Table of Contents Email the editor

(title goes here...)

Michael Watson, editor

You read that right, folks. I've been too busy to think up some witty nonsense for a title, so I'm putting the burden on you. Go ahead and think up a good one. Got it? Just imagine it up at the top of the screen right now. Please note that those of you who thought of "Editor Too Lazy to Think of a Title" will have to try again: I'm not using that one.

What have I been busy editing? A comprehensive list and detailed comparison of book listing sites, an extensive article on genealogical ephemera, bookselling lessons learned by the founder of Alibris, interviews with developers of bookselling software and an online bookselling site, and a write-up on the only print magazine devoted to fine books. When you add two bookseller biographies, a book care article, our informative Q&A, and an article on why our President belongs to the IOBA, the total is an informative issue that benefits our members and friends.

Our redesigned http://www.iobabooks.com is now online in its new incarnation and IOBA members may list their books online at what is possibly the lowest rate charged in the trade. Considering that there is no commission on sales, it's a tangible benefit that is available only to members of the Independent Online Booksellers Association. We're fine-tuning and fixing the site as we go, but pleased with our progress and sales. More information will be in the next issue, so watch for it.

We mourn one of our own, as Martha Kelly lost her fight with serious illness. Martha was a long-time IOBA member, author of three wonderful articles on womens' sufferage (1, 2, 3), and owner of Gutenberg Books in Rochester NY, USA.

IOBA members and friends are encouraged to donate directly to the American Red Cross to support relief for the victims of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Other charitable institutions supporting this cause may be found at Charity Navigator

A note from Ken Lopez, President Emeritus of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA): The Antiquarian Booksellers' Benevolent Fund is a nonprofit charitable organization established to help booksellers who have faced catastrophic circumstances whether as a result of natural disaster, sickness or some other unforeseen and uncontrollable series of events. We are appealing for information about booksellers who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina, and are also appealing for funds to support those booksellers. The ABBF was established and is administered by the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA) but the funds are available to all booksellers, whether ABAA members or not. In recent years, the majority of grants given out by the ABBF have gone to non-ABAA booksellers. Most recipients of grants from the Benevolent Fund do not even know of the fund's existence, and have not applied for grants; in general, the ABBF is informed of their circumstances by their colleagues, and is able to provide modest grants, no strings attached, in a time of great hardship. Donations to the fund may be made by check, payable to "Antiquarian Booksellers Benevolent Fund" and addressed to:

Antiquarian Booksellers Benevolent Fund
c/o Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America
20 West 44th St.
New York, NY 10036-6604

You may also call the Headquarters of the ABAA at 212-944-8291 or email at hq@abaa.org to contribute via credit card.

As always, if you find this issue of the Standard useful, tell another bookseller: they might benefit. If you feel something is missing from this issue, suggest it for the next issue: an e-mail to editor@ioba.org will get things started. If you want to promote the stability of our trade through higher bookselling standards, then visit us at http://www.ioba.org or join us today at http://www.ioba.org/app.html

Best regards. -Michael Watson, Editor, editor@ioba.org

Lessons Learned - Life in the Book Business

Richard Weatherford, Founder, Alibris

Like most people in the used and rare book business today, I was not trained for this career. I did not have access to the generations of knowledge and experience enjoyed by the children and grandchildren of the founders of Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles, the Arthur H. Clark Company now in Spokane, Washington, and The Argosy Book Shop in New York City. I had to learn this business by listening to mentors, watching how other booksellers worked, and by making mistakes more experienced people would never have made.

Sure - I was a reader. My father took me to bookstores in Seattle to look at used books and I grew up just down the street from Elizabeth Rider Montgomery, one of the authors of the Dick and Jane stories, who encouraged me to read. But none of that taught me to be a bookseller any more than looking at pictures of a lake taught me to swim. I had to jump into bookselling in order to learn its lessons, and since most of those lessons involved my making or losing money, I tended to learn and remember them pretty well.

My first book sale list, issued 33 years ago, had 10 items in it. Nine of these were rather common, inexpensive books, and the other item was an 8 volume leather bound set in nice condition of some famous writer whose name I have now forgotten. The cheap books were priced in the $2 to $5 range, and none of them sold. The leather bound set was priced at the outrageous sum of $100, and it sold right away. The lesson here was obvious: cheap books are so easy to find that there was no compelling need for my little group of customers to buy any of those. They could find them anywhere and buy them anytime. The leather set was unusual, though, and priced at $100 was obviously scarce and desirable. People were looking for them, but they were not looking for the cheaper books because they did not have to.

My next lesson came from the variety of catalogs I began receiving from other booksellers. Since I was teaching English, I naturally assumed I was going to specialize in literature. But Ohio has a long history and I began to find it easier to purchase scarce books, maps, and ephemera on Ohio and Midwest history, Native Americans, and the Civil War. In the first few years I was fortunate to have met and learned from some of the great Midwestern booksellers including Robert Younger of Morningside Books in Dayton, Ohio, the legendary book scout Arthur H. Phillips who lived in Columbus, the bookseller and writer Jack Matthews, whose books remain among my favorites for stories about booking in the Midwest, and some of the most knowledgeable collectors in the state, including Joe Dush of Willard, Ohio, and Bill Barth of Youngstown. Without exception, these and other booksellers and collectors freely shared their wisdom and experience.

Among the important lessons I learned from them was that the book business is as much about the customer as it is about the books. Books, they said, are out there, available in quantity, yours to find and buy, including the rare ones. But customers are hard to find and difficult to keep. They must always be treated with respect and the bookseller must always deal with them honestly - anything less than that will result in the loss of the customer. Since the collecting and bookselling community, especially for scarcer material, is relatively small, dishonest dealing will always garner attention. Fortunately my father had also taught me that lesson early on, so I had no problem guaranteeing everything I sold. Sometimes the guarantee was hard to support, as in the case of an expensive book I sold to a customer that had a finely crafted facsimile leaf I had not detected. I cheerfully refunded the $10,000 purchase price, plus shipping costs both to and from the customer, and I think now that it was one of the best experiences I ever had because that customer told everyone how honest and pleasant I was in the face of this disappointment.

It is clear, now, that just about anyone can become a bookseller. The bar to entering the trade is very low. Penny sellers abound and there are all too many who do not know the terms, customs, and techniques of bookselling. Fortunately most of the sellers who are new to the trade focus on selling more popular, less-expensive books. Gathering the information necessary to be able to acquire and sell antiquarian and more valuable modern books is still difficult, though. I learned that when, in the dawn of the personal computer age, Jake Chernofsky called to ask me to write a column for AB Bookman's Weekly and to attend the Antiquarian Book Seminar in Colorado (http://www.bookseminars.com/) to give a talk on what computers could do to take over some tedious jobs booksellers had to do, like keeping mailing lists up to date and printing catalogs and lists of books.

My first day at the Colorado Seminar was interesting. There was some hostility to using computers in a trade that believed in old ways of doing things, but Jake had warned me that might happen so I prepared myself for the worst. Jake invited me to stay for the full seminar as part of the faculty and that week changed my bookselling career forever. Much of the information given at the seminar was, I now realize, crucial to my advancing from a mere bookseller to a knowledgeable antiquarian bookseller.

There I became comfortable with a wide range of reference sources. I was able to associate with some of the best and most respected booksellers in the trade, both as friends and as mentors to whom I could turn for help, if needed. I was able to spend a week immersed in every aspect of the trade, from information sources, to cataloging, to book repair and restoration, to running a store. The faculty was open and available to help at all times and I realized after the end of the seminar that I could not possibly have had access to all that information and those contacts without the seminar. The information made it possible for me to move, with confidence, from selling cheap books to trading in scarcer, more interesting, and more valuable books, maps, documents, photographs, and ephemera.

Fortunately, I was able to return as lecturer and faculty member several more times and I always considered myself both a teacher and a student, always learning, always open to new ideas. Those were some of the best days of my professional career and the seminar made it possible for me to make a nice living outside of teaching.

But can that still be done? Is learning the antiquarian book business still relevant to a trade that appears to be focused on penny books and fast turnover? I believe strongly that it is. There are still many collectors looking for good and great books. They need and want the assistance of knowledgeable booksellers. The fact is that for more common books the customers set the prices. If someone wants a copy, but doesn't want to pay much for it, there is always another copy somewhere else that is priced attractively. That is not as true with the antiquarian book business.

As we say, "rare books are getting scarcer and scarcer." When demand is greater than supply, the seller sets the price and usually gets it. That is why selling scarce books is so attractive. People can spend a great deal of time buying, cataloging, shipping, and accounting for cheap books, all for very little profit. Scarce books demand more research, careful cataloging, and secure packaging for shipping, yet frequently are quite profitable because the seller who handles them has a customer who wants or needs a copy and is willing to pay for it because she or he can not find it anyplace else.

What the Internet has done is to expose, in an even more obvious way, what has been true for the past few decades: up to a point, customers set prices on books. If you have books that are relatively common, price them to sell. The Alibris Pricing Service was created to help sellers re-price and move this inventory. If you don't re-price you will probably see prices continue to fall and your copy will remain stale, perhaps taking up room and funds you could use for better inventory.

If you want to work with scarcer, more valuable books, learn all you can about the trade. Develop your sense of what is valuable, but be open to learning some of the same hard, sometimes-expensive lessons I have had to learn over the past 33 years.

Richard Weatherford is Founder of Alibris, an online bookselling venue at http://www.alibris.com

The History of Abracadabra Bookshop

Alan Culpin

I went into the book business after having taught at a local college for a number of years and having seen that the future looked bleak. Faculty were being cut and I knew there was no possibility of another job in my field: Colorado and Western History. What else could I do? I loved books. I had been collecting modestly in my field, and had several hundred books on Colorado and the West, so I started what I called The Western Americana Bookshop. For the first few years I ran the business on the side and still taught, which meant I did not have to take money out of the business - just as well! I knew little of the book business but learned as I went along. There were no book schools like the annual event in Colorado Springs, at that time, so it was pretty much 'learn as you go.' Twenty-eight years later I still learn and I still love it. It sure beats 'working for a living'! And, like the guy who won the lottery, I will hold on until the money runs out.

I started Abracadabra Bookshop in 1977 and the first location was in the Nepenthes Cafe on Market Street in Denver. After buying out Stage House II in Boulder, we moved to new quarters on Court Place, above the bowling alley. Dealing with the owners, Hare Krishna, was not pleasant, so we purchased a Victorian house on West 32nd Avenue and moved our growing stock into the Carriage House in 1980. We stayed there very happily until 1994, when, bursting at the seams with over 50,000 volumes, we moved to 32 South Broadway. This was a learning experience for us. Despite being the busiest street in Denver, Broadway did not increase our sales. It did, however, increase the amount of theft!

Frustrated by theft and other problems such as lack of growth - we did a study which showed that only 2 percent of the population of Colorado were book buyers - we decided in 1998 to move to Texas. We located in the pleasant Gulf Coast town of Rockport, known for great fishing, year-round sailing, and good seafood. We knew that a small town of 15,000 would not have the over-the-counter sales of Denver, but hoped the growing Internet would help. We were quickly surprised at how good over the counter sales were! We were soon doing 1/3 of our Denver sales. Texans are readers and the other Texas dealers were friendly and helpful. Good people.

However, there was a dark side to the Texas experience. Texas taxes are very high. A latent law allowing used books to be taxed as inventory was activated in 2003 and this meant we had to leave Texas. The Tax was 2.6% of the value of your inventory, and the law allowed taxing authorities to check your income tax records to see what you claimed. An idea of how devastating this can be seen in one item - a set of Octavo Audubons valued at $40,000 would produce $1000 a year in tax! We had to leave. I was getting very good at packing up and moving books. When we moved from Court Place to West 32nd, with 30,000 books, it took a week, shelf to shelf. West 32nd to Broadway, with 50,000, was accomplished in 10 days. Denver to Rockport, with 80,000 books took 10 days to pack, a week to ship in two tractor trailers, and 3 days to get back on the shelf. Rockport to Denver, with approaching 100,000 books, took 5 hours to pack, 5 days to ship, 2 days to re-shelve, and the rest of our lives to alphabetize! If anyone needs guidance in this area, please feel free to call.

So, back to Denver in 2004 and a new location at 7030 East 46th Avenue Drive. Colorado Taxes are among the cheapest in the nation, thanks to a man named Bruce. It is a good place to be in the book business and, with the Internet, location is not nearly as important as it used to be. We are able to buy well here, although Rockport produced some amazing finds, such as the 1st Edition of William Morris's Well at the World's End in Very Good condition!

We provide a complete book service, with close to 100,000 volumes in stock, a free book search, and our books are listed on the 'Net with several services. We do several book fairs every year, mostly in Texas. This brief account of our history would not be complete without mentioning my wife, Marcy, whose contributions after leaving the National Park Service have been marvelous, and over the years such great employees as Diane Kennedy, Joan Riddel, Russ Wiese, Jon Snurka, Caren Eno, Jack Plante, Katie Mclean, Melody Field, Melinda, Dan Gorski. and others. As always, we are always interested in purchasing good book collections.

Alan Culpin is the owner of Abracadabra Bookshop & Booksearch in Denver CO and can be contacted at (303) 733-5700, orders@abrabks.com", or http://www.abrabks.com

Why I Belong to the IOBA

David Friedman

In the quiet darkness of a late fall night, circa 1923, my grandfather Charlie and his family packed their belongings and quietly left Birmingham, England. Times were not good in Birmingham for union organizers and efforts to bring a reasonable standard of living to the bakers there came at a very high price.

Charlie and family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. The small used bookshop that he started there was stacked to ceiling with dusty shelves which held a mixture of magazines, books, old toasters, and soft-core British pornography. The bookshop was eventually taken over by my aunt and I visited there a few years before she died.

Perhaps my own relationship with books and selling them was genetic. Coincidentally, I also spent several years as the chief negotiator for a teachers' union. Times had changed and, happily, I didn't feel the need to flee Fort Dodge, Iowa - at least not because of my union organizing activities.

The IOBA booksellers are gently tied to one another, even though much of what we do is rather solitary. Our days may be spent hunting for books, keying in data, and dealing with sales orders. The 'Independent' aspect of our work is significant. Paradoxically, we are united in our sense of personal freedom and charting our own course. When we buy a book (or a thousand) we rely on our personal intuition and knowledge to determine if we'll be able to convert that book into a profit. Much of our day-to-day survival rests on our own shoulders.

But not entirely.

Being part of an association of like-minded people provides a sense that we're not in it alone. While there may be 15,000 independent online sellers, it's comforting to know some of them e-personally. It's also significant that those who choose to join together share a commitment to quality, service, and a code of ethics. As a group we independent people make a statement of our commitment to a standard of excellence.

It's a good business decision to let others know that you stand for something. Our customers are people who are interested in knowledge and education. It pays us to be knowledgeable and educated about what we are doing. There is no better way to accomplish this than by joining together.

There's a fair amount to know about the art and science of our business, especially since little more than a decade ago our business model didn't even exist! Through association with others in the field we each have the benefit of shared experience, such as learning about the cutting-edge information that can have a positive impact on our business. Frankly, why keep reinventing the computer chip, or the wheel, when others can provide you with some of the basics?

My involvement with IOBA has enhanced my work. It's been an association that has given me a great deal--and offers the potential for much more. IOBA is a unique organization that is dedicated to serving our shared interests. It helps each of us be a little bigger and have the potential to be a little more independent than we were without it.

My membership in IOBA has been of substantial value to me. We face increasing challenges in our business on a day-to-day basis. The explosion of the digitized world continues to provide tremendous opportunities as well as significant challenges. One of the challenges affected many of us when a few months ago a major on-line service had a significant glitch and interruption of service. Potential changes in postal regulations could impact the shipping of our books we sell. Together, we can learn how to deal with any adverse effects on our business, and have some potential to impact issues as they emerge.

As we know, right now anyone with a book can be a bookseller. For better or worse, it's what allowed most of us the opportunity to become a part of this field. Is there more to what we do than the very simple act of offering our goods in the market? I believe that without our willingness to 'associate' with one another in our common best interests, we will merely be reactive to the market place. Our potential strength and effectiveness lies in creating opportunities to make a difference in the market place and, ultimately, to influence that same marketplace. There's a lot for us to think about!

IOBA offers an expanding array of education and services to the on-line community. It provides substantial value for all of us. I'm dedicated to trying to help our association increase that value, because membership in IOBA is among the best investments an independent on-line seller can make.

David Friedman is President of the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA), owner of Bibliotique, and can be contacted at http://www.bibliotique.net

Why a Successful Book Collecting Magazine Is Good for Your Business

P. Scott Brown, Editor, Fine Books & Collections magazine

One evening in late April, after a full day at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, I stepped into one of those famous newsstands in Manhattan-600 square feet jammed with thousands of different magazines on floor-to-ceiling racks.

You can find almost any kind of magazine in these places. This particular shop, on Madison Avenue, had an entire display devoted to watch collecting, with five magazines and a few once-a-year special publications. The shop also stocked two magazines for pen collectors, several each for stamp and coin collectors, a couple of antiques titles, and even a magazine for Yu-Gi-Oh card collectors. (If you don't know any children between 8 and 14 years old, you may not be familiar with this insanely complicated Japanese card game that holds the elementary and junior high set in its thrall.)

But I digress.

My point is this: Among the thousands of magazines being published, you won't find even one about book collecting on any regular magazine newsstand. Yu-Gi-Oh-yes. Watches-more than you can read. Coins-how often do you want it? Weekly, monthly, bi-monthly?

Book collecting? Fuggedaboudit.

That's a large part of the reason that I started Fine Books & Collections magazine three years ago (as OP magazine-see The Standard, vol. IV, no. 1 and vol IV, no. 3). I collect various kinds of books but I'm generally interested in book history, fine presses, other book collectors, and what's going on in the auction rooms. I wanted to know more about books and book collecting, and there simply wasn't a publication that covered books in a broad way. I subscribed to some of the specialty publications, and there are quite a few-for miniature book collectors, collectors of diaries, Scottish books, modern first editions-but nothing with broad appeal and wide distribution.

Ours is a small operation, connected by the Internet. I edit the magazine from Eureka, California and my business partner, a magazine publisher, works out of offices in Durham, North Carolina. The publication is designed in Manhattan and printed in New Hampshire. This arrangement allows us to cover book news and events on both coasts.

Many people think that putting a magazine together entails printing stories people send in. In fact, less than a fifth of the stories we run in the magazine were sent to us. We commission the vast majority: I hire writers or researchers to do stories on particular topics. The typical feature will go through six drafts, will be fact-checked by two people, and copyedited by four or five. It's an intense and time-consuming process.

Nick Basbanes, a veteran newspaper reporter and the author of A Gentle Madness and many other fine books on book collecting, recently commented on the rigorousness of our editing process. "I am astonished at the depth of your fact-checking," he wrote. Why are we so nitpicky? Because I know that book collectors and dealers rely on us for accurate information.

At a point in time when many people are predicting the end of print, it might seem strange to start a new magazine. However, I think there's never been a better time to be a book collector and that means there's never been more of a need for a book collecting magazine. It's true that price competition and the increase in hobbyist sellers has hurt the bottom line of many professional booksellers. On the other hand, the power of the Internet is giving collectors the tools to build collections like never before. No collecting field supports as many e-commerce web sites as book collecting and online book auctions are vibrant and healthy. The transition to web-based commerce has been difficult for dealers but the opportunities available to collectors will be good for the trade in the long run.

Yet the hobby has a very low profile in the public eye, perhaps lower than at any point in the last century. This state of affairs is partially due to the Internet, which has fragmented the rare book world. We can now easily buy books on another continent, and as a result a lot of us no longer shop at the used bookstore around the corner. As more and more commerce goes online, the person-to-person interactions that are so important to building relationships and for educating both collectors and dealers are diminishing.

Where can new collectors turn for information about collecting? Where can dealers learn about books beyond their areas of expertise? Those learning experiences used to come from open shops. Every year there are fewer of those and people travel less: Why scout in person when you can surf the 'Net late at night from home in your p.j.s?

This is where a magazine fits in. One of our goals is to help knit the book world together by bringing our readers the voices of the many men and women who love books. You may not have an opportunity to talk with the head of the New York Public Library, but we can and did. We also talked to Google, booksellers, academics, book historians, the head of the National Library of Scotland, auctioneers, executives at Abebooks and Alibris, and collectors. And that's just in the most recent issue. Where the Internet tends to separate, Fine Books & Collections can help bring the antiquarian book world together, to introduce our readers to the range of current opinion and research on books and the hobby we enjoy so much.

In the last 12 months, we've gone from black and white to full color and from 36 pages to 60 for our July/August 2005 issue. While we've increased circulation three-fold in that time, it isn't nearly enough to sustain a viable, general interest magazine for book collectors-the sort of magazine that can hold its own against the glossy watch magazines on newsstands in Manhattan. We believe that a magazine that appeals to the broad spectrum of book collectors and dealers will be good for book collecting and will attract new collectors into the hobby. My business partner and I have made a significant investment in this venture because we think it is worth it from a business standpoint. We are also both long-time book collectors who want the hobby to thrive and for new collectors to take it up.

I know there are some skeptics reading this, so I'm ready to put my money where my mouth is. We know from past experience that most people who try Fine Books & Collections like, and many of you will, too. We invite you to join us, and we'll send the readers of the IOBA Standard a free first issue, with no obligation. Just follow this link: http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/freeissue

If you like the magazine, you'll also get our best subscription price, just $19.95 for your first year. This offer is not available on our web site - you must use the link above. Consider a gift subscription for your best customers: they'll remember your generosity with every issue.

Scott Brown is the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine. He collects books by R. K. Narayan and Gary Soto.

History of Dan Glaeser Books

Daniel Glaeser

Most book dealers have a story about how they found themselves in the book trade and I am no exception.\ I don't think there are many small kids who aspire to grow up to be used book dealers, but I may be as close as they come.

From my earliest memories of childhood, I have been fascinated by commerce. I loved everything that had to do with just about any aspect of commerce. I can remember when I was 6, teaching my 2 year old brother how to count using play money as my media for teaching. Whenever friends came over to play I would often suggest playing "store." Of course, I wanted to run the cash register: that was my favorite part. Add to this the fact that I was an early reader: I was already reading before I got to pre-school and when we arrived in Modesto mid-way through first grade I angered my teacher by reading the entire reading textbook (a year's worth of curriculum) my first weekend in her class. Books and commerce, commerce and books - I guess my childhood was a foreshadowing of what was to come.

During college I truly became a voracious reader. In addition to the textbooks for my business classes (no surprise there), I was often reading as many as 10 books at once, just for fun. I never did find much interest in novels, but loved non-fiction, especially theology and church history. I also discovered the joy of used book stores. Every Thursday night the main street in downtown San Luis Obispo, California was closed off for a local Farmer's Market. For most of my 4 years at Cal Poly Thursday nights meant the trek downtown for fresh veggie's, ribs at McClintock's, and an hour or so at Leon's Book Store which was a favorite among Cal Poly students.

Just 2 weeks after graduation from Cal Poly, back in my hometown of Modesto, California, I received a phone call from the owners of Modesto's premier used book store Yesterday's Books. Since I had grown up with their children and had known them for over 10 years already, the invitation to work at the store was an easy one. In fact I was called at 10 in the morning, and started at 1 that afternoon. What started out as a six-week temporary position grew into a full-time position, one that I held for six years. During that time I started my seminary training, feeling a call into full time ministry. To help pay my seminary bills I started selling books mail-order and even signed up with a new Internet based dealer-to-dealer network called Interloc. My employers were aware of my moonlighting in the same industry and even gave it their blessing.

I left my employ with the Dorman's at Yesterday's Books in the spring of 1997, having joined a music-based missionary troupe based in California. For the next 6 years I spent my life on a bus traveling throughout the United States and 18 foreign countries, giving as many as 300 concerts a year. In 2002 I completed my third two-year tour of duty and knew it was time to come home, but not sure what I was to do when I returned.

What I knew is that I needed a non-traditional job because I wanted a flexible schedule that would leave the door open for ministry opportunities that would open up locally. Well, the Internet market for books had changed dramatically while I was on the road and it was easy to step back into what I knew well. Plus, I could run the business from my parent's home while I re-established myself financially and explored the next chapter in my saga.

So that's the current chapter in the life of this book dealer. I specialize in religion (surprise, surprise) hoping that a good inventory of Protestant and Catholic theology and history reference will enable me to be of service to busy pastors and seminarians. In addition to the Internet business, I exhibit at several book fairs each year as well as several home schooling conventions. And yes, the flexibility of a home-based on-line business has allowed time for local missionary opportunities. For the past three years I have worked as the assistant Christmas Kettle Co-coordinator for the Salvation Army in Modesto where I also serve as the Church Worship Leader.

Blessings!

Dan Glaeser operates Dan Glaeser Books in Modesto, CA and can be contacted at http://www.DanGlaeserBooks.com