An end of the year roundup

The Best of the Bookmarks, 2005

By Allen M. Jones, 12-18-05

Here's a tiny little prediction: As the internet becomes even more ubiquitous, psychologists will start typing our various personalities based on our web-browsing habits. One can imagine a Jungian sub-specialty devoted to mailbox spam, streaming radio, bookmarks. Especially the bookmarks. Your "favorites" folder probably says as much about you as a Rorschach test, a word associations exercise. You can already hear the thick Austrian accent: “So! You have chose to go do ze shopping at ze Land’s End but not Eddie Bauer? Verrry interesting.� Over the last year or so, in the course of compiling regional "books and writers" information for New West, browser bookmarks have stuck to me like cockleburs. In the spirit of year-end reassessment, it seemed like a good idea to pass a few of these sites along, compare and contrast the links. Call it, The Best of the Bookmarks, 2005.

Top of the list, you have to put your independent bookstores, those brave and beset symbols of bygone American capitalism. Scrabbling holdovers from those days when folks could still go into business for themselves. Here in the Rockies, we’ve been blessed with some of the best little independents anywhere. In Montana, for instance, there’s both Missoula’s admirable Fact and Fiction and Hamilton’s hidden jewel, Chapter One, both of which provide ready access to Montana’s esteemed literary community. Down in New Mexico (and recently recommended by New West’s Emily Esterson), there’s Albuquerque’s Page One, “New Mexico’s Largest Independent� (here in the next day or two, I see that they're going to be sponsoring a signing by governor Bill Richardson), and Santa Fe’s Collected Works. In Utah, New West’s Randy Howard has recommended Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore (in business since 1929) and The King's English. Further north in Idaho, there’s the BookPeople of Moscow, the Vista Book Gallery in Boise, and Iconoclast Books in Ketchum. Spokane gives us Auntie's Books (one of my favorites, although not the most convenient web site in the world) and in Colorado, of course, there’s Tattered Cover (the baseline against which all other western independents are judged). Above all else, Tattered Cover is a fine resource for signed copies, having sponsored readings from every writer in American at one time or another, Aadlund to ZZ Packer. (The Boulder Bookstore, meanwhile, while by all accounts an exceptional physical store, needs to receive some sort of award for the least user-friendly web site.)

After the bookstores come the book blogs. Now, despite the media commotion surrounding blogging, I admit that I still haven’t entirely gotten a handle on these folks. Maybe it’s the inadequacy of the word itself, blogging; how it tries to contain both the late night drunken spiel as well as the very professional and well-written review. Seems like the different levels of blogging require a new descriptive vocabulary. Anyway, for my money, one of the best blogs going is Ron Hogan’s Beatrice. A talented writer, a sharp critic, Hogan puts real effort into his page, creating original content left and right, building a foundation of “author 2 author� discussions and reviews that make for truly entertaining browsing. Elsewhere, there’s the well-admired, Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant. If you measure a blog’s success by how often it’s referenced by other bloggers, then this site tops the pile. On down the list of my personal favorites, there’s Conversational Reading and the Happy Booker, MoorishGirl and Bookdwarf, MaudNewton and Chekhov's Mistress. Some are better designed than others (please, refrain from flanking your good and original material with those two distracting columns of links on either side) and some of are less interested in writing new stuff than in linking to other sites, but they all have something to offer. And if very few are preoccupied specifically with western letters, they are nevertheless good canary-in-the-coal-mine indicators of a regional book’s looming success or failure. Seems like if you’re blipping up positively on the blog’s radar screen, it’s just one more small step into national limelight.

As a reviewer, I’ve made it a point to drop in now and then on the regional presses themselves, see what’s happening in the ink-smeared trenches of production. For a reader of western letters, the search wants to begin and end with those intrepid twins, University of Oklahoma Press and University of Nebraska Press. Guided by palates as eclectic as they are informed, if they gave Olympic medals for publishing, it would be my vote to have these two houses stand shoulder to shoulder on the top platform. Other university presses that get it right include the University of Nevada Press, the University of New Mexico Press, University Press of Colorado, and University of Washington Press. And last but not least, on the bottom of the scroll bar, no roundup of small book publishers would be complete without some mention of Copper Canyon Press, a small poetry specialist in Port Townsend, Washington. In a world increasingly ignorant and uncaring of poetry, Copper Canyon has managed to weather through, a bright flame cupped under a rainstorm. (One of their books, a collection from the venerable W.S. Merwin, won a National Book Award this year.)

It has come to strike me as the greatest kind of irony that the internet – one of the world’s most clamoring distractions – should have become such a useful tool for attracting potential readers. In the easy dissemination of information, the fluid spread of opinion, the snap-your-fingers simplicity of buying a book in Montana that's been recommended by some guy in Jersey, it has changed everything. Best of all, perhaps, it has created a community, a personality-type of readers. Eventually, when us book readers have grown as scarce as certain spotted cats, we’ll recognize each other by our bookmarks.

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