the “Best of Young British Novelists,” and many of the chosen have gone on to carve out nice little careers for themselves. The first BoYBN class included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Pat Barker; the second had Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri, and Hanif Kureishi; and the 2003 group featured Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Rachel Cusk, and Hari Kunzru. Not bad, eh? Seems like they should keep producing these lists, right? Wrong! The latest incarnation, which arrived in April and featured only four red-blooded British male novelists, prompted this New Statesman article by Will Lloyd, in which the author asked the question that has kept many of us awake at night these past few years: “How did male literary novelists become uncool?”

Lloyd didn’t furnish us with a definitive answer, but he did murder poor old John Green (“Green was neither cool, nor was he sexy … Nobody could even be bothered to be rude about him”) on his way to this discourse-igniting conclusion:

Inevitably, it all comes down to status. The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses, nor is it evidence that the novel itself is in decline. Reality is simpler. If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonize.

I presume he’s referring to either Mars, the Metaverse, or the lost city of gold, but only time will tell. –DS

36.
BU’s Center for Antiracist Research, led by Ibram X. Kendi, was dismantled.

In the year that Donald Trump was elected President, Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning, which along with other endeavours like the 1619 Project, brough to the fore once again the notion that America’s foundation and entire history is inseparable from slavery. It’s fair to say that his 2019 book, How To Be An Antiracist, made him a bona fide star, and the protests across America in 2020 following the murder of Floyd George created a new moment of reckoning for public and private institutions, with corporations and colleges alike taking steps to show they were fighting racial injustice.

It was in this context in 2020 that Boston University announced that Kendi was to be appointed the inaugural director of the Center for Antiracist Research. The Center raised, by some accounts, up to $54 million and had a staff of over forty, with funding coming from the non-profit sector, the corporate sector, and individual donors. The Center would combat racism by, amongst other things, conferring a masters degree and an undergraduate major in antiracist studies.

But by September 2023 it was announced that over half of the Center’s staff would be laid off, that $30 million of the remaining funding would be placed in an endowment, and that the Center would refocus its attention to offering nine-month academic fellowships, a model familiar throughout the country. Of course, the right was quick to pile on, spouting all kinds of familiar racist tropes, but Kendi came in for some heavy criticism from former colleagues, who cited a culture of mismanagement, and fellow intellectuals, who found fault in Kendi’s aims and approaches from the beginning. Writing in the New Yorker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out that Kendi’s individual approach, where personal work can lead someone to become an antiracist, seemed more likely to assuage liberal guilt than bring about systemic change in the way that Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Angela Davis or James Baldwin had championed. As Taylor noted, perhaps “Kendi’s decision to simply sit on much of his funding, as what seems like a kind of anti-racist rainy-day fund, deserves more explanation than a murky idea that academic fellowships can contribute to the effort to combat racial injustice.” –SR

35.
Anthony Broadwater, after being exonerated for the rape of Alice Sebold, received a $5.5 million settlement from New York State.

 After being wrongly convicted and spending 16 years in prison for the 1982 rape of Alice Sebold, author of the memoir Lucky (which describes the attack and ensuing court case) and The Lovely Bones, Anthony Broadwater—who was exonerated in 2021—was granted a $5.5 million settlement from New York State. The New York Times reports that Sebold made the following statement: “No amount of money can erase the injustices Mr. Broadwater suffered. But the settlement now officially acknowledges them.” (As of 2021, Scribner no longer publishes Lucky.) –ES

34.
Hanif Kureishi dictated poignant daily dispatches from his hospital bed.

 On January 6th, Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia) shared with his Twitter followers that he’d suffered a grievous injury several days earlier, when he collapsed in Rome and regained consciousness without the use of his arms or legs. “It occurred to me then that there was no coordination between what was left of my mind and what remained of my body,” he wrote in the dictated Twitter thread. “I had become divorced from myself. I believed I was dying. I believed I had three breaths left.”

Kureishi continued to dictate to his family (of whom we get glimpses as well); his missives—poignant and funny, beautiful and candid—proved incredibly popular and eventually turned into a Substack newsletter called The Kureishi Chronicles. He writes about sex and drugs and music, his trepidation over returning to an able-bodied world, and of course writing and reading (among a smattering of other topics). A memoir, Shattered, that will expand further on the material, is planned for 2024—a major publishing event, to be sure. –ES

33.
Lit Hub made the Pulitzers change the rules (sort of). 

In August we published an open letter to the Pulitzer Prizes from almost three hundred writers imploring the prize to “update your requirements for the Pulitzer Prize to include the work of our peers who through accidents of geography, of violence perpetrated on our lands, and the personal familial reckonings with survival, have come to have or have been born into a mixed or undocumented status.” (Many people in the literary community first learned that in the categories of Fiction, Biography, Memoir, Poetry, and General Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize required authors to be United States citizens from Javier Zamora’s op-ed piece, It’s Time for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature to Accept Noncitizens.)

After our letter, the Prize reached out to let us know that they had been discussing the issue since last year and planned to address the issue at their fall meeting. In September, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced it had decided to expand eligibility for the Books, Drama and Music awards beyond the current U.S. citizenship requirement to include permanent residents of the United States and those who have made the United States their longtime primary home. The amended criteria will go into effect beginning with the 2025 awards cycle, which opens in the spring of 2024. “This expansion of eligibility is an appropriate update of our rules and compatible with the goals Joseph Pulitzer had in establishing these awards,” the Board said in a statement from co-chairs Prof. Tommie Shelby and Neil Brown. Did Lit Hub change the rules of the Pulitzer Prizes? Well, I don’t think we didn’t help! –EF

32.
Feminists bookstores came back.

One heartening trend as conservative lawmakers and “concerned parents” attempt to ban books about anyone who isn’t straight, white, Christian, and entirely without sexual parts or urges: Feminist bookstores are experiencing a welcome revival. Ms. reported that the number of self-identified feminist bookstores in the country has more than doubled since 2017.

At a moment when the rights of women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people are under assault and book bans are reaching a fever pitch, vibrant activist communities are once again coalescing in and around feminist bookstores.

Ms. highlighted business thriving as both bookstores and community spaces, particularly in states where freedom to read is the most imperiled—Burdock Book Collective in Alabama, Violet Valley in Mississippi, and the recently opened Eleanor’s Norfolk in Virginia. Once again, indie bookstores continue to be much-needed beacons of hope in a bleak, bleak national landscape! –JG

31.
The manuscript thief saga came to an end.

Remember the frankly dazzling series of heists that had the literary world on edge? No new manuscript was safe, it seemed, from some enterprising con artist who wanted them for… well, to read them, it seemed. Filippo Bernardini was unmasked last year and his case came to an end in March when a judge convicted him of a felony, without jail time. The judge described the case better than anyone: “I have no idea what to do with this case, and I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t expect to see anything like this ever again.” The guy just… wanted to read books in advance! And instead of asking for galleys like the rest of us, he engaged in a moderate amount of fraud. We at Lit Hub are not endorsing any further breaking of the law, but it’s also true that this year was a little more boring without a great unifying mystery like this one to bring us all closer together. –DB

A Roosevelt Island couple has proudly checked out five children’s books about the Palestinian experience, vowing not to return them so as to protect the good people of New York from blatant “indoctrination.” According the NY Post:

The books — for children as young as 3 — were prominently on display at the New York Public Library branch during “Read Palestine Week,” with several titles about Palestinians arranged in a “indigenous people’s” display with books about Native Americans.

As Asaf Eyal—whose wife bravely checked out the books in defense of Israel—told The Post: “It’s pretty easy to understand what they’re doing. They are trying to connect between these two identities, and make Israel and Jews look as if we are colonizers and not indigenous to our land.”

I would suggest that Mr. Eyal is correct in this assertion (and that there’s nothing particularly wrong about the display’s intent).

The Post then goes on to print a passage from one of the books—We’re in This Together, by Linda Sarsour—as if it’s some kind of gotcha. It is not.

An international organization called the United Nations decided that Jewish people from Europe, many of whom had experienced the horrors and tragedies of the Holocaust, needed a safe place to live, but there was one big problem: Palestinians had lived on that land for centuries.

Of course, if someone took your land, you would do everything in your power to get it back. So, ever since their displacement, Palestinians and other people of Arab descent have been fighting back against this injustice. This is called intifada — the uprising against the Israeli Occupation of places where Palestinians have historically lived.

The article goes on to complain about pro-LGBTQ NYPL displays and quotes some ass-hat from the Heritage Foundation about the pernicious ubiquity of the woke agenda (my words, not his). As risible as all this hand-wringing is (as hundreds of Palestinian children die each day) it’s indicative of a broad and opportunistic strategy by the American right to further dismantle our institutions of learning—specifically the university and the public library. It’s awful.

In the face of these deeply cynical, anti-democratic operators, I highly recommend buying the following books for your children:

Linda Sarsour, We’re in This Together

“An empowering young readers edition of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders, the memoir by Women’s March coorganizer and activist Linda Sarsour that’s ‘equal parts inspiring, emotional, and informative.’”

Aya Ghanameh, These Olive Trees

“The story of a Palestinian family’s ties to the land, and how one young girl finds a way to care for her home, even as she says goodbye.”

Reem Kassis and Noha Eilouti, We Are Palestinian

“From culture and food, to music and literature, We Are Palestinian is a celebration of Palestinian heritage.”

Hannah Moushabeck and Reem Madooh, Homeland

“As bedtime approaches, three young girls eagerly await the return of their father who tells them stories of a faraway homeland—Palestine.”

Anne Laurel Carter and Akin Duzakin, What the Kite Saw 

“In this memorable story, a young boy finds solace flying his kite from the rooftop after soldiers take his father and brother away.”

Dozens of indie booksellers, from stores across America, have signed an open letter in support of Palestine. Signatories from some of this country’s best bookstores—in Seattle, Oakland, Chicago—have lent their names to a letter that says, in part:

As workers in America, our money is filtered into the weapons of war that are being used against schools, refugee camps, hospitals, and civilians. The same weapons of war with names stolen from the language of Indigenous people, used against another Indigenous population. We acknowledge our inheritance of a legacy of Indigenous colonization, and accept our responsibility to work towards decolonization. The advocacy for the safety of Palestinians and their land is part of that responsibility.

Head here to read the full letter, and/or add your name in support.

It is, unmistakably, a book. Not a toaster oven or a bottle of perfume or a puppy. Rectangular, it fits to the hand as a book does, this thick brick of paper. No amount of gaudy wrapping, glittery red and green with an ornate golden bow, can camouflage that I have chosen, on this occasion, to give Dear Friend yet another book.

“It’s a tennis racket,” I say, our long-running joke (well, at least my long-running joke). I slide it across the bar between our cocktails.

Dear Friend is delighted. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a new book! They begin to open the wrapping at one end, carefully.

Then a little panic creeps up on me: Oh, no, it’s a book!

What if Dear Friend can’t hide the disappointed expression that says, this is not at all for me. Maybe it’s a book they’ve read about and rejected, or had already tried to read and returned. Maybe there’s something about the cover art that implies I don’t understand Dear Friend as well as I’d thought, or worse, they suspect I purchased it in haste.

But Dear Friend is gracious, as ever. “It looks wonderful,” they say, stroking the cover, riffling the first pages, then turning it over and reading the back jacket copy. They stroke the book’s cover once again. “I can’t wait.”

But they’ll have to wait, of course, and this is the real difficulty of such transactions: Books take time. Dear Friend tells me there’s quite a tall to-be-read pile at home, but they will get to this one soon. It might be weeks, perhaps months, possibly never, before I know if this book, a favorite of mine that changed how I see the world, has hit its mark.

It’s the thought that counts, we say of gifts, and with books, well, there’s a whole lot of thought—six hours? twelve?—required to truly appreciate one. If it was a sweater, Dear Friend could immediately try it on to check the size, then later wear it once in my presence, good and settled. Even if the sweater was all wrong, in style or material, I wouldn’t object to its being exchanged. It’s a nice sweater, but it never changed my life.

With the book, I’m giving Dear Friend, I hope, much more than a gift.

*

But this is no ordinary exchange, no birthday or congratulation or whim. It’s the holiday season—hence the ritual cocktails—so an already difficult exchange is made more fraught with peril. There’s a public pressure that comes with holiday gifts. Gift-giving is everywhere, on our screens, at work gatherings, in our homes; we’re surrounded by gifts and all the calculations that come with the season. Will they like it, will they read it, and most dauntingly, will it make the holiday season magical?

Nowhere else are these holiday pressures more evident than in a bookstore on Christmas Eve. Bookstores are happily open that day, though may close a bit earlier, six-ish, so the staff can sip the mulled wine or champagne that often celebrate the selling-season’s end.

The bookstore is a perfect place for last-minute holiday purchases. There’s something for everyone, whether the recipient is a pickleball fanatic, or a long-practicing Buddhist, or a burgeoning financial wizard, or a three-year-old who loves ducks. No need to race around town: One-stop shopping.

And books are relatively small; you can fill a sturdy bag with twenty gifts, rather than renting a U-Haul to cart away rugs or televisions or stepladders. Even if the bookshop doesn’t offer gift wrapping—almost all do; wrapping books is a fun, precise meditation—books are incredibly easy to wrap at home, much more so than that tennis rackets.

From the moment the doors open on Christmas Eve, the bookshop is frantic, because this is the last minute. Most early shoppers that day have a list, and find helpful clerks to assist them in fulfilling it. The real distress comes when a book on that list is out of stock, and the knowledge that “we can get it for you by next Friday” only makes the lack more troubling.

There are other customers, who, just as eager, are far less prepared. “She likes… they’re interested in… what would a 12-year-old girl…” Please, give me something, and please, make it right. And please, may I have a gift-receipt, just in case. These shoppers arrive late and tend to be more frazzled.  The bookstore clerk could pawn off any old book, some title still piled high on the feature table, but they don’t.  The great joy of bookselling is putting the right book into the right hands.

Finally, the very last minutes do arrive, and accordingly, desperate measures are taken: gift cards!  I don’t know any book-luster who does not welcome a gift card, but there seems a certain shame for the gift card’s buyer: I ran out of time.  It’s okay, the bookshop says, it’s all good, books will be purchased, and the right ones.

My favorite moment of Christmas Eve desperation came the year actress Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb was published.  It was a huge book that season, the kind that can help push a bookstore to profit for the year.  I was working at Printers Inc. in Palo Alto, CA, and we’d already sold hundreds.  The shop had just closed, and the staff were in the backroom, sipping, yes, mulled wine, and exchanging gifts.  These gifts were almost always books, as if we would never suspect where they came from.

There was a loud knocking on the glass front door.

I went to politely shoo away the tardy customer, but found an 11-year-old boy, practically shaking and clearly about to cry.  He clutched a handful of crumpled bills.  “Please, please,” he begged, “it’s for my mom and I have to get it and I know exactly where it is.  Please.”

One cannot Scrooge on Christmas Eve, so of course I let him in.  He had exact change, but would wrap it at home, thanks.

*

Dear Friend slides a book across the table to me.  This is a holiday ritual, too, but part of a longer habit; we exchange book-gifts all the time.  Over the years, we’ve each given the other books we loved immediately, some we loved later, and some, well, we never got around to.  We ignore those silences.

I tear off the wrapping and find a book that’s gorgeous, weighty and promising.  When I get home, I put it on my nightstand pile, but it’s too large for that position, so I slide it near the bottom, with a private vow that I’ll get to it right away.

Months pass, and over that time, when I catch sight of the book, I feel guilty, but for some reason or other, do not pick it up.  There are all these other books.

Until, having spent a restless 24 hours between books—I’ve just finished a truly great book and can’t yet see what comes next—I retrieve Dear Friend’s gift, settle into the reading chair, and crack it open with a mixture of shame and hope.

An hour later, I’m enthralled, the only proper word. It’s a wonderful book, but an even better gift.  Dear Friend has given me a book that, yes, is changing how I see the world, but most importantly, they’ve given me a part of themselves.

I can only hope I’ve done the same.

In the summer of 1854, a purposeful and unusual-looking traveler arrived in Broadway in Worcestershire in west central England, with an overnight bag full of manuscripts. He was Constantine Simonides, a Greek who claimed to have lived among the monks of Mount Athos, and he certainly looked the part.

There are descriptions and several early photographs, showing him as swarthy and with glossy black hair thrust to one side and usually a great unkempt dense beard like an Orthodox priest. He was quite short but with a large head and exceptionally high forehead, of the kind which in popular myth denotes intelligence. He had prominent dark eyebrows and deep-set clever and piercing eyes—“a face not easily forgotten,” as was remarked. He was restless and voluble, as unceasing as the Ancient Mariner but usually in Greek. He looked as though he slept in his clothes, which were always black.

In a rural Cotswold market town of the 19th century, as unlike the dusty and sun-baked landscape of Mount Athos as is possible to imagine, Simonides must have attracted some attention. He was here to see Sir Thomas Phillipps, baronet, of Middle Hill, Broadway, who had invited him to stay the night.

Phillipps had a part in Chapter 7 of my book and stalked many times in and out of Chapter 8, like the wicked fairy, forever enthralling and provoking Sir Frederic Madden in London. Now it is time to visit him at home, which not so many of the manuscripts fraternity ever did. It is about three miles from the high street in Broadway out to Middle Hill. You turn south along Church Street, which quickly becomes Snowshill Road through the countryside, bringing you eventually to the medieval church of St Eadburgha, where Sir Thomas Phillipps himself is now buried. There is a place to leave the car.

Immediately opposite, on the left (or east) side of the road, are the stone pillars and old iron gates of what was formerly the main entrance into the long drive up to Middle Hill, with a Victorian gatekeeper’s lodge, whose current resident, pottering in his garden, kindly gave me directions and reminiscences of long ago. The way is now a public footpath called Coneygree Lane, rising steeply behind the lodge up through the woods eventually to the gothic folly of Broadway Tower at the very top of the hill. The track is rutted and muddy and it must have been a very steep ascent for visitors such as Simonides in a horse-drawn cab, or maybe he walked up on foot with his bag.

After about ten minutes the path branches out diagonally across a field with spectacular views of the green valley below, and from here, instead of climbing further, the old drive once turned right, as the man below had explained, now leading through a gate and past a couple of new cottages, to Middle Hill itself.

It is a fine large and square 18th-century Cotswold stone house of two principal storeys with further attic windows above, added since the time of Phillipps. The old main entrance is in front of you from that direction, under a stone porch with three arches. I have been inside only once, many years ago. Visitors today reach the house up a modern drive further along Snowshill Road, more suitable for cars, and Middle Hill is now so thoroughly and comfortably modernized that it is hard to envisage today what Simonides would have experienced in 1854, stepping through the porch from the summer sunshine into a dimly lit house which was a packed and airless mausoleum of medieval manuscripts.

Thomas Phillipps was the illegitimate and only son of a very successful calico manufacturer in Manchester. His father had purchased Middle Hill in 1794, and Thomas was brought up here, without knowing his mother. An isolated and friendless childhood may have been what started Robert Cotton on the companionship of manuscripts, and Phillipps too as a solitary teenager was already spending beyond his allowance on the acquisition of books and manuscripts about local history and topography. His father died in 1818, leaving him a considerable income but an entailed estate, one which could not be sold.

The following year, Thomas married well, and his wife’s obliging family was able to secure a convenient baronetcy for him. The new Sir Thomas then embarked on a lifetime of self-importance and unmerited hauteur. Like King Lear, he had three daughters, whom he bullied and taunted with ever-changing hints of eventual inheritances.

All in all, Phillipps was not a very agreeable man, selfish, ill-tempered, grossly bigoted (notably towards Catholics), mean with money, litigious, and living forever in debt and on credit, as his dragon’s hoard of manuscripts at Middle Hill grew from a merely vast private library into the absurd, with thousands upon thousands of volumes crammed into every room, including corridors, staircases and bedrooms, often in tottering piles leaving almost no floorspace for access between them or filling wooden boxes stacked to the ceilings. The quantities of manuscripts simply astounded anyone who saw inside the house.

Of Phillipps’s passion and obsession, there is no doubt. Madden frequently described it as bordering on insanity. For this reason, I expect I would have enjoyed an evening with Phillipps (as Madden often did), as long as I was neither Catholic nor a tradesman and did not stay too long. His range of acquisition and interest was all-encompassing, extending with little discrimination from precious codices of late Antiquity right through to worthless manuscript papers of his own time. Many items were dirty and in poor condition, and Phillipps did not waste money on beautiful bindings or expensive repairs. The Abbé Rive would have been appalled.

Like the British Museum, Phillipps was actively seeking out manuscripts of every nationality, and he benefited greatly from the dispersals following the French Revolution and the political turmoil of continental Europe in the 19th century. All foreign languages were included, although Phillipps himself read only Latin and Greek, neither especially well. Whenever possible, he bought in bulk. (He could have been a candidate for the Oppenheim manuscripts in Hebrew, even knowing he could never read them.)

He kept a printing press on an upper floor of that neo-gothic tower at the top of Broadway Hill, part of the estate, where his harassed servants were made to print out numbered lists of the relentless purchases as they came in. A small oblong printed label with the number was then pasted to the spine of each book for identification.

By the time of his death, Phillipps had perhaps as many as 60,000 manuscripts, documents as well as codices. Madden was right that they would one day all be scattered. There is hardly a rare-book library in the world today without at least one or two manuscripts that were formerly crammed into Middle Hill or into the even larger Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham, where Phillipps later moved.

The collection took almost a hundred years to sift and disperse, beginning with a first auction in 1886, and I myself was initially employed by Sotheby’s in 1975 for the principal purpose of cataloguing the very last installments of manuscripts still being brought out in boxfuls from the Phillipps trove.

At the time of the visits by Constantine Simonides, Sir Thomas Phillipps was in his early sixties. His first wife died young and he had remarried. The childless and long-suffering second Lady Phillipps memorably claimed to have been “booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other.” Photographs of Phillipps at this period show an upright unsmiling man with greying hair, soon to be white, slightly overlapping the tops of his ears. He had a straight nose and thick mustache.

In pictures, at least, Phillipps appears carefully dressed in long dark jacket and white wing collar. Guests without business to transact testified to his courteous manners, but booksellers, competitors and most of his family despaired of his miserliness and single-minded obsession.

We are about to witness what was probably the third visit of Simonides to the baronet’s house. On the first occasion, in 1853, the previous summer, Simonides had brought to Broadway a bundle of manuscript scrolls comprising short texts by the early Greek poet Hesiod, supposed to be of very ancient date, including the celebrated Works and Days on the origins of agriculture and labour, composed around 700 BC.

There were ten narrow strips of seemingly old parchment, written on both sides in Greek, each about 10½ by 2 inches, attached together at the top onto a thin metal bar. Phillipps was sufficiently beguiled by the item to buy it. He had his printing press run off copies of a lithographed facsimile of its first lines of text, in a combination of large square Greek letters and a very strange-looking script resembling the spider-footprints of modern shorthand.

When the manuscript eventually emerged from the Phillipps collection for resale at Sotheby’s in 1972, it was obvious to 20th-century eyes that the writing was an utter fabrication of no antiquity whatsoever. Phillipps had struggled to read it, not surprisingly, and, in a bizarre inversion of reality, Simonides then offered his skills as a palaeographer to transcribe the Hesiod neatly for Phillipps for an additional fee of £150 (Phillipps countered with £25 for a partial transcription). Simonides assured him that the manuscript included at least one unknown work of Hesiod.

Phillipps had been to Rugby School and Oxford and this was exactly the bait to captivate a 19th-century Englishman drilled in the classics. All manuscript collectors are familiar with puzzled inquiries from unbookish neighbors as to what possible value there can be in gathering old books, and to have been able to announce the discovery of a lost classical text would have vindicated the entire library.

Later in 1853, Simonides had delivered five more scrolls of Greek texts to Middle Hill, comprising supposed works of Phocylides and Pythagoras and three Byzantine imperial documents. The receipt survives among Phillipps’s papers now in the Bodleian. Again, Phillipps agreed in principle to buy the items if Simonides could make transcriptions for him. In May the following year, Phillipps proudly showed these startling acquisitions to Madden in the British Museum. He, in turn, recorded in his journal:

I did not hesitate a moment to declare my opinion, that these were all by the same hand and gross forgeries; and I was grieved, but not surprised to hear Sir T. P. declare that in his opinion they were genuine (!) and probably relics of the Alexandrian library!!! Of course, although I did not express it to him, I feel the profoundest contempt for his opinion. In October last, when he wrote to me on the subject, I warned him against the purchase, but in vain. The vanity of possessing such rarities (supposing them to be genuine) has sufficed to counterbalance any doubts; and having paid a large price for these worthless specimens of modern knavery, of course Sir T. the more obstinately will defend their authenticity!

More was to come. Simonides had been hinting that he had a treasure greater than all these, nothing less than a classical manuscript of the Iliad of Homer. This was principally why Simonides was now returning to Middle Hill on 11 August 1854. By chance, we have a quite detailed record of the encounter because another visitor at that same time was the German map historian Johann Georg Kohl (1808–78), who was studying items in Phillipps’s collection for his own researches and described the event in his volumes of reminiscences, published in Hanover in 1868. “Among the other guests . . .”, Kohl recalled, “there was a Greek, whose name at that time was unfamiliar to me, but who had already made himself well enough known in the literary world. He . . . had brought with him various vellum rolls and pigskin volumes and like a pedlar had spread out his wares on the carpet, table and chairs.”

The most important of these was the promised Homer. Kohl recalled it as “a small, thin, closely written, tightly wound, long roll of vellum which the Greek declared was the most valuable thing he had at the moment to offer.” It comprised the whole of the first three books of the Iliad written in a script so microscopic that it all fitted onto both sides of a single scroll about 21½ inches long by about 2¼ wide, “so small,” wrote Phillipps later, “as not to be read without a magnifying glass.”

Everything about it was eccentric, including the layout, which opened with a kind of pictographic design of a Greek temple formed of lines of tiny script. The left-hand edge of the whole scroll was written vertically with one letter below another, creating a cascade of letters right down the scroll and then all the way back up to the top again and then down to the bottom once more, and so on, in what is known as boustrophedon, meaning resemblance to the path of an ox plough, back and forth, or, in this case, up and down.

It is a rare format known in archaic inscriptions on stone and pottery from the probable time of Homer himself, but then unprecedented in any surviving manuscript. It seemed a plausible indication of extreme antiquity. The text continued into the right-hand column in normal horizontal lines, as densely compacted as the grooves on a gramophone record. “Our conversation throughout the day turned on this remarkable object, and in the evening as well,” wrote Kohl.

These discussions must have been complicated. Simonides knew some English, more than he pretended (as subsequent events showed), and Kohl and Phillipps had some classical Greek, which they were mostly obliged to write down to be comprehensible by the other. Where had Simonides found the Homer? “The Man is so mysterious about his acquisition of these MSS.,” Phillipps wrote later in his printed catalogue; “a straight-forward honest person would state at once, with all candor, where he had obtained it, & how.” In another memorandum to himself, kept with the Hesiod, Phillipps recorded, “He told me that that he was Cousin to one of the Abbots of a Monastery on Mount Athos; that the MSS he brought were either found in a Monastery on Mount Athos or in Egypt.”

Several years later, Simonides modified this story to furnish further information. In 1859 a strange little book appeared by one Charles Stewart, A Biographical Memoir of Constantine Simonides, Dr. ph., of Stageira, with a Brief Defence of the Authenticity of His Manuscripts, published in London, printed in Brighton. The author is not clearly identifiable and the name was probably fictitious, but it may not be coincidence that it is a homonym of the Young Pretender and shares the initials of Constantine Simonides.

Phillipps, doubtless rightly, assumed that the book was really or mostly by Simonides himself, and certainly its careless orthography suggests material transmitted by dictation. In the Memoir, Simonides now seemed to remember that the abbot on Athos was his Uncle Benedict, that the manuscripts had been part of a library brought from Constantinople or Egypt by Saint Paul of Xeropotamou, son of the emperor Michael Kuropalatos (a real person, emperor 811–13), and that they had been hidden by the Orthodox monks beneath the ruins of a monastery on Mount Athos to save them from the Latinizers, or Roman Church, during the time of the Crusades.

The Memoir recounts that Simonides had acquired the manuscripts from his uncle when he was living on Athos and removed them on a private ship to Syme on 29 August 1840, three months after Benedict’s death. Detail was wanted: here it is, and the late Benedict could no longer confirm or refute it.

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From The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts.  by Christopher de Hamel. Used with the permission of the publisher, Penguin Press. Copyright © 2023 by Christopher de Hamel

The following essay by Tom Borders is excerpted from Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing & Bookselling in the 20th Century, edited by Buz Teacher and Janet Bukovinsky Teacher (Two Trees Press).

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In 1970, Louis Borders was working in a bookstore in Boston while attending M.I.T. He suggested two start-up business ideas to his older brother, Tom, who had taught English in a small college and was on a sabbatical trying to write the Great American Novel. Tom dismissed Louis’s scheme to computerize the Daily Racing Form’s statistics so they could make an easy living playing the horses. Louis suggested their next best opportunity was to open a small used bookshop in Boston.

During the time they were drawing up business plans for the bookstore, a neighbor in Louis’s apartment building on Boylston Street was burglarized in the middle of the night. The brothers decided Boston was too fast for them—they needed a more manageable city for their little enterprise. Louisville, Kentucky, their hometown, was out of the question because they had never seen much of a bookstore there. Both had degrees from the University of Michigan, and loved the smart, hip, intellectual atmosphere of Ann Arbor.

After discussing the enterprise name for many long weeks, they decided to launch “Borders Book Shop” on a very modest scale, quietly and out of the limelight, in Ann Arbor. No employees. Not a corporate venture. Barely a business. They would keep it very simple. Originally, they thought they would both work half-time and have time to read and write, and become intellectuals.

That same week, Tom and Louis heard about a major estate auction to be held in Boston, with thousands of books as part of the sale. They planned to commit a good part of their capital, up to $3,000, to buy inventory there. At the auction house they spent hours going through the marvelous collection of a man who had been in the Massachusetts Senate in the early 1900s and whose estate had been in litigation for years: hundreds of leather bindings, fine illustrated editions, but best of all a well curated reader’s library.

On auction day, the last items to be sold from the massive estate were the books. The auctioneer apologized because the original intent had been to divide the books into a dozen smaller lots, but since time was so short “we will auction the books in a single lot. Do I have an opening bid of $3,000 dollars?” A dozen people raised their hands including the nonplussed brothers.

Deflated, the Borders’ bookshop fantasy had seemingly vanished. After the auction they met the renowned antiquarian dealer Richard Mills, who had purchased the books for $8,000. A Harvard graduate and World War II Navy submarine vet, he lived in Exeter, New Hampshire. Mills had a photographic memory; he was a true genius and a gentle soul. Somewhat unkempt, he had a bottle of Maalox leaning out of his wrinkled sport coat pocket. Tom asked him if he needed help moving the books, and was hired. Without much further discussion, Richard Mills walked out of the auction house with a small box of rare pamphlets under his arm. The pamphlets were worth the price of the entire lot.

Tom rented a truck and moved the books to Exeter, lured by the excitement of the antiquarian business. Richard Mills’ house was his warehouse, showroom and office. His kitchen table was his service counter and conference table. One day, Tom picked up a collection of about 100 antique duck decoys, which Mr. Mills sold in the next few days to other dealers. Another day, Mr. Mills sold the antique desk in his living room for $16,000.

Later, an 18th-century house full of antiques and collectables came to market. Tom followed Mr. Mills as he strolled through the house, opening a drawer here and there, looking closely at a map. After about 45 minutes of looking through a dozen rooms of antiques, three appraisers quizzed Mr. Mills about the value of the items in the estate. At one point, talking about a mahogany desk where he had opened a drawer during his stroll, Mr. Mills told the appraisers “that is not an antique but a very nicely done 1950’s fake.” All three wrote that in their notes.

After six weeks, Tom had finished sorting and cataloging the books. He was stunned when Mr. Mills gave the Borders brothers his entire garage full of books—a truck load of very good reading copies. They drove their precious first inventory to Ann Arbor, laughing at their good fortune and babbling about their future plans. That day Mr. Mills helped launch Borders Book Shop. It would have been wonderful if he could have lived long enough to see their bookstore ten years later.

In Ann Arbor, they leased part of the second floor of a retail building at 211 South State Street in the campus commercial district near the University of Michigan’s main quad. The former residence had been converted to commercial use. On the same floor were Suwanee Spring Leather Shop, where Tom bought a pair of handmade sandals, and Herb David’s Guitar Studio. Louis and Tom were shaggy-haired hippies who fit right in to the Ann Arbor scene in the early 1970’s. They built bookcases and display tables in the space for a month. They opened their second floor used bookstore in February, 1971, with the books from Mr. Mills and others that they had accumulated. It was tiny—two small rooms with a half bath. Hot tea was made every morning for the customers. The final floor plan included a service counter with the commode tucked behind it. The store had to close for a while if the commode was needed.

Since few customers came into that second-floor space, the brothers had time to learn and love the antiquarian book business in the coming months. Several collectors found them and the books from Mr. Mills’ garage quickly went to new homes in Ann Arbor. Nevertheless, Rookie Mistake #1: they realized that, with their wives in school, two families could not make a living from such a small, off-the-beaten-track, second-floor retail space. They realized that the store could never be very exciting given the space limitations.

Six months later, Tom and Louis moved to a first-floor location on Williams Street: 800 square feet. The additional space was an improvement, but it wasn’t a good location for retailing. They wanted more. They moved for the third time in two years to a prime location at 316 South State St. where Wahr’s University Bookstore had been located “since 1892.” That building was three times larger with a full basement for storage and overstock and an office on the second floor. Neither Tom nor Louis were morning people, but their first employee, Doris Becker, was and she opened the store most mornings. Doris was motherly and very protective of the boys.

Rookie Mistake #2: they ordered some new books and mixed them with used books on the same shelves. Customers were confused, not knowing if a slightly worn new book was “used,” or if a gently used book was “new.”

Rookie Mistake #3: They finally understood that Ann Arbor was a readers’ town and that antiquarian books were of marginal interest to the local avid readers. All the used books were culled from the shelves. After surviving three moves in two years, Borders Book Shop was in a good location with enough space to make a splash, and selling the kind of books people wanted. Their ambitions were rekindled.

That year, Joe Gable, fresh from Madison, Wisconsin, swaggered into Borders Book Shop. During a stand-up job interview in front of the fiction section Tom asked him “What do you know about books?” Sounding a bit like Marlon Brando, looking straight into Tom’s eyes, Joe said humbly: “I know more about books than anyone in this store.” Tom was momentarily stunned by the hubris of the comment. But he took the insult like a man, and after a few pointed questions, he hired Joe on the spot. In fact, Joe did know more about books than anyone in the store. And he proved it over the next quarter century.

The auto industry and the Michigan economy were tanking badly in one of their periodic nose dives in 1974. Several commercial stores were vacant in the campus area. In that down economy, the Borders brothers were able to secure a very favorable lease for a large prime space at 303 S. State Street where Wagner Men’s Clothing had recently closed—10,000 square feet on two levels with an escalator and a full basement!! All new inventory would be ordered for the new store. In preparation for the move, Tom started organizing a clearance sale of everything in the old space.

Louis was mumbling something about “developing a system”—he took several yellow legal pads and went to the basement. Tom was immersed in running a frantic three-month long clearance sale to generate the cash needed for the move; he tried to get Louis to leave the basement to help on the busy sales floor. Louis refused—he was working on designing a “system” for inventory. Glancing at the legal pad, Tom scoffed at a 6-page list which included RANC, RANP, RANM. Tom admits that he did not understand the scope and importance of the momentous project Louis was undertaking. In the next months, Louis designed what was one of the first and likely the best computer system for a retail bookstore in the country. To get the computer system written, tested and running, computer time was rented at night on an IBM System 3 computer in the portable trailer of a massive auto junk yard, with howling guard dogs. The junk yard’s system kept track of auto parts (mostly still on the cars); the Borders’ system would keep track of books.

The store’s book buyers ordered an ambitious selection of books for the 10,000 square foot store. It was a chaotic time, with a clearance sale to the bones going on in the old store while Rudy Fink and his carpentry crew built and varnished solid hardwood bookshelves in the new space. All the while Louis and his buyers were placing huge orders, and he was frantically trying to get the computer system ready to receive a tsunami of books. Occasionally they needed to phone Rudy to get him out of bed in the mornings to manage his bookcase-making crew. In a panic, they hustled to open the store in November, 1974, a few days before Thanksgiving. Two days later, it snowed eight inches which virtually shut down retailing in Ann Arbor. Cash was very tight and Tom was often on the phone with publishers wanting payment.

What seemed like a disaster was averted when, during a booming December, their dream came true—they had a vibrant, exciting bookstore. Joe Gable trained and managed a young, smart staff to provide a specific “Borders Brand” of service: never pushy, cool, friendly, casual, bright. Joe’s crew knew their books, the customers quickly came to rely on the staff and everyone enjoyed the interaction.

They were in their fourth location in three years!! When space became available in an adjacent building, the new space was absorbed. Book titles were added to improve every category throughout the store. They created new categories: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, and Ecology. Every time they improved a book subject area, such as linguistics, sales in all subjects tended to increase: a customer comes in because she heard about an exceptional selection of linguistic books and she buys a science fiction novel as well. Customers were voracious, and most had never seen such a collection of books. The number of titles in the store increased towards 150,000.

Borders was then larger than most bookstores in the country. Though the brothers had not planned a superstore, their original tiny second floor space had grown in size by a factor of 50, and the quality of the store (selection and service) had increased proportionately. Though a well-run, small, quaint bookstore could still find a place, the high-traffic, high-volume Borders Book Shop in Ann Arbor with its vast selection helped redefine what a bookstore could be in the United States. By adding to the store space piecemeal, the brothers had drifted into the “superstore” concept quite by accident. Mathematically, the formula they discovered was astounding (and over simplified): as their bookstore became larger with better selection, it drew from a larger radius, and it became more exciting, and the sales per square foot increased!

Rookie Mistake #4: Louis and Tom realized that operating a full-blown computer system and employing the specialized subject book buyers and programmers required to maintain a built-from-scratch, one-of-a-kind, stand-alone, sophisticated buying system for over 150,000 book titles was not affordable for a single bookstore. So, in 1976 they started a new company called Book Inventory Systems. The Borders brothers helped individuals open their own stores using their own store name in their own cities and supplied them with a central buying and consolidated shipping. With two shipments a week from Book Inventory’s central warehouse in Ann Arbor, those independent stores often became the best bookstore in their market. Within a few years, in addition the Borders Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Book Inventory System had helped locate, design, and supply stores in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, Toledo, Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, and Lexington.

The second Borders Book Shop opened in Birmingham, Michigan in 1985. Joe Gable’s brother, Tim, moved from Montana to Michigan to manage the Birmingham store. Tim, like Joe, was a natural in a bookstore. Borders Book Shop in Birmingham was an instantaneous cultural center in that remarkably literary Detroit suburb. The level and sophistication of sales in the store were a tribute to the affluent community and its education level and value systems. Within two years, sales caught up with the 14-year-old Ann Arbor store. Traveling publishers’ sales reps remarked that both Borders stores were certainly among the top 10 bookstores in the country.

In keeping with Ann Arbor’s egalitarian environment, the Borders brothers installed a company-wide profit-sharing system. While modest at first, good years yielded significant additional pay for the young staff at the stores, which also helped create an esprit de corps, and a sense that this team was doing something important and different.

As they developed the inventory control and distribution systems further, their goal was to have all stores on the system be the best bookstore in their respective markets: best in selection and in service. Inspired by a seminar given by Edward Deming, they strove for continuous improvement.

Potential staff in the stores were given a test to assess their literary acumen, to find out if a potential staff member was a “book person” who could help customers and who could contribute to the delicate literary atmosphere. If he didn’t know who Norman Mailer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Julia Child, and Andy Warhol were, should he be working in a bookstore? The staff needed to be well read, communicative, and bright. They needed to offer a high level of service to the customers to compliment the complicated selection of books, without showing too much ego. Often the staff were specialists in certain subjects, such as art, science, literature, or history, allowing them to be more helpful to the customer. Those specialized staffs brought more to the table than typical retail clerks: they were smart, eager to learn and eager to share their knowledge. Furthermore, they helped the buyers improve the selections by adding titles for the system to their assigned subject area. A good bookstore is a glorious business with terrific people.

Borders Book Shops and its affiliated stores were well stocked and well-staffed, and created a refreshing, almost intellectual atmosphere—like a library but with classical music playing in the background, and with the stimulating excitement of discovering and buying a stack of books. The newer stores had coffee shops, and sold CDs and DVDs as an integral part of a very energetic environment.

Book buyers extraordinaire Phyllis Lambert and Robin Wagner, each ran Book Inventory System as interim president for several years. In 1988, Robert DiRomualdo, an Air Force veteran with a degree from Harvard and a strong marketing background, joined Borders as its first outside CEO. DiRomualdo brought enormous energy to the company, and under his leadership, store openings increased rapidly.

In 1992, after 21 years in the business, the Borders Brothers sold Borders Book Shops and Book Inventory Systems, Inc. At that time, the central buying and distribution system supplied about 20 Borders Book Shops and a dozen affiliated independent stores. They sold the businesses to K-Mart, which owned the Waldenbooks chain of bookstores, most located in enclosed malls. Waldenbooks was an asset on Kmart’s books, but was not sexy or profitable. K-Mart was looking for a way to dress up and bundle the Waldenbooks operation to make it saleable.

Borders Book Shops and Waldenbooks were quickly spun off as a single public company on the New York Stock Exchange as “Borders Group Inc.” (BGP) in 1995, with Goldman Sachs as the lead banker. It is curious and significant that combining 1,000 Waldenbooks with a handful of Borders Book Shops and Book Inventory Systems into a public company would be called “Borders Group, Inc.”

At the time they sold, the company had developed a powerful inventory and distribution system, highly effective in allowing the stores to carry more titles and to replenish them more efficiently than most other stores. The “system” had some early characteristics of artificial intelligence to help the book buyers manage the periodic replenishment of the thousands of titles in inventory.

When it became a public company, Borders Group, Inc. continued to be led by Bob DiRomualdo. The Borders brothers were not on the board and had no further input into the operations of the company. Bob had stimulated and managed much of the growth from 1988 to the time of the sale. He retired in 1998 and a bizarre succession of CEOs took over to head up Borders Group, Inc: Phil Pfeffer (1 year); Greg Josefowicz (7 years); Ray Marshall (1 year); Mike Edwards (1 year), and Bennett LeBow (1 year).

In 2011, nineteen years after the Borders brothers sold the business and sixteen years after becoming a public company, Borders Group Inc. filed for bankruptcy. All of the stores were closed. Thousands of booksellers lost their jobs. It was a very sad day in America when over 1,000 bookstores, each a mini-cultural center, a source of wisdom and good, healthy information and entertainment, shuttered their doors. And the closings felt like a kick in the stomach to the brothers.

There are many theories about what went wrong. But a series of non-Rookie Mistakes occurred: a far too rapid expansion in United States (40+ superstores were opened in 1998 alone, the year DiRomualdo left the company); a confusing international expansion (London, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia) and lack of control of the supply chain; changing leadership too often as each new CEO jerked the fast changing company in a different direction; poor financing machinations; poor real estate decisions; lack of understanding of the delicate nature and required quality of a great bookstore: the company forgot that selling books is not the same as selling sausage or socks.

At its peak, Borders Book Shop was a beautiful exhibition of the great freedoms Americans enjoy, with a broad selection of American publishers’ offerings, without a single government comment. It was also a bold experience in aggressive capitalism mixed with a strong dose of intellectual endeavor to create a unique setting for the American public.

Though gone, Borders Book Shops are still remembered by some. Their absence has left a hole in the fabric of society in many American cities.

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This is one of more than 100 essays by prominent industry figures in Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing & Bookselling in the 20th Century, edited by Buz Teacher and Janet Bukovinsky Teacher (Two Trees Press). Illustrated with vintage book jackets and period graphics from Publishers Weekly, Among Friends is a deluxe limited edition that pays homage to the creative and entrepreneurial spirit of the book business during a time of great change in American culture.