It’s not too late to celebrate the folks on your holiday gift list! Buyers at independent bookstores throughout the West will save our season with smart, surprising, page-turning gift ideas for last-minute shoppers (like us!). Literary experts from Book Passage in Corte Madera; Diesel, A Bookstore in Santa Monica; and Warwick’s in La Jolla will bullet-point top titles that’ll make perfect gifts for the nice—and even the naughty—folks left on your list. Need to know what to buy a coworker, a curious kid, a home chef, a true-crime buff, a stoic teen, and that booklover who already knows about every great book before you do? We have you covered—with a bow and a gift receipt—in this 30-minute panel that’ll solve many of your holiday-present quandaries.
About the guests:
Mary Lee Delafield has been a bookseller for over 22 years, first at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, Texas, and at Warwicks (her childhood bookstore) in La Jolla, California for over a decade.
John Evans is an owner of Diesel, A Bookstore in Los Angeles and San Diego. He has been a boardmember of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association and the American Booksellers Association. He has been a judge for the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Poetry, the ABA’s Indies Choice Book Award, and the National Book Award for Poetry. He is also a poet and has an MA in poetics from New College of California.
Luisa Smith practically grew up in Book Passage, so it was no surprise when she finally applied to work there back in 1996. Since then she has had many positions in the store, but her favorite, as buying director, is her current role and has been for a number of years. Besides her work at Book Passage, Smith is also editor in chief of Scarlet Publishing, an imprint of Mysterious Press. There she is able to take her love of books a step further and enthusiastically work to get the authors she discovers on bookshelves in stores across the country. Smith would describe herself as a reading addict who has been lucky enough to find great jobs to support her habit.•
