Heartland Forum: Memories of Sleep

"Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters."

Thus begins Sleep of Memory, the first novel by French novelist Patrick Modiano to be published since he received the Nobel Prize in 2014.

I picked up that slim volume the other day—a generous gift from Yale University Press—as the Heartland Fall Forum wound to a close.

"The press recently secured the rights to all of Modiano's books," the rep told me.

"What do you think of him?" I asked.

"I read one of them," she said with a shrug.

"I read a couple in the New York Review Books edition," I said. They were largely the same. Some guy wandering aimlessly around the streets of Paris. Lots of cafes. Some vague mystery. Not so focused as Breton's Nadja, even. There isn't really much there."

The same can't be said of the bustling Fall Forum, which brings together bookstore owners from states stretching from Ohio to North Dakota with the exhibitors who produce the things they might want to stock: newly published books. Yet reading a few pages of Modiano seemed a fitting way to wrap up a day spent among such books, a day consisting largely of brief encounters with publishers' reps, marketing directors, editors, authors, strangers, and a few old friends.

Being neither a buyer nor a seller myself, I didn't participate in any of the workshops, dinners, reading events, or social gatherings that lie at the heart of the gathering, but I did have the privilege of attending the trade show at the request of my old friend Norton Stillman of Nodin Press, to give him a hand behind the table and also to tend the booth while he wandered the floor, saying hello to the raft of friends, young and old, that he's made (and continues to cultivate) during more than fifty years in the trade.

Though I will always be an outsider at this event, I've gotten to know quite a few attendees over the years, and I enjoy reconnecting with people I've known casually for a decade or more but only see for half an hour once every two years. The many books that are "up for grabs" on the vendors' tables can be an added bonus.

Perhaps there was a time when I looked forward to accumulating a bit of swag in the course of a show. Not any longer. I already have plenty of unread books, including bits of detritus from previous conventions. And besides, those free-bees are mostly intended for book buyers rather than functionaries like me.

Yet inexplicably, I came away at the end of the two-day event with a hefty stack of books, most of them interesting, to judge by appearances. I really wanted a few of them, a few looked intriguing, and there were a few that I accepted out of courtesy and compassion, simply because the author was standing there or sitting behind a "signing table" and there was no one else around. The publisher's rep would say very cordially as I passed by on my way somewhere else, "Would you like a signed copy?" and I would look over to see a gracious, smiling, forlorn author sitting alone beside a big stack of books. What else could I say but yes?

And who knows? Those "courtesy" books might be the ones I come to know and love best?

During my stints at the Nodin Press table I had the opportunity to chat at length with Joanna, the marketing director of Milkweed, the publisher occupying the adjoining table. We discussed the bookstore they maintain now at Open Book, which she's found to be useful in evaluating prospective covers and maintaining a thumb on the pulse of the book-buying public. "Well, Norton here," I said, gesturing to my right, "owned Micawbers, a bookstore in St. Anthony Park, for many years, and for the same reasons." Judging by her reaction, I'm not sure she'd ever heard of it.

Though I seldom buy books retail, I have stopped into the Milkweed shop on occasion after viewing an exhibit at the Center for Book Arts next door, and I've found it to be pleasantly small and uncommonly well-stocked.

Joanna told me that due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict, she and her cohorts were going to vacate their table earlier than usual. "We're a non-profit." she said. "And we're having our contributor's dinner tonight. We depend on those events and the generous people who attend them for our budget, our operating expenses!" I'm probably misquoting, but the remark got me to wondering what role book sales really plays in the life of a small non-profit literary press.

While we were watching the passing parade, Norton told me about the chutney he made the other day, and asked me if I wanted a jar of it. Of course, I replied. Then he recited a very long list of ingredients. "But I didn't put in any onions," he said.

"I don't know," I said, though I've never made chutney myself. "Onions can mellow out and add some subtlety to the mix."
  

On my first wander around the floor, I heard another interesting piece of "financial" news from an old friend, Kate Thompson, a senior editor who was recently promoted to the directorship of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Not long after she took over the helm, the umbrella agency for the historical society, which also runs museums throughout the state, decided that it was illogical for the press to sell books to state-run gift-shops at a profit. That would be "robbing Peter to pay Paul," as they used to say.

However sound or unsound that line of reasoning might be, it has created an accounting challenge for the press and also reduced its revenue stream somewhat. (I suspect this is not the kind of work that drew Kate to editing, publishing, and the literary life as a young journalism major.)

All the same, her press continues to put out high-quality books. Scanning their double-wide booth I was immediately attracted to a book called Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America by Michael Edmonds. It consists neither of identification tips nor the latest ornithological arcana; rather, it explores how humans have reacted and responded to birds in the Midwest throughout American history. 

The crisp back cover copy informs us that

Taking Flight explores how and why people in the nation’s heartland worshipped, feared, studied, hunted, ate, and protected the birds that surrounded them. From ancient American Indian shamans to Renaissance explorers, and from frontier mar­ket hunters to modern conservationists, our ancestors thought about birds differently than we do, and acted differently toward them.

Sounds interesting.

At the other end of the back row of booths I chatted briefly with Josh Leventhal of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, though I didn't examine his badge closely enough at the time to discern that he was the director. A woman was at the booth signing copies of her new book about long-vanished downtown Minneapolis department stores, and I did my best to come up with a few: Donaldsons, Daytons, the Golden Rule. She hadn't heard of Amlickson's, but that was a fabric store. I failed to come up with Holzerman's Department Store on Cedar Avenue, which wasn't downtown anyway. And what about the Emporium?

I was more interest in a book I spotted out of the corner of my eye: Untamed Mushrooms - from Table to Field. The photography in this book, by Dennis Becker, is simply gorgeous. Again and again he creates a thing of beauty without removing himself too far from the moist dark ambiance of the woods.

"Are you a forager?" Josh asked.

"Let's put it this way," I replied as I thumbed through the thick luscious pages. "I like mushrooms, and I spend a lot of time in the woods ... but I don't want to die."

Then I added, so as not to appear entirely clueless: "Oh, I can spot a chanterelle, or a pheasant back, or a puffball, or a morel." Unfortunately, I mispronounced "morel" as if it were "moral." Maybe that's what convinced Josh I ought  to have a copy of the book.

Before moving on, I asked him, "How do you like having your booth way back here?"

"I think it sucks," he said with a wan smile. "Don't quote me on that ... No, do quote me on that. They should at least have the aisles running east-west so people can see there are exhibits back here."

I had a pleasant conversation about the merits of sheet cake with Anne Hellman of venerable Macmillan Publishing. (At the time I was eating a piece of cake supplied by Brett and Sheila Waldman in honor of Peef, the Christmas bear.) Anne and I agreed that nowadays cakes can get too chocolaty for their own good, and she ended up, incongruously, giving me a hardback comic book version of the early life of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Undoubtedly the chattiest rep I met up with in my various wanderings was Bailey Walsh of the University of Chicago Press. I think he was simply bored, but perhaps he noticed early on that I was interested in quite a few of the titles he had on display. I asked him straight away why anyone would put out a book featuring two thinkers as remote from each other as Isaac Newton and Francesco Guicciardini? Soon he was showing me a book about falcons by Helen Macdonald that had been "hurriedly" re-released when Macdonald's subsequent book, H is for Hawk, became a best-seller. (Hurriedly as in two years later!)

I noticed a new Peter Handke novel on the table and we got to talking about the used book trade. I seized an opening and told Bailey a little about my luck at finding remainder copies of Handke's early novels, including A Moment of True Feeling, The Left-Handed Woman, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and Short Letter, Long Farewell. Bailey was about to erupt into speech again when I added, "You know, Handke's more recent novels are even better. Slowness. Across. And don't forget Repetition."   

"But he's not the draw he used to be."

"Well, he used to be a pin-ball wizard and the future of literary Germany. Now he's just a moody, out-of-date romantic."

We got onto the topic of declining print runs, and I was surprised to learn that some of the books on the table were printed in smaller quantities than the one we were displaying in the next aisle at Nodin Press.

"You know what the trouble is," Bailey said. "The new generation of academics no longer feel the need to build up their personal libraries. That market is gone."

Then he told me about his ex-wife's father, who, years ago, built a new house in Spring Green with a climate-controlled basement for no other purpose than to hold his vast collection of medical books.

Brian Ferry's translation of the Aeneid was sitting there on the table, and it got us onto the subject of poet and translator Anne Carson. Bailey told me he'd bought her recent work Nox, an accordion-box book that contains facsimiles of the old letters, family photos, collages, and sketches Carson used to create a one-of-a-kind scrapbook in honor of her brother's untimely death.

"You would never find that in a used bookstore," he said. "At least, not with all the extraneous material intact."

Our conversation moved on the Enzenberger and Agamben, Bernhard, and even George L. Mosse, the historian after whom the widely disliked brutalist modern humanities building in Madison is named.

At a certain point I asked the inevitable question: "Are you the kind of rep who has to catch a plane back to Chicago tomorrow morning and would be glad to get rid of a few of these items?"

"No," he replied, cordially but firmly."Nothing is available. I'm traveling by car, carrying my books in the trunk, and I'm going to need everything at another trade show in Iowa tomorrow."

Fair enough.

A few seconds later sometime-publisher Ian Leask appeared to get a few books that Barry had evidently promised him. Barry seemed a little embarrassed by the poor timing, but it didn't bother me in the slightest. Ian was getting a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (who needs it?) and a few oversized workbooks.

"I have multiple copies of these," Barry said sheepishly to no one in particular.

"Ah. Don't worry about it," I said a few times. "I have plenty of shelves full of unread European masterpieces already."

"Well, here's my card. Just let me know if there's something you're really dying to read."

Perhaps I ought to mention the conversation I had with Monty Stoakes of Indigo Bridge Books about recent enhancements to the warehouse district in Lincoln, or with Steve Semken of Ice Cube Press about the new digital printer in Michigan he's using. Or Frank Domenico, the cheerful Ingram rep from Nashville whom I hadn't seen since 2004? Or Paul Von Drasek, who's excited about the literacy work he's doing with the Midwest Oceanographic Institute. Well, enough is enough. 

When I got back to our table, I noticed that the Milkweed reps had, indeed, left for the day, leaving behind a hand-written note to passersby that read, "We had to run. If you see something you like, take it."

I hope their fund-raising dinner went well; they've been putting out some very interesting books. I selected a single slim volume, a book of poems by someone named Ada Limon. It was the smallest thing on the table.

Thumbing through it later at home, I was surprised to discover the book has been set in 7 point type!