To everything a season.

As we celebrate the great tradition of summer reading (See "Hot Summer Reads," page 16), we could not help but notice a phenomenon here:

Books by and for African Americans are no longer relegated to the February--only, Black History Month, ghetto. The publication dates are spread throughout the seasons, just like books for the general market. This is a sign that the market for black books has come of age and that publishers are aware of our buying power, $300 million-plus annually on books alone.

We have been planning for months to identify books that would be really "hot" this summer. They would be the books all the black folks in the know would grab for vacation reading, discuss late into the night at elegant parties by the sea and insist that their book club put on the rail agenda. The editors here think we found a good sampling and enjoyed doing so, as we divided the task of reading them.

One thing that made the process harder than we expected was that more alluring books were published daily, of so it seemed, as we tried to close out our list. Every time we thought we had a handle on most publishers' summer catalogues, one of our editors would discover another title coming out this season. Frequently, we would get urgent calls from publishers: "Dial you get our book, and are you doing anything with it?" (Inevitably, we will have missed some books, but we hope to cover them as soon as we catch up on our reading.)

Those of us here can recall, not so long ago, when books for of about black people were few and far between. They were often re]eased only in the weeks leading up to February because publishers wanted the sales and the publicity flora news outlets in need of Black History Month stories. Having them then was itself progress. As a newspaper editor with pages to fill, I was one of those who were grateful for the articles these books could generate.

When only a handful of black books were published in a given year, we did not need book clubs, nor summer reading lists and certainly not a whole magazine to tell us about them. Well-read African Americans had indeed all devoured the same books and everybody at a black social gathering could discuss them: "Oh, what did you think of the Baldwin book?" (Or insert: the Morrison, the Walker, the Naylor, the Wideman, the Mosley, the McMillan?). This year, Mosley alone has had several books to talk about and new one coming in July.

Until recent years, finding appropriate, multicultural books for our children that included even a few brown faces and a good story was even harder, but now we have hundreds of choices, many of them award-winning books. This summer, the American Library Association has helped us pick the best for your children. (See CHILDREN'S BOOKSHELF, page 60).

Now, not only has the number of releases multiplied, but publishers and African American writers are offering choices across genres. An increasing supply of offerings in romance, mystery, sci-fi, Christian fiction, spirituality, urban/hip-hop, cooking and advice, among other categories, are being published. At the same time, publishers are turning out an impressive selection of literary fiction and "serious" nonfiction on history, politics, theology and social issues of interest to African Americans. In this issue, we have many articles and reviews that reflect this broadening of our markets.

Publishers now understand what BIBR's founders knew when they started this publication more than five years ago. Black people do read. They read a variety of subjects, and they spend money for good books.