It's Christmas in May
May 2, 2002

For some booksellers, the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' annual meeting makes this a profitable time of the year.

BY JOHN TAYLOR

OMAHA WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

For Jim Ross, Christmas is just around the corner, and he has already started decorating his shop.

The shop, Waterstone's Booksellers, is in the Eppley Airfield terminal. The decorations are books. And Christmas? That's the annual Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders meeting, to be held this year on Saturday.

Every year at this time, like a baseball park concessionaire loading up on hot dogs for opening day, Ross stocks his shelves and piles his windows with books about Warren Buffett, Berkshire's chairman, and Charlie Munger, vice chairman, or books that both men may have recommended.

"This is our Christmas," Ross said. "This is our best time of the year. Our sales increase about 10 fold over that (Berkshire shareholder meeting) weekend." Most of the business comes from Berkshire shareholders arriving and departing from Eppley.

Besides being wealthy and loyal, the shareholders also are literate and hungry for information about the men who helped make them wealthy and loyal.

They buy the books to read, and for some lucky enough to get close to the great men, to have them autographed. But Waterstone's hasn't been the only Omaha bookseller benefiting from what in the last few years has become a torrent of books about Buffett and Munger.

"(Buffett's) his own industry," said Diana Abbott, who works at the Bookworm, 8702 Pacific St., and has become somewhat of an authority on Buffett books. "I don't know of any other individual or corporation that has their own shelves in most stores," she said. "We have a Warren Buffett section. We have to because there are so many books."

The Bookworm has been given a leg up on other booksellers in that the store has a full page in Berkshire's official program that publicizes four books: Howard Buffett's book of nature photographs; Janet Lowe's look at Munger in "Damn Right!"; a book about Berkshire's managers, "The Warren Buffett CEO," by Robert P. Miles; and a new book, "Do Business With People You Can Trust," by New York writer Laura Rittenhouse.

The Bookworm developed a relationship with Berkshire years ago when the shop was in the Regency Fashion Court, where all Berkshire companies displayed their wares before being allowed into the shareholder venue.

The precise number of Buffett and Munger books is difficult to pin down, although they may number as high as 30.

Some authors whose books have been around awhile have acquired a bit of celebrity themselves, annually appearing at book signings or hosting parties during the weekend of the annual shareholders meeting.

Good fortune smiles on those writers whose works have the added benefit of having been recommended by either Buffett or Munger, or - blessings of all blessings - a preface or foreword written by the two billionaires.

Some writers have seen their books settle for weeks on the best-seller lists. "The Warren Buffett Way," by Robert Hagstrom, caught the fancy of readers, as did perhaps the best-written of the biographies, "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Roger Lowenstein.

One writer, Andrew Kilpatrick, has periodically added so many chapters to his original biography, "Of Permanent Value, the Story of Warren Buffett," that the book is approaching 1,200 pages.

And still the books come. One of the latest, which will make its debut at this year's annual meeting, is "Do Business With People You Can Trust."

Written by Rittenhouse, a former New York City investment banker who is now a communications adviser, the book tries a new approach.

It is, said Rittenhouse, "the first-ever guide" to letters written to shareholders by chief executives. She received permission from Buffett to publish some of the letters he writes in Berkshire's annual report.

She cites those as the models by which to evaluate letters written by other CEOs.

Rittenhouse's book even has an interview with Buffett in which he imparts such wisdom as: "If the CEO doesn't write (the shareholders' letter), it's a black mark against them for one reason - they may not know their business very well."

Not surprisingly, given Buffett's reputation for clarity, wit and knowledge, a lot of CEO letters fall short in Rittenhouse's eyes.

"Just about everybody admires what he does, and yet no other CEOs are doing what he does," said Rittenhouse, who analyzed letters written by CEOs of 100 of the Fortune 500 companies.

Included in the book are letters that appeared in Enron Corp. annual reports in the last five years.

"What I show in the book is that if people had been paying attention to what Enron (whose CEO was Kenneth Lay) was writing in their shareholder letters, they ought to have been concerned about the company," she said. "The letters don't tell me anything, it was a waste of my time to read them and reading them won't help me become a better investor."

Unfortunately, Rittenhouse said, that is true of two-thirds of the companies she surveyed.

You can expect a lot of the Berkshire faithful to boost sales of her book (self-published and priced at $22.95), as they have all the other books that line windows of stores like Waterstone's.

Last year, said Ross, manager of the chain store based in Atlanta, his top-selling book wasn't the latest John Grisham courtroom thriller. It was Robert Miles' "101 Reasons to Own the World's Greatest Investment - Berkshire Hathaway."

The No. 2 top seller? Something called "Genome," a book about the history of DNA that Munger mentioned during the annual meeting. That work edged out "Damn Right!," the biography of Munger, who has become somewhat of a cult figure through his association with Buffett and his terse, sometimes funny, sometimes incomprehensible pronouncements at the meeting.

Munger and Buffett sometimes have given Ross a heads-up on which books they will mention at the shareholders meeting - in response to the inevitable shareholder questions.

This year Ross expects that his top seller will turn out to be another Miles book, "The Warren Buffett CEO." Whatever the Buffett book, they'll all be out there, front and center, awaiting the Berkshire travelers. Ross will be ready, too.

"This is our Super Bowl," he said happily.

© 2002 Omaha World-Herald

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