A preamble to the my3books concept

I represent a lot of publishers to the bookstores in my territory (hey, if you were wondering, that’s Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri, with just a smidge of Indiana and Michigan), and every season, they all publish a lot of books. For instance, this coming fall, all my publishers put together have about 4000 new books in their catalogs.

I’ve been looking for a way to pull out just a few of those books at a time - to restore a more human-readable scale to the process - and focus on some of the really great ones. So here begins a series of posts that will each zoom in on three books - three from the same publisher, or three on a theme, or three by the same author, whatever.

This space is open to other friends in publishing & bookselling & litblogging, too. I’ll be glad to help spread the word about your 3 fave books on some topic or other. Send me a note about your ideas.

And do let me know what you think - I’ll be happy to include a letters column to clear the air and share news from readers on occasion.

John Mesjak
twitter: @mesjak

UPDATED: email address removed (6/7/09)