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Arts & Entertainment

West Makes Book Passage A Star Attraction

Karen West of Corte Madera's eminent independent bookstore has the best literary job in town.

Looking ahead, you could say that Karen West has a super-busy week ahead. And you’d be absolutely right, but you wouldn’t be saying anything new.

As director of events and conferences for Book Passage’s two stores — the big mainstay in Corte Madera and the small outpost in the San Francisco Ferry Building — West is in charge of all author appearances, literary luncheons, offsite events, community relations, and three weekend-long summer conferences.

A typical week will see 13 author visits in Marin and three in San Francisco, not counting the Saturday-morning Market to Table chef and cookbook event in the city.

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Saturday alone, four authors were reading, taking questions, and signing books in Marin. And talk about variety: The authors include novelist Carol Wallace (Leaving Van Gogh); anthology editor Victoria Zackheim, with Joyce Maynard, Pam Houston, and other contributors to He Said What? Women Write About Moments When Everything Changed); kid-lit writer Bethanie Murguia (Buglette the Messy Sleeper), and novelist Mary Doria Russell, with her third novel, Doc, as in Holliday. All this just a day after a luncheon at the Marin store with fave Book Passage novelist Isabel Allende.

With such diverse authors at the store all the time, says West, “the experiences are so vastly different, I feel like I’ve been traveling.”

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This week’s biggest name is probably Roy Blount, Jr., in Marin on Tuesday to promote his latest book, Alphabetter Juice. How do you get someone as famous as Roy Blount, Jr., to appear at your store?

“He’s on tour,” West explains. “New York (that is to say, his publisher) calls and says, ‘Why should we send him to you?’ '"

That’s easy: While, after all these years, the quality of the Book Passage audience is well known, West can truthfully add that she can fill the house even in the early afternoon, which is the time of day Blount wants to attend.

And how about getting a sought-after guest like Emma Donohue (who wrote the mega-best-seller Room) into the store cafe for an Insalata’s-catered literary luncheon (June 2, 12 p.m.)?

“We were early readers of her book,”says West. “Elaine (Petrocelli, who, with her husband, William, owns Book Passage) and I wrote (quotes for the bookjacket). We met her in New York and had lunch with her, and we had an event here when her book came out.”

She makes it sound so easy.

Besides “reading constantly,” how do you train for a job like this?

West, who grew up in Fresno, started with a degree in theater arts from San Francisco State University. A few years later, she earned another degree, at Fresno State University, in philosophy, which she highly recommends because philosophy “gives you curiosity and a basis for knowing how to posit good questions.”

It also may have helped her talk her way into a job at Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science (now closed), developing a lecture series and theatrical productions to accompany exhibitions. For a show on turn-of the-20th-century art from Paris, for instance, she worked on an exhibit of Ludwig Bemelmans’ classic Madeline books to attract children into the museum. Then she headed off to the British Museum to do the same kind of work in London.

After that, she worked through the ’90s for Barnes and Noble’s Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond stores,doing author relations and programming.

“I always say I was an independent bookseller at heart,” West declares, “because I promoted local-author visits” at a time when Bay Area authors were not getting the attention they should. Of course, having a name always helps. “One of the largest and most amazing events in my career wasbringing Alice Walker to Jack London Square. There were over 1,000 people there.”

West has been at Book Passage since 2001 and is “very, very content — continually challenged and delighted.”

Although she says "I don’t have much of a life outside of this” — how could you? — she does do a little something extra during the summers. “In addition to my 90-hour weeks with Book Passage,” she says, not that she’s complaining, “I work with Marin Shakespeare Company, doing box office and promotion.”

There’s a lesson here somewhere.

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