Book people

So the initial round of book publicity for The Last Three Miles ended on a high note tonight with a very satisfactory reading at The Raconteur, a great used bookstore on Main Street in Metuchen. (I’ll be doing more events all summer, including an early July appearance on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, about which more anon.)

I’ve been trying to balance independent bookstores with chain bookstores, and The Raconteur was one of the independent places I most wanted to visit. Alex Dawson and John McKelvey have been working hard to make their joint the center of a local literary scene, and their efforts are starting to pay off. Tonight’s event drew about fourteen people who sipped wine and chatted before Yours Truly took the podium (a music stand and a stool, to be precise) to regale them with stories of murder, mayhem and traffic engineering.

I spoke with Alex afterward and he talked about his ambitions for the store, and how he’s networking with other independent bookstores around the world, such as Atlantis Books, a labor-of-love on the Greek island of Santorini. If you check out The Raconteur site, you’ll find all kinds of events for the bookish and the adventurous. It’s a nice place to visit, and you might even want to live there.