There was no one you'd rather sit next to at a reading. There was no one you'd rather get a drink with. Kim Ricketts, who passed away earlier this week, loved books, loved using her imagination and doggedness to get more books noticed by more people, and would happily, say, call up the Seattle Aquarium and get a whale expert on the line when Dave Eggers asked 24 hours before a reading at University Book Store if there could be a lecture on whales beforehand. (She would tease him about it—no writer or book was so sacred that they couldn't take a little teasing—but she got it done, made the friggin' whale talk happen, projector and all.)

Her bluntness was a tonic. She would agree with you that most of the books pushed out into the world are stupid, and most of the people pushing them are doing it stupidly, and if you got her alone in a hallway during a reading she'd roll her eyes at the stupid woman who came to the reading with her stupid baby and stupidly sat in the front row. Some tsk tsk'd her for not being "appropriate," for talking to reporters too much, for not always blindly toeing the public-relations line. But her fearlessness made her one of the most quotable people in town. I once asked whether someone at University Book Store was a good manager, and she said he "couldn't manage his way from here to that table." I once asked her how Bookfest could possibly put on a festival without a staff (she was on Bookfest's board, and the staff had just been laid off), and she just said she had no idea. "I don't know the first thing about Porta Potties. I don't want to know. I don't even go in one, let alone know how to rent one."

If memory serves, the Bookfest board asked her to take media training after that—to learn better how to talk while saying nothing at all. Bookfest then died a long, slow, embarrassing death presided over by the sort of corporate goons who think they know how to do everything. Meanwhile, Ricketts built a new career for herself producing book events—private ones, public ones, literary ones, business-y ones, foodie ones.

Bethany Jean Clement interviewed Ricketts for Edible Seattle last year about the food events, and they got to talking about all kinds of things, including not shopping at Whole Foods ("I just kind of think the owner's crazy"), how working at University Book Store was like working for the government ("People there, they're there for years—they die there in the stacks"), and the time she produced an event featuring Marco Pierre White ("Then he decided, I don't know what came over him—well, too many drinks, but—there was this tall African American man, and Marco decided he would go up and confront him about how big their penises were...").

People who'd said no to her more-­ambitious ideas at various points along the way may well have envied her success later. As she told Clement:

People do want other ways to interact with books in their lives. And if it's a cookbook, it should involve food and wine. It seems so obvious to me. I just think it's more fun if you can eat their food, talk to them over dinner. And whenever anybody at the University Book Store complains about me—which they do all the time—doing what I do, I'm like, "I told you guys to do this when I worked for you. And you wouldn't do it."

She did whatever the hell she felt like. The city is a little less funny, a little less badass, a little stuffier without her.

Update: Seems like I misremembered the whale story. Dave Eggers remembers it like this.