This week's bookstore trip took me to Barnes & Noble, which was so busy that my partner and I almost had to yell above the din of voices coming from the café. It made me wonder if the Borders across town was even a fraction as busy.
At any rate, I strolled through the stacks and noticed that they were well stocked with copies of The Weird Sisters, written by Eleanor Brown and published by Amy Einhorn. Surprising since the first print run, at 50,000, is by no means large. They had top shelf display in the New Fiction section, as well as a stack in the New Fiction island display.
Curiosity taking the better of me, I checked for the other release by Amy Einhorn this month, You Know When the Men are Gone, the debut by Siobhan Fallon. I had to search to find the one copy, shelved spine-side-out (no extra money being spent to market this title). Also surprising, since Fallon has garnared a number of great reviews and even shows up on Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers list.
Other titles still available in first printings, were somewhat surprising:
Bruce Machart's The Wake of Forgiveness (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Oct. 21, 2010) :: [original print run of 50,000] - I noticed, too, that the Border's still had a first print of this title a week or so ago.
Dinaw Mengestu's How To Read the Air (Riverhead: Oct. 14, 2010) :: [original print run of 50,000] - Both B&N and Border's still have several first/firsts on the shelves.
Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (William Morrow: Oct. 5, 2010) :: [original print run unknown] - I noticed, though, that B&N has this marked 50% off, so they're trying to get rid of their remaining stock.
I was also happy to see that Roderick Gordon's 4th book in the Tunnels series, Closer, is finally out in the states. The release date is Feb. 1, 2011 - but B&N had a healthy supply on the shelves already. The true first of this was the paperback version, released last may in the U.K. The U.S. copy, however, is the first hardcover edition. For anyone collecting the series, I'm sure there are plenty of imprints in the first run.
Also interesting to note, is that there appear to be a number of copies of the original imprint, The Highfield Mole (later republished as Tunnels by Chicken House), up for sale on Amazon, Amazon UK, & Abebooks. The copies range in price from about $80+ (unsigned) - to over $1,000 (signed). Considering there were only 500 copies of this titled published, books found the lower price range are a pretty spectacular deal.Labels: Barnes and Noble, Closer, Crooked Letter, Gordon, How to read the air, Hypermodern collectible, Machart, Mengestu, The Highfield Mole, Tom Franklin, Tunnels, Wake of Forgiveness, Weird Sisters
