I would contribute the complete works of one of our local authors. Most of our local authors are wonderful people who appreciate the support the bookstore gives them. We display their work prominently and host monthly signings. Most of them are pretty good writers, and one, James D. Doss, enjoys a national reputation as a mystery author.
One, however, is a pain in the tuckus. Martha Mae fancies herself as the literary heir of Jane Austen (you can occasionally see her flapping around town in Eighteenth Century costumes). Her work includes a Southwestern mystery, a mystery of the Great Lakes area (not a big seller in the Southwest), the biography of a Michigan author whose fame echoes from Kalamazoo to Battle Creek, and a romance in the style of Jane Austen—if Jane Austen had been coked to the gills on heroin and mined a rich vein of prose combining the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.
Nevertheless, she has her fans.
Martha Mae’s main claim to fame is that she walked the entire length of the Santa Fe Trail from west to east over the course of many years. Far be it from me to denigrate the achievement. I mean, the woman is now 70+ and is planning another hike of the trail, this time over the mountain route. During her trek over the lower route, she sent back regular dispatches to the local paper, which obligingly printed them. She also accosted the editors of every small-town daily along the Santa Fe Trail and bullied them into covering her feat. She collected the clippings, combined them with those from the local paper—and voila! another book. As my dad once said, “That woman could take a cr@p and would write about it for publication.”
It’s her latest, the “ghost-written autobiography” of a retired English teacher at Los Alamos High School, that is making me nuts. In the first place, an autobiography should be written by the person herself. In the second place, nobody is going to pay twelve bucks for a photocopied velobound book. In the third place, she should have shared the money from sales with the teacher.
And in the fourth place, the teacher passed away at age 97 several days before Christmas, and Martha Mae called me at the store to see how many of the books we had on hand. I told her we didn’t have any.
She wanted to sell them at the memorial service. She said she couldn’t get any more because the copy place was closed for the holidays. She assured me, however, that she’d make up some order forms and put them out at the reception after the service so folks could bring them by the store to reserve their copies.
