Our home in Northeast Ohio is a cozy little bookshop in Cleveland Heights run by Suzanne DeGaetano. Mac's Backs, has been in operation for more than 25 years. It's a staple of the Coventry community. "It used to be an old Jewish neighborhood, and then it became a hippy enclave," says DeGaetano. "And now, the hippies are parents and grandparents, actually, so it's really become a family place."

Coventry is also the stomping grounds of Harvey Pekar.

Next door to Mac's Backs is Tommy's, a family-friendly vegetarian restaurant that makes the best milkshakes (and breakfasts) in the region. The bookstore and restaurant have a common entryway inside.

Ohio is a battleground state in the election, and there is no doubt which way the Coventry neighborhood leans. Last week, the sidewalks were teeming with America Coming Together volunteers encouraging people to vote for Kerry, and High Tide Rock Bottom, a novelty shop, has an impressive collection of anti-Bush and pro-Kerry stickers, buttons and paraphernalia on display.

Mac's Backs is three stories of book-browsing heaven. It has the feel of being a place run and patronized by book lovers. And if you're interested in local poets and writers, just ask Suzanne. She has a wealth of knowledge about the local scene. We'll be publishing a longer article about her and Mac's Backs in our section on independent booksellers soon.

Brad Beshaw runs Confounded Books, a hip little bookstore that shares space with a music store in Seattle's Capitol Hill region. You can find Kuhaku and plenty of other interesting books and zines on the shelves there.

Brad's story neatly ties together punk rock, the zine culture and independent bookstores. I'm planning a writeup on him and Confounded for our section on independent booksellers. But before I do that, I just had to get this photo of his tattoo up on our site.

Brad's buddy, Jaimie Trujillo, who runs Chrome Ohm, in Seattle, did the work on Brad's arm to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Confounded Books this year. Jaimie refused pay, so Brad gave him this book.

Confounded Books is at 315 E. Pine St. Hours are 11am to 8pm Mon.-Sat., and noon to 6pm on Sun. Tel: 206-441-9880

We've had Kuhaku in Intelligent Idiot for a good two weeks now. It's probably about time I introduced the store and process.

Intelligent Idiot is located just across the courtyard from Las Chicas, about a five-minute walk from Omotesando station (exit b2). It's near a handful of back-alley galleries and a beautifully designed paper store. This paper store (which I definitely recommend visiting) carries itself with such weight that if you ever thought choosing paper was a trivial process before, you won't anymore.

The stairs up to Intelligent Idiot are made of hard, unfinished planks that create a ruckus under leather soles. The store itself -- less a shop and more a small box with big windows -- is perched at the top. The selection at II is all handpicked by the owner, operator and cashier -- a wonderful young woman who clearly has impeccable taste. Everything is reasonably priced -- our book is bar none the most expensive thing in there.

Again, like with NADiff, this wasn't a perfect fit (where *is* our book a perfect fit??), but she was impressed and intrigued enough to buy (not consign) five copies. So please, if anyone is in the area, do this wonderful woman a favor and go grab our book.

As of 12:33am JST, October 25th, we've exploded in a torrent of paper and cloth and ink through the million mark barrier at Amazon.com. Officially, if for only a fleeting Internet moment, we ranked 159,056th out of all of their books. We certainly aren't selling like mad on Amazon, which only confirms that there must be a lot of books that simply aren't selling at all. Thankfully, all of you kind readers/supporters are graciously ordering from us -- an act that means we see more of a return to funnel into our upcoming projects. FYI: Amazon sucks up 55% (!) of the cover price, a fairly standard percentage for the American book market.

One thing we do need is more reviews. So if any of y'all happy Kuhaku readers want to help us -- the unknown independent publishing company with the lofty ideals -- please hop on over to Amazon and post a review.

Next stop, under 100k!

At 3:40 pm, a soft-spoken man in a brown sweater buttoned to the top came up to me and said, "Mr. Craig?" I expected Nozaki-san, who was forty minutes late, to be a fast-paced, quick-spoken individual running around buying and selling art and books. But he wasn't. In fact, that's probably why he was forty minutes late.

We sat down, and I showed him Kuhaku. He gazed at it, glided his hand over the washi on the cover. He opened it up with intense delicacy and maintained a similar level of reverence for the entire session -- treating each page with equally painful attention. He took in each image at the start of each chapter.

Finally he put it down and said. "This book doesn't fit in this store... but it's interesting. And very handsome. So I want to try it out." NADiff is, for all purposes, a strictly fine-arts-related store. We at CMP just happen to love it and wanted to become a part of it somehow -- even if that meant shoving our almost square book into the abstracted swirly shape of NADiff.

In the end, Nozaki-san took ten copies -- five for NADiff and five for their sister store in Shibuya.

This whole experience of trying to figure out whom to sell to, what distributors to use, how the book is going to sell, et cetera, is exciting because it's all new. It's an experiment. Sure, NADiff is a fine-arts bookstore, but we think that people who dig fine-arts books will also get a kick out of Kuhaku. Now we just have to wait a couple of weeks to find out.

In connection with the story "San Man Down" in Kuhaku, here's a NY Times piece from the 18th on the topic of Internet suicide groups in Japan.

From the Article:

Strangers in life, the seven found a bond in death. Working methodically, they parked a rented van at dusk on a mountain park road west of Tokyo, wrote an email message with their precise location and programmed a cellphone to send it after they were dead. They sealed the van from the inside, took sleeping pills, lit charcoal braziers, and tied their wrists and torsos together.

There's quite an interesting interview/discussion with Kimiaki Ashino of the well-known bookstore cum artstore NADiff (Japanese only link). The article discusses the interesting and convoluted path Ashino followed before opening his bookshop. He has this to say on the function of the store:

For Art Vivant, Seibu had a "gratitude and service" kind of business creed, and since I thought that I'd better choose one too, I made "continuity, directionality and tension" the motto of NADiff. That hasn't changed to date.

Different from Art Vivant, which started as a museum shop, NADiff became "art shop NADiff." That was seven or eight years ago, when it seemed too difficult to survive with a bookshop, and since it had occurred to me that it was difficult to keep up with the movements of art only through publications, I went for the "art shop" format.

We've been trying to get Kuhaku into Nadiff for a while now. But despite a torrent of calls, we have not been able to connect with their book buyer. As soon as this is posted, I'm going to be on the phone once again, trying to set up an appointment to meet with the increasingly mysterious Nozaki-sama.

( Link snatched from the ever excellent Jean Snow. )

Update: The bookstore Gods must have heard my pleas: just set up a meeting with Mr. Nozaki at 3 pm today. Will report the outcome tonight!

Was taking a bike ride during this beautiful weather down from Mejiro, along the Kanda river, up into Kaguraza and down towards Iidabashi when I ran into a street painting session. There was one long stretch of paper all the way from Kagurazaka station to Iidabashi station. Very striking. Perhaps more striking was the amount of participation going on. Everyone was into it -- drawing little cartoons, manga, stick figures -- and having their pictures taken by parents and friends while drawing.

One little girl ran up, threw down a blob of red paint, and then drew a black rectangle around it -- the hi no maru. Cracked me up; she did it with such intensity. I asked a few people what this was all about, and they just laughed and said they had no idea but figured they'd start drawing anyway. The whole strip was completely filled by the end of the afternoon and on my ride home they were scrubbing the street where paint had spilled off. I wonder what they did with all the drawings.

All in all, it was refreshing to see something cool and artsy a) going on outside of the standard trendy areas, and more importantly, b) being enthusiastically embraced by a whole community.

Off to sell some books to this wonderful little bookstore in Omotesando, Tokyo:

Updates on the blog have been slow lately, but behind the scenes, things are very hectic. We're currently planning a couple of readings to happen sometime in the next month here in Tokyo. More info on that once the dates and venues get finalized (as well as some comments on what it takes to set up a reading).

Kuhaku has sold out at Tsutaya Roppongi Hills and Book 246 again, and we just shipped off a new batch this morning. It would be really nice to have an intern to help with all these chores -- someone who wouldn't mind cutting cover cloths, packaging books, printing invoices and getting stuff shipped out. To anyone who's thinking about getting into the publishing industry don't, I repeat, don't under-estimate the insane amount of time shipping and invoicing requires. Especially when you do something obsessive-compulsive like hand rip and stamp Japanese paper covers.

Updates on new bookstore connections, news about our supporters in online communities and more coming in the next couple of days.

The Nethercutt sign is gone. In fact, it was broken up and thrown in the trash by our neighbor, Ellen. And, FWIW Internet fans, our previous blog entry had absolutely nothing to do with it. Here's what happened:

Ellen and Harold are an elderly bipartisan couple. Ellen is the Democrat; she had a "No Iraq War" sign in her window in early 2003 and now has a small picture of John Kerry and John Edwards there. Her partner, Harold, is a Republican. He once ordered a gin & tonic at our daughters' lemonade stand and then gave me a lecture on tax-and-spend Democrats. (But he also tipped the girls heavily, I should add.) We mistakenly thought that Harold was the one who put the sign in the yard.

I didn't intend to get into politics on this blog, but we woke one recent morning to find a "Nethercutt for US Senate" sign pitched in the corner of the Chin Music Press garden, just to the neighbors' side of the property line. This is bad karma. If I don't speak out, I fear our next book will be something like "Ann Coulter Does Japan and Decides All Asians Do Look Alike."

George Nethercutt is a classic Republican scumbag. He has based his whole political career on assuming that the voters are uninformed, and he has won time and again. He plays to the lowest common denominator. This time, let's hope he goes down in flames.