I’m just back from a seven-city bout of bookflogging and tabletop dancing. I’ve shown my ankles to smart and lively book lovers in NYC, Durham, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Columbus. I am a very, very grateful man.<\/p>\n
In the manner of a self-involved awards show honoree, I’d like to place my right hand over my heart to denote earnestness, and bestow the following awards:<\/p>\n
MOST UNFOUNDED EXPRESSION OF ANXIETY:\u00a0 My mother, on the eve of our mutual appearance on a community radio show in North Carolina called “Carrboro Book Beat,” asked me, “Is this going to be dressy<\/em>?”<\/p>\n MOST FLATTERING ASSESSMENT OF MY WHITEBREAD CHARMS: After a banter-driven conversation with interviewer Warren Etheredge in front of a Seattle audience, a friend of Etheredge’s asked me, “So, Henry, are you a New York Jew, too?”<\/p>\n MOST THRILLING ENTRANCE: My sister, with seven of her friends, in a white limo, to my Books, Inc. reading in San Francisco: possibly the first time that “white limo” and “independent bookseller” have appeared in the same sentence.<\/p>\n BEST REACTION TO A NOT-ENTIRELY-POSITIVE BOOK REVIEW: “How To Live” character Sylvia Miles said to me of one\u00a0 slightly dyspeptic book reviewer, “He wouldn’t ‘get’ someone like me. His idea of avant-garde is Arlene Dahl.”<\/p>\n MOST SEMIOTICALLY-CHARGED MOMENT: Given a Sharpie, I was asked to sign James Thurber’s closet at the Thurber House in Columbus.<\/p>\n STRONGEST EVIDENCE THAT MY WORDS ARE NOT FALLING ON DEAF EARS: Immediately after I uttered the statement, “I’m agnostic” at Books and Books in Coral Gables, the bookstore’s lights went off for three seconds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m just back from a seven-city bout of bookflogging and tabletop dancing. I’ve shown my ankles to smart and lively book lovers in NYC, Durham, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Columbus. I am a very, very grateful man. In the manner of a self-involved awards show honoree, I’d like to place my right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}