New Cool T-shirts From Novel Tees Charity

By Calvin Reid
As published September 2, 2008, by Publishers Weekly

Book marketing professional Lou Bank is back with a new set of Novel Tees, a line of cool literary T-shirts designed to raise money for Protect.org, a nonprofit political lobby focused on the protection of children from abuse and exploitation. The new Novel Tees designs are based on fictional businesses in the forthcoming novels of Andrew Vachss, Chuck Klosterman and others.

Bank, a member of the advisory board of Protect.org, has worked with Vachss for years marketing his novels as well as partnering with Vachss to support Protect.org. Banks launched the initial Novel Tees line in 2006 with T-shirts based on the fictional businesses in the works of Vachss, Joe R. Landsdale, Nick Hornby and F. Paul Wilson. The program has raised about $16,000 and Bank is hoping to kick-start interest in Novel Tees again with a new set of designs.

New designs include the fictional school logos of the Owl High Screaming Lobos and Owl High Screaming Satans from Downtown Owl, a new novel by Chuck Klosterman published this month by Scribner; and on Peligro's Automotive, a business in Andrew Vachss’s new novel, Another Life, to be published in December by Pantheon.

Novel Tees are sold directly through the Protect.org website but Bank is out to get bookstores interested in selling Novel Tees. Powell’s Books has had success getting customers to buy Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity along with the T-shirt based on it. “We'd love to see more of that,” Bank says. “And with Chuck Klosterman's book coming out in a few weeks, the shirt could make a nice pre-order incentive.”

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