20 Years

Our official 20th anniversary is December 1.

It was on that day in 1989 that we first opened our doors for business with about 3000 used books, no employees, no cash register, no credit card processing, no computer, and pretty much no money.

We've got a lot more of all of the above 20 years later (except for money) and, of course, many amazing memories. I hope to write about some of these in the coming months.

But one memory comes to mind because of the day I spent yesterday.

At the end of that first day of business 20 years ago, one of my longest-lasting friends in the world, Chuck Reece, and I had a celebratory dinner up at the awful Chinese restaurant that was located where the Brewhouse is now in Little 5 Points. Afterwards we retired to his house for a nice glass of brandy and hopes for a long and prosperous future.

We've accomplished at least half of that.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting Chuck's office at the design firm at which he now works, Unboundary, for a day of sharing favorite pieces of writing among his fellow writers and artists. Along with us was another of my oldest and best friends, acclaimed singer/songwriter Richard Buckner, who was in town to play at the Earl.

Richard performed a couple of his songs as well as a section from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which he set to music years ago for his magnificent album, "The Hill."

Chuck and company read and talked about meaningful passages and opening lines from their favorite works (and many of mine) by writers including Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, Tom Robbins, Billy Collins, Rick Moody, Janisse Ray, Tim O'Brien, Pat Conroy, Jack Kerouac and dozens of others.

It's good to know that a firm responsible for helping such companies as Fed Ex and Charles Schwab communicate can take time to focus on what makes writing meaningful.

And, of course, it's good to know that good friends are, themselves, doing meaningful work.

Now, meaningful or not, my work continues to be trying to keep A Cappella Books moving forward as we approach our 20th anniversary, and some days the task seems more daunting than others.

When in doubt, lately at least, my answer has been: celebrate! Starting today, our 20th anniversary celebration commences with EVERY USED BOOK IN THE STORE on sale for 20% off its regular price.

We'll come up with more ideas as the actual date approaches, but for now, we hope this will encourage many people to come visit the store and check out our wonderful selection of always reasonably-priced books, now even moreso.

Fourth Annual Decatur Book Festival (and HUGE sale at A Cappella)This Weekend!

For the past four years, Labor Day Weekend, which, frankly, I can't remember what it ever meant to me before, has meant only one thing: The Decatur Book Festival.

Begun as a typically hair-brained but appealing idea of fellow biblio-entrepeneur Daren Wang, the DBF is an entirely unique experience. Typically, after weeks of preparation, and in anticipation of weeks of necessary follow-up, we work 4 endless, back-breaking days in scorching late-summer heat (and occasional downpours), decimate our store's stock, spread our already thin staff to within a thread of tearing apart, yet, somehow, we keep coming back for more. And, after all of that fun, we give a share of our profits to the damn thing!

Nobody ever accused us of being in this crazy racket for the money.

Every year, we meet lots of great folks at the festival, some famous, some not, some once-famous, some soon-to-be. Reading is, of course, one of the most important things in my life, but, for me, as important as a love of reading, there is an excitement about the very idea of books and their endless possibilities, their unbelievable variety of creators and the peculiar passions they inspire. And it is this excitement that seems to be unleashed each Labor Day weekend on the square in Decatur. It really is a blast!

This year, we're taking it relatively easy. No baking under an outdoor tent for us this time. No hauling handtruck after handtuck of books up and down the stairs at Eddie's Attic. Instead, we'll be camped out in the air-conditioned Conference Center at the Holiday Inn for the Georgia Antiquarian Bookseller Association's annual book fair, and we'll be selling for the authors speaking at the equally cool and comfortable auditorium of the Decatur Libary.

Along with 50 other rare and out-of-print book dealers, we'll be displaying (and hopefully selling) some of our scarcest and most interesting items, normally locked up in the glass cases at the shop.

From noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday at the book fair, we'll also be hosting a book signing with Marc Wortman, the author of the brand new book, The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta.






Marc will then be discussing as well as signing his book at the Decatur Library at 4:15.

Here's the full line-up of authors we're working with at the library:

Saturday, 11:15 - Matthew Bernstein. Screening of a Lynching (Leo Frank Case in Film)

Saturday, 12:30 - Pearl McHaney. Eudora Welty as Photographer and Occasions: Selected Writings of Eudora Welty

Saturday, 1:45 -Niall Stanage. Redemption Song (Irish Journalist's account of Obama's election)






Saturday, 4:15 - Marc Wortman. The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta.

Saturday, 5:00- George Singleton & Daniel Wallace. Two fine, funny authors of, among other titles, Work Shirts for Madmen (Singleton), Big Fish (Wallace).

Sunday, Noon - History scholars Joe Crespino, Devin Fergus, Kent Germany, and Brett
Gadsen speak about the events leading up to the historic election of President
Barack Obama.

Sunday, 1:15 - Robert Olen Butler presents his latest novel, Hell!






Sunday, 2:30 - Presentation of the Annual Lillian Smith Awards.

Ariela J. Gross. What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in
America.

Bob Zellner & Constance Curry. The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.

Sunday, 3:45 - Patti Callahan Henry. Driftwood Summer
Janna McMahan. The Ocean Inside

Sunday, 5:00 - Don O’Briant. Newcomer's Guide to Georgia
George Singleton. Because once is never enough with ole George.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....


STARTING TOMORROW, SEPTEMBER 3 AND LASTING THROUGH MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, WE'RE HAVING OUR BIGGEST SALE EVER:

40% OFF EVERY BOOK, NEW AND USED, IN OUR STORE*

*Does NOT include consignment items. Previously discounted new books will be discounted no more than 40% off list price.

Paul Hemphill, R.I.P.

I have written one fan letter in my life, and it was to Paul Hemphill, who died this morning at age 73 after battling cancer for the last couple of years.

It was 1989, and I had just moved back to my hometown of Atlanta with the plans of opening a bookstore after years of managing one in San Francisco. Right before leaving the Bay Area, I stumbled upon a copy of Hemphill's first novel, Long Gone, and being an avid baseball fan, I was drawn to its subject -- the lowest of the low minor leagues, and going through a somewhat turbulent departure from San Francisco, I was comforted by the book's great humor.

Reading the author bio on the book's jacket, I immediately recognized Hemphill's first title, The Nashville Sound, and also being a fan of country music, I grabbed the first copy of that one I could find, too.

Before packing up my truck and heading home, though, I discovered Too Old to Cry, a collection of Hemphill's newspaper columns and other journalism--including some during his own ill-fated stint in San Francisco, and at that point, I knew I had found a writer who spoke to me as few others ever had or ever would.

Hemphill was a native Southerner who loved so much about his culture that he was secure in pointing out its obvious defects, and a natural journalist, whose writing embodied all the economy and simplicity of that world, but whose desire was to be more than that, to be a "real" writer, of books, at a time when those seemed to be things of permanence.

One of the first things I did when I got back to Atlanta, before buying inventory, before leasing a storefront, before coming up with a name, before writing a business plan (come to think of it, I still haven't written a business plan), I wrote a fan letter to Paul Hemphill.

I can't remember exactly what I told him in that letter, other than to say how much his work had inspired me at a time in my life when I was dealing with my essential identity as a Southerner despite most of the previous decade on the West Coast seeing if I could perhaps be something else.

Not long after I opened A Cappella in the cold of that winter, a skinny man in a fur-lined coat stepped inside my door and said, a la Johnny Cash, "I'm Paul Hemphill."

I tingled with excitement, and with a shaky voice showed him around my tiny new store, paying special attention to the first editions of all of his books that I showcased near the front.

I remained too in awe of Hemphill to ever even feel comfortable calling him "Paul," but over the years, we spent a good deal of time together, and in one of the career moves I take most pride in, I republished that first book, The Nashville Sound , to coincide with the edition of his great Hank Williams biography, Lovesick Blues, in 2005.

I have saved the email from when he agreed to let me do it, both because, like I say, it was a proud moment for me but also because its subject line is such a perfect example of Hemphill concision. It reads simply: "Let's Do Nashville."

Like most of my business endeavors--and most of his--the Nashville reprint was only a modest success. But, in our world, where Hank Williams always works as a soundtrack and failing to get a hit 7 out of 10 times at bat is as good as it gets--we were inspired enough by its performance to reprint the only remaining of his titles to, at that point, be out of print: Mayor: Notes on the Sixties, which he authored with Ivan Allen, Jr.

Soon, however, I received another classic Hemphill email:

"My life's on hold these days. Docs found cancer in my throat. Seems curable, and without too much pain. Excellent people on the case at Piedmont and Emory. No need to fret. Might be clear in couple of months."

That was two and a half years ago. By early this year, it was clear that he wouldn't be clear, and that Mayor would have to wait. Like everyone who knew the man, I've been prepared for this day for a while. I doesn't make the loss any less great.

It is possible to make too great a claim for Paul Hemphill's writing. It had its limits. It could be repetitious. But for anyone who ever fell under the sway of his words and his work, it was pure inspiration. Here was a man who did what he did, and did it damn well. It didn't make his life easy. But it made his city and his world a better place.

I am so grateful for the life and the example of Paul Hemphill.

Latest A Cappella Newsletter is Out

Young Pakistani author author Ali Sethi (The Wishmaker) reads on Sunday afternoon. Much more coming up the rest of June and early July.

http://tinyurl.com/mgq3q5

Great Works of Non-Fiction

Whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation for a good book about Atlanta, I always suggest Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary Pomerantz. Tracing the intertwining family histories of two of the Atlanta's most important mayors, Ivan Allen, Jr. and Maynard Jackson, Pomerantz reveals almost everything one needs to know to understand the distinctive nature of our city.

If the seeker wants more, I generally suggest Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing. Because its focus is so much more specific, it's not as easy to consider this a book "about" Atlanta in the same way as Pomerantz's, but its portrait of mid-twentieth century Atlanta--just as it is about to burst into the behemoth it became--is so alive and real that I can't recommend it highly enough.



What both of these writers share, besides the Atlanta connection, is the understanding that great truths about big topics come from intimate, personality-driven storytelling. And that for their type of storytelling to have the kind of sweep it has requires thorough, painstaking research.

For the same writer to contain both of these abilities (research and storytelling) in the degree these two have is rare. It makes sense that the two of them are friends.

So it was with great excitement that I learned yesterday that Melissa Fay Greene will introduce Gary Pomerantz at his book signing on Monday, June 22 at the Carter Center.

Pomerantz's latest book, The Devil's Tickets, is another tour de force, weaving the stories of a cast of fascinating people, some famous at the time, some not, to give a great portrait of America at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the Great Depression.

When the question arises about what certain people prefer to read, fiction or non-fiction, it sometimes seems like a false choice. In the hands of writers as skilled as Pomerantz and Greene, non-fiction shares all the traits of the great fiction: compelling stories whose meaning transcends their specific details.

Summer Reading

A Cappella's Latest Newsletter is out, with info on bad food, good beer, ethical business, "hip-hop" justice and beach reading even we can be excited about. http://tinyurl.com/qmvmuy

Food for Thought

I guess it only makes sense that in serious times, serious people focus on the most serious aspects of life. And, of course, there could be no life without food, so we currently see many of our best writers and thinkers focused in one way or another on, what in other eras, passes for mere entertainment.

It's easy to view the current outpouring of food-related writing (in books, magazines, blogs...) as a passing fad, but I'm not so sure. I sense that it is a defining sign of a very important time when people are realizing that a truly fleeting way of life (mid-to-late-20th century American-style affluence) is passing away, and we are returning to something more permanent and authentic.


Mark Kurlansky's talk Wednesday night about his latest book, The Food of a Younger Land, at the Central Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Library, certainly touched on such themes. Having resurrected the previously unpublished manuscripts from the WPA archives, this work portrays how Americans ate before highways, chain restaurants, frozen foods, etc. and Kurlansky and those in attendance were quite focused on how much that way of eating resembles the prescription that today's most thoughtful social observers recommend that we return to for the health of ourselves and our planet: seasonal, regional and traditional.

This Wednesday, May 27, at the Decatur Library, the Georgia Center for the Book presents a very different type of author with a very different type of book, but again, it is an indictment of the current state of American food. Robyn O'Brien will share her new book, The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It .

Her talk begins at 7:15 at the Decatur Library auditorium, 215 Sycamore St. in downtown Decatur. A book signing will follow. A Cappella will have copies of the book for sale. A portion of the proceeds benefit The Georgia Center for the Book.

The following night, Thursday, May 28, we'll celebrate a different another important food: beer. Don't laugh. As beeradvocate illustrates, beer is in fact food, and few beers are heartier than Guinness.



The Guinness Brewery is 250 years old, and its story is the subject of a new book by Tony Corcoran, The Goodness of Guinness: A Loving History of the Brewery, Its People and the City of Dublin.

We're marking the occasion at The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club in Little 5 Points. We'll have copies of the book for sale. Everyone who purchases a copy will be entered into a drawing to win valuable prizes, to be redeemed at the bar.

The local Guinness distributors will provide some goodies for the night, too. And the Yacht Club will have specials on pints and pitchers of Guinness, too.