Print book sales rise, but there's a downside -- May 6, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Vice President Kamala Harris visited an independent bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, Wednesday and bought four books.

She’d been wanting to read them, “and I’m going to find time to do it,” she said, according to a pool report.

Many of us share the aspiration. Just that morning, I had vowed, again, to find time to buy and read books.

One of the few upsides of the pandemic has been an uptick in print book sales. Sales of print books rose 8.2% in 2020 over 2019, according to NPD BookScan.

Much of the increase came as parents adjusted to remote learning and bought juvenile nonfiction books. The category was up 23% in unit sales year to year, Publishers Weekly reported.

Adult fiction sales rose 6% over 2019, led by a 29% increase in graphic novels.

But the news about bookstores isn’t as rosy. Many had to close temporarily during shutdowns, and dozens of bookstores shuttered permanently. Bookstore sales were down 28% in 2020 from 2019, according to the Census Bureau.

We all know it’s cheap and fast to buy books online from a certain retail behemoth, and during the pandemic we often didn’t have much choice but to shop online.

Now, though, with businesses reopening, we have a choice. It’s inspiring to see prominent politicians take the time to support reading and local bookshops.

“There is nothing that I enjoy more, or I think is more nourishing, than being able to just walk into a bookstore run by people who love books and love reading,” former President Barack Obama has said.

Obama has long championed indie bookstores. When his first book was published, Politics & Prose in Washington offered him a reading, and a couple dozen customers showed up.

His latest, “A Promised Land,” was the Number One political title last year with more than 2.5 million copies sold. Several Republican candidates and elected officials also had bestsellers last year.

 As president, Obama often shopped locally with his daughters, leaving with a stack of books.

Last December, he shared his 17 favorite titles of the year. Last month, around Independent Bookstore Day, he virtually visited six bookstores around the country.

“Each night, I’d have a stack of briefing papers and speeches to review and notes about economic issues or foreign policy issues. It would take me two or three hours every night to plow through that stuff,” he said in a video conversation with the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss.

“But the time I was done, it was pretty late. . . But I’m a night owl, and what I found was that having 45 minutes to an hour to be able to read something for me. . . helped to reset me and also helped to extend my perspective beyond the narrow set of headaches that were staring me in the face.”

Obama found fiction helped him connect with people. He advises President Joe Biden to “read whatever nourishes his soul,” adding “That’s going to be different things for different people.”

On her visit to the bookstore, Harris bought three novels and a cookbook. The novels were “Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead, “The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner, and “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett. “Simply Julia,” by Julia Turshen has recipes for “healthy comfort food.”

I spend a lot of time reading newspapers (always a good thing), magazines and the Internet – but lately I’ve missed the longer commitment of books.

I started “Middlemarch” by George Eliot, which I’d read, sort of, in high school. Everyone says it’s much better read later in life. Perhaps too much was going on in mine to focus on a sprawling 19^th century novel – even if written by one of the greatest English authors of all time – but it remains on my bedside table.

A good thing about books is they stay around until you’re ready for them.

So, I walked to my local indie bookstore, which has reopened in a new, larger location. It was lovely to let the books call out to me again, and I brought home a first novel I knew nothing about.

I intend to find the time to read it. What about you? Have you visited an independent bookstore? What are you reading?

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Love story: Book festivals bring readers, writers together -- Sept. 15, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

We think of reading as a solitary pastime, but it’s often social and cultural as well.

Who wants to talk about a great book? Just about everybody, as the explosion of book clubs in recent years attests.

Bring writers into the conversation, and you have a book fair. Add more readers and writers, and it’s a book festival.

About 75 book fairs and festivals are now held in 43 states. More than 120 authors and illustrators and upwards of 100,000 people are expected to throng the 15^th annual National Book Festival on Sept. 24 in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital.

Stephen King, whose books have sold an amazing 350 million copies worldwide, is the festival’s marquee draw. If you didn’t snag a free ticket for his sold-out appearance, you can still visit with big names.

No tickets are required for the other speakers, who, unlike King, will sign their books. Among them: filmmaker Ken Burns, journalist Bob Woodward and authors from at least seven foreign countries.

The celebration surrounding the opening of the Museum of African American History and Culture the same day likely will extend to the festival, where the roster includes basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, television producer Shonda Rhimes and novelist Colson Whitehead.

In addition, many readers may see Carla Hayden, the new Librarian of Congress for the first time. Hayden, the first African American and the first woman in the position, was sworn in Wednesday.

Free and with programs for all ages, the national festival is the legacy of first lady Laura Bush, a former librarian with the lifelong mission of inspiring people to read.  

In November, the Texas Book Festival, which Bush started when she was first lady of Texas, will mark its 20^th anniversary. She and the Library of Congress launched the national festival in 2001, just three days before the horrors of 9/11.

Bush didn’t invent book fairs, of course, but she did popularize them for modern readers.

Book fairs got their first 20^th century boost in 1919, when a Chicago department store held Book Week. One hundred thousand customers poured into the store to shake hands with 14 authors and buy books from 60 publishers, Bernadine Clark wrote in “Fanfare for Words,” a 1991 history of book fairs published by the Library of Congress.

The Miami Book Fair started in 1984 and the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in 1989. The Tennessee festival takes place Oct. 14 through 16.

In Virginia, the Fall for the Book festival, sponsored by George Mason University, runs Sept. 25 to 30, and the Virginia Festival of the Book is next set for March in Charlottesville. The 2017 Alabama Book Festival will be held in April in Montgomery.

Festivals are quick-hit gatherings for readers and writers, but the nation’s first, permanent celebration of American writers past and present is in the works. The American Writers Museum is under construction on the second floor of an office tower in downtown Chicago and plans to open in March.

The idea for the museum came from Ireland, where the Dublin Writers Museum honors great Irish writers. In this country, the writers museum will fill a void, says Jim Leach, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“We collect in central points the artifacts of civilization and honor politicians and soldiers, athletes, artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, but we neglect our writers,” Leach said in a statement on the museum’s website.

It probably won’t surprise anyone that Laura Bush is among those supporting the writers museum.

Like the Texas and national book festivals and literary events around the country, the new museum will “celebrate writers of every era, every genre and every race,” she says in a video, and “inspire everyone to fall in love with reading and writing.”

I hope she’s right.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Read now, live longer -- and more good news about books -- Aug. 18, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A young woman walking in my neighborhood the other morning had her eyes not on her phone, playing Pokémon Go, but on the page of a book.

“Must be a good book,” I said as we passed, catching a glimpse of the cover. “Oh, it is!” she assured me.

It was a romance novel – but no judging. It cheered me immensely to see a millennial so engrossed in a physical book that she couldn’t bear to put it down.

Evidently, she’s not alone. There’s good news, finally, about books. We can stop writing the obituary for the physical book.

Retail sales at bookstores were up 6.1 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the first six months of last year, according to the Census Bureau.  

And 2015 was healthy too, with bookstore sales up 2.5 percent over 2014, the first annual increase since 2007, Publishers Weekly reports.

Spurring sales in 2015 was the No. 1 bestseller “Go Set a Watchman,” Harper Lee’s first book since “To Kill a Mockingbird.” People had been waiting 55 years.

This year’s presidential election has juiced bookstores with political tomes. The top four non-fiction books on this week’s New York Times best seller list are anti-Clinton or anti-progressive. 

Physical books outsold ebooks last year for the second consecutive year, with revenue from hardbacks up 8 percent, the Association of American Publishers reported last month in its annual survey.

People are also listening to more books. Revenues from downloaded audio books have nearly doubled since 2012, the publishers’ survey found.

Even more surprising in the era of modernistic temples to Apple: Dusty, used bookshops are a hot new retail venue. Among the cities where used bookshops are making a comeback are New York, Washington and Richmond, Va., according to news reports.

“There’s a used bookstore renaissance going on in New York City right now,” Benjamin Friedman, co-owner of a bookstore café in Queens, told The Wall Street Journal, whose reporter Anne Kadet last month counted more than 30 used bookshops in the city, and more than 50 when she included rare-book dealers.

For me, few pastimes are more enjoyable than browsing books, new or used, in bookstores. I recently was in a used bookstore in Staunton, Va., where an old – make that classic -- jazz record was playing on a turntable. Perfect!

If “vinyl” can be cool, why not books with paper pages? The White House said President Barack Obama took five books with him on vacation.

For the first time, The New York Times devoted a special section of the full-sized paper to an excerpt from the acclaimed new novel, “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, and said it was the first of an occasional series of long excerpts from new books.

“Though we are excited by innovations like virtual reality and digital storytelling, we also recognize the lasting power of the broadsheet,” the editor wrote. The section was “a special ink-on-paper product, one not available in digital form. It is finite and tactile; to read it you must have gotten your hands on the Sunday paper.”

Think about that. The Times made something available only in the newspaper, making paper more valuable than digital. Brilliant.

Here’s another bit of good news about books: People who read books live longer than those who don’t, a Yale study reports.

The study of 3,635 people 50 and older over 12 years found that book readers lived longer than non-book readers. Those who read books for three-and-a-half hours a week or more – half an hour a day -- lived on average almost two years longer than those who didn’t read books or just read newspapers and magazines.

Reading books promotes “deep reading,” engaging the brain more than newspapers or magazines do, and can foster empathy and other traits that lead to greater survival, Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade and Becca R. Levy wrote in their study, “A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity.”

“We also found that any book reading gives a survival advantage over no book reading,” Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale, said in an email.

There’s never been a better time to crack open a book – and you may live longer to read more.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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