A book in the hand ...

Let us celebrate the return of the Intermittent 80s AM Book Club! Audio at end.

Our friend and guest contributor Brian Kramer is an editor, writer, and book lover. He’s a member of our unofficial, sporadically recurring 80s Book Club, and he’s here to share a special book from his past.

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Opaque by design, The New York Times’ Bestsellers List has always owned up to one unquantifiable factor in its rankings: the hand-sell. The successes of Water for Elephants and The Time Traveler’s Wife, for example, were at least partially due to these books being great hand-sells. Booksellers just liked recommending them to customers and literally placing them in potential buyers’ hands.

My selection for this week’s Intermittent Analog Mix Book Club came into my life as a hand-sell, of sorts. Not from a bookshop owner but from Mrs. Dann, the caffeinated, popcorn-permed librarian at Berne Elementary. All you had to do was tell her you liked Judy Blume better than Beverly Cleary and mysteries in castles more than adventures on trains, and then she’d begin pulling books off the metal shelves and handing them to you. By the end of a row, you’d be holding half a dozen books and could take home any — or all. I’m sure her recommendations relied on the classics of grade-school literature, but she also had a way of looking you up and down through narrowed eyes before recommending books. It felt like she was scanning your soul.

And that’s the joy and magic of a hand-sell — you end up with a book you’d never have selected that also fits you perfectly.

Without Mrs. Dann’s hand-sell in the first month of fourth grade, I wouldn’t have made it past the original cover of Anastasia Krupnick. For starters, Anastasia was a girl main character in a girl book that’s clearly about girl things. Secondly, she looked like … the geekiest geek. With her thicket of hair, oversized owl glasses, and corduroy pants tucked into midcalf boots, she’d never survive afternoon recess — and couldn't possibly be worth me reading about.

Just love these covers

This wasn’t the book I thought I wanted or would ever have picked up myself, but it was absolutely the book I needed as a loquacious, tragically misunderstood 4th-grader. Someone who, like 10-year-old Anastasia, recorded “observations” in a notebook (don’t call it a diary!) that I then tucked under t-shirts in my lowest dresser drawer.

Of course, I loved Lois Lowry’s 1979 book and immediately added “Things I Hate” and “Things I Love” lists, just like Anastasia’s, to my personal non-diary notebook.

The one-off that turned into a series for Lois Lowry

The book went on to become my first hand-sell. Mrs. Dann had pulled Anastasia Krupnick from the rack of 1985’s Young Hoosier Book Award nominees, a contest in which all Indiana grade-schoolers voted for their favorite title from a list of 20. After reading the book, I spent the rest of the school year finding ways to inject Anastasia into conversations and activities. I dogeared the chapter with an actual curse word and passed the book down the desk row to Keith and then Jerry, telling them to disregard the cover and prepare to be shocked. I recommended it to Cami for a book report project because it was, somehow, both sad and funny. 

When the results of the contest were announced in May, Anastasia Krupnick was not crowned the contest’s winner across the entire state or even in my school, but it had transformed me into a book enthusiast — and a hand-selling book evangelist.

Press play on this week’s Analog Mix Tape, Intermittent 80s Book Club edition.