My formative experience in the book business was running the chain of independent bookstores, Undercover Books, which I founded with my siblings and our parents in Cleveland, Ohio. During my seven years with the stores I served as a personal bookseller to thousands of readers and customers. Following bookselling, I’ve worked in publishing almost forty years. Through it all, I remain a bookselling-oriented editor, passionately devoted to helping authors connect with readers.
I am an editorial advocate for writer and reader. I edit with the author perched on one shoulder, the reader on the other, fostering a virtual dialogue between the two and creating mutual benefit for each. I am a hands-on line editor, of both brief and lengthy texts, with a generous feel for what a writer is trying to convey, and an intuitive sense of how to help them communicate their ideas as efficiently and memorably as possible. I welcome queries from new and experienced authors, predominantly in nonfiction, and some fiction, with fees quoted upon receipt and consideration of material.
I’ll be eager to take in a new exhibit at the City Museum of New York, marking the 175th anniversary of Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, which its 19th century planners designed to be a pastoral enclave amid the cacophony of the ever-growing metropolis. According to the City Museum’s website, the exhibit “features original artifacts, sculptures, drawings, and Hudson River School paintings; historic documents; and photographs.” Even its antiquated spelling, with the hypen mid-name, rather like the New-York Historical Society, has a 19th century air about it.
Last October, I visited Green-wood for the first time–for the unveiling of the “Angel of Music,” a new memorial statue at the grave of pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk–and discovered that its 478 acres of rolling hills, big hardwood trees, and sparkling views of Manhattan and NY Harbor, make it a pastoral, soothing place for mourners to say goodbye to their loved ones. As the New York Times‘ Joseph Berger reports after a recent visit to Green-wood, the cemetery is still a pastoral balm to the daily cares of all city-dwellers. Here are some of the pictures I took on that day last fall, on a gorgeous Saturday that turned out to be just three weeks before Superstorm Sandy wrecked hundreds of trees and gravestones in the memorial park, damage they are still working to clean up in one of NYC’s most historic treasures.
I’m so lucky to have so many terrific books to read this weekend and over the coming days. And, after these three, I’ve got a Henning Mankell novel I’ve never read, Before the Frost, a thriller that features not only his longtime series character, Kurt Wallander, but also his grown daughter Linda, who over several earlier books had voiced her ambition to become a police detective, like her father. In fact, the novel is officially dubbed “A Kurt and Linda Wallander Novel,” just as all the earlier ones were “Kurt Wallander” books. Interestingly, in Michael Connelly’s The Drop, featuring his series character Harry Bosch, the detective’s teenage daughter, Maddy, has told her father that she wants to become a police officer.
As I have written in earlier posts about Mankell’s books, I love his books, and all these detective authors for the loyalty over many books that they show to their characters. The cases become more engrossing and their characters more believable and more sympathetic the deeper you read in to each series. This is certainly also true for Philip Kerr’s whose A Man Without Breath I started this afternoon. This is the ninth book portraying Bernie Gunther, the German police inspector trying to somehow stay alive during WWII, while retaining his dignity and moral center, while the Nazis all around him engage in mayhem and corrupt self-dealing. I’ve also posted often about the Gunther books.
As for Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, I met Tom Reiss and heard him read from his book at the National Book Critics Circle annual awards ceremony in March, and was enchanted by what I heard of his biography of Alexandre Dumas’ father. More recently, his book won the Pulitzer Prize. I read Chapter One last night, in which Reiss explains how he came to discover the elder Dumas, a remarkable figure who had been all but lost to history. I’m really eager to get back to his book, and so glad I have this nonfiction to balance all my novel reading.
Please note, if you want to read any of the books I’ve written about in this post, I’ve embedded links in each title. If you click on them, it will lead you to pages at Powell’s Books where you can order them. As I explain in a note near the upper right corner of this site, they then return a portion of your purchase price to me to help maintain this site.
In my family, the passing this week of Ray Harryhausen evoked real sadness, along with fond memories and appreciation for this film pioneer who was–as we learned when my son Ewan, now a teenager, was just a toddler–also an extremely kind and gentle man. When Ewan was young he steadily worked his way through a movie diet that included many of the science fiction and adventure classics–“King Kong,” “The Blob,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and once he discovered them, all the films that Harryhausen worked his magic on: “Mysterious Island,” “20,000,000 Miles to Earth,” “The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” the three Sinbad features, “The Valley of Gwangi,” and from the early years of Harryhausen’s career, his Mother Goose fairy tales, which were reissued beginning in 2002. What’s more, TCM, in addition to showing the movies to which Harryhausen had contributed, aired and re-aired a fine documentary about his career, “Master of Fantasy.” We learned from this about his friendship with Ray Bradbury, going back to their days as chums in Los Angeles. I’m sure it was a blow to Ray Harryhausen when his lifelong friend died last June.
Safe to say, that much as our son came to love these movies, so did my wife and I, capturing as they did great imagination and vivid storytelling. Ewan even adapted his own form of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s signature technique, to make some short videos of his own. In 2004, when Ewan was just 7, Harryhausen came to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for a special screening of some of his films. I had to be in the Bay Area for a publishing sales conference, but Ewan and Kyle got tickets and went to the theater for this special occasion. After the films were shown, they met Ray, and as the pictures below show, he was warm, charming, and very patient while photos were taken of him with Ewan. He autographed our copy of his book, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, and the two left of them, feeling they had just met a really fine and nice man. I”m sure that one of the reasons Ewan has a creative spirit and a questing imagination is thanks to his early enchantment with the work of Harryhausen. Below is a video a fan compiled with many of the creatures and monsters Ray crafted, from “Mighty Joe Young” to the rattling skeletons of “Jason and the Argonauts” and pictures from the day Kyle and Ewan met him, along with other images of Harryhausen’s work.
In 2011 a senior communications executive at Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, contacted me about editing a manuscript, their in-house history. I made a proposal for the job, we discussed a schedule, with me suggesting that I would bill them at different junctures as the edit moved forward and as he judged each segment of my work acceptable. We also discussed beginning the process with a signing payment, a portion of my total fee, as we got underway. For a few days it looked like we would be working together. Then I got surprising news from him. I guess he’d not earlier worked with independent contractors, because he informed me now that Novartis makes no payments to freelancers sooner than 60 days from when an invoice is accepted. It seemed beyond high-handed that this multi-billion dollar corporation would feel free to simply stipulate this odious policy to outside vendors doing work for the company. I objected but he told me there would be no flexibility on this point. Because I didn’t relish the prospect of working many weeks without pay–particularly when my work would still have to be deemed satisfactory at each milestone along the way before every new 60-day period would even commence–I declined to take the assignment.
Ever since–when I see Novartis mentioned in the news, whether it’s about a patent dispute in India over the medicine Gleevec, or the ProPublica story by Theodoric Meyer I tweeted about above, with a lawsuit alleging that Novartis paid “kickbacks—cash, meals and favors to relatives” of doctors who then improperly prescribed the company’s drugs to their patients–I feel relief, satisfaction, and a small measure of pleasure, knowing that I didn’t end up doing any work for this disreputable pharmaceutical giant.
According to this National Post column by Robert Fulford that I tweeted about earlier, Random House is reissuing all 21 of John MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, and some of his books that were not in the McGee series. I hope they include in the latter group, The Executioners, the book that was adapted for the movie “Cape Fear,” in the first instance starring Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and Polly Bergen (1962) and later, Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, and Jessica Lange (1991). The McGee titles were all color-coded, so readers could remember which ones they’d read, and which they’d missed. I am glad to see they’re coming back, as paperbacks and ebooks. I love these books and have blogged about them frequently in the past couple years. I had first found this John D. MacDonald fan page on Facebook, where I discovered the Fulford column posted by a fellow fan. At Undercover Books, where I worked from 1978-85, we stocked and sold and reordered all these titles. Most of the books in the gallery below were in the library of my late brother, Joel Turner, which I brought in to my own library after his death in 2009.
May 4, 2018—On this date forty years ago, I opened Undercover Books in Cleveland with my sister Pamela, brother Joel, and our parents Earl and Sylvia. Below is one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written and shared from this blog about this date in my life.
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I published a version of this post on May 4, 2012, and have now updated it for 2013-14 with additional material, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” as you’ll see below. The comments below are from the 2012-13 posting–you’re welcome to add your own.
— May 4, a big date on my personal calendar
On this date in 1970 I was fifteen. That afternoon, around 4:30, I was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland, waiting for my sister Pamela to get off her job at Halle Bros., a local department store. Nearby, a delivery van pulled up, with the name of the evening paper, Cleveland Press, emblazoned across its side. The back door of the van rolled up and a worker began tossing bundles of that afternoon’s edition off the truck. It was a real “Front Page” moment, as in old movies when a swirl of numbered calendar pages and newspaper print resolves in to a splashy headline of bold, readable type and a brash reporter rushes off to get the rest of the story. Only this time, it was not a funny, Capraesque moment. In weirdly unfolding slow-motion I watched a particular bundle roll toward me until it landed above the fold, headline up. Like seeing a license plate in front of one’s eyes during a car accident—and remembering the combo of digits and letters forever—I read the inches-high black type: Four Students Shot Dead On Kent Campus. For several days prior, I had been following the antiwar demonstrations at Kent State, about thirty miles from Cleveland, and I knew that Ohio Governor James Rhodes had deployed armed troops to the campus. Pam soon joined me on the sidewalk and I told her the disturbing news. We shared our shock and dismay and probably dropped whatever we had been planning to do, though I have no memory after telling her about the newspaper headline. I recall that little more than a week later I heard on local radio Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recording of “Ohio.” It was as if Neil had written a musical version of an instant book, as is still done in the book world after a terrible catastrophe. In fact, in Neil’s recent memoir Heavy Peace he recalls quickly writing the song and the alacrity with which they recorded it, pushing the acetate copies of the song out to radio stations, before the vinyl 45s had even been pressed. Here’s a youtube version of the song from the Neil Young online archive. Thanks to Neil for making this sharable, as other versions of the song are not.
Eight years later, May 4, 1978
Pamela, our brother Joel, our parents Earl and Sylvia, and I all opened Undercover Books, the bookstore that would define our lives for many years. When I was graduated from Franconia College a year earlier, with a BA in Philosophy of Education and History of Religion, I had imagined I might work for the Anti-Defamation League or some similar organization. I certainly hadn’t thought of working in a bookstore, but my siblings—with Pam having worked in department stores, and Joel at Kay’s Bookstore in downtown Cleveland–had the idea of opening a bookstore in our home suburb of Shaker Heights, where despite it being an affluent and well-educated community, no bookstore had ever been located. We were fortunate in our timing, for in Cleveland, as in several other midwestern cities, book retailing was migrating from the downtown core to the suburbs. Undercover Books caught on right away, and I got what amounted to a graduate education, provided by bookselling. As buyer for adult books for what would become our three-store indie chain, I met every day with bookbuying customers and browsers. We were regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps, and became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at the store included Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit). I was with the bookstores for seven years before moving to New York City, and have written more about the transition here on this site. The bookstore proved to be a gateway to my career in the book business and it all began on this date thirty-six years ago today.
Another nine years, May 4, 1987
Now working as an editor at Walker & Company, my first full-time position with a publishing house, I was in the happy position of telling my author Ellen Hunnicutt that her novel, Suite For Calliope: A Music and the Circus—the first book I signed up on arriving at the company, and which was to be published that summer—had just received a starred review in Kirkus. Ellen was very excited as I read her the whole review with lines like these, “An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. . . . A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.” Note I read it to her, and didn’t fax it, probably because neither one of us had one. What added to the special quality of the occasion however was that this day, May 4, was also Ellen’s birthday. You can read more about how I came to discover Suite for Calliope in this essay elsewhere on this blog.
Nowadays, when May 4 rolls around again, even if nothing so deeply tragic or personally historic is occurring in that given year, I marvel at it all. For now, I’m just really glad I created this site over the past couple years, so that this year, I have a proper venue to share my memories of May 4, from 44 years ago, from 36 years ago, and from 27 years ago.
The pictures seen here were taken in what we called “the middle room” at Undercover Books, where we placed a comfortable rattan couch. The black Labrador is our dog Noah, whose ear Joel is massaging. I am wearing the same style of pink eyeglass frames as I wear nowadays. I’ve told the story of how Joel and I came to get Noah at a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1970, on a biographical blog post I tweeted out it a few months ago, with a picture of Noah and me that I cherish. I miss them both, Noah who passed in 1982, and Joel in 2009.
#FridayReads, May 3–Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, novelist James Lasdun’s nightmarish memoir is a literary yet realistic account of how he came to be cyber-stalked by a former student. No matter what Lasdun has done over the past several years, from contacting police to ignoring the woman he calls Nasreen, she has continued to make him the target of her ceaseless anti-Jewish hatred and twisted paranoia, emailing venomous messages to him with numbing frequency, posting vicious rumors about him, impersonating him to his contacts and in online forums, implicating his literary agent and colleagues. Despite these invasions of his personal space, Lasdun has prevailed, in his own way. The book is rich with allusions to such literary sources as Gawain and the Green Knight, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, The Penitent, and Lasdun’s own novel, The Horned Man. A disturbing yet compelling chronicle. I want to read more of Lasdun’s work, because whatever one may say about this horrible experience with Nasreen, he’s also a terrific writer whose sentence-making is continually engrossing.
I’ll be eager to take in a new exhibit at the City Museum of New York, marking the 175th anniversary of Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, which its 19th century planners designed to be a pastoral enclave amid the cacophony of the ever-growing metropolis. According to the City Museum’s website, the exhibit “features original artifacts, sculptures, drawings, and Hudson River School paintings; historic documents; and photographs.” Even its antiquated spelling, with the hypen mid-name, rather like the New-York Historical Society, has a 19th century air about it.
