ABQ / Santa Fe News

Western Book Roundup

Man Gives $20,000 to Help Golden’s Clear Creek Books

By Jenny Shank, 3-11-09

Clear Creek Books, photo courtesy of ClearCreekBooks.com.

Lisa Knudsen, director of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently wrote in the organization’s newsletter about the fate of a couple of Colorado bookstores.  Craig Johnson, the owner of Clear Creek Books in Golden, Colo. was having trouble keeping his business afloat.  After some media attention about the store’s pending closing, the folks in Golden rallied around the bookstore, and according to Knudsen, one anonymous donor wrote Johnson a check for $20,000.  Johnson hopes to keep the bookstore running, but says he won’t succeed unless people in Golden start shopping there instead of “stopping off at the Barnes & Noble after work in Denver or ordering from Amazon at 3 a.m.”

Meanwhile, the owners of the Book Rack in Fort Collins will close their current shop on March 31 and move to a new location, opening in Old Town Fort Collins as Old Firehouse Books in April. (Via Shelf Awareness.)

The people at Unbridled Books say they have a Southwestern treasure on their hands in writer Rick Collignon.  According to publisher Fred Ramey, “There’s a great deal of cultural significance in what he’s doing.” Unbridled has published several of Collignon’s books, and the latest, Madewell Brown, is due to hit shelves May 5.  To spread the word, Collignon and Ramey have embarked on a pre-publication “The Author As Artifact Tour,” with stops across the Southwest, including a visit to Denver and Boulder earlier this week.  The goal is to introduce the author to booksellers and readers who may not have heard of him before.  They will be at Moby Dickens in Taos today, and tomorrow they’ll travel to Collected Works and Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe and Bookworks in Albuquerque.

Ramey has uploaded the first entry in his video diary of the tour here, and you can follow his travels with Collignon on Twitter @FredRamey.  (By the way, I’m Twittering these days, too.) Watch for my review of Madewell Brown in May.

Mark A. Smith’s “Animalcules and Other Little Subjects,” won this year’s John Burroughs Award for Best Published Nature Essay.  The essay, published in Utah State University’s Isotope magazine, “explores the author’s amateur love of microscopes and the microscopic world.” Click here for a PDF of the essay.

The ABA Indie Choice Book Award Nominees were announced last week, and they include a couple of Western books—Steven Rinella‘s American Buffalo is up for “Best Conversation Starter (Nonfiction),” and David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is in the running for “Best Author Discovery (Debut).”

Poet Bill Holm passed away recently.  Although his roots were in Minnesota, he spent a lot of time in the southwest.  Rumor has it that when he was in Arizona, he could often be found having an afternoon drink with Jim Harrison on the back patio of the Wagon Wheel Saloon in Patagonia.  Arizona writer Tom Miller remembers him as “a fine poet and a raconteur,” and Minnesota Public Radio offered this remembrance.

The Tucson Festival of Books will take place this weekend.  One of the main events is an appearance by Elmore Leonard, whom Tom Miller will interview.  Miller notes, “I plan to ignore his crime thrillers and concentrate on his Westerns.” (Saturday, March 14, 2:30 p.m., University of Arizona Student Union - Ballroom South, Barnes & Noble Stage.)

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