Street Talk: Mrs. Morgan's Crowded Garage

D Magazine, Aug 01, 2001 by Bowden, Jeff

Morgan's job consists largely of listening to dealers and friends talk about their favorite childhood books. If it is, I'm afraid I added to her daily burden. I blurted out the name of my favorite children's book twice: once on the phone and again on our walk from the garage to the dining room-the corporate office of Purple House. "Have you ever heard of We Were Tired of Living in a House"" I asked Morgan. She hadn't. "I loved that book," I told her. "It's about these kids who run away from home, and ....."

Morgan is patient in such moments. They come at her with increasing frequency these days. As for her office, there are children's books on every flat surface, color proofs of dust jackets laying on the floor, and a computer in the middle of a bookcase. Above the computer are the books that Morgan is working to obtain the rights to republish.

When she republishes a book, she tweaks it. For instance, Morgan learned that Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side empire, was a fan of Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat, a story about a bear that sits on the houses of other animals before finally receiving his comeuppance and a knot on the head. So she contacted Larson. He wrote the foreword to the new Purple House edition of Mr. Bear. With The Mad Scientists' Club, Morgan is set to publish a "director's cut" of the original book. The author, Bertrand Brinley, who has since died, was unhappy with the published version of his story. Morgan will republish the book based on Brinley's original draft and with a new foreword written by the author's son.

After an hour or so, Morgan walked me back outside into sunshine and redbrick. Her nose seemed better.

"I just want to keep doing this," she said. "Every book I get in print I will keep printing as long as I can, I'm fortunate. I have very knowledgeable bookseller friends telling me what I should buy."

THE ENCHANTED FOREST BOOK Store, the largest independent bookstore for children in Texas, operates on the second floor of a shopping center at the northwest corner of Mockingbird and Abrams. On the afternoon I visited, to see Purple House books in action, a tiny girl, who introduced herself as Princess Claire, marched out of a hallway between a gingerbread cottage and a raised platform that serves as a stage. She was wearing a pink Cinderella costume and yellow sandals. She needed only a wand or a mean sister for the full effect. Her retinue consisted of a babysitter, and the store's owner, Jennifer Anglin, who happens to be Princess Claire's mother.

Anglin is the national president of the Association of Booksellers for Children and was the American representative to the International Booksellers Congress. She is a children's book reviewer and once was the national manager of promotions and advertising for the children's book division of Harcourt Brace. I won't belabor the point: Anglin knows her way around the genre.

"I thought I was just opening a store," she said, walking me back to her office deep inside the maze of stockrooms and nooks, some outfitted with knee-high tables and small green chairs. Anglin was on her way out of town to a bookseller's conference. When we reached her office, she cleared a place for me to sit.