Draw The Dark
by Ilsa J. Bick
Carolhroda Books / Lerner | 9780761381310 | $9.95 | Sept 2011
John Mesjak on September 12, 2011 People
by Blexbolex
Enchanted Lion Books / Consortium | 9781592701100 | $19.95 | Sept 2011
I've previously written an entire post about Blexbolex, and People, but this new trailer really does a great job of capturing some of the juxtapositions and the beauty of Blexbolex's style.
John Mesjak on May 2, 2011 Enchanted Lion Books makes such lovely books, and works with such talented artists, that it can be hard to appreciate in the moment – as I'm working with my store buyers – just how great each of their books will turn out. Sometimes, because many of their books need to be translated from other languages, the sales materials I see before I start selling a season of books can be ... works-in-progress. Or, as was the case with 2010's Seasons by Blexbolex, almost nonexistent.
But once the the finished books come in, we reps notice! And the buyers notice. And reviewers notice. And awards committees notice!
The timing for this fall's season of books could not be better – some of the ELB titles were held back briefly in the US so that finished books would be ready before we start selling. So I've already had a chance to take a close look at one of the new books on their upcoming list, and I love it!
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People
by Blexbolex
Enchanted Lion Books / Consortium | 9781592701100 | $19.95 | Sept 2011
Seasons
by Blexbolex
Enchanted Lion Books / Consortium | 9781592700950 | $19.95 | Apr 2010
I Know How To Cook
by Ginette Mathiot
Phaidon Books | 9780714857367 | $49.95 | Oct 2009
Blexbolex is the pen name of French illustrator Bernard Granger. His art style draws on a retro-hip sort of old fashioned illustration: human figures and structures are reduced to super-simple shapes and colors that cause his images to pop out of the sparsely filled pages.
He is perhaps best known to American audiences for his design work & illustrations in Phaidon's 2009 edition of the French cookbook classic, I Know How To Cook. (Check out some interior illustrations at this Design Sponge post.)
In 2010, Enchanted Lion Books brought out the English language edition of Seasons (first published in France in 2009). As I intimated above, at the time I was selling this book with early page samples, I didn't fully understand how lovely the book would turn out to be, or how wonderful Blexbolex's art would be in a full-length book setting. (A book trailer for Seasons is available here on YouTube.)
In Seasons, as in the upcoming English language edition of his award-winning People (published in 2008 as L'Imagier des gens), a single image fills most pages with a word caption at the top. For me, the magic in these two books lie in the way Blexbolex pairs the two facing page images. Sometimes there is a direct logical link between the two images, and sometimes they are merely neighbors – unrelated but still fascinating.
Seasons was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2010, and School Library Journal chose it as one of their Best Books of the Year.
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In People, Blexbolex has upped his game. Most of the paired images through the book contain some linkage – the early pages match Man/Woman, Couple/Bachelor, Mother/Baby. But as the book continues, the images of people move into life choices, situational comedy, and subtle social observations.
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The visual echo of the microscope and the telescope on this page made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it. The same goes for the Cowboy / Actor echoes. And don't even get me started on Nudist / Invisible Man. BRILLIANT.
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This book is great for so many different audiences, young and old, but the humor and the witty sophistication of the images' subtext makes it perfect for adults looking for something new for their coffee table. I can't wait to share this book with my buyers.
FURTHER READING & RESEARCH:
Enchanted Lion Books: web site
John Mesjak on April 28, 2011 The oh-so-clever editorial conceit here at my3books is to write about things in threes, and I'm sure that if I cast my mind back to a couple of years ago when I registered the domain, I'll be able to hear an echo of the smug chuckle in my brain.
But sometimes I feel a little constrained by that format when all I want to write about is one damn fine book and not worry about the editorial straitjacket that I've zipped myself into.
So here goes – a post about ONE damn fine book.
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This Is Us: The New All-American Family
by David Marin
Exterminating Angel Press / Consortium | 9781935259343 | $16.95 | Sept 2011
The book opens with a scene that could have been borrowed from the movie GIANT – the one at the end where Rock Hudson's character, Bick Benedict, and Liz Taylor's character, Leslie Benedict, take their Mexican daughter-in-law Juana and their mixed race granddaughter to Sarge's Diner. Sarge does his thing about not serving Latinos, Bick stands up for a table of Mexicans, and then Sarge and Rock Hudson have a diner-trashing fistfight.
In this version of that scene, the prologue to This Is US (which you can read on Exterminating Angel's web site) David Marin and his three adopted children stop at a Highway 101 diner in Santa Barbara County, where they're eyed with suspicion by the staff and customers. It's not that he's a single man with three kids under 10 who might disturb their meals. The problem is that he's a single white man with three kids who are obviously of Mexican heritage.
Why is he there? Why does he have these kids with him? To the eyes of everyone in the diner, something is not right.
Someone calls the Highway Patrol, and on their way out of the restaurant, Marin and his family are stopped by a CHP trooper. He tells Marin that the caller was worried that something "inappropriate" was going on, and though the question seems innocent enough, if insulting, the paternalism masks an uglier side, an unstated but all-too-clear racism. The inappropriate "something" is that a white man has three Latino kids with him and that's just not right.
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As you start this long journey with David Marin, you need to prepare yourself to be immersed in some new worlds: the world of California's adoption system (which Marin clearly believes is quite broken), the world of how we think about and treat the immigrants who come to our country, and the world of a man who simply decided that he was ready to have a family, even if he didn't yet have a wife or partner to start that family with him.
I read this book in a flash – maybe two days? – and as I read, I kept swinging from shock and outrage on Marin's behalf as he navigates the crazily complicated mazes of foster care, child protective services, and adoption law to overwhelming sentiment as he writes about his first months with his three amazing and resilient new children.
It's enough to close here with a paragraph from the back of the book:
"[Marin's] journey, and the deeply moving story behind the children's lives, proves once again that love is colorblind, that fathers love their children as much as mothers do, and that families like his – happy, loving, secure, and multi-ethnic – represent our single greatest hope."
I'm looking forward to talking about this book with all my booksellers this summer, and watching the splash it makes in the national discussion when it comes out this fall.
FURTHER READING & RESEARCH:
John Mesjak on January 6, 2011 
Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge
Small Beer Press (Consortium) | 9781931520102 | $16 | Jan 2011
I know it's early in 2011, but I got a finished copy today of a newly reissued book that has one of the most perfectly-apt covers I can recall. Best cover of the year? Maybe it's too soon to call, and probably a bit hyperbolic. But still. Check it out!
You can read a sample first chapter at author Kelley Eskridge's web site.
When I first read the manuscript of this reissue edition, I was just blown away. There are three distinct sections to the book, and each one has its own flavor and energy – all adding up to a dark but wonderfully described future. It was absolutely one of my favorite novels from the Fall 2010 Consortium catalog.
Here's a snippet of catalog-y descriptors from Small Beer Press:
"Jackal Segura is a Hope: born to responsibility and privilege as a symbol of a fledgling world government. Soon she’ll become part of the global administration, sponsored by the huge corporation that houses, feeds, employs, and protects her and everyone she loves. Then, just as she discovers that everything she knows is a lie, she becomes a pariah, a murderer: a person with no community and no future. Grief-stricken and alone, she is put into an experimental program designed to inflict the experience of years of solitary confinement in a few short months: virtual confinement in a sealed cell within her own mind. Afterward, branded and despised, she returns to a world she no longer knows. Struggling to make her way, she has a chance to rediscover her life, her love, and her soul—in a strange place of shattered hopes and new beginnings called Solitaire."
Harper Eos published Solitaire back in 2002, and it's been OP for a couple years at least. Somehow I missed it entirely the first time around. Luckily, Small Beer Press has stepped into the breach to bring us a beautiful new edition of a modern deserves-to-be-classic.
FURTHER READING & RESEARCH:
Booksellers can order Solitaire from Small Beer's distributor (who I represent): Consortium Book Sales & Distribution: homepage | twitter | Solitaire @ CBSD
Individuals can find Solitaire in bookstores everywhere, and presumably in ebook formats everywhere too, though my favorite source of ebooks has to be Small Beer's homegrown storefront, Weightless Books – source of DRM-free editions of their own books as well as a clutch of other cool indie publishers' books: homepage | new book update via RSS | Solitaire @ Weightless
Author Kelley Eskridge can be found online here: homepage | blog | twitter
She and her partner, author Nicola Griffith, also own Sterling Editing, an editorial & authorial consultancy for writers.
John Mesjak on September 14, 2010 
In the bookselling and publishing world, there are endless opportunities to make new friends. After all, we're always going to conferences and trade shows, hanging out in bookstores, and we definitely like our cocktails, and we're never at a loss for something to say when we meet a fellow traveller. You just ask, "What are you reading?" and you're off and running.
But every so often, you run across someone in our world who, though they're new to you, has almost exactly the same worldview, the same kind of tastes in authors, maybe even a similar job history. It feels like this new person was running along a parallel track with you all along and you never knew it. And when you meet, there are no barriers, no initial awkwardness. You just click.
It was that way with David Thompson. I started out working in bookstores, spending a good deal of time with mysteries, and I eventually made my way to the publishing side. David seems to have spent his entire career making friends and wowing customers at Murder By The Book in Houston. He's beloved by bookstore customers, authors, and publishers.
When he saw too many great mysteries that weren't selling strongly enough to be supported by the big guys were going out of print, he started up his own indie publishing company, Busted Flush Press, so he could help rescue those OP books from his favorite writers, and help spread the word about deserving new authors, too. And so he ended up in publishing.
I don't think David ever took a publishing course, or bothered to learn how he was "supposed" to run a publishing company. From my perspective, he just went and did it. And he was a natural. I'm sure that his friends in Houston, and his wife McKenna, saw just how hard it was for him to juggle both jobs, but from my somewhat distanced point of view, he made it all look so easy.
We would exchange tweets and emails about upcoming books, share ideas for some bookstore promotions for his new releases, talk about our favorite authors. At trade shows and sales conferences, I started to look for David as a highlight of my time spent on the job. I eagerly awaited news of what each new Busted Flush Press season would bring.
The saddest part for all of us about losing a friend like David so soon is that we've all lost the chance to spend many more years with him. My particular sadness comes from knowing that we'd only just begun to be friends.
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