I’ve just attended American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute. For four days, independent booksellers and authors gather together to discuss books and the state of the industry. Now in its tenth year, the Institute was held in the small, pretty city of Asheville, North Carolina. Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville was a very considered choice by the ABA; in the mid-20th century Asheville’s downtown area had been decimated by the construction of malls on the city’s outskirts, which had sucked the lifeblood out of the city centre. With the help of some enlightened developers and town councillors, the city has been undergoing a successful rejuvenation process. An integral part of that process was the town’s bookshop, Malaprop’s, which had been started in the run down downtown area in 1982 by Hungarian-born Emöke B’Racz – ‘You could walk three blocks in either direction to find another building that was occupied’. In 1997 she was approached by one of the developers who wanted to buy a large abandoned building a few doors from Malaprop’s; he would only buy the building if Emöke would move her store into it. It was a risk for the developer and for Emöke, but they pulled it off and Malaprop’s became a key factor in the revitalisation of the downtown area, their success encouraging sympathetic businesses to take the risk also.

Today Asheville is a vibrant and delightful little city full of interesting local businesses supported by an engaged and committed community. It’s no surprise, then, that Ashevillle is at the forefront of the growing Buy Local movement in the United States; studies have shown that locally owned businesses contribute much more to local economies in terms of jobs, taxes and in intangible benefits than do the large national brands, and certainly in Asheville the community has embraced the idea with businesses such as Malaprops thriving in spite of the online competition from the likes of Amazon. Indeed, the mood among the 600 or so booksellers at the Institute was buoyantly optimistic, with booksellers reporting growing sales and community support. The American public, it seems, have decided that local independent bookshops are an important asset for their communities, and that without their support they will lose them.

Hundreds of authors also came to the Winter Institute to pitch their new books to the booksellers. Authors and publishers alike are acknowledging how important the independent booksellers are in reaching readers. In what was like a giant speed-dating exercise where authors got a chance to meet booksellers and spruik their books to them. I’d like to share a few titles that caught my interest. Steven Johnson, the author of How We Got to Now – Six Innovations That Made the Modern World gave the opening address. In his book he traces six key technologies that changed the world – refrigeration, clocks, lenses, water purification, recorded sound and artificial light. He was fascinating. I met photographer Sally Mann, who was signing advance copies of her memoir Hold Still – endorsed by Patti Smith, this looks fascinating. Historian Erik Larson wrote In the Garden of Beasts a few years ago; his new book Dead Wake is about the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915 on its way from New York to Liverpool. I was enchanted by Mary Norris, who’s been a copy editor at the New Yorker for over 30 years. Her book on grammar, Between You & Me – Confessions of a Comma Queen is due out from Text in April. I had a brief chat with T.C. Boyle, whose novel The Harder They Come, about three damaged characters from California, is due later this year. Debut novel City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg is set in New York in the 1970s. At 900 pages, it looks daunting but very enticing – the ‘70s was such an interesting period in the life of that city. It’s due in October.

Mark Rubbo