Huge fire wrecks new book on Route 66
A warehouse fire in St. Louis devoured a small publisher’s entire stock of some 200,000 books and dashed authors’ dreams, including two in Arcadia who were set to give us more kicks on Route 66 just in time for Christmas.
Jim Ross and co-author Shellee Graham do still have a limited number of their just-published “Secret Route 66: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure.”
Ross said they will go ahead sell them at planned book signings from 2 to 4 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Quail Springs Barnes & Noble, 13800 N May Ave., and from 3 to 5 p.m. Dec. 9 at Full Circle Bookstore in 50 Penn Place, 1900 Northwest Expressway.
Amazon also has some copies, said Lanna Demers, a spokesman for Reedy Press, who sent me a news release about the book on Tuesday.
Between the time she sent it and I got to it to reply on Thursday, the Reedy Press warehouse, and all those books, burned.
How shocking and sad to find her latest, sent late Thursday as the books still smoldered, in my email box Friday morning:
“Unfortunately, this press release was sent out in the midst of tragedy yesterday. Yesterday morning, our book warehouse in St. Louis caught fire and as a result, we lost all of our books. We do not have any copies of this book to send to you or sell.”
Josh and Mary Beth Stevens started Reedy Press — named in homage to William Marion Reedy, editor of the turnof-the-20th-century St. Louis literary journal Reedy’s Mirror — 14 years ago, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Reedy Press publishes local and regional authors, mostly on his- tory, sports and culture, for the trade market, and custom and commemorative titles for schools, communities, and institutions.
This week, they watched the five-alarm fire burn everything.
“We still have revenue from recent sales, but obviously that will dry up,” Josh Stevens, 45, told the St. Louis paper Thursday. Holiday sales are “shot,” he said. “The authors are very upset. We’re going to get back on our feet so we can get their books back in circulation.”
Not every title will be reprinted right away, he told Post-Dispatch Book Editor Jane Henderson. As for “Secret Route 66,” Demers told me, “I will let you know when we reprint the book and it is available for purchase again, but this will not be until after the new year.”
In the meantime, there are the book signings and Amazon’s limited stock.
Who knows? This cloud of smoke might have a silver lining. Nothing creates demand like scarcity.
Don’t you want to know “why Hooker, Missouri, disappeared, and who murdered Billie Grayson in Chandler, Oklahoma”? I do now, for sure.
The publisher further teases “Secret Route 66”:
“Did you know that a strongbox full of gold still lies buried near the Colorado River, or that tragedy hounds a tiny place in Arizona named after a cartoon? Is it true that ghosts and monsters lurk along the highway’s reaches? Do you know what a Walldog is, or whether nuclear weapons were once used to blast a path for the route? ...
“Two of the historic highway’s most recognized authorities, Jim Ross and Shellee Graham, chronicle these and dozens of other tales as they peel away the layers of history to expose the weird, wonderful, and obscure of America’s Mother Road.”
With the road blocked for now, we’ll just have to hurry up and wait.