Out West Books’ titles put the right books into the right hands

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Out West Books in Grand Junction recommends three titles that, through fiction and nonfiction, revolve around finding just the right read.

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From the publisher: Evan Friss’ history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus.

“The Bookshop” is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries — including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

From Marya Johnston, owner: Reports of the demise of bookshops have been greatly exaggerated….for hundreds of years, according to Evan Friss!  I can’t tell you how many times people I’ve never seen in my life have asked me, “How’s business?” with a tone that expects a doom and gloom answer.  I’ve never been able to mollify their dark curiosity.  Bookshops aren’t only surviving, we’re thriving!  There have been 730 new independent bookstores in the U.S. in the last five years! 

To this end, Friss’ delightful book details the resurgence of the industry and bookselling’s traditions and culture, including the labor, speculation, financial insanity and joy that are involved in putting the right books into the hands of the right people. The public just feels differently about book stores than, for example, the grocery store.  In what other line of business can you change the course of a life by suggesting the perfect book? In what other store can you have a conversation about your new favorite read with a like-minded stranger?

This easy-to-read history of the bookshop from its earliest iteration in the 1700s, and its first booksellers, including Benjamin Franklin, to current times and our most well known bookshops and booksellers will keep you highly entertained. It’s a love letter to booksellers, bookshops and well, readers.

A quote from Roger Mifflin from the book: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.”

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From the publisher: Zoe Ziakas enjoys a quiet life, working as a librarian in her quaint New England town. When a mysterious black book with an unbreakable latch is delivered to the library, Zoe has a strange feeling the tome is somehow calling to her. She decides to consult the Museum of Literature, home to volumes of indecipherable secrets, some possessing dark magic that must be guarded.

Here, among their most dangerous collection, the Books of Dubious Origin, Zoe discovers that she is the last descendant of a family of witches and this little black book is their grimoire. Zoe knows she must decode the family’s spell book and solve the mystery of what happened to her mother and her grandmother. However, the book’s potential power draws all things magical to it, and Zoe finds herself under the constant watch of a pesky raven, while being chased by undead Vikings, ghost pirates, and assorted ghouls.

With assistance from the eccentric staff of the Books of Dubious Origin department — including their annoyingly smart and handsome containment specialist, Jasper Griffin — Zoe must confront her past and the legacy of her family.

From Didi Herald, bookseller: About five years ago I ran across the idea of li-fi in a children’s book (“What We Found In the Corn Maze and How it Saved a Dragon” by Henry Clark) where a character claimed librarian/library fiction was attractive to librarians — so if writers included librarian characters, then librarians would buy copies and talk about their books.

McKinlay does an amazing job of depicting librarians and libraries, from the small town library where Zoe works to the arcane and well guarded BODO library hidden within the Museum of Literature in Manhattan. Books in this combination of fantasy, mystery, and romance are not passive clumps of paper sitting on a shelf. The book that first hunted Zoe down in the library and later shows up at her home tries to manipulate her in her sleep to open it up, while another book serves as a prison for a practitioner of dark magic. 

This smart, fast paced novel combines the mystery of what happened to Zoe’s grandmother and to her mother who had abandoned her with a strong good vs. evil conflict and an abundance of imaginative, menacing, undead characters. This is the kind of escapist reading that keeps a reader reading.

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From the publisher: Nancy has just about given up on finding her special person when Jack Jackson — big, scary and the town loser — walks into her bookstore. He’s desperate for help in the romance department. After a bit of gentle persuasion, he finally accepts her guidance in securing his dream girl. Practice dates, lessons in tenderness — you name it, she can teach it.

There’s just one problem: He’s actually the demonic son of Satan, from the deepest depths of Hell. He’s spent his entire long underlife dragging evildoers to their fates, while really trying not to live up to his dad’s expectations.

He needs to become a better man to win over the woman he’s been cosmically bound to, in a “Beauty and the Beast”-style pact. Luckily for him, Nancy may well be the witch she’s always tried to pretend she wasn’t. She can save him, he knows it — and she’s starting to know it, too. Even if every day spent with him is an agonizing reminder that she isn’t the girl he’s fated for.

From Didi Herald, bookseller: I always feel an obligation in October to read something seasonal (Halloweenish) but horror novels give me nightmares so I look for my ghosts, vampires, or witches in the romance category. This year I found a romantic hero who is a demon, the spawn of the devil who sounds pretty icky to begin with. He is a different kind of hero — chivalrous, kind, thoughtful, radically muscular, and when excited he explodes into a horned demonic monster. He even smells like cigarette smoke. 

The bookselling heroine shares the problem common to booksellers and librarians of never wanting anyone to go without the book they really need or want which sends her to Jack’s horror show house and puts her in hellish danger, to which she is pretty much oblivious. This humorous, hot romance is endearingly unique with characters who aren’t gorgeous or rich or super successful. Instead, they are kind, generous, helpful, determined, goal driven and willing to face down eternal fire to help another find love.

Type of Story: Review

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