Books books books

[osprey_archer]

A strong few days for books! On Sunday I went to Zionsville to visit Black Dog Books, which turned out to be closed, but directly across the street there is a whole new bookstore, Curious Squirrel Bookshop! Which seems honestly perhaps too close to have two bookstores, but they cater to quite different markets, so perhaps it will be all right. Black Dog Books focuses on used & rare books, while Curious Squirrel Bookshop's mission is "to celebrate inclusivity and representation in the books we read and the community we serve," and seeing these books en masse really drove home the fact that publishing has adopted a particular candy-colored Look for the inclusivity and representation books... Is that good? Is that bad? Well, it's marketing.

Then this afternoon I spent an hour or so trawling the children's section at the local university. This collection appears to have been forgotten by God and man: it's tucked away behind the periodical archives in a dark annex, with switches at the end of each aisle so you can turn on the lights in order to browse. The books are often toppled over and the alphabetization is lackadaisical: if you have multiple authors with the call number SUT, for instance, all the different Sutcliffs and Sutcliffes and Sutherlands promiscuously mixed.

However, as a result of this neglect, the collection includes a random assortment of books by older authors that might long ago have been weeded from a more assiduously attended collection. I scored a number of Newbery books (the original reason for my visit, of course), Mary Stolz's Cat in the Mirror, two books by Doris Gates who wrote my beloved Blue Willow (somehow it never occurred to me to see if she had written anything else!), and Rumer Godden's Fu-Dog, a charming tale about a Chinese-British girl who receives a toy fu-dog in the mail from her Great Uncle... and the fu-dog talks to her... and it might be just imagination, but I think there's just a bit more evidence that the dog really is magic. And there are delicious food descriptions and also at the end our heroine gets a Pekingese puppy!

Comments

[asakiyume]

Excellent haul at the university library!

re: candy colored, does that mean pastels or bright primaries or--? Both/either also seem to go along with children's stuff (well... maybe more the bright colors than the pastels).

[osprey_archer]

Mostly bright colors, both for the children's stuff and for the display of queer romance novels. Lots of purple! Nothing brings the gays to the yard like a little lavender, I guess.

There's also a more general trend in romance-adjacent covers away from clinch covers to... I'm not sure how to describe it, but the cover design exemplified in Emily Henry's books, like People We Meet on Vacation. Both protags on cover, not actually touching, big color blocks for their clothing, not too much detail in the drawing?

[asakiyume]

I knew exactly what that cover was going to look like before I clicked on the link--because YES. I see that prominently on my friends' to-read books on Goodreads. The blocks of color, as you say, and a kind of stylization of how things are represented. Here's one from off my Goodreads friends' to-read list; here's another. One more. ETA: LOL oops, the last one is by the same author as the one you gave as an example, so it's not surprising those two covers are similar...

[osprey_archer]

YES, these covers are everywhere right now! I think the idea is that they're eye-catching, and they are, but this is somewhat negated by the fact that there are so many that they all look the same...

[rachelmanija]

Yess, Cat in the Mirror!

I never even heard of Fu-Dog! It sound delightful.

[osprey_archer]

I had never heard of Fu-Dog either! Godden simply wrote so many books... impossible to keep track.

[sovay]

Which seems honestly perhaps too close to have two bookstores, but they cater to quite different markets, so perhaps it will be all right.

I grew up in a town that had at one point five bookstores in its center, which was honestly pretty great. One was used, one was science fiction and fantasy, one was children's books, one was independent, one was a chain. I miss all of them. (I miss the independent bookstore least, oddly, but I cared more about used books and science fiction and I worked at the children's bookstore and the chain.)

[osprey_archer]

I'll be curious to see if both bookstores survive! They aren't really direct competition, so perhaps...

[kore]

Aw, Blue Willow and Cat in the Mirror were two of my favourite books as a kid!

[osprey_archer]

I absolutely adored Blue Willow as a child! One of the books that got me interested in the Great Depression and led to Tramps and Vagabonds, tbh. And I wish I'd discovered Mary Stolz's work earlier.

[lokifan]

Fu-Dog sounds ADORABLE, and quite reminiscent of The Queen's Nose by Dick King Smith, a childhood favourite of mine.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, it's very cute! Really pleased to have run across it.