Three BIG objects arrived here at my3books HQ recently and they've all blown me away in one way or another.

McSweeney's Issue 33: San Francisco Panorama
edited by Dave Eggers
McSweeney's / PGW | 9781934781487 | $16 | Dec 2009

The results of a yearlong effort by the McSweeney's crew to put together the Platonic ideal of what the  Sunday edition of a newspaper could be - it's a wild success for lovers of words and images on paper.  The front sections contain investigative journalism, current affairs, infographics, and an over the top front-of-book data page.  The sports section leaves the daily stats to the web and brings readers the kind of sporting reportage that would fit right in at Sports Illustrated.  But, as you would expect, it's the Comics, Arts, and Book sections that really shine.  Contributions from Michael Chabon, Stephen King, William T. Vollmann, Miranda July, Junot Diaz, Nicholson Baker, to name a few.

Imagine a comics page with Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel and more.  You don't have to - that's what the Panorama offers us. The Books section offers in-depth reviews and short fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, among others, and poetry - all showcased in an innovative layout.

McSweeney's has moved on as they always do - the next issue of their journal will undoubtedly appear in some other format - but this experiment shows one possible way that printed newspapers can survive and thrive and inspire.

You can see more here on the microsite that McSweeney's put together for the Panorama.

***

Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons
by Gahan Wilson
Fantagraphics Books / Norton | 9781606992982 | $125 | Jan 2010

A monster production, a slipcased behemoth, nearly 1000 pages in three volumes, with deliciously wicked humor on every page.  The slipcase has a plexiglass cutout on one side with a photo of Gahan Wilson fighting to be freed from his box.  Introductions by Neil Gaiman and Hugh Hefner each open two of the volumes.  The third includes an interview with Wilson.

Open the box, free the three volumes, and dive in anywhere.  You will not be disappointed.

Fantagraphics has posted a photo and video slideshow on Flickr of the box set with sample images from the book for the curious.

***

A Sketchy Past: The Art of Peter de Sève
by Peter de Sève
Editions Akileos / SCB Distributors | 9782355740992 | $54.95 | published in France in October 2009, and imported and reviewed here already, but officially coming to the US in March 2010

A massive monograph that provides a comprehensive survey of the American illustrator and character designer Peter de Sève.  The book contains samples of finished work and his sketches from his advertising, book covers, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and his other magazine commissions. 

The book also shines a light on his nearly-anonymous work behind the scenes on animated movies: Robots, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille.  He's probably best-known among animation fans for having designed all the characters for all three Ice Age movies.

A Sketchy Past features sketches from his recently published children's book, The Duchess of Whimsy, written by his wife, Randall de Sève (also the author of Toy Boat).

As a peek behind the curtain of an artist's process, it's worth the effort of picking it up!

Since he originally sent me this post, but before I could get it posted on my3books, word came out that Jeff is one of the Fiction Judges for the 2010 Best Translated Book Awards, sponsored by literary blog Three Percent, a "resource for international literature at the University of Rochester."  The longlist for the 2010 awards in fiction was announced on January 5, and the shortlist will be announced on February 16.  The shortlist in poetry will be announced on February 16.  The final winners will be announced in March.  It's a really strong list in fiction.  Check out the longlist if you need more suggestions beyond Jeff's 3 picks below.

Welcome to the winter, friends. Grab some cocoa, a little something to fortify it, a few blankets, and get ready to hunker down. That's right, it's hunkering weather, and I've got three Scandinavian novels that will freeze your hearts while they warm your little book-loving souls.

The Discoverer
by Jan Kjaerstad
translated by Barbara Haveland
Open Letter Books (dist. by University of Nebraska Press) | 9781934824122 | $17.95 | Aug 2009

The final and, honestly, most crucial tome of the Jonas Wergeland Trilogy.  Never heard of it? Doesn't matter, mon frere. Each of these books stands alone, and The Discoverer stands tallest.  Jonas Wergeland is a disgraced (wife, dead) former television personality and this novel is an extraordinarily well-wrought examination of the man's life and mind. More, it's a virtuosic exercise in heroic narrative; Jan Kjaerstad and translator Barbara Haveland have created a book that interweaves paragraphs of past and present experience into something of grave and moving beauty.

*** 

The True Deceiver
by Tove Jansson
translated by Thomas Teal
NYRB Classics (dist. by Random House) | 9781590173299 | $14.95 | Dec 2009

This slender novella is one of my favorite books of the year, and new only this month. An austere and modern novel, The True Deceiver is about the relationship of an affect-less Swedish woman, her brother, and an overly affected children's book illustrator in one of the few Swedish communities in Finland. This is a book that plumbs the nature of familial love, and the depths of manipulation and inscrutability. A masterful study in opposition and confrontation, this book simmers with aggression, and the reader will never be quite sure who the title refers to, the cold Katri Kling, or the apparently vapid Anna Aemelin.

***

The Twin
by Gerbrand Bakker
translated by David Colmer
Archipelago Books (dist. by Consortium) | 9780980033021 | $25 | Apr 2009

Are the Dutch even Scandinavian? Probably not, but this novel has a striking, ice-bound personality at its center and fits this post like a warm and woolly glove. Bakker's book is the story of a lone twin, Helmer. Aching, inert, and incomplete, Helmer has not recovered from the loss of his twin brother, Henk, more than twenty years ago. Neither has his father, and as the old man's health fails, the fifty-seven-year-old Helmer finds himself at the sort of emotional crossroads that most men reach forty years earlier. To add poignant contrast, a sullen teenager named Henk (!) comes to live with him— and to underscore everything that Helmer might have lost forever.

***

The Final Word:
Here's a stat for my3books readers: only three in one hundred books published each year in the United States are original works in translation. Three Percent. That that's true or may be true is troubling, but it's also very exciting. We have an opportunity here to read again as children, as cultural strangers, and experience familiar things made strange and new. Forgive me for evangelizing, but these three books are part of a groundswell of outstanding international work brought home, and only some very serious talents make the trip.

Jeff Waxman 

***

Learn more about these three excellent publishers (one of whom I DO represent) and their extraordinarily rich publishing programs:

Open Letter Books: Twitter – Blog (yep, Three Percent) – Site – Catalog

NYRB Classics: Twitter – Blog (A Different Stripe) – Site – Catalog (direct download)

Archipelago Books: Twitter – Site – Catalog

UPDATE: I've modified the first paragraph and post title to correctly describe Jeff's position & bookstore.  But he's still an awesome bookseller, no matter where you come across him.

Princeton Architectural Press is distributed to bookstores by Chronicle Books.  These three books on their spring list absolutely wowed the reps in the conference room – wonderfully illustrated books, a quirky take on pop culture, a peek inside the lives of creative people.  You can count on PAP to deliver books in those veins every season, right alongside their signature architectural monographs and reference books for professionals.

Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?
by Kate Bingaman-Burt
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988900 | $19.95 | Mar 2010

Alien anthropologists wondering where all our money went in the first decade of the third millennium A.D. would do well to lay their tentacles on this book.  On the surface, it's a diary of self-absorption and typical consumerism, but with a closer look, Obsessive Consumption cleverly leaves those first impressions in the dust.

A professor of graphic design in Portland, Bingaman-Burt has been documenting her personal relationship with consumerism across a range of artistic endeavors.  Here in this book, though, she bears witness with a daily drawing of something that she spent money on that day, beginning on February 5, 2006.  The book covers the first three years of her documentary urges and her impulse spending.  From her monthly credit card bills to a bottle of soda at the CVS to an iPhone (finally, on 11/21/08!) to more fancy artist's pens (the last entry), Bingaman-Burt bears witness to how we live today, and where all the money goes.

Her drawings are tart doodles, combining representative line art, squiggly captions, and how much money she spent and where she spent it.

Fans of the documentary & book Handmade Nation (also from Princeton Architectural Press) will recognize her work - she provided all the illustrations for the book.  Kate Bingaman-Burt can be found here on the web, with a blog here and you can even buy a print of one of her pages at 20x200.  Twitter.  Etsy.  Flickr. Frankly, I think she may be the most findable, connected author I've ever profiled on my3books.

***

Lists: To-do's, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts & Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
By Liza Kirwin
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988887 | $24.95 | March 2010

This book makes a nice pairing with Obsessive Consumption, above, providing another way to peer inside the surprisingly mundane lives of artists.  Curator Liza Kirwin has gathered from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art dozens of examples of unremarkable lists made by remarkable men and women. 

The lists themselves demonstrate clearly that geniuses truly are just like you and me. But it is precisely those actual accomplishments outside of the mundane list-making realm that make these lists worthy of collection, curation, and in the case of this book, further study.  We see lists of paintings sold, lists of appointments, lists of books to read and more.  Many of the lists give us more than just daily ephemera: we see Pablo Picasso listing his recommendations for the epoch-making Armory Show in 1912, Alexander Calder's address book is a who's who of the Parisian scene when he lived there.

The catalog copy provides a list of its own: the artists who have been collected here, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth.  And yes, the list does goes on.

***

Bird Watching
by Paula McCartney
Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books) | 9781568988559 | $50 | Feb 2010

Another clever subversion of the observer's expectations, Bird Watching documents artist Paula McCartney's recent work in art and nature photography.

Each photograph captures a scene of purest wilderness - trees, branches, sky, pine needles underfoot, distant trails.  Carefully framed in each photograph is a beautiful specimen of passerine, or perching bird.  Notations accompany each photo, citing location, weather conditions and descriptive text of each documented bird.

Look a second time at these photos, though, and you may begin to see that there is more artist than naturalist at work in this journal.  Each bird has been carefully affixed with wires or strings to the branches, because these birds were purchased at craft stores.  McCartney's work is walking the divide between the artificial and the real, and along the way, she has found a way to make the real world feel that much more vivid.

You can spot some examples of her work on her page at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, and at the web site for the Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.  Her own web site is here.

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution:  As always, I left this two-day long sales meeting completely overwhelmed with options.  Among the hundreds of new titles that will be coming out from the more than 100 indie publishers that are distributed by Consortium are a couple dozen that I'm very very excited about.

On the Children's and Young Adult side of the catalog (literally - it flips over!), a new publisher joined Consortium for Spring 2010, Enchanted Lion Books.  Two of their picture books are featured below, alongside a graphic novel collection of Trickster tales from Fulcrum Publishing.

The Chicken Thief
by Beatrice Rodriguez
Enchanted Lion Books (Consortium) | 9781592700929 | $14.95 | Apr 2010

Perhaps the sweetest & funniest picture book I've seen in a long time, it's the wordless epic of a fox who snatches a hen from the yard where she lives and runs off with her.  Bear, rabbit and rooster make chase, but after a surprising number of twists in the tale, it's a happy ending for all involved.

***

The Wild Daydreams of a Solitary Hamster
by Astrid Desbordes
illustrated by Pauline Martin
Enchanted Lion Books (Consortium) | 9781592700936 | $17.95 | May 2010

With understated humor and a very clear line indeed, young readers encounter a graphic novel-format picture book about a Hamster whose interactions with the other animals who are his friends gently illuminate the meaning of life, the life of the mind, and the nature of friendship.  Naturally, it's translated from the French.

***

Trickster: Native American Tales
edited by Matt Dembicki
Fulcrum Publishing (Consortium) | 9781555917241 | $22.95 | June 2010

More than 20 trickster tales, each retold and illustrated by different Native American storytellers working with selected illustrators.  Here's a sample page from one of the tales, Coyote And The Pebbles.

***

Consortium on Facebook & on Twitter.  Their Spring catalog can be downloaded in two parts here: Adult & Kids.

I spent a lot of time in November and December in a series of sales conference meetings with the publishers I represent and with the other sales reps who also represent them around the country.  These sales conferences took place via web conference, by phone conference call, and in person on both coasts and in the middle. The sales rep group I'm a member of added some new publishers to our list for this coming season, and it all added up to the longest, and most intensive, series of sales conferences I can remember.

I've been making notes all along about my favorite new books coming out in Spring 2010.  Some of them I've read all the way through, some I've seen just an excerpt of or sample chapters, and for some I'm going entirely on catalog copy and maybe a few page spreads.  Nevertheless, the books that you'll see featured in this coming series of short posts are the books that I was most excited about at the end of the sales conference process.

As the season progresses, I'll also be putting up more typical long-form posts about some Spring 2010 releases that I'm really excited about.  But it was this process of reading sales kits and reviewing my notes about the Fall 2009 season that caused me to start blogging at my3books in the first place, so I wanted to begin to put up these posts for this coming season.



Two of them were recently featured in the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2009 (A Penguin Story and The Snow Day).  Though they were both published earlier this year, the NYT reviews were the first I'd seen of them, somehow.  I tracked down copies of both and I was completely charmed.  The third is a book I spent all summer talking about with my booksellers - it takes a close look at the science behind snow, with real photographs of super-magnified snow crystals.

A Penguin Story
by Antoinette Portis
HarperCollins | 9780061456886 | $17.99 | December 2008

For a couple of years now, whenever I begin to talk to one of my buyers about a new book that touches on childhood creativity, or with kids creating something new from the stuff around them, my savvy buyers give me a little shake of the head and say something like "Nope. We've got Not A Box."  After this happened a few times, I asked my buyer to show me this magical ur-book of youthful creativity.  And of course, that's exactly what Not A Box turned out to be.  I had nothing to compete with Not A Box.

And now, the Evil Genius author and illustrator who has frustrated so many of my book presentations is back with another delightfully charming story, sure to squelch any future sales I might otherwise make with books about penguins.

In A Penguin Story, Edna the penguin has finally grown weary of the somewhat limited palette of colors in her antarctic world: white snow, blue sky and water, black sky at night, and the black and white of her fellow penguins.  She bravely leaves her colony in search of some other colors that believes must be out there.

When she stumbles upon a scientific expedition, she soon sees that there are more colors than her usual blue, white and black - she sees sweeping tents, cold weather gear, and especially a mitten, all made of bright orange.

The hilarity of a whole colony of these charming little penguins "helping" the human scientists pack up to go home brings the story to sweet closure with the gift of a glove.

***

The Snow Day
by Komako Sakai
Arthur A. Levine Books / Scholastic | 9780545013215 | $16.99 | January 2009

There's an entirely different snow story working here - the quiet warmth of a wintry day spent close to home, the unlooked-for pleasures of a day with no school and no work, mother bunny and child watching a storm blow through, waiting for dad to come home safely from a trip.

From the first quiet panels as the small bunny wakes up to discover a darkly snowy day beginning, this is the best kind of story to share with young readers on the sofa watching their own snow day underway.

Komako Sakai's other book published in the US is Emily's Balloon.  You can find out about more books published by Arthur A. Levine by following them on Twitter.

***

The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter's Wonder
by Mark Cassino with Jon Nelson, Ph.D.
Chronicle Books | 9780811868662 | 16.99 | October 2009

After two imagined journeys through snowy tales, some readers may be wondering what it is that makes snowflakes form?  What is the lifecycle of snow?  Perhaps those readers would be surprised to learn that some snow crystals are not flaky at all, but can be cylinders. What is the truth behind the story that each snowflake is unique?

With drawings, actual photographs of highly magnified snowflakes, and tips on how to catch and observe your own snow crystals, The Story of Snow would make another great companion book for a snow day at home!

The Story of Snow

Chronicle Books' page for the book offers a downloadable teachers' guide.  The microsite and blog for The Story of Snow can be found at StoryOfSnow.com.  Mark Cassino has a separate blog for his photography here.

2009 saw a significant number of great new middle-grade novels. The three discussed here all have a variety of male characters spanning three generations.  They have various strengths, weakness and individual characteristics which give them depth, texture and longevity.  Of the many wonderful books I read this year with great guy leads, these are my top 3. They are most excellent and highlight the wonderful world of middle-grade fiction. Interestingly, all three were written by women. 

January 2009: The year began with a hardworking and powerful debut.

The Heart of a Shepherd
by Rosanne Parry
Random House | 9780375848025 | $15.99 | Jan 2009

My sales rep touted this as one of his favorites early on when presenting the Winter list.  I had heard good things about it from other booksellers (an Indie Next Spring Kids Pick!) — a double dose of recommendations.  Unfortunately, my only galley was sitting dejectedly on the nightstand of a kid critic.  When I followed up with him about the book, he said he wasn’t going to read that one because it had a father in Iraq and looked like it was going to be too sad. I gently asked him to return the galley to me—which I NEVER do—and decided to take it home and put it in the “to be read really soon” pile.  A few weeks later, I began what was to become one of my favorite books of the year.

In The Heart of A Shepherd we meet not only a tender-hearted and perceptive lead character, but also a military father and a revered grandfather. The setting is an Oregon ranch. The characters are thoughtful and hardworking. Finally, the story was about finding your place amongst family, faith and tradition.

The Mother Daughter Book Club has a nice summary of the book here .

In can be hard to sell a book on Chicago's south side with a cowboy on the cover, but I'm going to put this one in the hands of urbanites in search of greener pastures, teachers, and young people of all backgrounds.

***

June 2009: The summer soared with a steam-powered first novel.

When The Whistle Blows
by Fran Cannon Slayton
Philomel | 9780399251894 | $16.99 | June 2009

I read this one just as it was releasing and couldn't have been happier with the result.  Shortly after reading this delightful debut I was lucky enough to spend the day with the author and a 2k9 event at Anderson's Bookshop.  Visit Fran's website to see a blurbs of praise, get insider information and more.

It's about trains and troubles, boys, uncles, dads, and friends, all woven into the fabric of strong family traditions. Short vignettes of Jimmy Cannon's life leave the reader wanting to know more about the characters in this West Virginia town where men live and die by the railroad. Slayton strikes a balance between the irresponsibility of boyhood, the importance of sticking together and the meaning of the phrase, "one good turn" in a sad, but gentle story of growing up in the shadow of an admirable parent.

I knew right away that this story would find a kindred spirit in Rosanne Parry's The Heart of a Shepherd, making a great gift for young boys in need of noble male role models, and all readers who know that with great heartbreak and bitterness comes the sweet hereafter of a memorable story.

***

September 2009: The fall lit up with a newsworthy gem.

The Last Newspaper Boy in America
by Sue Corbett
Dutton, $16.99, 9780525422051

It wasn't until September that this trio was complete and I finally read Sue Corbett's latest novel. There is a paperboy tradition in Wil David's family.  All the men have held the route Wil inherits on his 12^th birthday for as long as anyone can remember.  When things don't go as Wil had hoped we learn a lot about journalism, perseverance and the importance of community.

Corbett has created a fun story with a strong sense of place and small town pride. You'll come to lament the loss of the paperboy and rejoice in the unique and resourceful characters. I hope a few teachers will pick this one up, finding it a please-all for both boys and girls, with nods to books and literature, science and math, art, and photography.

While the overarching theme here is journalistic ethics, you'll find a great set of admirable male characters.  From our young hero himself, to his brothers, or the fathers and grandfathers before them,  family traditions are alive and well.

The Final Word:  Read any one of these (or all three!) and rest assured that there are authors out there writing complex and admirable male characters for you and your children.

– Angela K Sherrill
57th Street Books

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
by Terry Teachout
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | 9780151010899 | $30 | Dec 2009

A thorough examination of the life of a music legend and American cultural icon, this story is how one man overcame an enormous amount of personal challenges and societal obstacles, to become who he was meant to be: one of the most original, inspiring entertainers of a generation.

A music history education in one life, Louis Armstrong defined a new style of music in his own likeness. By sticking to what he enjoyed doing most, playing and singing music from the core of who he was, he set a standard that inspired innumerable musicians and listeners alike.

There were many critics along the way during Armstrong's decades' long career. In the end, however, there is no other jazz musician who has achieved the level of admiration and respect for his dedication to his craft. Equally, no other musician has ever left behind a collection of letters, recordings, and documents detailing life in the recording studio, on the road, in the movies, and on TV, as he did.

Author Terry Teachout says in the afterword,

"...this is surprisingly, the first fully sourced biography of Armstrong to be written by an author who is also a trained musician." It is a narrative biography, not scholarly, but interpretive of a life well documented by academic scholars. Additionally, Teachout had access to a wealth of archival material previously unavailable to biographers."

Poet Philip Larkin said of Armstrong, "It is already accepted -- or if it isn't, it soon will be -- that Louis Armstrong was an enormously important cultural figure in our century, more important than Picasso in my opinion, but certainly quite comparable," and further, "an artist of Flaubertian purity, and a character of exceptional warmth and goodness."

For music lovers, those interested in American culture and general entertainment, Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong will be the standard bearer for years to come.

***

The Pat Metheny Interviews
by Richard Niles
Hal Leonard Publishing Corp. | 9781423474692 | $19.99 | Oct 2009

The Pat Metheny Interviews is an insightfully revealing dialogue between American jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny and Richard Niles, a renowned recording artist, composer, producer and songwriter; a proverbial eavesdropping on a conversation between two long-time friends and musicians.

Richard Niles first met Pat Metheny at Berklee College of Music in 1974. It's hard to imagine that Metheny would take the time and discuss his thoughts on his long career with anyone other than a close friend, given his admitted self-criticism and intense working schedule. As a reader, and a fan from the beginning, I am glad he did. Drawn from a series of interviews Niles made with Metheny on several occasions for a three-part series that originally aired on the BBC in 2007 titled Pat Metheny – Bright Size Life.

Metheny is a rare exception in the contemporary music scene. He is an artist who has had a long recording and touring career, continuing to attract and maintain a large and devoted audience for over thirty years. In The Pat Metheny Interviews, Metheny discusses his need for finding his own means of musical expression through composition. He details his dedication to practicing, his musical inspirations, the issues of sound and melody, addresses jazz as a genre, among other topics. What separates him from many other talented musicians, he attributes to his razor-like focus on what he wanted to do with his playing and knowing how he wanted to go about it from a very early age.

Informal in tone, the question and answer format is mostly easy to follow, even when it gets into discussions of abstract concepts. There are a few sections of musician lingo and music theory references that only musicians might appreciate. One of my personal favorite passages comes from the chapter on melody, wherein there is a discussion of the biological and physical responses to music:

“My favorite way of describing this [responses to music and melody] is that music is actually this gigantic mistake that we’re not actually supposed to know about. That in our sense of the universe around us there’s these tiny little crack that give us a window into everything that we can’t possibly understand because we’re not equipped to understand those things, because we don’t have the tools for them. . . . But somehow music seeps into those cracks and it’s something that reminds us or indicates to us these unperceivable things that are in fact around us all the time. I tend to think of music as something that’s an incredible variation, away from the rest of most human experiences. For that reason I value it even more.”

Interspersed are entries from some of the musicians Metheny has performed with during his career such as Gary Burton, John Patitucci, Lyle Mays, and Jack DeJohnette. Photographs included portray his teenaged years of playing gigs around Kansas City, record company portraits, and tour pictures.

An engaging examination of an enduring musical artist, The Pat Metheny Interviews, is a unique gift of insights from this expressive guitarist and composer.

***

Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues
by William Ferris
University of North Carolina Press | 9780807833254 | $35 | Oct 2009

[Editor's note: We've already featured Give My Poor Heart Ease on my3books earlier this year, so instead of a third full-blown writeup, Teresa would prefer to point you to another book blogger who wrote quite passionately about Give My Poor Heart Ease.]

Check out this beautifully-written review of Give My Poor Heart Ease on BiblioBuffet.  Blogger Nicki Leone's review of the book really captures the spirit and passion and flavor of William Ferris' lifelong pursuit of the blues and the people who make the music come alive.

Here's one short excerpt from Nicki's review to give you the flavor:

"The results of this life-long . . . well, mission doesn’t seem to be too strong a word for it . . . have been brought together into an incredibly powerful book called Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. A collection of oral histories,  the book looks at some of the people and places at the roots of blues music, starting with the churches in his own community of Rose Hill, and spreading outwards into the countryside filled with people who farmed and fished during the day and played music in the evenings, the men in the prison camps and on work detail in the cotton fields, and the men who ran the radio stations and nightclubs in the towns."

***

Resources for further exploration:

On Pops
> Pops will appear on the December 2009 Indie Next List – “Great Reads from Booksellers You Trust”
> Publishers Weekly *Starred* Review: “Teachout's portrait reminds us why we fell in love with Armstrong's music in the first place.”
> A link to the publisher's web page for the book.
> Author Terry Teachout's long-running blog About Last Night and his somewhat more recent Twitter presence. Crucial!

On The Pat Metheny Interviews
> A link to the publisher's page for the book.

 On Give My Poor Heart Ease
> The Facebook fan page for Give My Poor Heart Ease.
> UNC Press's blog & Twitter presence.
> Our linked-to book blogger Nicki Leone is a fellow bookseller-at-large (to borrow another of her phrases), and writes about books at BiblioBuffet and her own blog, Will Read For Food.

I thought it would be useful and interesting for my3books' readers to get a look at the various holiday catalogs from around the country.  Most of them are either downloadable as a big lump PDF or in small pieces.  You'll find links below to the regional associations' web sites and to the direct downloads (or online viewable editions, if downloads aren't available).

PNBA - Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
The PNBA represents bookstores in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.  Their main catalog page has links to downloads of individual pages for different categories.

SIBA - Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance
SIBA represents over 300 bookstores in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and Mississippi.  Their main catalog page has lots of information, including a link to launch an online version of the catalog.

GLIBA - Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association
Representing bookstores across the Great Lakes region of the US - Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio with member stores in other adjacent states.  Their 2009 catalog is available as a PDF download.

MBA - Midwestern Booksellers Association
The MBA is the association that represents bookstores in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, as well as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  You can download the full PDF of their 2009 catalog here.

NCIBA - Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
The NCIBA, obviously, represents booksellers in Northern California.  Their main catalog page has links to download the cover and a list of the titles featured in the catalog.

SCIBA - Southern California Independent Booksellers Association
As with NCIBA, the SCIBA is the home base for Southern California booksellers.  Their catalog has not been unveiled yet - that's their placeholder cover above.  Meanwhile, here's a list of the titles that will be featured.

MPIBA - Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association
The MPIBA covers a vast swath of the country's mountainous midsection – over 250 indie bookstores in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.  Their 2009 catalog is viewable in parts here.

NAIBA - the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association
Spread across the mid-Atlantic region of the country, member bookstores are to be found in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington DC.  You can download their complete 2009 holiday catalog here.

NEIBA - New England Independent Booksellers Association
Member bookstores in NEIBA hail from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont.  Their 2009 holiday catalog is downloadable here.