Though at first glance booksellers don’t seem to be a competitive lot, underneath their calm masked demeanor burns a desire to sell. What often makes it different is that sometimes the challenge is not quantitative in terms of sales, but qualitative. Naturally, Destination: Books stocks books that we think potential buyers are likely interested in, (e.g. books on okra and mushrooms), but sometimes we become a more adventuresome seller intentionally offering something that is more of an outlier or quirky. “It is an article of faith that such a book can be the lid to somebody's pot,” says one of our staffers.
For example, throughout the summer we have carried in our Destination: Books popup booth Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta two books about the melodic pawpaw fruit. Though the Asimina triloba is more prevalent north of here (ranging from Arkansas to Virginia and northern Alabama to southern Michigan) its southern-most habitat does include Georgia. There are pawpaw trees, I am told, planted on grounds of the Carter Center.
One such offering is Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit by Andrew Moore. The title alone tells you that the pawpaw—though the largest edible fruit in North America—has long suffered an image problem. Some say it tastes like a cross between a mango and a banana. Others say, “a pawpaw is to a mango and as quince is to an apple.” Though his travels throughout the Southeast, Moore provides a detailed cultural history of the fruit going back centuries.
Another pawpaw-flavored book is Pawpaws: The Complete Growing and Marketing Guide by Blake Cothron, which like the Moore book gives some background about the fruit. What separates this book from the Moore book is that there are instructions on how to grow your own pawpaws either commercially or for personal consumption.
Other Possibilities
There are a couple other new “long shot” additions which have been and a source of discussion in pre-booth staff meetings. One is Jonathan Franzen’s book of essays, The End of the End of the Earth, which we wrote about last month here in the blog and the other is science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s hefty novel, The Ministry for the Future, which was written about recently in the short piece “Speculating on the Future,” recently posted on our companion blog.
Both authors have name recognition and a sizeable following but would not necessarily expect to see their books on the tables of a Farmer’s Market. However, both writers creatively tackle the question of what hope looks like in the face of cataclysmic climate change.
Will these books leave the display table at our next popup appearance on Saturday morning, August 28, 2021? Should we really be surprised if they do? After all our motto says: Destination: Books “for the adventurous.”
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