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I’ve got a lot of books in my office.
It’s not as many as I expected to have when I was a small child thinking about working in publishing — that envisioning had books carpeting the walls (and possibly even the ceiling). There are actually a few editors in our Macmillan-owned building who have offices like that — books and books and books everywhere. But it turns out for marketing, I don’t need to have a whole lot of books that aren’t published by First Second on hand, so I keep those at home where I have time to read them.
This is my active bookshelf — the one that I pull books from on a daily basis, for mailings, review copy requests, to send to our sales department. Most of the books on this shelf have come out in the past year — we have another whole bookcase where we keep other titles from the more distant past.
This shelf is also the place where I keep the limited advance copies of books that aren’t out — those are mostly the stacks you see: Marathon, Baby’s in Black, and because I sometimes work on graphic novel-y books from our sister companies, The Year of the Beasts and Take What You Can Carry. And yes, the exciting stack all the way at the top is Diamond’s Previews catalog.
Also I have this bookshelf that spins! It is mostly for display, though — and the problem with spinning bookshelves is that the books tend to fall out with the exciting spinning action.
My desk also has shelves that are immediately above my desk area. On this one, I try to keep a copy of all the books that we publish, so I can have them for reference. (This is mostly not successful, because people tend to request them for review, and I cannot resist sending books to them even if I only have a single copy.) Also I keep stuff there that Cal at Strange Adventures sends me — that would be the water glasses and the mug.
I also have this other shelf above my desk where I mostly keep labels, coffee cups, and our extremely sporadic promotional materials. And I probably can get rid of that SDCC binder from 2009, right? But I also keep the fiction and non-fiction I read that’s going to get donated to charity (that’s the large stack you see on top) and miscellaneous reference books — always useful. And disorganized — it turns out that my need for Harrap’s Shorter French and English Dictionary (the blue volume on the far left) is extremely sporadic.
And that’s all the bookshelves I’ve got for today. Hope you enjoyed the tour!
