The Book and 2012

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Since the boxes of books arrived on our doorstep, the past week has been the very definition of a whirlwind and we couldn’t be more excited!! Just minutes after opening the first box to take a look at all of our hard work, Chris set up the mini photo studio to take a ‘product shot,’ as we say in our retail day-jobs. It was a blast seeing the official announcements go up all over the interwebs. That evening we broke out the champagne to toast the result of so much hard work and got started on immediate and long-term plans for how we would go about getting the word out. Very first on our list: Deliver to anyone and everyone who wants a book right away, including our Top Level Jumpstarters who had so patiently waited for the book’s release! The following morning, with a solid tank of coffee for humans and gasoline for the Aveo, we headed out to the burbs to start the deliveries. We stopped in Fox Point, where the book would actually serve as a birthday, rather than Christmas present! We had another stop in Wauwatosa, right before the couple headed off to a family Christmas in northern Wisconsin. We looped back downtown to deliver a book for a friend’s dad’s Christmas present. Then it was a delivery out to Dousman, made extra awesome as we chatted for awhile about retro stuff and running a small business, also witnessing their daughter’s hilarious baking hijinks. After two more stops back in Milwaukee, we were really overcome with gratitude. All of this fervor and support from old friends and new was the perfect pre-Christmas event to get us in the holiday spirit! In Bay View, we stopped at another friend’s place to deliver a couple more books. The jar of crazy amazing spiced nuts she gave us for Christmas served as a much needed snack as we drove down to Pleasant Prairie outside of Kenosha for one more book delivery. We met a seriously cool new friend who is just as excited about all this classic nostalgia and photography as we are. Definitely the best possible way to cap off such an awesome day!!

And perhaps this was a tiny preview of our spring/summer to come! As we’ve mentioned, we are super excited to share this book with anyone who is interested in Route 66, and what better way to do that than to take the book on the road and talk to our peers in person! We’re not sure how far we’ll get on our grassroots book tour, but we would love to drive the whole Route again over the next year or so. Showing our book may be one driving force, but another is to take more Polaroids. YEP! You heard right! There are so many places we love but haven’t captured on Polaroid film yet! Even in nearly 275 Polaroid photos, we’ve honestly only scratched the surface of Route 66.

Until spring rolls around, we’ll keep working on getting the word out there. We were absolutely thrilled to read this article Matt Baudo wrote for Third Coast Digest!! While we really hoped people would be excited about this book and Fading Nostalgia, we are totally overwhelmed with happiness from the positive feedback we’ve received in the past week. It’s only been a week!! There’s no way we could’ve done it without our Fading Nostalgia supporters, as well as the amazing Route 66 community that we’ve connected with via Facebook and Twitter. Everyone has been so sweet and for that we are eternally thankful.

Here’s to an amazing 2012! We hope to meet a bunch of new friends and continue to keep the dusty, rusty Americana spirit alive and well in the new year!