Exciting news! The advance reader copies of Through Early Yellowstone: Adventuring by Bicycle, Covered Wagon, Foot, Horseback, and Skis arrived at Granite Peak Publications last week. Now I can send them out to colleagues, potential reviewers, and our distributor, and they can find out what we have been working so hard on! While editor Janet Chapple’s research goes all the way back to 2002, my review of the manuscript began in December 2014. I helped Janet to shape it into its current form of eleven main selections and ten short excerpts or poems. Two prominent authors we unfortunately had to leave out to make a reader-friendly, reasonable-sized book were Ernest Thompson Seton, the famous writer of animal stories and Boy Scouts of America founder, and Sir Archibald Geikie, a nineteenth-century geologist. But the book includes delightful stories by skier Billy Hofer, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Ray Stannard Baker and artist Anne Bosworth Greene, among others.
One of the uses for this early version of the book is the American Booksellers Association Advance Access program. When you go into your local independent bookstore, have you ever noticed a monthly flyer with the Indie Next List? If you haven’t, pick it up some time. Each book is given a short but pithy and passionate review by one of the staff members at an independent bookstore. I am making eleven of these advance reader copies available to booksellers to peruse, read, consider for their stores, and we hope recommend for the Indie Next list.
We will definitely keep you posted on this site’s Reviews page when we do get a quotable comment.
—Editor Beth Chapple