Judith Regan, who was abruptly fired by HarperCollins late last year after being accused of using an anti-semitic slur not long after she tried to publish O.J. Simpson's If I Did It, has sued Harper and News Corp. for $100 million, according to the New York Times. Among other things, she says that the company sought to smear and discredit her.

In the suit, Regan charges that she was encouraged by a Harper executive to lie to federal investigators about her affair with Bernard Kerik while Kerik was being vetted in his failed bid to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. Regan published Kerik's memoir.

Regan maintained that Harper and News Corp. were interested in helping former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had recommended Kerik for the federal post. Kerik had been Giuliani's police commissioner. Giuliani is, of course, running for president. Last week, Kerik was indicted for tax fraud and other crimes.

Incidentally one of Regan's claims is that booksellers greeted the publication of If I Did It "with fervor and huge orders," according to the Times. Most of the bookseller fervor we recall was decidedly negative and resulted in cancelled orders.

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In a "clarification," New York State's department of taxation and finance has indicated that online retailers with affiliates in the state need to collect applicable sales tax on items bought by consumers in New York, Bookselling This Week reported.

The department said that retailers must register and begin collecting sales tax as of December 7 to avoid being assessed sales tax before that date or any penalties or interest for not collecting sales tax in the past.

The ABA, which has argued that online retailers with nexus in a state should collect sales tax--making them more competitive with independent booksellers--welcomed the change. COO Oren Teicher commented: "In many states, the law is clear: If a company sells through an affiliate that is based in the state, then it should collect sales tax within that state."

Among large retailers of books online, B&N.com already collects sales tax in a majority of states. Some have argued that Amazon.com should collect sales tax in all states because of its affiliates program. The e-tailer has said that such tax collection is technically feasible.

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Labyrinth Books opens today in Princeton, N.J., the Daily Princetonian reported.

Labyrinth co-owner Dorothea von Moltke told the paper that the store aims to appeal to the university and the community: "The idea is not to separate events into [those] for one or the other constituency because we really think the kind of events we're planning to do should be interesting for both groups."

The 6,500-sq.-ft. store is a replacement of sorts for Micawber Books, which Princeton University bought last year and closed in March. 

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The new Old Dominion Bookstore, Norfolk, Va., will celebrate its grand opening Friday-Sunday, December 6-8. The 42,000-sq.-ft. store, which has three and a half stories, is a partnership of Follett Higher Education Group and Old Dominion University. The store includes a café with outdoor seating area and devotes 5,000 square feet of space to trade books. Altogether the store will stock about 20,000 titles. The anchor of ODU's University Village, the store replaces the bookstore in the Webb University Center.

The grand opening events include signings Friday by Joanne Steen and Regina Asaro, authors of Military Widow, and David Poyer, author of Korea Strait and on Saturday by David Baldacci, author of Stone Cold. On Saturday, there will be a ribbon cutting, music and photo opportunities with Big Blue and ODU cheerleaders, and on Sunday, the store hosts a story time with Curious George.

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Cool idea of the day: Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., has launched a Signed First Edition Club, which features signed first printings of newly published books that are selected for both "literary merit and potential collectibility." The books will be sold at list price.

"As an incentive against procrastination," the first 40 people to sign up for club membership will be able to buy a signed first edition of Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors. And everyone who signs up before November 26 will receive November's selection, Dr. Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

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Ira Levin, playwright and author of Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, among other novels, died on Monday in New York City, the New York Times reported. He was 78.

Most of Levin's bestselling books were made into movies. He also wrote Deathtrap, the long-running Broadway play.

The Times wrote: "Combining elements of several genres--mystery, Gothic horror, science fiction and the techno-thriller--Mr. Levin's novels conjured up a world full of quietly looming menace, in which anything could happen to anyone at any time. In short, the Ira Levin universe was a great deal like the real one, only more so: more starkly terrifying, more exquisitely mundane."

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Congratulations to Craig Herman, v-p and associate publisher, marketing and publicity, of Running Press, who has been named one of Advertising Age's 2007 Marketing 50--which honors the most innovative and inspiring marketers of the year--for his work on the book Skinny Bitch by Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman (Shelf Awareness, June 30, 2007).

Ad Age lauded Herman for "smart management of the buzz" that followed the publication of a picture of Victoria Beckham holding a copy of Skinny Bitch, helping make the book "nothing less than a cultural sensation."

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A rare first edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, sold for £114,000 (about US$235,032) at Bonhams London auction house. The Guardian reported that the copy was purchased by "antiquarian bookseller Robert Kirkman, on behalf of an unnamed British client who is a keen collector of Brontë works. Only three copies of this edition have come up for auction in the last 35 years."

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Marvel Comics has unveiled its new online archive of more than 2,500 back issues, including the first issues of Spider-Man, X-Men and the Incredible Hulk. According to USA Today, "Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited will offer the archive in a high-resolution format on computer screens for $59.88 a year, or at a monthly rate of $9.99 . . . To help sell the experience to an audience unaccustomed to paying for content, Marvel will offer a free sampler of 250 titles."

USA Today also asked "two of Marvel's celebrity writers" to suggest which archived classics fans should pick first.

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Independent bookstores in south Florida are "refining their craft to boost sales as competition from online stores, digital media and chain superstores increases," according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The article noted that "veterans" like Pyramid Books, Pompano Beach; Murder on the Beach Mystery Bookstore, Delray Beach and the African American Heritage Bookstore, West Palm Beach, are staying competitive by using strategies that include "niche marketing, specialty or diversified store merchandise as well as enhanced Web sites and online ordering systems."

"The business is not what it used to be," said James "Akbar" Watson, owner of Pyramid Books. "The way the community views the bookstore is changing, but I want to remain."

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Booking passage on a novel cruise to a literary destination. The Flathead Beacon profiled Novel Passages, owned by Montana entrepreneurs Cindy Weaver, a travel agent, and Cindy Dyson, "a novelist and supplier of literature to cruise ships."

Unlike the cruise ship book clubs that have gained popularity in recent years, Novel Passages matches the destination with the book or books being read, offering "a tool for readers at sea to expand their relationship to the destination, rather than just being a ship-board pastime."

Dyson's book, And She Was, will be used on Novel Passages' Alaska cruise in 2008. In addition to readings, the author will join book club discussions, lead journaling sessions and serve as literary tour guide. "This is more experiential, more than the author reading and lecturing,” said Dyson, whose novel is set in the Aleutian Islands. On one of the shore excursions, Dyson will introduce the group to "the remnants of an Aleut internment camp, cannery, and graveyard--all settings for her novel."

 

 

Leaves-N-Beans Roasting Company is promoting some HarperCollins trade paperbacks on the company's Storyteller's Blends coffee packages and will promote and distribute the titles through the Leaves-N-Beans school and library fundraising catalogs and its wholesale partners, which include coffee shops, bakeries, bookstores and gourmet food and department stores.

This month two Storyteller's Blends and book gift sets will appear for the holiday season. In January a new line of Storyteller's Blends coffees will feature Harper titles.

The partnership will be promoted online through browse-inside-the-book widgets and sweepstakes on Storytellersblends.com. This will include commentary from other coffee-loving storytellers (including both the published and unpublished) as well as tips on  ideal coffee and book blends and links to HarperCollins newsletters and blogs.

Among titles being promoted and distributed through Leaves-N-Beans are Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Mr. Ives' Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos, Their Eyes Are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, The Island by Victoria Hislop, The Pact by Jodi Picault and The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble.

 

A kind of literary film trifecta takes place this coming Friday, November 16, when the following movies open:

• Love in the Time of Cholera, which stars Liev Schreiber and John Leguizamo. Two lovers must wait 50 years in early 20th-century South America to be reunited. The movie tie-in edition is out (Vintage, $14.95, 9780307387141/0307387143).
• Beowulf, which is directed by Robert Zemeckis. Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson and Anthony Hopkins star in this adaptation of the epic poem in which the mighty warrior Beowulf must slay Grendel, a murderous monster, and then the beast's vengeful mother.
• Elegy, which stars Ben Kingsley, Dennis Hopper and Penélope Cruz and is directed by Isabel Coixet. Based on the novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (Vintage, $12, 9780099422693/0099422697), the movie is the story of a professor who becomes obsessively attracted to one of his students.

 

This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., features an interview with Jennifer Anne Moses, author of Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou (University of Wisconsin Press, $26.95, 9780299224400/0299224406).

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Shannon Brownlee, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury, $25.95, 9781582345802/1582345805).

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Today on the Tavis Smiley Show: Shirley MacLaine, author of Sage-ing While Age-ing (Atria Books, $26, 9781416550419/1416550410).

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Tonight on the Colbert Report: Lisa Randall, author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Harper Perennial, $15.95, 9780060531096/0060531096).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a repeat: Chris Matthews, author of Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success (Random House, $24.95, 9781400065288/1400065283).

 

The following is by Elizabeth Little, a New York Times travel writer whose first book, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic (Melville House, $21.95, 9781933633336/1933633336), appears next Tuesday, November 20:


Of all the words I choose to study when traveling abroad, "book" and "bookstore" usually aren't among them. But not because I don't like to visit bookstores. Wherever you are, bookstores are a perfect refuge when the hustle and bustle of foreign travel gets to be too much--even if you get a kink in your neck from tilting to the left instead of the right to read the spines.

I remember one particularly brutal day during my stint in China, when I had fought passionately--and, ultimately, ineffectually--with officials at a local post office who refused to release a care package that had been sent to me. (Sadly, "but I need my American breakfast cereal!" wasn't the convincing argument I had hoped it would be.) I stormed out of the office, glared at an old man who tried to sell me live crickets and ducked into the first bookshop I could find. I could hardly speak Chinese well enough to order a decent meal, much less read a full book, but that didn't keep me from being calmed by the sight of a beautifully bound edition of Dream of the Red Chamber. Had my backpack been big enough, I would have bought it no matter how impenetrable the language. Instead, I ended up walking out with a slim bilingual learner's edition of Jane Eyre, which rather neatly made me forget about my forbidden Apple Jacks.

"Eyre" in Chinese, by the way, is transcribed with the character 爱 (aì)--"love." At the time, I could think only of how grossly offended my feminist high school English teachers would have been.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I also don't bother to learn the word for "bookstore" because it seems that no matter what language you choose to study, one of the first phrases you learn is "the book is on the table." I figure that I could go just about anywhere, bat my eyelashes and say the phrase with an inquiring expression and probably be pointed to the closest bookshop. Or, alternately, resort to that age-old technique of communication: charades.

But even though many practical and mime-ready travelers might not need to know the words for "book" or "bookstore," any language-loving bibliophile is likely to be charmed by the variety of words used for "book" throughout the world. The English word "book" is echoed in a number of other languages (such as the Dutch boek, the Icelandic bók, or even the Indonesian buku), words that all trace back to a long-ago Germanic word for "beech," the wood that was commonly used back when rune-carving was all the rage. Many Romance languages use words that originate from the Latin liber, which originally described the inner bark of trees. Please note, however, that no matter how politically tempting it might be to say otherwise, the Latin words for "book" and "freedom" are only coincidental homographs.

Not all languages base their words for book on types of tress, though. In many Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, the word for "book" is related to the act of writing. And biblion, the Greek word for book that has been handily co-opted by the bestselling book of all time, is most likely derived from Byblos, the Greek name for the Phoenician port that handled most of the trade in Egyptian papyrus.

My favorite book-related bit of lexical trivia, though, doesn't relate to history or etymology. Instead it relates to rather unpleasant creatures. I've never been particularly skittish about worms, mostly, I think, because I grew up with such friendly bookish thoughts about the slimy things. Rodents are another story. So imagine my surprise, when I discovered that in Spanish, French and Italian, the equivalent of "bookworm" is, literally translated, "library rat."

It may not be the most lyrical phrase, but when I think about the way I scuttled off to that Chinese bookstore, nose crinkling at the smell of fresh paper, I can't help but admit that it's frighteningly apt.

 
At first, Bob Eckstein's arguments for the cultural importance of the snowman seem specious. For example, that there are no Harry Truman or Charo candlestick holders but plenty of snowmen; that snowmen have graced more magazine covers than Muhammad Ali; and that snowmen represent "the most naked, simple portrait of our humanity." But by page 7, with the inclusion of "The Snowman's Index" (who knew that 16% of Americans with the last name "Snowman" live in Florida?), Eckstein easily convinces the reader that the snowman ("a frozen Forrest Gump") is more than just cute or kitschy.
 
Journeying backwards through time, Eckstein searches for the first snowman, moving from the present "age of expansion" where snowmen are making a comeback in the consciousness (just in time for global warming), through the "white trash" years of the last quarter of the 20th century (featuring killer snowmen in film, snowman porn websites, etc.), to the snowman as political statement in the 19th century, and all the way back to the 14th century.
 
All levity and snow puns aside (Eckstein is a cartoonist and humorist), this brisk, charming book is well researched and full of entertaining, informative nuggets. For example:

• There are no snowmen in the dry, cold Arctic where humidity is below 20% and the temperature below 10° F--both must be higher in order to pack snow.
• The Association of Education Publishers has banned the use of the word "snowman" in textbooks because it is gender biased.
• The Taliban banned snowman-making when it came to power in 1996. 

Eckstein even manages, in three illustrated examples, to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the snowman. And if that weren't enough, he also includes a small section of the "best" snowman cartoons (where his own are easily the laugh-out-loud funniest).
 
On a more serious note, when Eckstein does find that first snowman in a 14th century manuscript in the Hague, it turns out to be an anti-Semitic illustration; something Eckstein calls "truly unfortunate" as the key appeal of snowmen, at least in modern times, is that they are nondenominational. Yet he also repeatedly finds pathos in the appearance of snowmen over the centuries and shows convincingly that whether used as political statements or childhood rituals, snowmen hearken to a time when life was simpler and snow had a chance to fall before it melted. One hopes that Eckstein won't stop here, but will follow up with a sequel designed for those of us in warmer climes (possibly all of us soon). Perhaps the history of sandcastles . . . --Debra Ginsberg