My Way or Norway, or; Tied Up in Knuts

Knut Hamsun is considered one of Norway's most important writers. He's not read very widely in the US despite Hemingway's claim that "Hamsun taught me to write." But Hamsun was a hugely prolific author and one of only 11 Norwegian Literature Nobel laureates. His books are spare, taught, with deep characters and lush Nordic atmospheres. It sounds oxymoronic but he is really worth reading to understand what I mean.

Just this last week the UBC coincidentally acquired several of the few novels of Hamsun's translated into English from different customers throughout the week. Get a foothold in Norwegian literature with Hamsun, or discover a new writer. There are many points of entry and no two of his novels are alike.

Here are the ones in stock this week:

A perennial Hamsun favorite; considered his masterpiece by the Nobel committee. Chock full of Norwegian landscape it is the story of man in nature told through a village of homesteaders at the turn of the 20th century.

A masterpiece of existentialist literature. A man wanders the streets of Oslo starving himself in order to fuel his experience and creativity. Haunting, creepy, like staring into the gaping maw of an Edvard Munch painting or reading a depressing Kafka story turned grotesquely realistic.

One of those heartbraking love stories where the poor young man is in love with the wealthy girl, but she is expected to marry into her own social caste while he works desperately to make something of himself.

A mysterious stranger moves into a shack near a village. He lives a solitary life with his dog until a village girl wanders by. They fall in love but neither knows the other's feelings. A bittersweet modernist fable.

Protagonist Ove is a drunk, a womanizer, an incorrigible. His interactions in the microcosmic world of his Norwegian fishing village occupy this slim, humorous novella.

Go go go go

It's nearing the end of my second-to-last semester of graduate school, the holidays are about to hit, and our extraordinarily stellar events series is being its extraordinarily stellar self (Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen is tonight, this event will be glorious).  In short, life is busy.

My favorite picture of the Booksmith is this one, taken a few months ago, before our event with Chris Matthews, or was it Molly Ringwald?  I honestly don't remember. Point is, we brought out every single folding chair we had in the store and put it in our event space. I remember running around before the event, making sure everything was taken care of, and I took this picture when I went to test the mic. The room was empty, save the chairs, and it was an amazing sight to see.  In ten minutes, people would start filing in and the room would transform, but for now?  It was quiet and exciting in its own way, the chairs just waiting for people to occupy them for an hour or two. 

This may sound silly, but I often marvel at our events series.  We pull it off, the events team and I, and we're lucky to be part of this niche in the Boston literary scene. I hope you've either been to an event or are planning to go to one, because this here, when we all come together and are bubbling with excitement over getting to hear an author we love love love speak?  That's the best part of my job.

Gift tables, a guardian moose, and other reasons I'm still feeling thankful

Okay, so technically, Thanksgiving's over. Technically, it's Cyber Monday, except that there's already speculation that Cyber Monday is a thing of the past because Black Friday has gotten so darn huge. Oh, and there was Small Business Saturday, which was pretty awesome, and I hear that tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. My point is, if the Shopping Days can have this much of the calendar, then it's not four days too late to share some things I'm thankful for.

I'm thankful for customers like the very excited grandmother seeking fairy tale books for her soon-to-be-adopted grandchild. The young reader in question wasn't slated to arrive for about six months, but the customer wanted to have the books ready so the older-sister-to-be could practice reading them. Books get to be part of some of life's most joyous moments, and I'm thankful I get to be part of that.

I'm thankful for customers like the elementary-aged girl I spotted cracking up as she read Diary of a Wimpy Kid 7: The Third Wheel. Seriously, this girl was practically rolling in the aisles, and she was learning that books can make you do that. I'm thankful, too, that more and more parents are embracing the kinds of books that kids themselves choose. I love me some classics, and many kids do choose them, but the Wimpy Kid series and its ilk are a powerful literary gateway drug, and I will push them happily. 



I'm thankful for the customers who say they don't know anything about children's books, but then see a Richard Scarry book, or a Ramona book, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and are suddenly gushing about childhood reading memories.

I'm thankful that the kids' department has grown, both in space...

...and in staff, who have gamely jumped in with their handselling skills and their making-things-look-pretty-and-run-smoothly skills.

I'm thankful for our new gift table, the go-to place for boxed sets and other gifty, booky items. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the only place in the store where you will find Katniss and Clementine within a few inches of each other.

I'm thankful for Thidwick, our guardian moose who arrived courtesy of Oliver Jeffers' This Moose Belongs to Me. We promptly charged him with overseeing the children's section and making sure all went well.

He's doing an excellent job.

There's gold in these here walls

The above book may not look like much (unless you've got a hankering for puffed pancakes with sausage, in which case, hurry down to our Used Book Cellar and snap this baby up) but it's something of a refugee. I found it the other day while shifting things around in the art section. Turns out when you take all the monographs off the bottom shelf it reveals a thin little gap between the wooden slats; a passageway to the void from whence this little guy returned to us. Sometime in the murky past (I'd spitball around three years ago if publication dates are any guide, but that assumes some chronolinear laws of reality to which bookstores are often an exception), "100 Meals for $5 or Less" slipped past its bulkier cookbook colleagues and slid away behind the wall. If it weren't so aggressively orange the protruding corner of its cover might have escaped my notice entirely and it would have spent eternity back there with the dust-bunnies and phantoms.

Which kind of got me to thinking. What else do you think might be lurking within the walls? Because I'm a little obsessed with the idea of ruins and buried history. Just think about the bones of this old bookstore. A few decades back we housed our own cafe; the floorboards still creak from a legendary (apocryphal?) coffee-tsunami. And you may have heard that we just celebrated our 50th birthday, but 279 Harvard St. wasn't always a literary landmark. Once upon a time this was a neighborhood grocery, and it still bears a few traces of those days. We have a meat locker in our office and somewhere there is a dumbwaiter, which I vow to find, even if it requires inconveniencing several busy people.

Ye olde-timey Booksmith.

Here, I posit, are a few things that generations to come might find during renovations to expand the store over an entire city block (in utopic future times when the rest of the world tunes in to what Brookline already knows about the critical import of bookstores):

- A colony of very well-read Borrowers.

- A leather-bound first edition of The Scarlet Letter.
- A dog-eared copy of Ezra Pound's Cantos filled with Charles Olson's cryptic but besotted marginalia.

- The loopy signatures of the 21st century's greatest literary minds. (This part is for real. You know all those big-name authors you get to meet and hear read at our store? The illustrious Dennis Lehane started the tradition of signing our bathroom wall and now it's kind of a thing).

- A signed declaration of surrender from the CEO of Amazon.
- Red Sox trading cards.
- All the very BEST used books (with inscriptions and pictures and fold-out treasure maps) that you just know the employees keep squirreled away for themselves even though we swear we'd do no such thing.
- A thousand buttons, earrings and ballpoint pens.
- The body of a Poe protagonist.
- Wistful postcards.
- The Arkenstone.

But enough speculation. My archaeological sense is tingling so I'm off to dig up some real dirt. Stay tuned for more ancient Booksmith updates.

Black Friday is upon us!

Retail workers around the world are bracing themselves for the holiday rush, and though it officially starts today, the Booksmith is READY, cowboys and cowgirls. We've already had crowds the last few weeks (THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU), we have a big beautiful gift book table front and center, and we have this fancy gift guide on the internet! And this Tumblr with tons of recommendations on it! You can shop on our website or call us in the store and we'll wrap and ship your presents basically anywhere. If it's a really cool destination, like Hawaii, I think a lot of booksellers would be happy to deliver it personally for a nominal shipping and handling fee. Us Booksmithies are wildly aware of how lucky we are to have such a fiercely loyal customer base that shows up every year and takes our advice on gifts and walks away with presents for most of their family from our humble little shoppe.

But if I can get on my preachy high horse for a minute: if you're thinking of not buying local, reconsider. We may not carry a really obscure copy of an academic book on the statistics of manatee migrations that you think would be a killer gift for your dad, but because of our space, what we do offer is a highly curated and super-considered selection of anything lots of kinds of people will love. So if you re-calibrate your expectations to walk in our doors and see what we recommend, we have 51 years of experience in your neighborhood, and our staff has cumulatively some 20 higher ed degrees and hundreds of years experience reading and seeing what works for our customers. So keep it local this year! Fight the internet conglomerate beast! WE PAY OUR TAXES! Things are cheaper online because companies don't incur the costs of having a shop of crazy brilliant, super-excited booksellers running around helping you, with lights and heat on, with rent costs in our neighborhood and then funneling tax money back into the community we share. So yeah it would be nice to save a few bucks on a book or gift, BUT AT WHAT COST? Those discounts are doing something bigger. They're changing the world, and this year you can put your money where your ideals are and decide which world you wanna live in.

Here at the Booksmith we are eager to help you walk away with the best gift for your friend or family member because, really, gifts and books are all we care about. They're our full-time jobs and our hobbies at home. We know our stuff and we're so excited about it, that we want to help you choose the perfect gift. So stop in, say hi, and let us work our holiday magic!

Wasn't It Just September?

The holidays have already started here.  Try as we might, Christmas items are creeping up everywhere.  I just realized I accidentally put on red and green today, which makes me want to cry a bit.  Thanksgiving hasn't been ignored--we valiantly have an inflatable turkey up front along with other Thanksgiving items (have you seen the turkey mask?)--but Christmas is still elbowing its way forward. I'm trying to stop it like that person who likes standing in the middle of doorways, but am infinitely less successful.

Before I go on my Thanksgiving leave, here are some shout outs.  To the people who were in Trader Joe's this afternoon, aren't you glad we survived the line and have all these bottles of wine? I sure am.  To the customer who just called to ask if we are participating in Small Business Saturday, we are, and thank you for being so enthusiastic on the phone.  To the hot guy in fiction, thank you for being handsome and yes, you may have my phone number.  To the woman who loved Natasha's recommendation of Jeffrey Eugenides, thank you for being so fun. To you, blog reader, thanks for taking the time to read this.  You're a sweetheart. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and wish me luck with the turkey.

Earth as Art

I love walking through the travel aisle and finding a customer standing transfixed in front of our map browser, gazing at the brilliant colors of our Tyvek map, contemplating the World Upside Down, or pointing out a memory of a place on a map to a friend. Maps draw people in, ask for interaction, reflection, or simply admiration. While I walk by our browser fifty times a day, I gained a new appreciation for the art of cartography this past week at two different venues: the Boston Antiquarian Book Festival and the new map room at the Boston Public Library.

Walking through the rows upon rows of ancient and beautiful books, prints, and maps at the Antiquarian Book Festival at Hynes Convention Center, it was my turn to gawk. I squeezed between two tweed suits, through a cloud of must, and stood staring at the familiar shape of my home state. A German 1955 map of Iowa hung before me, surrounded by maps that showed our states divided into territories–a visual history lesson. I passed one map so old it depicted California as an island. I’d seen a similar map at the Boston Public the week before when I finally made it to the new Map Room there.

If you haven’t visited the Norman B. Leventhal Map Room, check it out on your next trip to the BPL. When I went, it was election week, and the walls were covered in red and blue U.S. maps, with plaques explaining the electoral college. I read the plaques; it still confuses me, but this was no fault of the exhibition. The current exhibit focuses on Boston’s public spaces. As you enter the map room there is a gorgeous mural of downtown Boston, overlooking the State House and Common. Inside, you can learn about the development of your favorite greens around town.

If you or someone you know is also an appreciator of the map as art, come check out the amazing travel-oriented gift books we have on display at Booksmith. From the Granger Collection we have a gorgeous book of Historic Maps and Views of Boston. After perusing these historic views of your favorite city, check out Mark Ovenden’s new Railway Maps of the World, which I happen to have on my coffee table at home. From Kim Je-hwan’s dizzying design of the Tokyo Metropolitan Railway System to a map of the United States covered with an intricate system hairline cracks that was the world’s largest railroad network at its peak in 1918, this book will stun, absorb, and amaze your guests.

And finally, when you’ve completely saturated yourself with these visual masterpieces, pick up Robert D. Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography. Kaplan examines the history of the world through the lens of the map, exploring how climate changes, topography, and proximity all contributed to major events in the shaping of world history. All of these books make great holiday gifts, especially when paired with that tube-shaped package that can only be the wall map on their list. For more about the maps we carry, visit us at www.globecorner.com.