Hennessey + Ingalls, which closed its Hollywood, Calif., location a year ago and recently closed its Santa Monica store, has reopened in a 5,000-square-foot space in One Santa Fe, a new mix-used complex in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles. LA Observed wrote: "It's perhaps a better location for selling design and architecture books: facing the long windows of Sci-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Not to mention all the other construction and openings happening in that section of DTLA."

Founded in 1963, Hennessey + Ingalls calls itself "the largest art, architecture and design bookstore in the western United States, and probably the largest retail operation in the country dealing just with books on the visual arts."

Hennessey + Ingalls is located at 300 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. 90013; 213-437-2130.

"Due to our name still being misunderstood, even after six years," the Fountainhead Bookstore, Hendersonville, N.C., is changing its name to Novels & Novelties Bookstore, the store announced on its website. "But everything else will be the same--great customer service, wonderful recommendations, cool under-the-radar title choices, and interesting gift options. Same staff, same place, same local community bookstore, just a new name."

A too powerful Rand brand seems to have prompted the change. As the Hendersonville Lightning put it, "perhaps" the problem arose because the store "shared its name with the well-known 1943 Ayn Rand novel that signifies the triumph of individualism over collectivism."

Novels & Novelties said its original name referred to a definition of fountainhead as "an original source of something" and is "a tribute to all the authors who continue to astound with the amazing things that come out of their heads."

The store is also doing away with its whale logo, "a tribute to Moby Dick," in which one phrase refers to the whale as a fountainhead. To come up with a new logo "to celebrate our new name," Novels & Novelties is holding a contest whose winner receives $100 in cash and $150 in a gift certificate and will be "feted" at a release party on April 30, when the new logo will be introduced.

Based on feedback from early events and an outpouring of requests for appearances, Knopf will expand the author tour for Nancy Jo Sales's American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and has created an online discussion guide for parents and teenagers, available for free on the American Girls website. Released on February 23 and based on hundreds of interviews with teenage girls, American Girls explores the often-damaging role social media plays in the lives of today's teenagers. Also on the book's site is a section for parents and teens to share and discuss their own experiences with social media.

"I think parents are troubled by what they're seeing and [Sales's] book is providing an opportunity for them to educate themselves about social media and more importantly share their experiences," explained Paul Bogaards, executive v-p and director of publicity for Knopf. "Based on the number of requests we've had from all over the country, we thought communities would want to use this book as a point of departure for a conversation about teens and social media."

In addition to expanding Sales's author tour, Knopf is putting together an event kit to go out to some 190 independent bookstores around the country in the next few weeks. The kits include discussion guides, buttons and an infographic poster. The idea for the kit, Bogaards explained, came from the fact that even with an expanded tour, Sales won't be able to make it everywhere, but indie bookstores and community organizations like schools and libraries can still host American Girls discussions without the author. Bogaards added that Knopf will also try to make Sales available for events via Skype.

Sales appeared last week in Madison, Conn., for an off-site event hosted by R.J. Julia Booksellers. The author was in conversation with Dr. Kiki Kennedy, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, and according to R.J. Julia's events manager Liz Bartek, the pair drew a sold-out crowd of around 300 people. "It's a conversation that absolutely needed to happen," said Bartek. "We only reached the tip of the iceberg. People wanted to continue talking. It could have continued for another couple of hours."

Elisabeth Egan and Nancy Jo Sales at Watchung Booksellers' event.

"It's a really scary time for girls, and social media is something that as mothers, we don't even know how to guide them in," said Margot Sage-EL, owner of Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, N.J., who hosted an off-site event last week with Nancy Jo Sales in conversation with author Elisabeth Egan. The event drew around 150 attendees, predominantly mothers. "You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium as [Sales and Egan] were speaking," Sage-EL said. "They were trying to capture every word."

Booksellers interested in hosting American Girls events may Helen Tobin at htobin@penguinrandomhouse.com. --Alex Mutter

Florence Lloyd, "an emigrant from Imperial Russia who helped run the Smithsonian Institution's bookstores, located in the museum shops," died February 5, the Washington Post reported. She was 105. From 1970 to 1982, Lloyd directed the bookstores owned by the Smithsonian and was a volunteer reader of correspondence in the Clinton White House.

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Margie Ghiz, longtime owner of Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica, Calif., died on February 27. She was 75 and had battled cancer for several years.

As her obituary noted, Ghiz spent "her entire life fighting for social justice and equal rights for all working class and under-represented people. Her 40 years as first volunteer, and eventually owner and operator of the Midnight Special Bookstore are characterized by her passion and singular commitment to educating and empowering people. Margie was a force of nature, and much like the light of the Midnight Special, her light still shines on in the faces and actions of all the people she encountered along her journey."

Midnight Special closed in 2004.

Chris Grabenstein (far left), author of The Island of Dr. Libris and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library, visited Sacred Heart School in Havertown, Pa., where students dressed up like characters from his books. The event was arranged by Children's Book World in nearby Haverford. Grabenstein's new middle-grade novel is the puzzle-packed sequel, Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics (Random House).

For its "People at Work" series, Lake Placid News profiled Donna Ignatuk, who "found a dream job" at the Bookstore Plus in upstate New York, where she decorates the showcase window, with "themes changing nearly every week to entice passers-by into the store while reflecting her artistic flair."

"I've just kind of been a freelance, my own investigation, my own interests, my own likes," Ignatuk said. "I've done some drawing and some painting, but all just for personal pleasure. I think I've taken it to a different style completely in that I really just let the books speak, or the time of year speak for the window. When I decorate the window, I want to showcase what we offer, because the store is not just books, it is all kinds of stuff."

Marc and Sarah Galvin, owners of the Bookstore Plus, hired Ignatuk nearly five years ago. She also works as a bookseller, which informs her design choices. "The benefits of working in the store have brought not only what books are brand new, what are selling, what the interest is for the local people," she said. "We can draw from anything, any media, any local activity going on, we hear about it and we can make it happen."

Londonist showcased "14 independent London bookshops to follow on Instagram," noting that "we love a good independent bookshop. In fact we love them so much, we've mapped our favorites. Far from being dusty old places, London's indie bookshops have got their feet firmly in the 21st Century--this lot are even on Instagram. Why not give them a follow."

In a recent interview with Endicott College student Brianna Meagher, Laura Cummings, owner of White Birch Books in North Conway, N.H., talked about what it's like to own an independent bookstore. Among our favorite exchanges:

What does community involvement mean to you?
It's long been said in bookselling circles that a bookstore is what they call like a community third place.... And so as a bookstore, we feel that we're kind of a third place for people in our community. Community is important. It's a lot of saying yes to things. When people want to do things jointly we take our show on the road. We work with the local libraries. We work with several local nonprofits. We work with the schools. And we pretty much do almost anything we can to work with these different groups. We're happy to donate to any organization that come by and that kind of thing because community is what makes the difference. People can buy books almost anywhere and in a lot of cases they can buy them cheaper. But what we have, and what makes a difference is that they see people that they know. All of us who work here are involved in our communities. You know I also sit on my local school board. I sit on my afterschool program board. And that's the same with all of us that work here. We're real people with personalities and they see us around. It is important to get people into the store....

Is there anything you'd like to add about White Birch Books or anything you want people to know?
I think I have a very exceptional group of people who work here. I have made great friends working here. It's a fantastic community, the community of bookselling. I get to travel to different places.... I mean they're fantastic, interesting people and it's just ever-changing. I mean back when I first started and I would meet an author I swear it was like you were meeting a rock star. Now, it's not quite as new and exciting but still I get such a kick out of it and I think that's the thing. The thing with the 'Amazons' and things like that, they've really tried to turn books into a commodity. And in one case you know books are. They're something to be bought and sold. But it's more than that and that's the part of the business that I love. And I think that's what the independent bookstores keep alive are the stories and getting stories to the right people. It sounds corny but that's the fun stuff. If I was selling shoes I wouldn't be that excited about it.

The Best Place on Earth by Ayelet Tsabari (Random House), winner of the Sami Rohr Prize.

Today:
Fresh Air: Tracey Helton Mitchell, author of The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin (Seal Press, $24, 9781580056038).

Tomorrow:
CNBC's Power Lunch: Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781476763255). He will also appear on Sirius XM's Stand Up with Pete Dominick.

CNBC's Squawk Box: Lawrence B. Lindsey, author of Conspiracies of the Ruling Class: How to Break Their Grip Forever (Simon & Schuster, $26, 9781501144233). He will also appear on Fox Business's Cavuto Coast-to-Coast.

Playground Entertainment (Wolf Hall, The Missing) has acquired Guardian journalist Patrick Kingsley's forthcoming book The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis and "will use it as the basis to develop and produce a major new TV drama series," Deadline reported.

"The New Odyssey is an epic piece of journalism that provides an intimate account of the people caught up in one of the biggest humanitarian crisis since WW2," said Playground creative director Sophie Gardiner. "We believe this can be television at its best--powerful, emotional and compelling storytelling that explores the complexities and human dimensions of the biggest story of our time."

Rosemary Sullivan won the C$25,000 (about US$18,800) RBC Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction, which is given to an author "whose book best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style and a subtlety of thought and perception," for Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Sveltana Alliluyeva, published in the U.S. by Harper. Later this month, she will announce the winner of the RBC Taylor Emerging Author award, who receives C$10,000 (about US$7,520) and the opportunity to be mentored by Sullivan.

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Twenty books have been longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and can be seen here. The winner will be announced June 8.

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Longlists have been released for this year's £3,000 (about $4,265) Orwell Prize for books, which honors a work that comes closest to George Orwell's ambition to "make political writing into an art." The shortlist will be announced April 21 and a winner named at the end of May. Check out the complete Orwell Prize longlists here.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, The Taxidermist's Daughter, a brooding mystery by Kate Mosse (Labyrinth), starts with a superstition and progresses into a murder most twisted. Family secrets, madness and buried crimes make for a tense and chilling journey.

In the Fishbourne Marshes of Sussex, old superstitions still have influence. Constantia Gifford discreetly follows her father one night, afraid he might get into trouble in his alcoholic stupor, and finds herself at a churchyard where a small gathering waits to see if an old legend is true. Folk wisdom has it that on St. Mark's Eve, specters of people fated to die in the coming year will appear and pass through the church doors. Connie cannot fathom why her father, a reasonable man, would attend the vigil. The mysterious woman she spies in the church's graveyard certainly is no apparition, for the next morning, Connie finds the woman's body in the marsh behind the house she and her father share. She discovers a wire from her father's taxidermy workshop embedded in the victim's neck, clearly used as a garrote. She also finds his bedroom empty.

Although ashamed to suspect her father of wrongdoing, Connie cannot help herself. Not only does the elder Gifford spend most of his time lost in drink, he won't tell Connie about her past. Ten years ago, at the age of 12, she lost her memories after head trauma. Her father believes her childhood is best left forgotten, but Connie wonders if he wishes to protect her or a dark truth. Why, she wonders, did he close up his taxidermy museum all those years ago? The almost-memory of a female presence hovers on the edges of Connie's mind, yet her mother died in childbirth, and her father refuses to tell her who this shadow was. With the help of aspiring young painter Harry Woolston, whose father has also disappeared, Connie probes the enigma of her past and faces unimagined dangers.

Mosse builds a thick gothic atmosphere on a foundation of foggy, sucking marshland and the Victorian fad of stuffed birds and animals as decor, a trend not far in the past for Connie. While Connie's stuffing of a blackbird corpse demystifies the process of taxidermy, Mosse works a morbid angle with a killer who uses the tools of the trade against victims. Layers of questions, buried tragedies and looming corvid imagery form a dark tone perfect for mystery readers who want their whodunit served with a side of the grotesque and chilling. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Shelf Talker: An English taxidermist's daughter is drawn back to secrets in her lost memory when she finds a murdered woman behind her family's house.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. RoomHate by Penelope Ward
2. From Sanctum with Love (Masters and Mercenaries Book 10) by Lexi Blake
3. Soulless: Lawless Part 2 by T.M. Frazier
4. Brazen by Maya Banks
5. The Arrangement: Vol. 21 by H.M. Ward
6. Bad Boy (An Indecent Proposal) by J.C. Reed
7. Chasing You (Love Wanted in Texas Book 5) by Kelly Elliott
8. Royal by Winter Renshaw
9. Curvy by Alexa Riley
10. Untamed by Emilia Kincade

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]