Books I’ve brought out as publisher; essays and reviews I’ve published

Joel C. Turner, May 26, 1951-Dec. 8, 2009

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On this anniversary of what would have been my late brother Joel’s 61st birthday, my sister Pamela and I remember him with all the force of memory and familial affection, as well as our departed parents, Earl and Sylvia. On May 4, 1978, the five us founded Undercover Books, the bookstore that would give all three of us siblings our adult careers. For those who didn’t know Joel–or who did and want to be reminded of his personality and accomplishments, which included a run for Congress in 2000 and earlier being among the very first online booksellers, several years before Amazon.com–you may read an obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the remembrance I wrote that was excerpted in Shelf Awareness and Bookweb. The entire piece is pasted in below, set in the Comic Sans font to which Joel was partial (for readers able to view it that way) along with photos of him.
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December 9, 2009

Dear Friends and Colleagues,



It was with great regret and sadness that we write to inform you of the recent, sudden passing of our dear brother, Joel C. Turner, 58 years old. 


Many of you will recall that we three siblings together opened Undercover Books, in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1978, on May 4 of that year, with the hard-working assistance of our parents, Earl (deceased, 1992) and Sylvia (deceased, 2006). From the original location at Van Aken Shopping Center, our family-run independent chain grew to occupy a location in the historic Old Arcade of downtown Cleveland, and a shop that also featured the sale of record albums and the then-new format of CD-ROMs, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Joel’s role in the bookstores’ success and the good reputation we enjoyed in the book world was vital and indispensable. He was always generating exciting new ideas that drove our growth. Joel was a constant reader, a passionate believer in books and the power of the printed word. He derived tremendous satisfaction from selling books to the devoted readers whose trade we cultivated in our bookstores. 

We were fortunate to open our business at a moment when throughout the country and particularly the midwest, much book retailing was migrating from older downtowns to suburban locales, as the book departments of long-established department stores and old-line independents gave way to new indies like us. Soon, we were being regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps from all parts of the industry, as Undercover Books became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at our stores included Mark Helprin (“Winter’s Tale”), Richard North Patterson (“The Lasko Tangent”), and Walter Tevis (“Queen’s Gambit”).  

The stores, indeed the Turner family home, helmed by Sylvia’s extraordinary cooking and hospitality and Earl’s gregarious nature, and Joel’s energetic raconteurship, also became a favorite stop for sales reps and authors.



By the early 1990s, competitive and economic pressures had mounted, and Joel had the vision to reduce the brick & mortar concentration of our enterprise and transform it into an operation that served businesses, corporate libraries, schools, and public institutions. As this shift occurred, the name of the business became Undercover Book Service, which soon also had an online presence, surely one of the first online booksellers. He also developed a sideline in the antiquarian and second-hand side of the trade. Joel was a true bookseller, and also served the book industry through active participation as an officer and board member of the American Booksellers Association.  



In this decade, he and Sylvia moved to a lovely part of North Carolina, where he helped her live very comfortably for the remaining years of her life. After Sylvia’s death, he built for himself a beautiful home on a scenic mountaintop in the town of Bostic,  Rutherford County, North Carolina, where he died in his sleep this past weekend.  In addition to the two of us–his younger brother and older sister–Joel is survived by nephew and niece Benjamin and Emma Taylor; nephew Ewan Gallup Turner; brother-in law Ev Taylor; sister-in-law Kyle Gallup; cousins Stephanie Shiff Cooper and Brian Shiff; and Uncle Myer Shiff and Aunt Linda Shiff. 



Plans for memorializing Joel are being considered as we write this to you. For those wishing to mark Joel’s life with a charitable donation we urge you to make contributions to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE,  http://www.abffe.com/) or for medical research in search of a cure for diabetes.  

We write in sadness, but with fondness and appreciation for all the years that we three Turner siblings and our parents were recipients of your generous affection, respect, and consideration.  The bookstores gave all of us, and especially Joel, great enjoyment and satisfaction, along with so many wonderful friends. Feel free to send this message on to any of your contacts in the book world. 

Sincerely, 

Philip Turner (philipsturner@gmail.com) and Pamela Turner (pturnertaylor@roadrunner.com)

// more. . . Please click through to the full post to see all photos.

 

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Ruth Gruber’s Photojournalism at Soho Photography

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To mark Jewish American Heritage Month, Open Road Media–which has recently brought out five ebooks by my longtime author Ruth Gruber–has published a celebratory post on the Open Road Blog. In addition, Ruth’s photojournalism, for which she’s received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, is on exhibit through June 2 at the gallery Soho Photography on White Street in Tribeca. Among Ruth’s mentors was Edward Steichen, who exhorted her to “Take pictures with your heart.” I recommend you read Ruth’s inspiring books and go see her photographs, including the two accompanying this post. The image above was taken when Ruth was sent to Alaska in 1940 by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, her boss in the FDR administration; the one below was taken aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park, on which the refugees from the Exodus were forcibly sequestered during the summer of 1947, a chronicle that Ruth tells in her book Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation, which is illustrated with more than 100 of her photographs. I published it with Ruth in hardcover in 1999, and in trade paperback in 2008. It is still only available in hard copy, and is not yet among the ebooks from Open Road. For the record, the titles available as ebooks are Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America; Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; Raquela: A Woman of Israel; Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman; and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of an excellent documentary covering mostly the first four decades of Ruth’s life). For readers’ handy reference, I’ve previously blogged about Ruth Gruber, here and here.

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Savoring Great Books with a Dying Parent

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Longtime book world friend Will Schwalbe published a lovely Op-Ed on Mother’s Day, drawn from his forthcoming The End of Your Life Book Club. It opens with Will and his ailing mother in a medical office awaiting a chemotherapy appointment. He asks her what she’s reading–it’s Wallace Stegner’s aptly titled Crossing To Safety. “It was a book that I’d always pretended to have read, but never actually had. That day, I promised her I’d read it.” Soon, over the months of treatment and convalescence until her passing, they find mutual comfort in discussing the books they are reading in a kind personal book club all their own.

It’s touching story, and as I read the column I found myself in Will’s place, glad for the solace provided by these books and the opportunity for closeness shared reading offered them.

Having operated a family-owned bookstore–Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio–and later losing both my parents, Earl and Sylvia, and my brother Joel, I look back on all the books we shared and enjoyed over the years. I just have to look at my home library and dozens of memories and conversations come cascading forth, from the novels alone: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; Peter Rushforth’s, Kindergarten; Jack Finney’s Time and Again; Mary Tirone-Smith’s The Book of Phoebe; James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss; Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances; Philip Kerr’s March Violets; Ernest Hebert’s Dogs of March. This list could go on indefinitely.

Will’s new book will be out in the fall. I’m eager to read it.


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Results in for Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards

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I’m happy to announce that The Great Gray Bridge was in the end a finalist in Goodreads’ Independent Book Blogger Awards, in the Publishing Industry category. While this result is extremely gratifying, alas, it was not the winner. I want to thank the hundreds of readers who voted for this blog, and who helped make it a finalist, and after only six months of publication. Full results may be found here via this link on the Goodreads site, which includes the names of the winners in each of the four categories, and all fifteen finalists in each category who did not win. I’m grateful they held the contest and appreciative that I was able to enter my blog in it. I know it’s brought more readers to this site and I’m thankful for that.

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Treasuring Early Natural History Books

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Always happy to see a story involving my old hometown Cleveland’s book culture–Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly reports that an 1886 book of natural history and ornithology, Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio, a copy of which was discovered in 1995 in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is now being republished by Princeton Architectural Press. PAP’s catalog listing for the book shows that the new edition has been retitled  America’s Other Audubon by Joy Kiser, the librarian who found one of twenty-five remaining copies of the rare book.

The author, Genevieve Jones, an amateur naturalist of her day, was inspired to create the book after seeing Audubon’s Birds of America paintings at the World’s Fair of 1876. She created sixty-eight original lithographs in making her book, which contemporaries described as “the most beautiful book ever produced in America.” Sadly, Jones died before it was finished and her family labored seven years to see to its completion, then underwriting printing and selling it by subscription. Only 90 copies were produced, and among the subscribers were Theodore Roosevelt and President Rutherford Hayes.

I love old natural history books, such as The Journal of A Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, to which H.G. Wells contributed an Introduction upon its publication in 1919–a few months before the author died of multiple sclerosis at age thirty. Two sample entries from Barbellion’s youth, January 3, 1903: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing 0n ‘How Cats Spend their Time.'” and March 18, “Our Goldfinch roosts at 5:30. Joe’s kitten is a very small one. ‘Magpie’ is its name.”  I have an old Penguin copy of the book and a reprint published in 1989. Then there’s Fishes: Their Journeys and Migrations by Louis Roule, originally published in 1933, which I republished as a Kodansha Globe title in 1996, with a new Introduction by George Reiger of Field & Stream magazine. A reviewer of the original edition wrote, “Will please the nature student, the Izaak Walton enthusiast, or the reader who delights in believe-it-or-nots.” Living in an age of diminishing biological diversity with an accelerating pace of extinction, it is important to be aware of species and varieties that used to be common and are no more, or increasingly scarce, and I treasure these books for aiding that effort, decades after they were first published. That’s kind of miraculous.

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Continuing to Correct Politico and Drudge

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Some readers of this blog will have noticed yesterday that an incorrectly reported Politico story–about Barack Obama as author of Dreams From My Father–which was then inflated on the Drudge Report in to a bogus “Obama lied” meme, led to me being quoted in TPM’s story on the dust-up, because I published the first paperback edition of the book, in 1996. The TPM story ran under the headline, “‘Dreams From My Father’ Publisher: Drudge, Politico Obama Hits Bunk.”

And now today, Craig Silverman–who in 2007 published a book with me, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Our Free Speech –writes about this situation on his blog, where he covers media mistakes and corrections, in a column, How Politico can fix its mistake about Obama book. In his piece, Craig does an excellent job taking away useful lessons from the episode that all media people and news orgs should consider following, especially on how to handle the aftermath of a mistake. For media people who care about preventing errors, and the misinformation and harm that flow from them, I urge you to heed Craig’s constructive advice.

For the record, I’ve also written about correcting the Politico error and the Drudge amplification of it here, and earlier wrote about publishing Dreams From My Father here.

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