On Buying Books

I don’t buy enough books. My wife and fellow author Nancy Marie Brown buys books hand over fist. Nonfiction, contemporary novels, historical novels, poetry. She almost buys enough books for both of us. But not quite.

I buy books that help me understand life in America during the early 1800s, when my fictional sheriff Gideon Stoltz tries (not always successfully) to uphold the law in backwoods Pennsylvania.

I bought The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, by Andrew Delbanco. Great background material and details that I used in my third mystery, Lay This Body Down, which includes the murder of an abolitionist newspaperman, plus a brave and determined young man who has run north from Virginia to escape enslavement.

I bought A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by Stephen Mihm. Did you know that between the Revolution and the Civil War most paper money in circulation originated not with the federal government but from often-shaky private banks? Or that in many parts of the country fully half the bills used to buy food and goods and services were fake? Counterfeit money and a psychopathic con artist help propel the fourth Gideon Stoltz novel (not yet titled), which I just started writing.

I’m trying to overcome my parsimonious nature by buying more fiction – mainly novels in the mystery, suspense, and thriller genres, both for the pleasure of reading them and to give other authors a boost. Because unless readers like you and me actually buy such books, publishers won’t bring them out. Instead, we’ll get more self-help and how-to volumes, more blather from politicians, sports stars, entrepreneurs, and entertainers. Which I don’t think we really need.

real friend chris evans relaxes with a book in new mexico.

It’s also important to buy books in hardcover and not wait for the paperback to come out, because if a book doesn’t sell enough copies in hardcover, the paperback will never get printed. Which is why my second mystery, Nighthawk’s Wing, is available only in hardcover.

I just ordered Hatchet Island, by Paul Doiron, from my local bookstore, Green Mountain Books in busy (not really) downtown Lyndonville. I want to support Doiron, and I want to support a real store owned by a real person, Kim Crady-Smith (she’s a delight); a store that, in my opinion, is the heart and soul of this small town just over the hill from where Nancy and I live in northern Vermont.

Hatchet Island is the new and thirteenth installment in Doiron’s Mike Bowditch crime novel series. Bowditch is a Maine game warden and a skilled outdoorsman with his share of problems and complicated interpersonal relationships. Doiron’s vivid writing and intense pacing make his books hard to put down. His depictions of nature, wildlife, and landscape are spot on.

When I was a teenager, one of my father’s friends had a book published, a work of nonfiction predicting world famine caused by human overpopulation. Both of my parents were avid readers; as children of the Great Depression, they mainly patronized the library. But they laid down cash for their friend’s book. I never read it, being much more interested in stories and novels by writers like John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway (as a dutiful child of children of the Great Depression, I invariably checked those books out from the library). But I remember that the author signed my parents’ book and added a message something like this: “To Leonard and Ruth, real friends. They bought this book!”

Want to be an author’s real friend? Buy their book. Buy it from a bookstore and suggest the store order another copy to replace the one you just bought. Or buy it online if you don’t have a local bookstore. It’s important. And even if the author can’t thank you with a zingy inscription, know that you’re helping keep books and writing alive.