We know the mail will still come today and Monday, and there are a couple of titles ordered that could sneak in the door still. As of now, 10:30 a.m. on 12/29, we now make it 19 years in a row that we've brought or allowed way too many books to come inside the walls of our home.
In 2018 166 new works between covers (not including comics or graphic novels--a whole separate post/category for us this year) wandered through the doors. Way more than we could have read had this been a good reading year.
The male/female split went 86 to 80. While for a few years I had specifically set up a purchasing plan to make sure the numbers were somewhere near this, I did not do so this year but instead think I've learned to look past the titles being pushed on readers and reviewers. I do have to say, of the complimentary books received (noted below), about 80% were penned by males. At least 54 of the books were written by POC. Again, not intentional, but I think part of this is due to the industry maybe doing a better job of making sure other voices are being heard.
27 of the titles were chapbooks. I also probably added a half dozen or so broadsides this year but did not include them in this listing.
11 of the books were translated to English from their original language.
At least 97 of the titles were published by Indie houses.
Not our best year for short story collections, only 54. That rolls with 58 novels, 12 works of non-fiction, 4 cookbooks, 2 novellas, 1 collection of plays, 1 art book, and in what has to be a new high for the EWN, 34 collections of poetry.
One of these books was a gift, and 43 of them were complimentary Advanced Review Copies from publishers. Meaning, we did our best to help keep the publishing world a thing by throwing cash onto counters for 122 titles this year. We can only guess but would say approximately 40 of these books were purchased between Literati and Pages in Ann Arbor and Detroit respectively and another close to 40 ordered direct from publishers. Probably half a dozen were picked up at Dollar Tree dollar stores and probably two dozen were either picked up at John L. King Books in Detroit or via ABEBooks.com due to their being OOP and needed for Dzanc's rEprint Series. Some were picked up via B&N because much as we love indie booksellers, we think there needs to be a big company to at least try to keep the Behemoth honest. And in some cases we did weaken and use that company. Much, much less than one would expect though from a group that purchased 122 books this year.
In a first for us here, we also bought a literary related work of art! We purchased the piece of art that Nancy J. Rodwan created (you can see it in her book, Purged) from the book that Anna Clark gave her. And we purchased it through the indie bookseller, Pages.
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