Plainsong by Kent Haruf. New York, NY: Knopf, 1999.
The simple wisdom of Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong” is revealed in the choral cast of characters. The interwoven stories stay with the reader long after the book is finished: a watchful teacher, a young pregnant girl who finds support from an unexpected pair of lonely bachelor farmers, a couple of young boys making their way without a mother. “Plainsong” is a story about a community coming together when the most predictable lines of support are absent.

Kent Haruf was born in 1943 and grew up on high plains of eastern Colorado, the landscape that features prominently in all of his novels. A college course in American literature exposed Haruf to Faulkner and Hemingway and changed his aspirations from a biology teacher to literature and writing. After two years living in Turkey as a Peace Corp volunteer, Haruf applied to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop but was rejected. The University of Kansas instead provided a graduate degree but Haruf still longed for the writer’s workshop in Iowa, so he moved to Iowa City in the dead of winter with his wife and baby girl with no placement and a meager job as a janitor in a nursing home. By May, he was finally accepted. It was in Iowa that Haruf developed important writer friendships with Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek, Tracy Kidder, T. C. Boyle, and John Irving. He also developed his fictional landscape of Holt County, Colorado where all of his novels would be set.

After writing for eleven years, it was his friend John Irving who sent Haruf’s first novel to his own agent at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Haruf recollects in an essay for Granta: “[Irving] said he had sent fifty writers to his agent and he hadn’t taken any of them, but maybe he’d take me. And he did . . . That was a great day for me.” Haruf had been writing for twenty years and was forty-years-old in 1984 when his first book, “The Tie That Binds,” was published and won a PEN/Hemingway citation and a position teaching freshman composition at Nebraska Wesleyan. Later, he received a more prestigious position at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale where he would write his breakout novel “Plainsong.”

In 1998 Haruf’s agent sent “Plainsong” to Knopf, and Gary Fisketjon became his editor. Besides the intense yet never overbearing editing that Fisketjon offered, the two developed a friendship over part of Haruf’s 15-city author tour. “Plainsong” received a National Book Award nomination as well as adoration from a growing fan base. Fisketjon recalls on his blog, “Remembering Kent Haruf”: “Readers who’d taken so much from his work were now lining up to give something—adoration, trust, celebration—back to him.”

Collecting the six novels of Kent Haruf is to collect something of the heart. The stories of Kent Haruf never leave the reader and it can seem somewhat irrelevant to collect the books as objects. However, the stories are more than just stories that touch the heart. These novels read as modern day classics and will endure as classics. Haruf’s first two novels are harder to find as the print runs were smaller and signings were limited. By the time “Plainsong” was published, the print run had expanded to 70,000 and Knopf sent Haruf on national signing tours. Knopf issued a small number of “Benediction” signed as Haruf was too ill to tour.

Kent Haruf passed away November 30, 2014 at the age of 71, but not before leaving us one final gift. “Our Souls at Night” goes on sale May 26, 2015.

Three hundred and fifty independent bookstores across America celebrate their tenacity and appreciation for their customers on Saturday, May 2—including Mississippi Independent Bookstores. National Independent Bookstore was inspired by California’s first Independent Bookstore Day in 2014 which was celebrated by an impressive 93 California bookstores.

One of the most legendary bookstores in California is City Lights in San Francisco, opened in 1953 by poet and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, a sociology student and publisher of a magazine called City Lights. Martin’s idea was to open a quality paperback bookshop. At that time, paperbacks were sold at newsstands and little thought was given to the impact a small, cheap book could make.

A couple of years after their shop opened, Ferlinghetti heard the first public reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg at the 6 Gallery. The poem opens:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

Ferlinghetti had started a series of books called City Lights Pocket Poets Series and he famously sent Ginsberg a telegram after hearing Ginsberg read “Howl”:

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?”

“Howl and Other Poems” became Number Four in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Poets Series, but hundreds of copies of the book were seized by U.S. Customs officials and Ferlinghetti was charged with obscenity. The charges were later dropped when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem had redeeming social importance.

Through Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, his own poetry, the publication of “Howl”–which set precedence for the freedom to publish controversial literary works of redeeming social importance, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 96-years-old, embodies everything an independent bookstore and its booksellers could ever wish to be.

Ferlinghetti wrote dozens of poetry books, including America’s most popular selling book of poetry, “A Coney Island of the Mind.” Over the years, the poet has signed paperbacks of his poetry for fans who have visited City Lights bookstore. For serious collectors, Ferlinghetti’s books issued as signed limited editions will have lasting value and beauty.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Ferlinghetti here. 

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Toni Morrison at work. Photo by Jill Krementz.

Both sides of Toni Morrison’s family left the deep South and settled in Ohio in the 1930s due to racial threats and lynchings. With this unsettling background left behind, Toni Morrison’s parents bore her into the diverse community of Lorain, Ohio. Italians, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, white people and black people all went to the same school together and played together. Unlike her parents and grandparents, Morrison felt she entered the world with little personal fear or distrust of white people. Morrison has become known for her ability to communicate a pure view of the daily life of African-Americans from the period of slavery to modern times.

Toni Morrison during her years as an editor at Random House (1970s). Photo by Jill Krementz.

Morrison studied literature at Howard University and completed her Masters at Cornell University. After seven years of teaching and the break-up of her marriage with two kids in tow, she took a job as a textbook editor. Later she became an editor at Random House where she championed black writers. Reflective of her upbringing, Morrison wanted for herself and other black writers to simply write as a black people. In a 1992 interview with The Paris Review, Morrison explains:

“It’s very important to me that my work be African-American. If it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they came from, and I do too.”

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Morrison elaborates:

“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze . . . In so many earlier books by African-American writers particularly by the men, I felt that they were not writing to me.”

After the publication of “Beloved,” a group of black writers and intellectuals signed and published a statement in the New York Times admonishing the publishing industry for not honoring Toni Morrison with the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. Though Morrison has never won the National Book Award, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “Beloved” and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She remains the only black woman recipient of Nobel Prize for Literature and the only American to have won the Prize since John Steinbeck in 1962.

At age 84, Toni Morrison has published 11 novels. “Beloved” was brought to mainstream readers when Oprah chose the novel for her book club and made it into a film in 1998. Over the years, Morrison’s early works, from “The Bluest Eye” (1970) to “Beloved” (1987), have become highly collectible. Because Morrison has made herself available for book signings and Knopf has offered select booksellers pre-signed books, signed first editions of Morrison’s later works have been accessible for collectors. However, as Morrison ages and readers appreciate her work more, signed editions may become harder to find and may increase in value.

Morrison’s new novel, “God Help the Child,” goes on sale Tuesday, April 21, 2015.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Toni Morrison here.

Written by Lisa Newman

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner and Sons, 1952.

The Old Man and the Sea first appeared as a 20-page insert in the September 1, 1952 issue of LIFE magazine. After Hemingway’s friend and Broadway producer Leland Hayward talked about the novel with enthusiasm at a LIFE editorial lunch, Hayward sent a manuscript to the editorial board at LIFE. Hemingway believed so strongly in the story of The Old Man and the Sea that he agreed to release the novel through a LIFE magazine insert two weeks before the book’s release.

Hemingway wrote to Daniel Longwell, LIFE Editorial Board Chairman:

“Don’t you think it is a strange damn story that it should affect all of us (me especially) the way it does? . . . I’m very excited about the book and that it is coming out in LIFE so that many people will read it who could not afford to buy it.”

Five million copies of the magazine sold within two days. Two weeks later the novel was issued in book form with a first edition printing of 50,000 copies and a simultaneous Book of the Month Club publication.

After winning the hearts of Americans, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, Hemingway reflected on the novel in a December 1954 interview with Time magazine:

“‘No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,’ says Hemingway. ‘That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.’ He opens two bottles of beer and continues: ‘I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.'”

Collectors of fine first editions should look for Scribner’s seal and the letter “A” on the copyright page as the notation for first printing. Be aware of the Book of the Month club edition: the jacket will be missing the $3.00 price and “Book of the Month” will be noted; there will also be a nick or embossment on the bottom right of the hardcover, near the spine. Signed editions greatly increase the value of the book.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Hemingway here. 

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

“The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Mississippi has a long history of producing some of the greatest literary and commercially successful writers. Consider William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, John Grisham, and Greg Iles; and then add Thomas Harris, author of “The Silence of the Lambs,” to the list.

Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1940, but grew up in Rich, Mississippi—near Clarksdale—where his father moved the family to take up farming. Harris was a quiet kid who read everything he could get his hands on. His mother said, “’he is the most gentle person I have ever known’” in a rare interview with the author and his mother in New York magazine in 1991. So how did such a gentle man come to write such a brilliant blend of crime suspense and horror fiction?

Harris majored in English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where his uncle was a physician. While in Waco, Harris worked night shifts at the Waco News, often covering gruesome crime stories. His colleagues noted his relentless pursuit of every angle to get the story right. Friends and colleagues also saw Harris’s undeniable talent in writing short fictional pieces for magazine publication. Upon graduation, Harris took another night shift at the AP office in New York where he also covered copious crime stories, but this time Harris and two friends/fellow reporters came up with an idea for a novel based on a true story. Putnam bought the story and the friends split the advance three ways. Eventually, Harris quit his job to turn the story into the novel, “Black Sunday,” which was released in 1975.

It’s 1981: Enter Harris’s disturbing Hannibal Lecter in “Red Dragon,” which was published with moderate success. Hannibal takes center stage in “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1988 as the book hit the national best seller list. The success of “Silence of the Lambs” only grew as the blockbuster film starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodi Foster won an historic five Oscars. (As a further honor, the film has since been preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.) Harris received a five-million dollar advance for his next two books, “Hannibal” and “Hannibal Rising.”

Collecting Thomas Harris’s books is no easy task. Over the years, the shy author would rather be cooking gourmet meals or writing than giving interviews or book talks. His publishers have never issued any special signed limited editions, and the few signed books mostly come from random circumstances.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Thomas Harris here. 

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.