BTW Articles

By Carl Lennertz

Whodunit? You did. Thank you for the great recommendations you’ve been sending in and I’ve been tallying. A neat Top Ten, yes? The pad of 100 fliers goes to press momentarily, headed for the June white box mailing to you.

By 1936, two New Yorkers were touted as the greatest political leaders of the century -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Alfred Emanuel Smith Jr. While every American can recall some accomplishments of FDR, only those who lived through the 1920s and 1930s will likely even remember who Smith was.

A major goal of all booksellers at BookExpo America (BEA) is to identify key titles and to discover intriguing new houses. During the show, BTW staff talked with a number of publishers, particularly smaller, independent houses, to try and help highlight some of the promising books from upcoming lists. By no means exhaustive (although everyone attending BEA can plead exhaustion) the following titles struck us as good possibilities for the fall.

Before 1989, Dr. Sharon Ames-Dennard -- who in April was named "2002 Working Mother of the Year" by Working Mother magazine -- had never set eyes on a black bookstore. There were none in her rural hometown of Cheapside, Virginia -- population 1,000 -- nor any in the areas of Florida where she attended graduate and undergraduate schools. But an internship in Los Angeles led her to the Aquarius, Eso Won Books, and other black bookstores in the area, where she discovered a new passion.