From the Editor by Craig Stark #24, 2 August 2004

Brace yourselves. Prime bookselling season is only a few weeks away - at most a month or two. Are you ready? Have you spent the summer accumulating scads of quality inventory? (And, simultaneously, dumping unproductive inventory?) Worked hard to improve your presentation skills? Added 1,000's of new flashpoints to your master lists? Done anything and everything you can to become book smart? I thought so. And that means you'll have time to take a short breather and sit down with Henry Petroski. Petroski, in case you don't know, has authored an impressive collection of bestselling books, some of them about seemingly insignificant stuff: pencils, paper clips, zippers, and yes, books - more to the point, bookshelves. If you think these are topics that can be adequately dispatched with in brief articles, think again. Petroski has a gift for seeing the universal in the particular, not to mention a gift for making it all very engaging, and this most certainly requires the expanse of a book to do. See our interview with him in today's BookThinker.

I'm happy to report that BookThink Contributing Editor Pamela Palmer makes two appearances today, first in BookThink's inaugural mystery column with an in-depth look at the Nancy Drew phenomenon and second in another new BookThink feature - BookTopics. BookTopics articles will, over time, organize past BookThinker articles into intuitive groups and be published on BookThink's new BookTopics page for ready reference.

For Gold Edition subscribers - today's issue will take a look back at the Fabulous 50's, specifically TV-related publications. This is a hot niche and getting hotter, and if you're looking for a painless method to improve your sales, this is a great place to start. For non-subscribers, this, other individual issues, and subscriptions are available for sale here.