"So buy away. It's Mother's Day. It's coming up." First Lady Michelle Obama offered this sound advice to those in attendance during her book signing at Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C., earlier this week for American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (Crown).
It's no state secret that Mother's Day is big business. The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend an average of $168.94 on Mom this year, up 11% from $152.52 in 2012. Total spending is expected to reach $20.7 billion. 
Mother's Day is big book business, too. On my computer screen, approaching holidays tend to gather momentum like a digital information wave until they inevitably crest into quiet backwash for another year. Our industry is currently surfing the annual Mother's Day breaker because, lovely maternal sentiments aside, this is a key spring retail weekend. Here are a few items that attracted my attention:
"How do you find the perfect gift that sums up what they are all about?" asked R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, Conn., in its e-newsletter yesterday. "Because most moms are multi-faceted, it's not always easy. However, it gives us the perfect opportunity to meet your challenge so that your mom has a face that lights up the moment she sees the book or gift we have recommended for her."
In their latest e-newsletter, McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, Mich., opened with a seasonally appropriate quote from Jane Sellman ("The phrase 'working mother' is redundant") and concluded with: "Mother's Day is Sunday, May 12. You've got time, and we've got all kinds of ideas."
Cathy Langer, lead book buyer for Tattered Cover Bookstore, used her regular guest spot on Bertha Lynn's 7News Denver midday program to recommend some great Mother's Day gift books.
To honor local moms, the Regulator Bookshop, Durham, N.C., is donating 10% of its sales this Saturday to the city's shop local organization, Sustain-a-Bull.
"I started with the idea that I wanted people to write about an object," Elizabeth Benedict, editor of What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most (Algonquin), told NPR. "And if I had said to all these people, 'Write me a story about your mother,' I think I wouldn't have gotten anything because people would've freaked out. But I think being able to focus on one object and tell the sort of beginning and middle and end of that object and how it radiates and reverberates really allows people to get to the core of the relationship."
That book in digital format is also part of a joint ABA/Kobo promotion. "Can't decide what to get mom for Mother's Day? Give her the gift of e-reading!" noted Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, Mass., highlighting the deal on Kobo eReaders that includes a "free e-book copy of What My Mother Gave Me--AND a card!"
Speaking of greeting cards, a Mother's Day retail mainstay for indie booksellers, check out the blog at Boswell & Books, Milwaukee, Wisc., where "Daniel and Halley Talk Moms... or Specifically Mother's Day Cards."
Elinor Lipman, author most recently of The View from Penthouse B and I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays, wrote on her Facebook page earlier this week that for readers attending her event at Brookline Booksmith, she would "inscribe your Mothers' Day present warmly, personally, lovingly. You'll get all the credit!"
Open Road Media created a video/trailer featuring several authors recalling how being mothered and becoming mothers themselves had shaped their lives and work, including Erica Jong, Alice Walker, Anne Perry and Rexanne Becnel.
The staff at Milkweed Editions, ("the only thing our mothers love as much as their children are the books we publish") offered "recommendations for books we know our own mothers would like," with accompanying photos.
Equal time, you say? Shame on you, but just to counteract the temptation of being too sappy on this justifiably sappiest of holidays, consider the Scottish Book Trust's ranking of "worst mothers in literature, from the irritating to the purely evil" or Bookish's "meanest moms in literature" or Redbook magazine's "the best & worst mothers in our favorite books."
Of all the items arriving on my virtual desk this week, however, the one that had the most impact was an invitation from Masha Hamilton's extraordinary Afghan Women's Writing Project to "celebrate the mother(s) in your life by sharing with them AWWP's newly released collection of poems and stories about love & forgiveness, the heart and soul of motherhood. Then, HONOR her with a donation to AWWP in her name!" And so I did. Of course, I'll also buy my mother books... and a card. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now).
