Update Announcements by Craig Stark 25 June 2025

By Craig Stark

This newsletter is not a test. After tossing out last week's trial newsletter, I was delighted to hear from so many of you, not a few of whom are still in the trade. Thank you all. It persuaded it me to move forward with the BookThinker.

My first inclination regarding this newsletter was to do a case study article on a book I first read when I was 11 years old. Speaking for myself, I don't always know how influential a book will prove to be after reading it for the first time, but this one was all but hidden to my view many years before I saw its powerful influence on me, and yet it fell under the category of juvenile fiction. To my knowledge, it has never been in the spotlight of high spots in bookselling circles. Still, it was popular enough in 1958 to spawn a series of books with the same protagonist - Henry Reed - and was illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner Robert McCloskey. Sadly, my copy of Henry Reed, Inc. has long since passed out of my hands. Much later, when I'd begun to grow aware of its influence (and feeling somewhat nostalgic), I purchased another copy on eBay, a first edition in a priced dust jacket for less than $10. Similar copies in comparably beautiful condition now sell for hundreds of dollars.

And - I know exactly why it so powerfully influenced me. Henry Reed was a born entrepreneur, always looking for the next moneymaking scheme, trying and failing with often comical outcomes, and he had a sort of partner in crime, a similarly aged, then tomboyish girl named Margaret, nicknamed Midge. Funny thing, I now look back on the history of my adult life, and it's been nothing if not a continuous pattern of scheming. Even BookThink, though a more global entity as schemes go, has been packed with sub-scheme after sub-scheme over its 22-year history, most of them failures, many of them comically dismal, but a few that actually worked. Funnier yet, I palled around with a girl named Margaret in my youth, lost track of her for many decades, and today, I find her in my life once again. I don't call her Midge.

But this is just my story, and not overly powerful for bookselling purposes. Today's feature article, on the other hand, features a book that exerts much more power. It's also about an 11-year-old boy who read a book that influenced his life in a major way.