Robert Gray: Revisiting a Book Blog--What Was I Thinking? 

Earlier this month, a somewhat notable date passed by without fanfare: September 12 marked the 20th anniversary of my first post on a new blog called Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal.

Back then, I'd hoped to explore the book business from the perspective of a frontline bookseller. That initial post would eventually (June 2006, to be precise) grow up to become this weekly Shelf Awareness column, though I sure as hell didn't know that when I started. 

In olden times, there weren't as many blogs around, especially in the book world. I had been a bookseller at that point for 12 years, and was fascinated by what a business consultant/customer called "the last three feet," that mysterious point of contact when a product or service transfers from a business to its customer. Frontline booksellers were one of those points of contact. I just wanted to write about them, about us. Here's what I said initially:

"It would be tempting to begin a journal like this on a day that might serve as an official portal into the bookselling world--the first day of the year, for example, with the journal reaching its climactic finish during the mad holiday season. But bookselling isn't a dramatic profession. Often people who envy booksellers do so because they imagine some idyllic little bookshop myth, where the bookseller reads peacefully at a counter, his well-fed cat sleeping near his elbow, and when the little bell over the door rings, announcing a customer's arrival, he looks up casually from his book and welcomes the newcomer to biblioparadise.

"I haven't had many days like that. I love bookselling, but part of that love is not unlike the day to day reality of any relationship. There are moments of wonder, moments of pleasure, moments of surprise, moments of joy, and these are all balanced with moments of melancholy, anger, boredom, and frustration. Like life.

"In a way, this blog will be a kind of travel journal. Reading is as much a journey as any package tour European vacation--six hundred pages in six days; if it's Tuesday, this must be Chapter 12. Thoreau once wrote that he could travel the world without leaving Concord. Or something like that. Sam Hamill's The Essential Bashō is an excellent collection of writing by the 17th century Japanese poet, whose Narrow Road to the Interior is a template for travel writing.

" 'Nothing's worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes,' Bashō observed..... His writing blends the random observations, poetry, and sharp imagery he captured on his travels through Japan with the twin lenses of his heart and mind. He collected experiences and strung them together like prayer beads. Fresh eyes. Let's begin the trip."

In the early blog posts, I wrote about topics like Decoding Customer Requests ("a daily task, a Holmesian moment in which clues are presented and deductions made, elementary and otherwise"), Discovering Books ("every reader 'discovers' books, but a bookseller gets to do this before the publication date, thanks to the never-cresting wave of Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) that flood our buyers’ offices on a daily basis"), and For Writers: The Fine Art of Choosing a Bookseller ("That point of contact, of course, is in the casual yet pointed conversations between booksellers and readers on the sales floor. These foot soldiers are often overlooked when writers wonder why their books seem to get lost in the biblioshuffle.").

Time passed. A couple of years later, as my work at Shelf Awareness expanded, the Fresh Eyes blog drifted away quietly. During the winter of 2007, I revisited the blog's origin story in one of the final posts, noting that "its modest mission has altered over that brief time, but one aspect that hasn't changed is the original wellspring, the journals and poetry of Bashō. Publishing industry headlines are still rife with closing indie bookstores and evolving technology that may threaten the very existence of 'fiber-based' texts. Should we be afraid, like medieval peasants terrified by the prospect of what army or disease might be coming over the hill to annihilate their village next?

"I don't think that way. It is, as it always has been, the end of some worlds and the beginning of other worlds. The peasants adapt to survive. So do the artists. And sometimes death is an illusion anyway. Bashō, for instance, still lives, more than three centuries after his death....

"I'm a reader. I look ahead with faith. I look back with gratitude. This blog has been, as it was intended to be, a travel journal of one bookseller's trip. I'm not a fan of itineraries, however, so even though there has been an unavoidable chronology here (today's entry is posted today, etc.), the illusion of time moving forward breaks down regularly. Memory often plays a role, and memory is a sieve. I've been looking for signs of what books mean and why we value them, not just timelines of progress and destruction."

Bashō wrote, “A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” And so, happy 20th blog birthday to the late Fresh Eyes: a Bookseller's Journal. I began with just one question--What am I thinking?--to which there have been, and continue to be, an ever-changing series of momentary answers. 

--Robert Gray, contributing editor
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