Harry Potter continued

Well, the book gods were kind. Out of about six hundred copies we've sold (the first printing was twelve million copies, of which nine million sold the first weekend--oy!), only nine defective copies have come back to us so far. As the books were packed ten to a carton, my guess is we just had one bad carton, and that tenth book is still out there. Slow reader, maybe.

Or maybe he or she is thinking that, like the famous upside-down postage stamp that sold at auction for millions of dollars, that defective Harry Potter is going to be worth a fortune.

Could be right.

The bidding starts at $60. Get 'em while they last.

Bad to the Bone

Every year we do a Tour de France window display at the bookstore, with a few Lance Armstrong books, a Michelin guide or two, my favorite cycling novel (more on that later), a stray Campagnolo part or two from my closet, and a whiteboard that I update every day with race results. Mainly we do it because I'm a bike geek, but it's also true that our neighborhood is big on bike racing. Even now, in the post-Lance era, people still tell us that they follow the race in our front window.

Of course, this Tour has been a rough one for cycling fans--Alexandre Vinokourov, the pre-race favorite, thrown out for doping, and his whole team for good measure; then Michael Rasmussen, the actual leader, fired by his team (for doping-related lies) just when he had all but clinched the yellow jersey; and a number of small fry ejected as well. I had to get out the red marker and cross Vino and Rasmussen ("The Chicken") off my leader board.

You hear some people saying "The Tour is dead." But that's bullshit. As rider Christian Vande Velde put it, "Cycling will always be a beautiful sport no matter how many people disgrace it." The transition to clean competition will be tough, but cycling at least is being forced to tackle the challenge while other sports are still in denial.

Now it's true, doping is a venerable tradition in cycling. The French champion Jacques Anquetil, a five-time Tour winner, when asked if he'd ever doped, replied "Only when it was absolutely necessary;" and when asked how often that was, said "Almost all the time." And when Englishman Tom Simpson died from amphetamine use on a Tour stage, a statue was erected to honor the event. Little mixed message there?

The doping thing, as I see it, fits in with a certain masochistic strain in cycling. It's just not a feel-good sport. You'll frequently hear riders talk about races, or even training rides, in terms of "suffering" and "pain." The covers of cycling magazines typically feature the hero of the day sweating and grimacing as though his limbs were being torn off. And of course, it's common to see riders crash in a race, then ride on with broken bones or with blood streaming off their body. If sports were Shakespeare plays, cycling would be King Lear or Hamlet.

It's this dark and twisted spirit that animates my favorite bike racing novel, Bad to the Bone by James Waddington. (OK, there aren't a ton of bike racing novels to choose from, but still.) Told in a cheerfully snarky voice (think Nick Hornby on exogenous testosterone), the book is laced with authentic detail--you can tell that Waddington's gotten a close-up view of cycling's underbelly. But it's also wildly imaginative, almost surreal in places, a nightmare vision of the drug-sodden lunacy of the Tour de France.

Waddington keeps the reader enjoyably off-balance: it's a farce, it's horror, it's a mystery... but whichever, absorbing fun. There's a Spanish rider who suddenly, inexplicably, has awesome form; a more than sinister team manager with a suitcase full of something very nasty; a mutilated corpse or two, riders murdered in scenes fraught with Christian symbolism; a philosophical, borderline incompetent police detective; and a gut-wrenching, mindbendingly improbable finish.

Though only a little more improbable than this year's race.

Harry Potter and the Defective Hallows Part I

It all went surprisingly well. Our Potter Party planners shopped like crazy people, lettered signs in silver paint, made elf wine, and strung a line of golden snitches across the bookstore; the sales clerks heroically didn't call in sick; the kids showed up in their black robes and nerdy glasses; upper management (despite lingering back injuries) hauled umpteen boxes of books up the stairs.

Unpleasant incidents were few. A couple of customers tried to bribe us to get their books ahead of the publisher's draconian 12:00:01 a.m. on-sale time. There was some confusion over whether one gentleman had ordered the CD version of the book or the cassette version. Some slutty little witches showed up, doing marketing for a Harry Potter game that you play on your cell phone. A dispute arose over the proper color of elf wine.

But then it was time to sell books. Or in the case of people who'd prepaid, to hand out books. At midnight, the line for prepaids stretched the length of the store. Three minutes later, the line was gone, a slight breeze ruffled the crepe paper decorations, and we had a pile of empty white cartons at the information desk. The other line, for procrastinators and spur-of-the moment types ("Hey, honey, look, they're selling the Harry Potter book!"), straggled haphazardly out the front door onto the sidewalk. I'm sure we didn't sell as many books as some other stores, but it was certainly more than we're accustomed to selling after midnight on a Friday night. Our last customer was a uniformed SFPD officer who tapped on the door at a few minutes to one.

Saturday morning a new line had formed outside the door by the time we opened. Sales varied from brisk to crazed all day long. We started to worry about running out of books. The kids book buyer from corporate told us to keep our shirts on and she'd take care of us. I couldn't get the count to come out right, but I found another fifty books, so we knew we were at least going to make it through Saturday. At about eight p.m., three hours from closing, we passed our sales goal for the week (with one day left to go!) Very sweet. I threw some printouts in my bookbag and got ready to head home.

That's when the call came. One of our staff members. She'd bought three copies of the book the night before. All of them, she reported, were missing pages 675-706. Not torn or cut out, not blank, just missing, absent, not there. WTF?

Well, it happens. Publishers make mistakes. When the previous Harry Potter book came out, someone up in Canada or somewhere found some that were printed upside down. Flukey, weird, maybe a collector's item, but not so unusual really. Still... I remembered now that I'd seen a copy at the sales counter with a note in it--"Damaged."

Not, in fact, damaged. Defective. (I have not ever been able to get this distinction across to everyone in the store.) Publisher defective. Missing pages 675-706.

At this point, belatedly I'm sure you'll agree, the full implications struck me. We'd sold hundreds of these books. How many of them had this nasty, almost certainly fatal birth defect? (The story I heard later was that our staff member's brother read one of the defective copies through from cover to cover without noticing the thirty missing pages, but surely that's not right.) More importantly, how long would it take our customers to reach the Big Freaking Gap, and how long after that before they headed back to the bookstore? Gruesome possibility--if enough of them brought the book back the next day, could we actually go into the red for that day--and sink back UNDER our weekly sales goal?

Too embarrassing to contemplate.

Iraq and the Other George

If you only read one book about the Middle East, it should be A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. The public conversation about the Iraq war, and the problems of the wider region, seldom covers anything that happened before Sept. 11, 2001 (or, at a stretch, the First Gulf War.) But in fact, today's troubles have their roots in the First World War and the peace imposed by the European powers at its end. Fromkin traces the lineage of the conflicts with great clarity and surprising verve.

It's a complex narrative, full of epic characters (Lawrence of Arabia; Winston Churchill; Feisal and Ibn Saud, the rivals for the throne of Arabia; David Lloyd George, the ruthlessly imperialistic British prime minister; Woodrow Wilson; Chaim Weizmann and the other founders of the state of Israel; the French prime minister Clemenceau; Gertrude Bell, the godmother of Iraq) and cataclysmic themes (the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rising conflict between Arabs and Jews, the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the European powers). But suffice it to say that in redrawing the map of the Middle East to suit their own purposes, with little understanding of or regard for the desires of its inhabitants, the British and French lit long-burning fuses throughout the area. Fromkin is calm and deft in pointing out the results of their hubris, and it's a lesson that could have been useful; this is the book George W. Bush should have read before he invaded Iraq.

AKA Gandalf, AKA Dumbledore

I do not blame J.R.R. Tolkien. I do not blame J.K. Rowling. Not really. Well, maybe a little, in the way that you blame people for doing things they have every right to do, like being ahead of you in the grocery store check-out line with a shopping basket full of produce that the clerk doesn't know the codes for.

Really, I suppose, it started with the Lord of the Rings movies, but I don't blame Ian McKellen either. It's not his fault he looks a lot like me (shared Scottish ancestry.) With the movie, as with all major movies these days, the publisher reissued the book with new covers showing scenes from the film. When the new book arrived in our bookstore, it arrived in large numbers, with a cardboard display stand. With the cardboard display stand came an almost full-size--I mean like five feet tall--cardboard image (I think they call it a standee) of Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Grey robes, beard, long hair, staff, elven ring. Gandalf.

Apparently he looked like me. Not that I have the beard or the grey robes--just the long hair, and seemingly the same bewildered expression that the standee wore. Some of my fellow employees couldn't help pointing this out. Some of them pointed it out more than once. In an affectionate way, of course.

Fast forward to the present. The publication of the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is imminent. Like almost every bookstore in the country, we're having a Harry Potter party on the eve of the release date, so we can start selling the book at midnight. Food and drink, games, activities (make your own wand! read the crystal ball!), door prizes, trivia contests, costumes...

Costumes. The kids dress up as their favorite characters from the books. It's scary how good the costumes are. The store staff dress up too... well, those of them who can be convinced to do it. You can see where is going.

I haven't read the books (maybe I'll get around to them after I finish Finnegan's Wake and Gravity's Rainbow) but it seems there's this wizard named Dumbledore. It seems I resemble him. A lot. A five-year-old was the first to point this out. Much to the glee of my co-workers.

So the question is... will I dress up as Dumbledore for the party? Will I emcee the divination lottery? Will I read the strange wizardly words that Dumbledore would read?

If I've learned anything in my centuries as a wizard, it's that attempting to predict the future is risky at best. So I won't try to answer those questions. What will happen Friday night, will happen. But I will say this: I wouldn't be much of a wizard if I didn't have the ability to make myself invisible.

Moving Books

I moved not long ago, from a place that was way too big for me to a place that was way too small... from a clipper ship to a tiny sloop. In the clipper ship, you had your choice of places to toss things... in the sloop, everything has to be stowed carefully in its proper spot, or you will a) stumble over it b) block your access to something else you'll need sooner, or c) be embarrassed when guests squeeze in and are forced to sit on it.

As for most book people, the issue was not furniture or clothes or kitchen equipment; who can afford that crap? The issue was 60 boxes of books. (Not as bad as I'd feared, but tell that to the pulled muscles and strained tendons in my body.) I knew I'd have to cut down. Be ruthless, even. Having mapped out the interior of the new vessel, and figured out how to shoehorn as many bookcases as possible into the cabin, the galley, the sleeping berth, even the head, I was still clearly short on book space.

I was just going to have to apply cold, hard reason. Out of all those books, some (many) were indispensable; others less so; some I might even be glad to see gone. I set up and applied a rigorous sorting method. I am glad to say this was a complete success. Here is how it worked out:

BOOKS TO KEEP:

(115) Books I will read again (or refer to)--e.g. White Oleander, North of Montana, Webster's Collegiate Dictionary from 1910

(287) Books which have sentimental value-- e.g. Swallows & Amazons, The Book of Clever Beasts

(79) Books which are worth serious money and need to be kept as investments-- e.g. Devil in a Blue Dress (advanced reader's copy), The Neon Rain (signed first edition)

(112) Books which are decorative--e.g. In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods, A Tolkien Bestiary

(65) Books which I firmly intend to read someday--e.g. Ulysses, Vanity Fair

(607) Books which I'd like to read someday--e.g. Doctor Zhivago, Geek Love

(95) Books which might make a visitor think I'm smart-- e.g. Remembrance of Things Past, Moby Dick


BOOKS TO GET RID OF:

(25) Books which I don't care about but which are worth a dollar or two-- e.g. the latest Jim Crais mystery, a Lonely Planet guide to Myanmar

(24) Books which I don't care about but which the Salvation Army will accept--e.g. The Accidental Tourist, The Firm

(790) Books for which there is room in my mother's garage--e.g. Great Exploration Hoaxes, Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie