David Thompson

I try to stay away from real life as much as possible, on the blog and as a general principle. Today, though, I got the rotten news that my good friend David Thompson died suddenly, and I'm going to piss and moan for a paragraph. He was a bookseller and publisher and a friend to many dozens of people. He was married to a wonderful woman he loved very much, and he was as joyfully engaged with his work as anyone I've ever known, and he was only thirty-eight. Above is a picture taken the last time I saw him, when he made a trip to St. Louis to help set up BoucherCon 2011. He was one of the best people I ever met in the book business, and nobody had an unkind word to say about him.

I owed him an e-mail from last week. There were books I wanted to recommend that he publish. We had plans, goddamnit.