One of the best perks of working at Lemuria is being able to meet the authors that come through the store promoting their books.  Now, with my new position as community liaison I am able go out in the community and meet the speakers that are coming to town.  This past Saturday, Ellen and I had the pleasure of going to the annual meeting of the Mississippi Cattleman’s Association.

Let me tell you, all I know about cattle farming is that I like what it produces! I do enjoy a good steak and hamburger from time to time, but I really had no idea what all it takes to produce good quality cuts of meat.  From time to time, you hear about abuse of livestock and the terrible conditions that these animals live in, but I will say that I think the majority of these people that we met on Saturday really do care for their animals.  Especially since I saw how interested they were in listening to the keynote speaker of the day, Temple Grandin.

Dr. Grandin, as many of you know, is a doctor of animal science and a professor at Colorado State University, a best-selling author  and a consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior.  Her humane livestock facility designs are in use all over the world and she serves as an adviser on animal welfare to several segments of the fast food industry.  As a person with ‘high functioning autism’ she is also well known for her work in autism advocacy and for inventing the hug machine, designed to calm hypersensitive persons.

Dr. Grandin’s theory seemed pretty simple to me:  Safer Handling–Better Meat.  If you follow her methods then you will “improve the day-to-day operation as well as the profitability of  your farm by raising healthier, more contented animals. Your benefits are great–for you and your livestock.”

I would like to thank the Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association for inviting Lemuria to take part in their annual meeting. We really enjoyed meeting your members and hope to see some of you in the bookstore soon.

Humane Livestock Handling by Temple Grandin (Storey, 2008)

Today Borders officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy citing a debt of $1.25 billion and supposed assets of $1.275 billion. Publishers and distributors are owed some $230 million. Over the next few weeks, Borders will be closing 30% of its stores or about 200. No news yet that Flowood’s Borders will be one of those. (Scroll down for full list of publisher creditors.)

At the present time, interpreting future landscape of book selling is difficult.

My first question, asking myself, is where will all the books go that are now on Borders’ book shelves. As stores close, will inventory be shared to the remaining existing stores? A logical guess. Will an extensive amount of inventory be returned to the publishers to pay outstanding bills? How much of Borders’ unpaid bills will be written off by the publishers, thus causing more pressure to booksellers who pay their bills. Will huge closing sales take place across America increasing the already exorbitant discount of my product?

My big question is why the publishers let Borders escape from paying their bills on time? I cannot fathom the size of the bath the publishers will take. I ask why? It doesn’t seem that Borders’ continual deep discounting of books they aren’t paying for has helped our book selling cause. I feel this publisher tolerance has erased value on all levels of legitimate book selling.

Just this November, I made an envelope addressing mistake on a publisher’s address. My check was lost in the mail, my slight error could have been caught by an astute postman, but it wasn’t. My favorite publisher, the one I try to pay first and foremost on time, threatened to cut off my account. I was beginning to run 30 days past due. When hassled, I knew I wrote the check and mailed it as soon as I could. Stopped shipments from this company would have been disastrous for Lemuria’s Christmas season. Fortunately, intervention from inside company aids kept my account temporarily open, until my check was returned, address error corrected and check then resent, thus clearing up my problem. I must add, I still was not 60 days past due.

My point is why a small bookstore paying its bills regularly is hassled and threatened while Borders owes and refuses to pay such a huge amount. Why didn’t the publishers demand results from Borders sooner? They were sure quick to pull the trigger on me. It will be interesting to see how the publishers answer this question about their tolerance over the next few weeks.

As Borders falls, I hope the publishers learn from their mistakes. Maybe their philosophy will become one of supporting real book selling with team work, and local community book selling will be enhanced.

Publishers helping the bookstores that pay their bills to make more money could be a starting foundation to rebuild our industry.

Here is the full list of publisher creditors:

Penguin    $41.1 million

Hachette Book Group    $36.9 million

Simon & Schuster    $33.75 million

Random House    $33.5 million

HarperCollins    $25.8 million

Macmillan    $11.4 million

Wiley    $11.2 million

Perseus    $7.8 million

F+W Media    $4.6 million

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt    $4.4 million

Workman    $4 million

McGraw-Hill    $3.1 million

Pearson Education    $2.8 million

NBN    $2 million

Norton    $2 million

Zondervan    $1.9 million

Hay House    $1.7 million

Elsevier Science    $1.6 million

Publications Intl.    $1.1 million

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

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On a Saturday night, when I was a teenager in 1970s Ireland, my pals and I would go to the school-kids’ disco at the Presentation College, Glasthule. ‘Prez’, as it was known, was fairly grimy at the time, but fantastically exciting, too. Deep Purple were in vogue. The girls wore cheesecloth and denim. When Status Quo were played, the air would be filled with swirling dandruff as we head-banged and thrashed air guitars. The climax of the evening was always Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and if you hadn’t persuaded someone to slow-dance with you before that song sped up, the consensus was that you were going home alone. And most Saturday nights, that’s what happened to me. Tongue-tied, nervous, I faced the long road home. But still, there was a love story in Glasthule.

My walk home would take me past the old Victorian house where the great writer John Synge and his widowed mother had endured their last years, a house that appears several times in Ghost Light. As a child, I passed it often, was faintly afraid of it, often wondered about the stories it had seen. On a wintry night it could be forbidding as the Bates Motel, or as Wuthering Heights in a rainstorm. But on a moonlit summer evening in that coast-town of seagulls and steeples, a strange beauty seemed to glitter from its windows.

My late mother, a great reader, had often told me the strangest story of all: how in the last years of Synge’s life, this reticent, broken genius, the son of a Protestant land-owning family, had fallen tempestuously in love with a Catholic girl from the inner city of Dublin, a young actress called Molly Allgood. Molly had been an apprentice dressmaker at one point in her teens. My mother, too, had trained as a dress-designer. Molly’s stage name was ‘Maire O’Neill’, my grandmother’s surname. These tiny connections, and other ones, kept the story burning long in my mind.  But the main thing that fuelled it was the memory of lonely Saturday nights, when I’d walk past that house and feel its ghosts gazing out at me, every bit as friendless as I was.

A couple of years ago, I began writing this novel inspired by Molly Allgood and Synge. I started with the uncertainty most novelists have at the outset. You don’t know if your story is going to work at all. What tense should it be written in? Who should be the narrator? Every book needs to have a style, its own unique voice, and to find it can be gruelingly frustrating. But somehow, over time, through dozens of drafts, I came to see that this story needed to be simple, focused closely on Molly. She began to loom up at me from the phantoms of dead drafts, as funny and flirtatious as I had imagined her in my teens. I suppose I learnt to stand out of her way, to let her lead me into the story of Ghost Light. I follow her through a day in the 1950s in London, when the past comes back to an elderly Irish actress who was once the beautiful muse of a genius.

To write fiction based on real people and those they loved is a morally ambiguous enterprise, to say the least.  Ghost Light is a work of the imagination, frequently taking immense liberties with fact. The experiences and personalities of the real Molly and Synge differed from those of my characters in numerous ways. Yeats and Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey appear in the book too, no doubt in forms some biographers won’t like. Then again, these giants often said they had fanned their fictions from the sparks of real life, renaming the people who had inspired their stories. The practice was sometimes a camouflage, sometimes a claim of authenticity. It was an option I considered carefully but decided against in the end, and so I dare to ask the forgiveness of these noble ghosts of world literature for not changing the names of the innocent.

To finish a book is an ambiguous feeling too. You have worked so long and hard on it, you know its every line and comma. In the final stages of editing, you dream about it. And then suddenly, the day is coming when it must go out into the world. You won’t be there to hold its hand, to reason away its deficiencies, to explain it to those who will encounter it. There is a kind of joy in finishing, but there is fear and apprehensiveness too. You want the book to find friends who will meet it halfway. Perhaps it’s similar to what a parent feels when a child leaves the house. This day was always coming; it’s what everything was building towards; but there is anxiety in the mix, a sense of encroaching realities, and if I am honest, there is even a touch of sadness. You come to know your characters so well; everything about them. Things you’ll never know about your spouse or your closest friend, you know about a person you have created. To see her walk away, into the great, wide world, is to watch a little piece of your self take its chances. But that’s what a novel is for: to offer itself to the reader. I hope you find something in it that speaks to you.

This essay first appeared on Joseph O’Connor’s official website. There you can find material for book clubs, reviews, video, book tour information, and much more.

Lemuria is one of nine stops on Joseph O’Connor’s U.S. tour for Ghost Light. He will be signing at 5:00 and reading at 5:30 on Friday, February 18th.

The signing and reading will take place at our Dot Com events building.

Ya’lls Blues will start playing music at 5:00. Come on over for a beer and a relaxing evening on the deck.

Also see Nan’s blog on Ghost Light.

Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011)

I love architecture and design books. From shabby chic to the gaudiest luxe, if the pictures are gorgeous and the text’s more than just a description of the picture, I’m in. Lemuria is featuring two of our design books now — a new book on Ken Tate’s houses in the South, including Mississippi and New Orleans, A Classical Journey, and Carolyn Roehm’s newest interior design book, A Passion for Interiors.

All of Carolyn Roehm’s books are amazing. We’ve got several of her entertaining books; in one, A Passion for Parties, Roehm’s memoir-like commentary runs alongside photographs of outdoor and indoor festivities for every occasion and season. A Passion for Interiors is her latest book, which invites the reader into three homes, two of which are hers, showcasing her incomparable style: classical architectural details softened by graceful fabrics.

And Tricia Guild’s new book is just fun. Her first book, Pattern, made up of full-page photos of fabric, was a textile-lover’s dream. Colors, Patterns, and Space is no less eye candy; her design style is bright and spunky, mixing up the classical and modern in playful yet incredibly elegant rooms.

i quite often judge books by their covers.  regularly this results in me reading a damn fine book.  it is difficult for me to resist a book that has an amazing cover, even if i know nothing about the book or the author.

penguin has two series which feature new cover art that i am all but drooling over.  the series i’m most in awe of is what penguin is calling the ink series.

“For seventy-five years, Penguin has united the best in literature with the best in graphic design, creating some of the world’s most recognizable books. To help celebrate our anniversary, we’ve chosen six of our favorite books and are presenting them with new covers specially designed by some of the world’s best artists working in the world of tattoos and illustration. These striking new covers, perfectly reflecting the timeless stories within, document Penguin’s efforts to bring new readers to great books.” –penguin

the other new series they have is apart of their penguin classics deluxe editions.

enjoy the eye candy.

by Zita