LIT 50
Who really books in Chicago
Nos. 11 - 20

11
Christie Hefner
Family jewel
An ever-burgeoning media empire (from foreign mags to cable channels to IPO-poised Playboy.com) hasn’t stopped Playboy’s monthly print version from featuring famously good writing between the spreads: Behold June’s short story "Enabler" by "Fight Club"’s Chuck Palahniuk, or the latest James Bond serial installment, "Double Shot," by Raymond Benson. As CEO and chairman of Playboy Enterprises, Christie wears the pants, but that didn’t stop father Hugh from swooping into town this year for his honorary street-naming, or from finding time between doses of Viagra to edit last fall’s well-received "The Century of Sex."

12
Bob Greene
Greener pasteurization
Like pecan logs and ice-cream sodas sold in brightly colored displays on cloverleafs off interstate superhighways, a hokey constant of the American literary landscape is the Boomer nostalgia of Bob Greene. His newspaper column remains popular, perhaps chiefly for its seldom-shifting conformations: the loneliness of the long-distance traveler, neglected children, sports, being a teenager in the middle of the century past. The cadence of his prose rings like diligent yet prudent mottos of self-affirmation. Who can argue with plangent sentences like, "My mother knew full well that my father and I were never any good at talking to each other about anything serious; I’m not proud of that and I’m not ashamed of it"? Approaching to the twenty-book mark, the daily grind is worlds away from the best that Johnny Deadline has shown himself capable. He’s strip-mined most of the material from his modest life experience, culminating with the just-released "Duty: A Father, His Son and the Man Who Won the War" (William Morrow). We pray for years of continued health for Greene. After the navel-gazing, eye-gouging likes of 1997’s "The 50 Year Dash: The Feelings, Foibles and Fears of Being Half A Century Old," we worry what could come next. Is Greene’s life as published a portrait of everyman? Or no man at all?

13
Charlie Trotter
Chef’s table of contents
With combined sales of his five gourmet cookbooks hitting the quarter-million mark, and his business philosophy touted in last year’s "Lessons in Excellence" (Ten Speed Press) by Paul Clarke, Lincoln Park’s fanciest foodie is showing no signs of growing stale in the publishing world. In addition to keeping his eponymous Armitage Street restaurant in top form (with plans to add a take-out-only Trotter’s To Go), and his "Kitchen Sessions" cooking show rolling for an ordered twenty-six more episodes on PBS, this fall Chef Trotter serves up "Charlie Trotter Cooks At Home," a tome that promises recipes that are less complex and more user-friendly than his fancier titles. He’s also busy working on a meat and game cookbook, due out next year. Meanwhile, you can check out Ed Lawler’s chronicle of the restaurant’s "humble beginnings to world-class status" in the just-released "Charlie Trotter’s" (Lebhar-Friedman).

14
Don Yannais
Dot.commander
The sun isn’t likely to set on the Britannica empire anytime soon—it’s just beginning to cast a little different shadow on it. Last fall, Britannica-the-encyclopedia and Britannica-the-Website became two separate companies, with a much heavier emphasis on the dot.com under now-captain Yannais. Their critically acclaimed site—unlike the cumbersome print volumes—is free and includes daily editorial updates. Syndicated alliances with pop rags like Entertainment Weekly have also helped give the stuffy old boy a facelift. Sadly, however, this success has come at somewhat of a cost—not in dollars, but in an end-of-an-era kind of way. Production of the classic mighty tomes has nearly come to a halt, with no plans to release a new edition until 2002.

15
Tenny Ahn
Barnes raiser
"You can’t go to an ‘Amazon’ store," reasons Tenny Ahn, district manager for Central Chicago Barnes & Noble Booksellers. And he’s right – which may explain why, even with the advent of online shopping, business in B&N’s Chicago stores beat the company’s national average—and during its best year ever. Though the "clicks and mortar" chain boasts the Net’s fourth most visited e-commerce site (BN.com is second only to you-know-who in online bookselling), it’s hardly curbing the expansion of superstores: Ahn has his sights on no less than five spots of Chicago real estate right now. Perhaps most remarkable of all, the Lincoln Park store, just steps from Borders, "is doing just fine."

16
Mark Davis
Borders runner
Barnes & Noble may still have the world’s largest market share in retail bookselling, but you wouldn’t know it by glancing at Michigan Avenue. The Mag Mile’s Borders behemoth—considered one of the corp’s flagships—is still surging, as are the two other Chicago stores, in Beverly and Lakeview. Last month, Borders added an Oak Park outpost to its Chicago-area roster of eighteen stores, and Chicago and Midwest regional director Davis hopes to see that list keep growing. Though Borders comes in third in online sales, the company is gearing up for a unique Internet "convergence" system, which will feature in-store kiosks capable of locating books for customers and simultaneously informing of related events.

17
Richard Davis
Road king
For more than seventy-five years, the Rand McNally Road Atlas has been in the back seat of more cars than Fonzie, Mike Seaver and Sam Malone combined, and with more virtuous intent. Their flagship map sells around fifteen million copies annually, enough to trump even the mighty AAA’s hand. Since acquiring the Washington-based King of the Road Map Service, company president Richard Davis has seen to it that the cartography royals have increased their online presence. Their recently-relaunched Website offers good planners access to address-to-address directions, world mapping, downloadable color maps and a number of other travel-planning features. Bottom line, if you get lost, the Skokie-based Rand McNally has your back.

18
Rosellen Brown
Brownie points
After wrapping up the century with one of her short stories being named by John Updike as one of the era’s 100 best, Rosellen Brown started off 2000 pretty well, too: May brought the publication of "Half A Heart" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), her fifth novel and yet another moving family drama, following in the tradition of "Tender Mercies" and "Before and After." And the award-winning author (having snagged, among other honors, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts) is helping nurture a new generation of wordsmiths, teaching writing workshops at the School of the Art Institute.

19
Morris Philipson
Marooned
This summer marks the end of esteemed director Morris Philipson’s thirty-three-year stint with the University of Chicago Press, the largest university press in the nation. His shepherding of the scholarly publisher will not have gone unnoticed: Philipson just received the prestigious Curtis Benjamin Award for innovation and creativity in publishing from the Association of American Publishers, and UCP is also reissuing four of Philipson’s own novels this year: "Somebody Else’s Life," and the New Haven Trilogy of "The Wallpaper Fox," "Secret Understandings" and "A Man in Charge." Meanwhile, in addition to producing scientific journals and highly regarded new editions of classic works, UCP’s not too high-falutin’ to proffer the likes of "One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko" and "Liberace: An American Boy." This fall not only brings a new director —Paula Barker Duffy—but also a handsome new homebase at 60th and Dorchester.

20
Dominique Raccah
Raccah on
She’s stealing third and going for home: Dominique Raccah, who started Sourcebooks, Inc., in her suburban bedroom thirteen years ago with the scrappy sum of $17,000, has managed to smack a couple of line-drives straight through the chicken-soup world of non-fiction hot sellers. In 1998, "We Interrupt This Broadcast," with its introduction from Walter Cronkite and a Bill Kurtis-narrated companion CD, hit the New York Times bestseller list. Before anyone could wave and say fluke, Raccah had another hulking coffee-table book up there: the similiarly titled "And the Crowd Goes Wild: Relive the Most Celebrated Sporting Events Ever Broadcast," penned by the same author, Joe Garner. Topping the sports fan’s Christmas list for ’99—especially the ones who ain’t afraid to get a little misty—"And the Crowd Goes Wild" has accompanying CDs narrated by sports quality-control man Bob Costas. Sourcebooks’ 1998 acquisition of imprint Hysteria and Sphinx Legal Survival Guides shows Sourcebooks and Raccah are playing for keeps.

SUMMER TRAVEL
Snappy suggestions for places you can drive in a day

VIDEO PARADISO
Scanning the racks of Chicago's international video emporiums

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