Retailers used aggressive discounting "to lure bargain-conscious shoppers into stores last month, helping the industry post better-than-feared sales, despite this year's late Easter, which stands to benefit April sales more than it did March's," the Wall Street Journal reported. For the month, sales at stores open at least a year increased 2.2% at the eight retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters, compared with projections of 1.4% growth and a 2.7% jump last year.

Data provider Euclid reported that although shopper traffic in March declined 1% from last year, it expects "a rebound of activity, especially after a depressed start to the year," the Journal wrote. "Weather shouldn't be a challenge, there are minimal economic headwinds we see on the horizon, and store traffic should pick up," said Euclid's Breton Birkhofer.

Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers' space at 716 Broadway near Astor Place in Manhattan has been listed for rent by Massey Knakal Realty Services, the Commercial Observer reported, adding that the "owners declined to comment on their current rent or the shop's future." Although the online listing does not include a price, listing agent Brendan Gotch said the location's rent will be $50,000 a month for a 3,000-square-foot retail space on the first floor and 2,000-square-foot basement.

Gotch added that while he and the landlord are sad to see Shakespeare & Co. leave, "that part of Broadway has changed. Their lease has expired and they're staying on briefly until the landlord acquires a new tenant. The fact of the matter is that along with many bookstores, they are having trouble paying rents that were affordable 10 years ago when they signed these leases."

Shakespeare & Co. has two other locations: on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in Brooklyn, near Brooklyn College.

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In other bad news for NYC bookstores, yesterday the Landmarks Preservation Commission "shot down a last-ditch effort" to save from demolition the historic building that has housed Rizzoli Bookstore, which is set to close today, DNAInfo reported. In a statement, the LPC said the interior of the building at 31 W. 57th St. "did not qualify for protection because its design dates back only to 1985, when chandeliers, bookshelves, cabinetry and flooring were installed as part of an overhaul to turn the former Sohmer Piano showroom into a bookstore."

On Facebook last night, Jeremiah's Vanishing New York posted: "Rizzoli is a mob scene. The interior landmarking was denied this morning, and everyone is making the pilgrimage, taking photos, buying books at 40% off. They say they might be moving to the Flatiron area, but it's goodbye to that beautiful building. A sin."

Deborah Aaronson has been appointed v-p, group publisher at Phaidon Press, where she will be responsible for expanding the company's visual arts, photography, interior design, fashion and children's publishing programs. She will also oversee design and production. Prior to joining Phaidon, Aaronson was v-p, publisher for the adult trade group at Abrams.

Amazon has reached an agreement to acquire comiXology, the large retailer of digital comics with a library of content from more than 75 publishers as well as independent creators. Terms were not disclosed and, subject to various closing conditions, the acquisition is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2014, Amazon said. Following the acquisition, comiXology's headquarters will remain in New York.

In a letter to customers, comiXology's co-founder and CEO David Steinberger wrote that the company "will retain its identity as an Amazon subsidiary and we're not anywhere near done 'taking comics further.' We are confident that--with Amazon by our side, who shares our desire for innovation and a relentless focus on customers--we've only just begun."

World Book Night U.S. has a range of plans involving e-books. This year, it is making available for free to all givers The World Book Night 2014 E-book: An Original Collection of Stories and Essays by Booksellers, Librarians, and Authors. The e-book contains 10 pieces by past givers, and will be available for two weeks, beginning April 22, accessible for download to any device with a web browser as well as downloadable as a PDF to print.The eworldbooknight.org site is up now, with contributor profiles, excerpts and an e-mail alert sign-up.

Booksellers contributing to this year's e-book include Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Susan Scott, Secret Garden Books, Seattle, Wash., Aaron Curtis, Books & Books, Coral Gables, Fla., and Sam Kaas, Village Books, Bellingham, Wash. Other contributors include former bookseller and Shelf Awareness contributing editor Robert Gray, with a story about his father; Luanne Rice, who contributed a piece about her hometown library; and Pikes Peak librarian Kirk Farber, who shared his essay about the Midwest. The e-book also contains author Sophie Hannah's introduction to the WBN edition of Agatha Christie's After the Funeral.

Two authors who have been givers and contributed pieces for the e-book are starring in  two WBN e-book-focused events on Tuesday evening, April 22. Politics & Prose will host Elliot Holt, author of You Are One of Them (Penguin, trade paper, April 29), and Brazos Bookstore will host Chris Cander, author of Whisper Hollow (Other Press, Jan. 2015). See the WBN launch event map here.

Next year, WBN U.S. plans to publish more e-books. One e-book will again feature the 10 best bookseller giver essays, and the grand prize winner will receive a pair of plane tickets to BEA in 2015. A librarian essay contest will have the same guidelines and a grand prize of plane tickets to ALA.

Another e-book for next year will feature the 10 best essays submitted by this year's volunteer givers about their World Book Night giving experience. Submissions will be divided geographically, with one winner each in nine regions (a 10th region is the overseas military base category).

Executive director Carl Lennertz commented: "We've discussed a digital component for WBN since year one, but it didn't come together until the great people at Livrada stepped forward, and until two authors who were givers, Chris Cander and Elliott Holt, happily agreed to contribute pieces. Then we sought and received the fun bookseller and library contributions to the e-book.

"This is a supplement to our primary mission of printed books, not a change in direction. It's short and fun original material, and we wanted the givers to have this to offer.... Our main mission is still to find a half million people without means or access to printed books, but this digital extra is a nice plus. We also feel it's a great thank you to the 25,000 volunteer givers to enjoy as well. And now, we have the giver contest to be in next year's e-book!"

Mary Cheever, "a central figure in a family of prominent American writers whose most notable member was her husband, John, with whom she had a relationship as complex as those he wrote about," died Monday, the New York Times reported. She was 95.

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Author Sue Townsend, who was best known for her highly successful Adrian Mole series of novels, starting with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 in 1982, died Thursday, the Guardian reported. She was 68.

From the Facebook page yesterday of Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colo.: Our Throwback Thursday photo: Tattered Cover staff in the original store, 1979. Four of these folks are still working at TC, including, of course, owner Joyce [Meskis] (lower right), next to our lead buyer Cathy [Farr Langer]."

The Penguin Book Truck is on the road this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and Vroman's Bookstore blog noted that "representatives from Penguin will be working at the Penguin Book Truck (it's like a food truck, but with books instead!) to bring you great reading suggestions and the best books Penguin has to offer! Reps Amy and Tom even brought the truck by the store for a little test drive. A few of our lovely booksellers will also be working at the Book Truck, so stop by and say hi!"

David R. Godine, Publisher, has revamped its sales and marketing team. David Goldberg has joined Godine as the director of sales and marketing. He was formerly New England sales rep for Norton. Megan Sullivan has joined Godine as publicity manager. She was at America's Test Kitchen for the last six months and before that worked at Harvard Book Store for 14 years.

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Tina McIntyre has been promoted to the newly created role of executive director, strategic planning and digital publisher for Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. She was previously executive director, digital publishing and operations.

The Cold Song, a novel by Linn Ullmann, translated by Barbara J. Haveland (Other Press).

This morning on the Today Show: Lincoln Peirce, author of the Big Nate series, including most recently Big Nate: In the Zone (HarperCollins, $13.99, 9780061996658).

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Tonight on PBS's Moyers & Company: Harvey J. Kay, author of The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781451691436).

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Tonight on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher: Rob Lowe, author of Love Life (Simon & Schuster, $27, 9781451685718).

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Tomorrow on Weekend Edition: Robert Dawson, author of The Public Library: A Photographic Essay (Princeton Architectural Press, $35, 9781616892173).

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Sunday on OWN's Super Soul Sunday: Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Invention of Wings: A Novel (Viking, $27.95, 9780670024780).

Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia) is joining a cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler and Sarah Paulson in Carol, the Hollywood Reporter wrote. Directed by Todd Haynes, the project is based on a 1952 work by Patricia Highsmith, who "adopted the pseudonym Claire Morgan in order to write a lesbian novel called The Price of Salt," Word & Film noted.

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Zac Efron (High School Musical, The Paperboy) will star in a film adaptation of John Grisham's novel The Associate, according to the Hollywood Reporter, which noted that Efron will also produce via his Ninja's Runnin Wild banner (That Awkward Moment); and Doug Wick & Lucy Fisher (producers behind Divergent) will produce through Red Wagon Entertainment. Michael Simkin and Nicki Cortese will oversee development. "Sources say the producers are currently attaching a writer before bringing the package into studios," THR wrote.

Hannah Sanghee Park has won the 2014 Walt Whitman Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Park's manuscript, The Same-Different, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2015, and the Academy of American Poets will purchase and distribute thousands of copies of the book to its members. Park also receives $5,000, a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center and promotion on Poets.org.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout, who selected Park, commented: "The poems in The Same-Different, beginning with a set of gnomic sonnets, tell it slant, then slanter. They are so full of chiasmus, pun, and near-rhyme that their figures twist back on themselves like strands of DNA or a staircase by Escher. They are mirror-bright. This book is a literally dazzling debut."

From last week's Indie bestseller lists, available at IndieBound.org, here are the recommended titles, which are also Indie Next Great Reads:

Hardcovers
Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel by Louis Bayard (Holt, $27, 9780805090703). "It is 1914 and Teddy Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, along with other members of a scientific expedition, are traveling deep into the jungle to map Brazil's Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a mysterious Amazonian tribe, and the head tribesman explains that the tribe needs their help to kill 'The Beast With No Tracks,' which has been killing jaguars as well as humans, but has never been seen. Another wonderful reinvention of the past by acclaimed author Bayard, whose literary style includes wit, suspense, and psychological horror with a twist." --Karen Briggs, Great Northern Books & Hobbies, Oscoda, Mich.

Murder at Cape Three Points by Kwei Quartey (Soho Crime, $26.95, 9781616953898). "Two bodies appear drifting in a canoe at the Cape Three Points oil drilling rig. They turn out to be Charles and Fiona Smith-Aidoos, prominent members of the local community. Charles works for Malgum Oil, the company that owns the rig. The local police investigate, but nothing comes of it. Sapphire, the Smith-Aidoos' niece, requests the help of the Ghanaian federal police, and Inspector Darko Dawson of the Accra police is assigned. Quartey portrays the country of Ghana with all its charms and quirks, a culture that stands at the brink of the modern world, yet has not lost its tribal traditions. The result is a thoroughly fascinating book." --Janice Hunsche, Kaleidosaurus Books, Fishers, Ind.

Paperback
The River of No Return: A Novel by Bee Ridgeway (Plume, $16, 9780142180839). "This romp in time has it all! There's a dashing hero, several feisty heroines, some really nasty bad guys, plenty of mystery, suspense, humor and romance as Ridgeway navigates her eminently plausible route along the River of Time filled with paradoxes and switchbacks. Shelve this alongside Gabaldon's Outlander and Harkness' Discovery of Witches." — Annie Leonard, the Next Chapter, Knoxville, Iowa

For Teen Readers
Alpha Goddess by Amalie Howard (Sky Pony Press, $16.95, 9781626362086). "Howard's Alpha Goddess is a breath of fresh air for any young adult fantasy fan. Sera's adventures in discovering her parentage and her existence as the reincarnation of Lakshmi, one of the most powerful beings in the created universe, are exciting and interesting. Sera finds herself caught amid the battle between good and evil and must choose to take her place as the savior of the known world. Howard's writing is excellent and her concept stands out among the flood of angel and demon fiction already populating the genre." --Demi Marshall, Park Road Books, Charlotte, N.C.

[Many thanks to IndieBound and the ABA!]

photo: Damien Sass

Irishman Aidan Harte was studying classical sculpture in Florence when he began writing Irenicon (Jo Fletcher/Quercus, April 1, 2014), a historical fantasy set in medieval Italy. Irenicon was shortlisted for the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for best debut, and Lawrence Osborne called Harte "a brilliant new voice in historical fantasy." In a previous life, Harte created the show Skunk Fu for the BBC and Cartoon Network. His sculpture can be viewed at the Sol Art Gallery in Dublin, the Sculpture Company in London and at aidanharte.com.

On your nightstand now:

The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This short novel, set in the 17th century, is about a Polish Jew whose family is murdered in a pogrom and is subsequently enslaved by brutal peasants. It doesn't sound it, but this is a gentle love story infused by melancholy wisdom. Singer wrote The Slave in the early '60s when the world was still realizing the scale of the Holocaust. It's an example of how the best writing is rooted in its time and transcends it. The Slave looks obliquely at the horror and--remarkable thing--finds some solace in the darkness.

Singer was a funny guy. He said he kept writing in Yiddish because ghost stories ought to be told in dying languages.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. Clearly it was an odd child that relished this quixotic mix of paranoia, farce and theology. I continue to reread it annually. I think something of the memorable finale, where the protagonist confronts God, found its way into [my] Wave Trilogy.

Your top five authors:

Impossible! Irenicon is more grounded in history than most fantasy, so let me narrow it down to writers of historical fiction: Shakespeare, Patrick O'Brian, Cormac McCarthy, Neal Stephenson and Hilary Mantel. Besides being idiosyncratic stylists, all of the above do justice to their characters: they do not condescend. It's sometimes hard to imagine, but the gentlemen and women in the graveyards were every bit as contented and aggrieved as we are.

Book you've faked reading:

"Faked" is so damning. What about those books that you haven't read but convince yourself you have? They're like islands you haven't visited yet but you know the coastline intimately. Do they count? Can you triangulate a book if you're read the work that inspired it, and the work it inspired? Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo is a few miles beyond the Castle of Kafka, but if you get to Allende's House of Spirits you've gone too far. Of course, the fun of actually visiting is watching our preconceptions shatter. Dodging the question? Damn right I am. Next!

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. That book's got brio. I'm currently writing a sci-fi [novel]--my first--and Bester's rapid pacing is my ideal.

Science fiction goes through fallow periods where authors feel duty-bound to educate readers on contemporary physics, but lengthy technical exposition makes lousy science and lousy fiction. It reads like a textbook, and not accidentally--that's what it aspires to be. Happily, hard science fiction dates swiftly, so a new generation comes along that realizes being entertaining isn't sinful. That's what made William Gibson's Neuromancer such an event. Sure, all that cyberpunk tech was rad, but the book moves. You can feel the spirit of Bester pumping adrenaline into every line. I think we're due another shot.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I rarely pick books for their covers. Perverse, I suppose, since my other job is visual art. I love those old Penguins with the orange stripe and title and author written in the same functional typeface. No sales pitch, just the facts. It's like keeping a secret from the world. That said, I was hooked by the covers of the Pocket Canons. This was a series by Pentagram reprinting books of the Bible in a pocket-sized edition. The cover of Job was an old bum in the street, Isaiah was a building being shredded by a hurricane and Exodus was a grainy Polaroid taken from a car on an endless motorway. I'm a sucker for killer titles, however. No way could I leave Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress on the shelf. As I recall, the cover illustration was an airbrushed nightmare--chrome space ships buzzing about a lemon crescent. Oh my, it was nasty, but that only sealed the deal: it's an iron law of science-fiction that the more luridly terrible the cover, the better the book contained therein.

Book that changed your life:

You find Melville or Hemingway growing up and you think, well, that's fine, but no one's that good today. I did, anyway. There's a three-page passage in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses where two Texas boys working on a hacienda break 16 mustangs over four long days. All McCarthy does is tell you what happens. Not a single line tells you how to feel about it. It kills me every time.

Favorite line from a book:

"Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly up." --Job 5:7. Ain't that the truth.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

With densely wrought books, like Moby-Dick, you find treasure each reading. Indeed, it's part of their design. So the first time is necessarily the most superficial. The tales I'd love to experience afresh are short stories. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery springs to mind. That first time hurts sweeter than a paper cut.

What we can expect from the next installment of the Wave Trilogy:

Peace. War. Not necessarily in that order.

Real fishing, fly-fishing, is done mostly alone and in the wild, and John Gierach is to fishing what Roger Angell is to baseball--a seasoned observer who writes with knowledge, humor and a touch of reverence. Gierach, author of the classic Standing in a River Waving a Stick and many other fishing books, describes his days as a professional fishing writer in the first chapter of All Fishermen Are Liars with characteristic self-deprecating humor: "The worst that happens is that you occasionally go fishing without turning a profit: something normal people do every day."

Gierach meanders through Alaska, Canada, Wyoming, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula in search of good fishing and good company. His target species doesn't much matter; they all have their particular habits and especially picky tastes in flies--and Gierach has plenty to say about those flies, bearing such colorful names as Green Butt Skunk, Skagit Mist, White-Winged Akroyd and Undertaker. Sometimes a fisherman's biggest field decision is choosing which "comeback fly" to cast when the first one "presented" fails to get a hit. As an Oregon steelheader describes the process, the first fly is "the steak and potatoes that gets him in the door," but the comeback fly is "that little piece of cheesecake dessert that closes the deal."

Gierach amusingly dissects the secrets of great fishing lodges, iconoclastic guides and fly-fishing rod selection (although happy with modern graphite, he loves split-bamboo rods "in the same category with cherry 1957 Chevys driven by older guys for reasons that aren't immediately evident"). His most interesting digression is a chapter on a Japanese fixed-line fly-fishing technique called Tenkara: "No guides, no extra line, no reel... the fly-fishing equivalent of haiku." In the end, he reminds us any gear will do, since "your odds of catching fish... increase the longer you keep the hook in the water"--even if, like one diehard Alaskan fisherman, you "pee in your waders rather than stop casting for five minutes to wade ashore and take care of business the normal way." Now that's a good fishing story. --Bruce Jacobs

Shelf Talker: In his latest collection of fish stories, veteran fisherman and fishing writer John Gierach takes us on an entertaining trip through fly-fishing's "cradle of civilization."

First, a confession: I did not know what a clerihew was until I learned that Ice Cube Press would be publishing The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram July 1 (shipping June 15). On the other hand, I did know that the author is a legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, where he has worked since 1989. Whenever a list of great indie handsellers appears, he is inevitably on it.

From Ingram's introduction to his collection, I soon discovered the clerihew was first devised by English author Edmund Clerihew Bentley and follows the rhyme scheme AABB, with the first line including "the name of a well-known or ill-known person." Since Bentley's death in 1956, and despite its adoption by poets like W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, "the form has seldom been in use."

Until now, that is. Ingram's mischievous creations have been found at last ("And how did they become lost? Many reasons. They are tiny and often find themselves on napkins, old receipts, sugar packets and matchbook covers."), and readers will soon enjoy the pleasure of their company.

Igor Stravinsky
Couldn't convince me
He knew one damn thing
About the rite of spring.

Ingram said he had doubts when he initially toyed with the form 20 years ago: "I believed I just wasn't clerihew material. I just wasn't that clever. But I do all the buying for the bookstore and had hundreds of names going through my head, so once I'd figured out how to do a couple, I figured how to do a lot of them." Although he estimated he has composed as many as 400 ("not 400 good; not 400 publishable"), Ingram noted that "there are plenty that I did not include in this collection because they are pointedly offensive."

Does the clerihew perhaps allow him to vent a little? "I feel I'm generally a way, way too respectful person, but I don't always necessarily feel that way," he replied. "It's just what came out; they come out kind of naughty. I think most of what I have in there now is just this side of printable."

In his blurb for the collection, Richard Howorth, co-owner of Square Books, Oxford, Miss., called Ingram "an extraordinary bookseller who has not only found the lost clerihews; he has elevated the entire form. This book forever shall reside in our guest bedroom so that visitors will either know or wonder what sort of people we are."

How Ingram's clerihews evolved into a book is one of those great tales of the right people converging in the right place at the right time.

"The book's genesis was mostly through Bruce J. Miller, who encouraged me to go listen to Paul tell me some of them," said Steve Semken, founder and CEO of Ice Cube Press. "I listened to Paul recite clerihews and laughed and loved how clever they were. At first they seemed merely funny, but then, when I realized the point of a clerihew is also to make biographical points about the person, I thought, What could be better than laughing and learning all at once?"

Miller, co-owner of Miller Trade Book Marketing, added: "It's been an exciting time. For me the publication of Lost Clerihews represents the fulfillment of my long held wish to help bring Paul's work to a national audience. I asked him from time to time if he had thought about publishing his wonderful clerihews, and this time I was able to help make it happen."

The book is illustrated by Miller's wife, Julia Anderson-Miller, an accomplished artist who has known Ingram since 1987. "When I was asked if I had the time to illustrate The Lost Clerihews, I was so happy!" she recalled. "What an education and variety of inspired situations those clerihews provided for my creative juices. I was only planning to do 12 or 24, but ended up doing 134. And I still do not want to stop--but the book is finished.

"I did not want to illustrate verbatim, so it was fun to wander off a wee bit. I needed research, because I did not know who some of these people were, and I also needed to get the realism of gesture, face or interesting facts. I looked forward to solving difficult clerihews to put into pen and ink. I love a challenge."

"Having an illustrated clerihew book is 'how it's done,' " Semken observed. "Auden's was illustrated, as was E. Clerihew Bentley's clerihew book. This really is a valuable part of the book, I think."

The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram will include a foreword by Elizabeth McCracken and has already drawn accolades from a range of word enthusiasts, including Jane Hamilton, Daniel Menaker, Roz Chast, Elizabeth Crane, Christopher Merrill and Amelia Gray; as well as booksellers like Howorth and Anne Holman of the King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah.

And what does the future hold for the clerihew? "I would be absolutely delighted to see great clerihews popping out all over," Ingram said. "I'd love to be part of making that happen. I have also discovered, for example, that just about all of them fit in a tweet."

Semken may have summed up the Team Clerihew project best when he said: "That Paul works at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, and it was through a Midwest sales rep telling me, an independent press in the Midwest, about the idea--I really think all these parts working together prove that real partnerships exist in the book industry, that we all need each other." --Robert Gray, contributing editor