In 1975, Lemuria was born as an independent bookstore. It was a brain-germ product of the counter culture movement that started in the 60s. Middle America was a little later in the culture realization of those times. I remember that independents were approximately 50% of trade sales for publishers. We were also in the middle of the “malling of America” retail growth stage and the mall chain bookstores were the primary competition for independents.

Above: The original Lemuria sign used at The Quarter.

As the “malling” strength took effect, a parade of cattle-like customers looking to consume enhanced the growth of chain bookstores. Somewhere in the 80s, I remember independents strength of sales declining to 40%, then 33%, thus decreasing the importance of independent book selling in the marketplace.

Left: Lemuria was actually a converted apartment and held a modest $8,000 in books.

In the 90s, independents were challenged by the development of the big box stores, and their strategy branding (B&N, Borders and in the South, Books-A-Million). Wholesale Clubs, Wal-Mart, etc. began to erode small store sales using heavy loss leader discounting. Independent market share continued to drop 25% to 20% and so on.

Amazon was also birthed in the 90s, and the loss leader book price was exaggerated to its height of influence and product devaluation as the new century began. Airports became the new malls as bookstores prospered from the busy traveler. Independent market share dropped like a sunk boat to around 10%. Product printed price seemed to have little meaning as independents struggled to add customer value from their reading skills, inventory editing using their buying skills, and loyal author/publisher support with bookstore signings and readings.

In the 2000s, box stores boomed, Amazon sales exploded and price clubs continue to devalue our market place and product. Now 2011, Borders appears busted, B&N seems on the run, though end of year sales figures don’t prove that fact. Amazon’s Kindle is in a beast-like growth cycle and seems to be the lead market dictator followed by the nook and iPad. (See previous Bookstore Key: The New Rules of Retail)

Please note, these exact sales figures are not my point, for I am reflecting basically from memory. However, 3 1/2% of market share is where independents stand today according to a recent Publisher’s Weekly article.

Market Share of Major Outlets for Trade Books, 2009–2010

(based on dollars)

(See full article in Publisher’s Weekly here.)

You may ask why I write this as it appears that the independents industry strength is at the exposed end of the Titanic about to sink with the band playing a swan song: I disagree.

Our time for redefinition is now. We can be vital again, and if we made it through the Great Recession, we’ve done a few things right. As we’ve flattened out, it’s now time to bust a gut and grow, utilizing what we do right. We need to keep refining our bookstores to our community. Do we have the energy left and can we muster up the juice it takes to grow again?

So much depends on our publishers and their desire or need for our good work and services. Three and a half percent of trade sales is so little, however, can our influence be 10% or more in 2 years? I’m not so sure it can’t, and who knows if that can happen. We need help from the publishers that care about our work, helping us to make our presence more felt in our communities to enhance good books, good authors and good writing.

And once again, I ask: Can the publishers lower retail prices to give us a chance? Please help us stop the prostitution of our product and so much hard work by the authors. Good readers and good booksellers want the care and good help of publishers.

See previous blog on The Future Price of the Physical Book

As a newbie to the Jackson area, I’ve been reading my way through a self-taught course on southern culture. I started with Welty and Foote, and visited Vicksburg to get a sense of what things would have actually looked like during the Civil War. I had a mild obsession with the Civil War; I wanted to understand the sacrifices that people made, where they made them, and what it must have felt like.

I came back to this feeling recently reading Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Willis. The book is technically science fiction, but it’s the quiet kind of science fiction that is more grounded in science and history than anything else. On a dark and stormy night, Jeff meets Annie at a book release party. Jeff is a research assistant to a famous Civil War novelist, and Annie is his old college roommate’s sleep study patient (and undercover girlfriend). Whenever Annie sleeps, she finds herself tortured by vivid Civil War dreams. Upon further investigation, Jeff determines that all the dreams must come from the perspective of General Lee.

As Lee’s soldiers march through Annie’s head, she and Jeff take off to try and find the cause before the doctors can lock her away or Jeff’s boss can try and use her as a human research experiment. When Jeff isn’t guarding Annie from her own subconscious, he spends his time desperately trying to figure out the cause of Annie’s dreams before it is too late. The science of dreams is also addressed: Are Annie’s dreams the result of some terrible metaphysical mix-up, or just a result of some dangerous drug cocktail?

While well researched, the strength of the book is really in the emotional punch of Jeff and Annie’s journey. As they become more sleep deprived and malnourished, they find themselves reluctantly recreating the journey that Lee and his men also took all those years ago.

If you’ve never tried the science fiction genre (or just didn’t think it was for you), this book is a great starting point. It’s a beautiful and moving look at southern culture and duty in the modern age. -HJ

Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Wilson (Bantam, 1992)

As I had mentioned in my previous post, Lemuria…Out and About, I have been having a grand and glorious time going around the metro meeting people in the community and letting them know what is going on at Lemuria Bookstore.  I have been lucky enough to hear some great speakers and talking to “book people” and learning just what people are reading out there in the real world.  I thought I might let you know what I have been up to these past two months.

You will usually find me at the Mississippi Department of Archives—History at Lunch program and at the Eudora Welty Library for their Applause program.  These two programs are great especially if you are interested in Mississippi history and Mississippi authors and are both a wonderful way to spend your lunch hour. I hope that you will click on the above links and I will see you at one or both in the next few months. I was also lucky enough to be invited by the Daughters of the King at Chapel Cross to a lovely dinner and talk by Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts and editor of Mississippians. Neil laughs that the only other person who has heard his story more than me is his wife!  I really continue to enjoy his redemptive tale every time I hear it.

Did you know that there was a devastating flood in Paris in 1910?  Well neither did I until the Alliance Francaise deJackson invited Jeffery Jackson to speak to them about his book Paris Under Water and I was there to help him have a book signing.  It is really an amazing story and the comparisons to Katrina in New Orleans and even the Easter ’79 Flood in Jackson were interesting.  One of the things that I really thought was amazing were the raised wood walkways that were built so that the people could still get around the city.

Let me tell you something, Peggy Brent and the folks out at Hinds Community College  did a wonderful job last week with the Mississippi and the Arts Week.  I was out there helping put on the book signings for Neil White, Culpepper Webb, Benjamin Cloyd and Curtis Wilkie.  It was great to see all the students so excited to have these authors right there to listen to and then able to ask them questions about their various experiences and their writing process.

Many of you probably saw me at the CrossRoads Film Festival this past weekend.  I was there with Mary Murphy, author of Scout, Atticus and Boo and film maker of Hey, Boo. I was so pleased to meet Mary who was celebrating the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird which happens to be one of my all time favorite books.  I saw many people there who must agree with me because they all came out of the film with huge smiles on there faces!

My favorite thing I did, because you all know I love talking about books, was speaking to the Elisnore Garden Club.  We met in the DotCom building and had a fantastic time talking about books that would make great spring and summer reading and ate some great food while we were at it.  I thought I might share a few of the titles that we talked about:

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht

Georgia Bottoms by Mark Childress

What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell by Suzanne Marrs

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

These are just a few of the titles so I guess you will just have to swing by the bookstore and see me to get the rest of the list. If you would like me to speak to a group whether it be a luncheon club or just a group of friends getting together, shoot me an email at maggiel@lemuriabooks.com or a call 601.366.7619.

Ask for Maggie ’cause I got books and will travel….

I am much looking forward to bringing my 17-year-old son on the US book tour for An Evil Eye in April – he’s never been to America, but he plays guitar and the name Robert Johnson means something very good to him.

We’ll be visiting a range of fantastic independent bookstores across the south and west, with Lemuria as my very first gig, talking about the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, crime thrillers and food, I hope.

Now, the Telegraph newspaper in the UK has asked me to keep a travel blog on its pages, kicking off with a print piece on detectives and travel, and I’d really appreciate the help of you blog readers here.

Back in the mists of time, I wrote travel books – one, in fact, about walking across Europe to Istanbul – but I believe that it’s in crime novels that some of the best ‘travel’ writing is being done these days. I mean, a trip to Venice is much enhanced by following Donna Leon’s Brunetti through the watery streets, just as London will remain, for generations to come, the city of fogs and rattling horse-drawn cabs depicted in Sherlock Holmes. And when James Lee Burke gets going on Louisiana, I smell the swamp – don’t you?

So I want some tips from you guys – who, in your opinion, really captures the scents and sights, not to mention the seamy underbelly, of some of the places I’m set to visit on this compendious book tour? Let’s see: Jackson? Alabama. New Orleans. Austin, Texas – does Austin have a fictional crime fighter I should know about? Houston?

And who’s the go-to crime writer for Arizona? I can do Raymond Chandler for LA, obviously; less obvious to me is San Diego. Give me a few top tips for San Francisco, too: who really puts the Bay Area on the page? We wind up in Portland, Oregon. Is there a murder mystery I don’t know of, set in the city, or the state?

It’s a parlor game, really: try it, and drop me a line if you can. You can find me at jsn.goodwin@gmail.com and all suggestions are welcome. I also blog at thebellinicard.wordpress.com

If the writer you propose is published in the UK, so much the better – but let’s leave no stone unturned here!

Maybe we can blast somebody really good across the Atlantic…

Lemuria is where the US Magic Carpet Tour for April 2011 is kicking off.
I’ll be there on Wednesday, April 6th at 5:00 pm for reading and talking and signing. Come along – and send your friends, too!

-Jason Goodwin

Yesterday, I finished reading the young adult novel and one of our upcoming Oz First Editions Club picks:
The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens. It was an action-packed adventure starring three young orphans who are far from ordinary and are beginning to discover their destiny. But I don’t want to talk about it too much, cause I’m sure there will be blogs coming up from Emily, who is pumped about this first book in a trilogy by a new author who already shows so much promise.

After finishing a book, especially on a gorgeous Sunday, a little panicky voice whispers, “What are you going to read next? That book was so perfect for a Sunday on the porch with the sun and the soft breeze and the mild weather . . . and now what? You know you’re just going to pick something absolutely dismal, you always do — something depressing or overwritten — not at all a good segue from that delightfully charming book whose last page you just turned. It’s taunting you, that last page, isn’t it? Well, you should have slowed down, but no, you had to finish and it’s only five and the sun won’t set for two hours and what are you doing to do?!”

My anguished inner monologue was given further fuel because I had just days ago begun a book that seemed to have promise and found it wooden. I couldn’t slog through that. No, I needed to gamble, to start fresh.

Well I didn’t. I made supper and watched some tube and considered my reading over for Sunday.

Till bedtime. I took with me into bed Open City by Teju Cole, a book that initially got some buzz but, at least at Lemuria, that we haven’t heard much more about. This is the plot of the book as far as I can tell: Julius, a young Nigerian psychiatrist in his residency, meanders through New York City, musing on his life, his childhood in Nigeria, his patients, music, culture, anything really. But that’s not the importance of the book, as far as I can tell: it’s a meditation on solitude, on the paradoxes of silence, juxtaposing its oppression and its freedom, its narcissism and its sensitivity. Julius is a thoughtful narrator, and Cole has created a novel that speaks to its reader’s condition in situ — the condition of reading, of being alone and quiet, of being closed and withdrawn while simultaneously being opened to new ideas.

On an afternoon of heavy rain when ginkgo leaves were piled ankle-deep across the sidewalk looking like thousands of little yellow creatures freshly fallen from the sky, I went out walking.

chapter 3 opening, Open City

Today is overcast, and as the wind sometimes whips through the trees outside, I sit silently at my desk reading.