Thank You Rick Riordan

Three brilliant books that arrived in the Kids section since last we spoke:

1. Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater
Oh man. Maggie Stiefvater is brilliant. We all know that already. Now she's given us the third book in her Raven Cycle. It's brilliant and now I might die before the last one comes out.

2. Once Upon an Alphabet by Oliver Jeffers
It's Oliver Jeffers. He does a little story for each letter. V is my favorite. Hands down.

3. My True Love Gave to Me edited by Stephanie Perkins
Stephanie Perkins, author of Anna and the French Kiss, is enough of a sell but with authors like Kelly Link and Holly Black this is the perfect winter anthology.

I spent most of my Saturday working the Booksmith table at the Boston Book Festival. This was the third year I worked it and we had, by far, the best weather and, by far, the biggest crowd.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Three other booksellers and I arrived down at Copley Square just after 8 AM. It was chilly and early. Coffee was much needed and I was barely functioning. We shuffled tiredly into the beautiful Trinity church and were welcomed by a most glorious sight.

1,000 Rick Riordan books sitting on tabled primed for signing.

I was not so tired anymore.

This wasn't a particularly thrilling sight to Peter and Clarissa who'd been there the day before to set them up but I was pretty excited about it. I've never been fortunate enough to be in the store when Rick Riordan has come in to sign stock so I was ready. Two things happened.

1. He signed 1,000 book in 30 minutes. He. Is. Magic.
2. I didn't say a word to him until he left and then it was a hurried "Thank you so much!"

Doesn't matter. I spent about 35 minutes in a room with Rick Riordan.

And that half an hour is what made the festival for me. Not just because I'm nothing if not a fangirl and I got to be there. It kept us busy most of the day. I got to stand at the end of the table and just keep refilling piles of his books. I got to talk to people about the books. I got to see the kids in Camp Halfblood/Jupiter tee shirts and camp necklaces and the one girl fully dressed as Annabeth. They were excited and that plus the adrenaline was way better than the coffee.

The kids book person in me was just so thrilled. We had a line for a solid two hours after Riordan's keynote and sold somewhere around 700 of his books and a lot of them were to people who already had them. It was amazing. And I loved that it was a kids author.

It's so easy to get discouraged when you're a kids book person. There are so many people who are determined to write it off and say that it doesn't count as "real literature" or that it's not worth anyone's time. When a book gets big then come all of the articles ripping it to shreds and explaining to us why it's not teaching kids anything. Sometimes that makes it hard.

To see people, most but not all kids, standing in line twice for Rick Riordan, the first to get into his talk (there was a line when we arrived at 8) and the second to buy tee books, was brilliant. It makes me a little more proud of what I do.

And I just really wanted a kids event to win this not-competition competition.

We totally did.

Thank you, Rick Riordan.

P.S. We still have signed copies of Blood of Olympus and Percy Jackson's Greek Gods come and get some!

Earnest Readers at the Boston Book Festival

Booksmith was back at the fourth annual Boston Book Festival this past weekend. Luckily the hurricane held off so we didn't have to fight the winds and rains, and instead enjoyed a crisp, sunny autumn day. For those of you who didn't make it to Copley Square to wander among the publisher, bookseller, and all-things-book-related booths or to attend one of the author panels, we were parked just outside of Trinity Church, sharing the  main circus tent with Information and WBUR. We had the privilege of selling books for the authors speaking at Trinity's two venues. Those of you who stopped by to say hello or browse our tables would have seen stacks upon stacks of--among others--Junot Diaz's latest This is How You Lose Her, Brookline's own Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, and a pile of books resembling bricks of gold (and weighing almost as much)--that was Eric Kandel's Age of Insight, a beautiful hardcover with Klimt's "Golden Phase" on the cover, which sold out after his event.

In fact, we sold out of many of our books in the charged atmosphere of the festival, as readers met their author idols and shared their favorite reads. It's this particular atmosphere that makes me excited to work the book festival each year. I love wandering among the booths and seeing all of the organizations that make up my writing and reading life in Boston. Everyone around me is, in some form or another, a reader. Don't get me wrong, Booksmith is full of book-loving customers, but at the book festival, there's a particular eagerness to the readers that come by our booth. They're excited about the ideas they just heard, the free book bag they just won, or the prospect of getting a copy of their book signed in person. It's more than eager--there's something earnest about these readers, which instantly endears me to them.

That's why I was so sorry to disappoint one young man who came out of Junot Diaz's event looking for Diaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I had to tell him we had just sold our last copy. He looked at me, stunned. "Are there any bookstores in the area?" he cried desperately. I couldn't think of any close by. "How long will Diaz be signing?" he asked. We both looked at the long line of readers, stretching out of the tent as far as we could see. "I think he'll be here for awhile,"  I guessed.

Not more than thirty minutes later, Diaz was still signing, and the customer was back. "I made it!" he cried, dripping with sweat, completely out of breath, and triumphantly holding up a rather worn copy of Oscar Wao. He told me he had run home three miles to get his copy of the book so Diaz could sign it. I watched him proudly join the end of the now-dwindling line, and when, a few minutes later, I looked up, I saw Diaz congratulate the runner with a hug before signing his book.

Once Upon a Time...

A scene from The Fairy-Tale Princess: seven Classic Stories from the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell.

I have a bit of an embarrassing confession. When I was a kid, I was a fairy-princess for Halloween...multiple times. I still don't quite know what a fairy-princess is...a princess from a fairy tale? Or a princess with wings? All I know is that a fairy-princess costume included a combination of tiara, wand, and satin.

Turns out that fairies - or faeries - are actually related to the earliest Halloween tradition. The Celtics believed that faeries dressed up as beggars on Samhain (what we call Halloween) and went door-to-door asking for food. Those who gave them food were given a reward and those who didn't were punished. Which turned into...trick or treat.

The origins of Halloween are steeped in tradition, in superstition and storytelling and magic. It seems natural that dressing up as characters from fairy tales, one of our oldest types of stories, became part of of how we celebrate the holiday. In the Halloween spirit, here are my recs for some great books about fairy tales.

The bicentennial edition of The Annotated Brothers Grimm was just released, with an introduction by A.S. Byatt and edited by Maria Tatar (who will also be at the Boston Book Festival this weekend, along with the Booksmith). Along with the classics, like Cinderella and Rapunzel, Tatar includes a handful of stories that the Grimms felt were not for children. You could get lost for hours in this book.

A modern take on classic fairy tales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is edited by founder of Fairy Tale Review, Kate Bernheimer, and includes forty short retellings of fairy tales from contemporary writers, such as Kelly Link, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, and Neil Gaiman. The seven dwarfs stuck living together in an apartment in NYC? Yup.

And for a cool bedtime book, I love The Fairy-Tale Princess: Seven Classic Stories from the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell. Each story is illustrated with paper cut sculptures of the scenes, with some sculpture even emerging from the pages of books. Paper cut art always blows my mind - just the amount of patience, the detail - and the work in this book is incredible. Recognize the scene above?

Happy Halloween!