It's Book Fair Week at last!

The week's @RareBookCafe features Kentucky bookseller John Glover as we head into the weekend of the @FloridaBookFair! See it here: https://t.co/0sx0eYx5Gl pic.twitter.com/YFfmsB03ab

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) April 16, 2018

Don't miss this week's BookWeek!

Don't miss this week's BookWeek! Before you know it, it will be next Thursday! https://t.co/8lbEDGICSq pic.twitter.com/65bbjgEUOB

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) April 14, 2018

April 14: the book laird of Kentucky

April 14th’s Cafe guest is a true legend. John Glover runs one of the oldest bookstores in the state of Kentucky, Glover’s Bookery in Lexington. A regular exhibitor at the Florida Anntiqurian Book Fair, he is also coming to see us Saturday on Rare Book Cafe!

Glover's Bookery is a large general used & rare bookstore with a well organized stock of over 80,000 mostly hardback books, antiquarian maps & prints, and tribal art. They have been buying and selling books since 1978. In their Lexington, Kentucky store, you can find thousands of used and rare books for the scholar, collector, and general reader. The Bookery started selling books on line in 1998 and never looked back.

Another account has it,

Glover’s Bookery is perched prominently on South Broadway, beckoning customers with its array of used and rare book selections for “the scholar, collector, and general reader.” A true shopping experience, this unique storefront offers a well-organized stock of more than 80,000 mostly hardback books, along with antiquarian maps and prints and tribal art.

It is one of the longest-running bookstores in Kentucky, selling a majority of rare and collectible books and fueled by a self-professed “passion and love,” according to owner John Glover. Outside of the books housed within the store itself Glover has more than 20,000 selections for purchase through an Internet database. Nearly one half of his profits are garnered from online sales.

“In this business, you must shift gears and adapt,” he said. “If you don’t go with the niche market, you will die.”

Glover is not a mere book collector but an antiquarian, or one who deals exclusively in collecting, selling or studying old valuable items. His main interest lies in the highly collectible and aesthetically cherished titles. However, this should not discourage anyone from bringing him boxes of books, which he fields on a daily basis.

“If it’s neat, interesting and unique, I will look at it,” he said. “I’m a book lover, so I will never retire from this.”

While he echoes the feelings of fellow proprietors that book-selling is changing, he remains confident about the sustainability of books and the bookstore. Glover does an inordinate amount of travel and has seen the unfortunate demise of his favorite independent bookshops across the nation. Some of these operations simply could not justify the overhead required, which has moved many to run their book businesses out of their garages. While this is not the traditional storefront, physical bookshop, it still purveys the persistence of collectors.

“There will always be used bookstores in some form,” he said, “just in a passionate, somewhat reduced degree.”

*****

Rare Book Cafe is streamed every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

The program’s regular guests include Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein;  and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.

We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers:A Bric-A-Brac in Miami;  Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; A-Bric-A-Brac in Miami Beach; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtual live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

Here's today's Rare Book Cafe program!

Today, @RareBookCafe welcomed Amber Shehan of @Biblio_com, a sponsor of this year's @FloridaBookFair, and author @historian2pac Lee Irby, who is SO OVER book tours! https://t.co/mcRAkUa9G0 pic.twitter.com/rCsFJ1Fn6n

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) April 7, 2018

April 7 on Rare Book Cafe: not one but two fascinating guests!

It’s a crowded and entertaining week Saturday on Rare Book Cafe, with not one, but two, of our favorite guests!

Lee Irby, who moonlights as a history professor at Florida’s Eckerd College, is the author of Unreliable, his 2017 hit novel:

Riotous and riveting, this is the story of a charming college professor who most definitely did not—but maybe did—kill his ex-wife. Or someone else. Or no one. Irby plays with the thriller trope in unimaginably clever ways.  

Edwin Stith, a failed novelist and college writing instructor in upstate New York, is returning home for the weekend to Richmond, Virginia, to celebrate his mother’s wedding—to a much younger man. Edwin has a peculiar relationship with the truth. He is a liar who is brutally honest. He may or may not be sleeping with his students, he may or may not be getting fired, and he may or may not have killed his ex-wife, a lover, and his brand-new stepsister. 

Stith’s dysfunctional homecoming leads him deep into a morass of long-gestating secrets and dangers, of old-flames still burning strong and new passions ready to consume everything he holds dear. But family dysfunction is only eclipsed by Edwin’s own, leading to profound suspense and utter hilarity. Lee Irby has crafted a sizzling modern classic of dark urges, lies, and secrets that harks back to the unsettling obsessions of Edgar Allan Poe—with a masterful ending that will have you thinking for days.

Unreliable is Irby’s fourth book. His first, 7,000 Clams (2005) and its sequel, The Up and Up (both were published by Doubleday) centers on the quirks of Florida's history, the interplay of natural beauty and rampant corruption and violence that marked the Sunshine State in the 1920s. 

Indeed, in a story in the Eckerd College student paper  highlighted those crosscurrents:

The interactions between people and the environment in Florida are a passion of Visiting Assistant Professor of History Lee Irby. He teaches classes such as Florida’s Fragile Environment and Florida History to highlight key Floridian environmental issues. He feels the phosphorus levels in Lake Okeechobee is one of the biggest concerns...

Irby echoes nature writer and Everglades conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ words that “the Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet”... “The ecosystem of the Everglades just doesn't reflect Florida history — it is Florida history, because the natural Glades took up the bottom 40 percent of the state,” Irby said. “The Everglades is dying a slow death, despite the efforts of well-meaning people, because the lifestyle of development and tourism will never mesh with what the Glades needs, which is clean, free-flowing water.”

Of himself, the author writes, “Irby was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1963. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1986 with degrees in English and History. He then set about seeing the world, living in St. Croix, Italy, Mexico, and several major U.S. cities. He came of age in Key West, Florida, where he worked many odd jobs but found his voice as a writer amid the human debris of that island city,” we took him at his word. 

But wait! as the late-night Ronco ads used to shout: there’s more!

While wired readers load up their iPads, Kindles and Nooks with summer reading, one online marketplace is keeping the pages turning for hardcore bibliophiles. For over 10 years, Asheville-based Biblio.com has connected collectors around the globe with used and rare books, growing to become, by some measures, one of the top-three online used-book sellers.

A year to the day since her last visit, we’re also going to be joined by Amber Shehan, Biblio’s Marketing Coordinator and Book Pixie (they also have a CEO/Quixotist; a COO/Minister of Finance; and a CTO/Recondite Gumshoe), is a bookseller down to the ground. Don’t take out word for it; she said so herself, in a Huffington Post article she called “A Childhood Built on Banned Books.”

In her off hours, Shehan is active in the Asheville theater community and cultivates all things herbal via her blog, Pixie’s Pocket, which offers “recipes, foraging tips, weird homebrews, and other wild kitchen experiments you'd expect from a tipsy fae creature.” Mead, anyone?

Biblio.com, founded in 1993, represents some 5,000 independent book dealers around the world, most recently moving into the Australian and New Zealand marketplace. They count among their business collaborators The Internet Online Booksellers Association, the Association of Antiquarian Booksellers of America, and BookGilt. Some one hundred million books rest in Biblio’s internet inventories.

_____

Rare Book Cafe is streamed every Saturday from 2.30 to 3.30 pm EDT. We feature interviews, panel discussion and stuff you can learn about book collecting whether you are a regular at Sotheby’s or just someone who likes books.

The program airs live on Rare Book Cafe’s Facebook page, and remain there after the show.

The program’s regular guests include Miami book dealer, appraiser and WDBFRadio.com’s Bucks on the Bookshelf radio show creator Steven Eisenstein, Thorne Donnelley of Liberty Book Store in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; Lindsay Thompson of Charlotte’s Henry Bemis Books; miniature books expert Edie Eisenstein;  and program creator/producer T. Allan Smith.

We enjoy the support and encouragement of these booksellers:A Bric-A-Brac in Miami;  Little Sages Books in Hollywood, Florida; Liberty Books in Palm Beach Gardens; As Time Goes By, in Marion, Alabama; Quill & Brush in Dickerson, Maryland; Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg; The Ridge Books in Calhoun, Georgia; A-Bric-A-Brac in Miami Beach; and Henry Bemis Books in Charlotte.

 Rare Book Cafe program encourages viewer participation via its interactive features and video: if you've got an interesting book, join the panel and show it to us! If you’d like to ask the team a question or join us in the virtual live studio audience for the program, write us at rarebookcafe@gmail.com.

All the news to give you fits.

Today's BookWeek: rare book crime, academic feuds, and the BW guarantee that all the news we report happened in the same year.https://t.co/E48NBK5p6t pic.twitter.com/q8h0TN7ry5

— Henry Bemis Books (@henrybemisbooks) April 5, 2018