On 2010-02-04 Caraculiambro, La Mancha and environs wrote: Look, if Wendy Werris had been my mom, I would have found this an absorbing and delightful read. It details how she got into the business of flogging books and contains a few lively anecdotes of the famous people she ran into during her decades of work in this field.
But she´s, uh, not my mom. Therefore, the book´s claim on my attention as somebody who doesn´t even know Ms. Werris is unclear. What do I care if she once sat down next to George Harrison? What do I care about the upheavals and intrigues in the publishing industry? What do I care about the time Werris unwisely told an editor to increase the print run of a book?
It was my impression that this book was an account of Werris´s life as a reader, detailing all the books she loved and why, how she got into reading and what it meant to her. No, nothing like that.
Instead, it talks about the book publishing business. Literally.
For year Werris was a slave to corporations whose goal was to make a gizmo for a dollar and sell it for two. To Werris, however, since the gizmo in question was books (sacred, sacred books!), the industry is therefore holy and deserving of our reverential attention and admiration.
Here´s just a sample of the compelling tale you´re in store for:
´It was our job to combine the branch orders to get the best discounts possible, place the orders with the publishers, and then have them drop-ship the books to the individual Pickwick locations in Southern California. This was an extremely efficient system that Mr. E had initiated years earlier. Joni and I also worked closely with the publisher´s reps who called on us, so I became familiar with their titles, discount schedules, return policies, and customer service departments.´ (p. 25)
Engrossing! I just can´t get enough of it! Oh, if only she had written more about the discount schedules!
Given that the high point of Werris´s life was her getting porked by Richard Brautigan, she would have done well to reconsider releasing her memoirs to the public.. And summed up by saying 280 pages of name-dropping. Currently An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books has an overall rating of 8 over 10.
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Carroll & Graf claimed Little did Wendy Werris imagine that when she began a temp job at a Hollywood bookstore in 1970 at age nineteen, she had embarked on a thirty-five year career that would stretch into a journey of self-discovery and literary enlightenment. In An Alphabetical Life, Werris reflects upon how she came to embrace the book culture as her singular way of being in the world. Her career began when the book business was conducted amid an atmosphere of civility and wry humor, and her memoir captures the essence of this time and the people she met along the way. The challenges she faced, in what was then a male-dominated industry, are also discussed — particularly in 1976 when she was one of only two women repping books in the entire country. In describing the hilarious, eccentric characters that were her colleagues, lovers, and partners in crime, the essence of retail bookselling comes alive. Among the figures she profiles are Henry Robbins, editor of The World According to Garp; Alan Kahn, then of Pickwick Bookshop in Los Angeles, now President of Barnes and Noble Publishing; and many great and memorable retail bookbuyers and authors.
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