Rick Simonson

A Small Toast (end of a season)
April 21, 2008

The final sales appointments here for this long-wintered spring season were almost two weeks ago, when Actar and Taschen were done. But, buying appointments aren't really done until attendant paperwork is, and it was over a week in the doing. This past Friday then it was that a spring buying season that had started with George Carroll and Oxford on New Year's Eve, was now concluded.

A buyer friend at another store once told me she marked the end of a buying season with a raising of a glass in acknowledgement of such conclusion - I thought it apt. In my case this season, with things having started with a New Year's toast, it seemed right, on Friday, to do so at season's end.

Having done this for over twenty-five years, I have always liked it that books (most we deal with) are published in seasons. Those presented by month - mass market titles - I've always had trouble relating to. It's too short a window. The occasional use of other words: from somewhere in Bantam Doubleday-land, I once heard the wor 'span' - but never would go there. I'm a season person. 

The rhythms and cycles of a year are in there, much as we all vary and consider what seasons mean for stores in different regions, with different markets, proximities - who's affected by school terms, who gets tourist traffice, summer residents, good/bad weather, all of it. Our bookstore is by a few sports stadiums- we know when it's baseball season, or football season.

Out of curiosity, I checked this year's calendar with the past few years - things were wrapped up earlier, by mid-March, in those years. This year, I threw wrenches in the works with a few trips. And with one or two reps, there were extenuating circumstances they were dealing with. In good time, it all gets done.

In these more accelerated, a-historical times, it almost seems a major leap to remember not that long ago - twenty-some years - when reps' sales visits were much longer. A sales call included not only the front list, but usually some delivery of backlist orders. We worked off of alphabetized index cards - one would drone on and on, Penguin, Random, Dover backlists, saying '1 copy,' '2 copies,' ;1 copy,' while the rep dutifully marked an order form. There would be the stores that needed inventories (Tower) for backlists to be generated, and then there was the matter of what hotel room, or bar, a rep on a Portland  visit would be working, taking Powell's legendary 'cards' and marking backlist orders from those.

More reps were part of this, too. For another time here, the exercise that occasionally arises during a call - how many reps used to represent all the imprints that went into Random, Macmillan, Penguin, Harper, etc. It's quite the contraction.

Pre-email, or voice-mail, for that matter, there was even the setting up of appointments. Most were by phone. If you had questions as to a commission rep's lines - pre-fax - those lists might be mailed.

My marker of a season's end in those days was always the light blue postcard sent by Henry Ponleithner. From northern California, he had his own publishing company (Pacific Books), and repped Stanford and Illinois, among other lines. His typed card always had us for a 2 p.m. sales call on a Friday. We would be the last stop of his two-day Seattle visit. Sometimes he would have his tie off by then, usually not.

His timing really was end-of-season. His fall sales calls usually came the last Friday of October - as we were then almost done doing winter lists for the few (then) that had them. Better yet was spring, where Henry invariably showed up a week before we were setting off for ABA conventions.

All of this musing aside - the raising of the glass, the imbibing - better be quick. Many of the spring's books are upon us (many good ones) and, what's more, the first batch of fall catalogs. Random House, Harper, Macmillan. First appointment for the fall is in a few weeks. Once again ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on April 21, 2008 | Comments (3)