Seattle Loses More Bookstores

Couth Buzzard Bookstore in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle closes it doors as reported by the Seattle Times. And Couth Buzzard is not the only one, M Coy Books and All for Kids Bookstore also closed this year, among others. Although Seattle still has the most bookstore's per capita then any other city, rents and buying habits are taking its toll on the traditional open bookshops left open.
Yes, you can buy your book from Amazon but you can't get the same satisfaction of browsing a well stocked local store and find the book you weren't looking for. It's what I call the happy accident of discovery that makes the difference.

thanks to Shelf Awareness for the lead.

It Was Great and Bad Beginning

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was announced. Named for the author who brought us the famous opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night". This year's effort was entered by Garrions Spik of Washington, DC:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

I love the taxi reference, good work Mr. Spik!

Bombproof Horses, Nude Mice, and Joyous Chickens

From theBookseller.com a forthcoming book celebrating 30 years of the oddest book titles of the year. An annual prize, The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, will be having a vote for the oddest title in the last 30 years. The people at the Booker prize recently did this but this is so much more fun. "To mark the occasion, Aurum Press will be releasing an illustrated collection of some of the winners and nominees of yesteryears, How to Avoid Huge Ships (£9.99, ISBN: 9781845133214). It features original jackets of 50 of the best-loved titles since the prize began, and an introduction from The Bookseller's former deputy-editor Joel Rickett."
I can't wait to see the book as it looks quite delicious.
Here's a list of some of the winners, enjoy!

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
The Joy of Chickens
The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
How to Avoid Huge Ships
Reusing Old Graves
Bombproof Your Horse
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification

Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the tip.

Roller Coasters, Smoke Jumpers and Amazon Flexes

I just returned from the road on business and pleasure and here's the landscape as I saw it. There's nothing like forgetting the business of books for an afternoon of riding Santa Cruz's famous wooden roller coaster, The Giant Dipper, the third oldest in the country, with your teenage daughter. A great ride, so much fun in fact that we rode it all day. A memorable afternoon with life's rich pageant on the boardwalk.
Yreka, CA at the Oregon/California border has been living in a smoky fog since the 800+ forest fires starting in California. Asked to the locals, it's been like that for months. It's very eerie.
Ashland has several great plays this season; Othello, with one of the strongest casts I've ever seen of this play, and Arthur Miller's "A View From The Bridge" are stunning productions. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is always a great stop.
Visited several bookshops - Albany, Corvallis, Ashland, Santa Cruz, San Francisco - and the general consensus is that business is well, difficult all over. Everyone is tuning to the 'buy local' campaigns to keep a foothold on the slippery slope of retail book selling. Some are doing better than others, but none are seeing much growth at all if any. In the 90s it was the rapacious targeting by Barnes and Nobles and Borders that buried local independents. Now, its Amazon that's thrusting the final twist of the knife. As more and more people buy on-line though Amazon less people are making the effort to go into their local shops. A shame, as going into a good local bookshop is a far better experience than shopping on line. Couple this with the news when I returned from the road that Amazon just bought ABE Books.com, the largest on-line used book site, it seems only a matter of time before Amazon chases into the corner the on-line book market. The third largest on-line bookseller, Alibris, I predict will be bought out by Amazon in some form within five years.
So it goes, its always a challenge for booksellers and now the landscape will just get more interesting.