One of the advantages of living in or near a larger city is that authors come through regularly on book-signing tours. There are several independent bookstores in the Phoenix area that host such appearances on a regular basis, and meeting authors, getting to know some of the ones who come through frequently, and of course reading and collecting the books has become a major source of enjoyment for me these days.
Our mystery-centric bookstore in Scottsdale, The Poisoned Pen, is one of the best places to hang out and meet authors. The owner is a former archivist for the Library of Congress, a publisher, and a personal friend of many of the authors, so they rarely skip Scottsdale on their tours.
Among the writers whom I’ve met there are the late Robert B. Parker (‘Spenser’, ‘Jesse Stone’), Andrew Vachss (the ‘Burke’ series), Lee Child (‘Jack Reacher’), Kathy Reichs (‘Bones’), Craig Johnson (‘Longmire’), the late James Crumley, Earl Emerson, Ed Kovacs, Clive Cussler, Laurie King, Joe R. Lansdale and Jeffrey Deaver. I tend to gravitate more toward the “hardboiled” detective stories, but one author of the lighter variety - the “cozies”, as they’re called – named Betty Webb has written a series of books called the Gunn Zoo Mysteries (beginning with ‘The Anteater of Death’) and I feel obligated to buy and read them (and get them signed, of course) because Betty named the heroine of her books after my wife.
A general interest bookstore, with a couple of locations here in the Valley of the Sun, is called Changing Hands, and they also frequently host author signings. Last week I met Ila Borders, she of Independent Baseball pitching fame, there and got her to sign her just-released autobiography and a baseball. A few years ago, I met Matt McCarthy, the Yale pitcher who wrote the controversial minor league expose ‘Odd Man Out’ at the same store.
Others I’ve met at Changing Hands are former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, Anne Rice, Linda Ronstadt and Ozzie Osborne. (That last autographed book was a gift for my sister, who was a big fan of his reality show. The Ozzie signing brought out a very…interesting crowd; that was the longest I’ve ever stood in line to get anyone’s autograph.)
One of the first author signings I attended after moving here in 1993 was at the now-defunct Brentano’s, where I met Leslie Nielson. Some years later I was privileged to see Charlton Heston at that same store, which is a story in itself. I think it was at a Barnes & Noble store that I met and spoke with U.F.O abductee Travis Walton; he signed his book for me of course, and my VHS copy of Fire in the Sky. Travis was the second U.F.O. abductee I’ve met, having seen Whitley Strieber at a signing some years ago in California. (I also have a rare signed copy of a book by ‘50s U.F.O. abductee and famous oddball George Adamski, which I discovered in a second-hand bookshop many years after his death.)
That is far from being the only signed book that has come into my possession second-hand, as it were. One of my favorite poets is the late William Stafford, and one of my favorite poems is his ‘Traveling Through the Dark’. For my birthday one year, my sister sent me a signed copy of his poetry collection of the same name…and apologized because it wasn’t a first edition. In a second-hand bookshop in San Jose in the ‘80s, I found a copy of The New Testament: An American Translation by Edgar J. Goodspeed, which was popular in the ‘20s, signed by Professor Goodspeed. (It’s not every day you come across an autographed Bible.) It was also about that time that I attended an author’s symposium at the San Jose Public Library and met fellow Indiana-expat Jessamyn West and Harlan Ellison. (Louis L’Amour was there, too, but the signing line for him was out the door and around the block.)