Because of the Labor Day holiday, this is our last issue until Tuesday, September 7. Enjoy your weekend!

 

General retail sales for August were up as retailers "delivered a late-summer surprise, with sales for the key back-to-school buying month coming in better than expected," the Wall Street Journal reported. Sales at stores open at least a year rose 3.3% in August, as measured by Thomson Reuters, compared to a 2.9% drop a year ago and well ahead of the 2.5% that analysts had projected.

The Journal noted that department stores in particular did well, citing Kohl's (4.5%), J.C. Penney (2.3%) and Macy's (4.3%) as companies that beat expectations. Costco's 5% rise in same-store sales also exceeded the 3.6% gain that was anticipated.

"Things have been so poor in terms of the economy and even the stock market and that really pulled expectations down," said Stephen Hoch, marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "We're treading water on the retail front, and it was thought that we couldn't even do that."

Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research for Thomson Reuters, told the New York Times that a 3% increase and up "represents a healthy U.S. consumer," adding that the gains by discount stores was notable. "Those that are unemployed are spending, but only on basic necessities, and that’s why the discounters do so well."

 

The Independent Book Publishers Association board has five new members for the 2010-2012 term:

Shelf Awareness's own John Mutter, who founded the company with Jenn Risko five years ago. Earlier he worked at Publishers Weekly for more than 20 years, for much of the time as executive editor, bookselling.

Davida Breier, manager for Hopkins Fulfillment Services, the distribution division at Johns Hopkins University Press. Earlier she worked for National Book Network, where she was marketing director and oversaw NBN Fusion. Before that, she was sales and marketing director for Biblio Distribution. She is also a board member for the non-profit publisher No Voice Unheard and is a contributing writer and photographer for its book Ninety-Five: Meeting America's Farmed Animals in Stories and Photographs. She’s been involved with small and independent publishers since 1994 and is actively involved in the "zine" community.

Roy M. Carlisle is marketing and sales director at the Independent Institute. He has been senior editor at HarperOne, West Coast senior editor at the Crossroad Publishing Company, co-owner and editorial director at Circulus Publishing Group and general manager of the Fuller Seminary Bookstore. He has also been a founding board member and former chairman of the board at New College Berkeley and founder and former executive director of the Academy of Christian Editors.

Poet, publisher, editor and educator Haki R. Madhubuti has published more than 28 books, mostly poetry and nonfiction. He founded Third World Press in 1967, was a founder of the Institute of Positive Education/New Concept School and a co-founder of the Betty Shabazz International Charter School, the Barbara A. Sizemore Middle School and the DuSable Leadership Academy, all of which are in Chicago. He has taught at Columbia College of Chicago, Cornell University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Howard University, Morgan State University, the University of Iowa and Chicago State University. Currently he is the incoming Ida B. Wells Barnett University Professor at DePaul University.

Robert Rosenwald helped his wife, Barbara Peters, found the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1989. Jointly they started Poisoned Pen Press in 1997 in response to the loss of backlist titles and shrinking number of midlist authors as a result of consolidation of large publishers.

---

Ron Burkle plans to appeal the dismissal of his lawsuit against B&N by the Delaware Court of Chancery (Shelf Awareness, August 13, 2010), the Associated Press reported.

In a statement, B&N said, "We are not surprised Mr. Burkle cannot accept defeat in the baseless litigation he brought against Barnes & Noble and that he would now force the company to incur further legal costs to advance his self-serving agenda of gaining control of Barnes & Noble without paying a control premium to shareholders."

According to Reuters, Burkle's Yucaipa Companies, which filed the appeal "because of Riggio's decision in August to exercise options to buy Barnes & Noble shares, argued that the lower Delaware court had made its ruling on the premise that Riggio would not exercise any of those options."

---

Gulf Coast booksellers are generally optimistic about the fall season despite the harsh impact of the BP oil spill disaster on lives and businesses this summer. Bookselling This Week reported that "six weeks after the capping of the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, booksellers along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama reported varying effects on their businesses, but all said they were looking forward to the fall season."

For Kay Gough of Bay Books, Bay Saint Louis, Miss., the combination of BP grant money to promote tourism in the area and new books examining another regional disaster have helped keep her business ahead of last year: "One thing that has really benefitted business in the last two months were sales of books that came out to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Katrina."

Anticipating the fall season, Gough said, "Our beaches are in good shape. People are feeling more confident about the seafood. We have something to look forward to now, instead of dreading waking up every morning and listening to the news."

---

Kobo will provide the e-book store for Samsung's Galaxy tablet computer, Bloomberg reported, adding that the Galaxy Tab "will be sold in Europe in October and the company is in talks with mobile phone service providers to bring it to the U.S."

"This partnership is an industry first for Kobo and Samsung, offering the first e-reading experience on an Android tablet to readers worldwide," said Kobo's CEO Michael Serbinis.

PCWorld suggested that the Kobo announcement "is potentially its biggest victory yet" because, as the engine behind the "Readers Hub" e-book reading app, "Kobo software will be pre-loaded on Galaxy Tabs globally, and will give customers wireless access to the entire Borders and Kobo bookstore, with over 2.2 million titles--over a million of which Kobo claims can be downloaded free. The Readers Hub syncs reading across devices, supports ePub and PDF titles, and has simple navigation through the Tab's touch screen."

---

Earlier this month, Mark Bierley resigned from his position as Borders COO and CFO "to pursue another employment opportunity" (Shelf Awareness, August 24, 2010). Yesterday, Reuters reported that Bierly will replace Frank Paci as CFO for convenience store operator Pantry Inc., which "is buying 47 stores from privately held Presto Convenience Stores LLC to expand its geographic footprint."

---

Obituary note: Steve Eddy, the longtime owner of Book King bookstore, Rutland, Vt., and "one of downtown's most vocal and active supporters," died Tuesday, the Rutland Herald reported. He was 70. He had sold the bookshop last year to former part-time employee Elizabeth Dulli after nearly 40 years in business.

Michael Coppinger, executive director of the Downtown Rutland Partnership, called Eddy a renaissance man and observed that he "was an astute businessman. As other stores came and went, the Book King became one of the retail anchors, navigating the ups and downs of the economy."

In a 2009 interview, Eddy said that the "way you do compete with the big box stores and with Amazon, you know your community and you know the wants of your community and you establish ties with your community and people appreciate that." A celebration of life service will be held today at 11 a.m., at the Paramount Theatre on Center Street.

---

Novelist Vance Bourjaily, "whose literary career, like those of Norman Mailer and James Jones, emerged out of World War II and whose ambitious novels explored American themes for decades afterward," died on Tuesday, the New York Times reported. He was 87.

---

Let the debate begin. Flavorwire showcased its top 10 bookstores in the U.S. while offering the sound advice that people should head to one "and buy something fer chrissakes."

---

Miami New Times profiled A&M Comics, "one of the oldest comic book stores in the country. When you walk into A&M Comics on Bird Road, you might think that you've walked into a taping of A&E's Hoarders. It's stocked from ceiling to floor with comic books, collectible figures, T-shirts, and posters. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the array of comic book paraphernalia, and even the owner admits that there is no kind of inventory taken, per se."

But customers can talk with owner Jorge Perez "about any kind of comic from any time period and from any publisher. He knows the biggies like Marvel and DC, but he's also familiar with indie publishers like Dark Horse and Image. With so many years in the biz, he's seen it all."

---

$#*! the f@#&ing New York Times doesn't say. The New Yorker's Book Bench blog cited Andrew Gottlieb's parody Drink, Play, F@#k as exhibit A while considering Blake Eskin's recent scolding of the Times "for its conservative language policy... I noticed that Black Cat Press had opted to 'bleep out' the final word of the title on the book's cover, and in all subsequent mentions. (That 'f@#k' is spelled out in condoms on the cover shows that there was a limit to the publisher’s high-mindedness.)"

Book Bench featured a book cover slide show exploring "how some other publishers have chosen to deal with the offending word."

---

Book trailer of the day: Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Gross Junior Edition by David Borgenicht and Nathaniel Marunas (Chronicle), which will be released September 21. Cheers! Quirk Books publisher Borgenicht toasts the end of summer with the winning recipe in Chronicle's BEA contest for the grossest smoothie, submitted by Patti Pattee of the Watermark Book Company, Anacortes, Wash.

---

Effective today, Continental Sales is now U.S. and Canadian distributor for h.f. ullmann, the Tandem Verlag imprint, and former Könemann titles. Distribution had been handled by Langenscheidt Publishing Group. All returns should now be sent to Innovative Logistics.

 

San Diego-area indies Warwick's, Mysterious Galaxy, the Book Works and the Yellow Book Road have joined forces to partner with the Union Tribune and provide book-related content in the wake of layoffs at the paper that resulted in the loss of its arts and books critic, Bookselling This Week reported.

"We were worried there wasn't going to be any books coverage," said Adrian Newell of Warwick’s, which "organized a community forum to discuss the future of books and culture coverage in the UT."

McBeth

"We invited a panel of arts, books, and culture leaders in San Diego to address this concern," said Susan E. McBeth, director of marketing and events at Warwick's. From that brainstorming session--which included UT editor Jeff Light--and subsequent meetings, several ideas emerged, including the proposal "that local booksellers participate in the revamped book section."

"We thought it would be great PR," said Newell. "And it would give us a chance to focus on titles that were off the radar, and to periodically let the public know which authors would be doing events."

Newell added that reduced book coverage was not something she ever wanted to see, but "you can't go back. There have been so many changes in this industry that none of us has liked. Our question is, 'How do we best move forward that benefits everybody?' We don't like that there won't be a dedicated book critic, but we thought it was important to provide content from San Diego booksellers and focus on the local connection. We wanted to show the community that there are these great independent bookstores that are very committed to the community."

 

Tomorrow on NPR's All Things Considered: Richard A. Billows, author of Marathon: The Battle That Changed Western Civilization (Overlook, $30, 9781590201688/159020168X).

---

Monday morning on Regis & Kelly: Bethenny Frankel, author of The Skinnygirl Dish: Easy Recipes for Your Naturally Thin Life (Fireside, $16, 9781416597995/1416597999) and Naturally Thin: Unleash Your SkinnyGirl and Free Yourself from a Lifetime of Dieting (Fireside, $16, 9781416597988/1416597980).

 

With the recent unveiling of next season's cast for ABC's Dancing With the Stars, Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog observed that "DWTS keeps neglecting one important genre of stars--authors! Author Ally Carter took to her blog to comment on this travesty. In 11 seasons with more than 100 stars, none of them have been authors. (This does not count the stars who have book deals, like reality mom Kate Gosselin.)... I'm not sure I'm comfortable living in a world where Bristol Palin is considered a 'star' and a best-selling author is not. And that has nothing to do with politics."

 

The Sandman rumor mill is churning again. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. TV "is in the midst of acquiring television rights from sister company DC Entertainment and in talks with several writer-producers" with Eric Kripke (CW's Supernatural) "at the top of the list" to adapt Neil Gaiman's bestselling graphic novel series for television, but the project is still in the "early stages of being developed."

THR noted that a film version of The Sandman "has been in development since the mid-90s, with an early version involving Roger Avery. The movie version cooled earlier in the decade, with the thinking moving to the best way to tackle an adaptation is the TV route. Up until a few months ago, DC was in talks with HBO and James Mangold to develop a show minus WBTV’s involvement, but that never coalesced."

The good news? "Gaiman was not officially involved with the HBO attempt, though he and Mangold held several rounds of talks surrounding characters and story." The bad news? "The author is not involved in the new developments, though since it is early in the process, that may change. In fact, securing Gaiman will prove key for the project to go forward."

 

Ronan Bennett (Public Enemies) is writing the screenplay for a film adaptation of Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King. According to the Deadline.com, Luc Roeg, CEO of Independent, which is developing and producing the project, said, "Skeletons on the Zahara is going to be a really fantastic project for the right American star to play Captain Riley."

---

Among the films being shown at this year's Venice Film Festival is director Tran Anh Hung's first literary adaptation, based on the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Variety reported that Tran "said Wood came naturally to him though 'working in the (Japanese) language was difficult since I don't speak it.... The book was so well-known in Japan that everyone wanted to make the movie.' " Fifteen years ago, Tran won the Golden Lion award at Venice for his film Cyclo.

 

The winners of this year's NAIBA Books of the Year, sponsored by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association:

Fiction: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Random House)
Nonfiction: Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco)
Picture Book: Jeremy Draws a Monster by Peter McCarty (Holt)
Children's Literature and YA: Flawed Dogs by Berkley Breathed  (Philomel)
Trade Paperback Original: Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna (Bloomsbury)

NAIBA has also created a new award, the NAIBA Carla Cohen Free Speech Award, whose first recipients are Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis for The Dreamer (Scholastic). The award includes a donation to ABFFE in the authors' name.
 
The winners will receive their awards at the NAIBA Fall Conference Awards Banquet, Tuesday, September 21.

 

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime by Leif GW Persson, trans. by Paul Norlen (Pantheon Books, $27.95, 9780307377456/0307377458, September 14, 2010)

 

Opening lines of a book we want to read, aside from being taken with the title:

 

Free falling, as in a dream

 

Stockholm in November

 

It was Charlie, age thirteen, who saved the life of Vindel, age fifty-five. At least that's how Vindel described it at the preliminary police hearing.

"If Charlie hadn't looked up and pulled me to the side, that damn thing would've hit me right in the skull and I wouldn't be sitting here now."

It was a peculiar story right from the start, for three main reasons.

First, Charlie was thought to be deaf in both ears. Not least by Vindel himself, who was convinced that the only things Charlie understood nowadays were eye contact, sign language, and physical touch....

Second, it is a long-established axiom in Western physics that a free-falling body precedes the sound which said body produces by friction against the surrounding atmosphere. Thus, according to said physics, there would have been no noticeable sound whatsoever.

Third, and this was the most remarkable. If Charlie had heard something, noticed the danger, pulled Vindel aside and thereby saved his life... why didn't he hear the sound of the victim's left shoe, which, only a few seconds later, struck him right in the neck and killed him on the spot?  --selected by Marilyn Dahl

 

Patrick Hennessey's debut, The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars, is being published as a trade paperback original by Riverhead Books (September 7, 2010). The war memoir spent eight weeks on the London Sunday Times bestseller list and was named Book of the Year by the Independent when it was published in the U.K. last year.  

Hennessey joined the British army shortly graduating Oxford in 2004, and completed officer training at Sandhurst (Britain's equivalent of West Point), where he was awarded the Queen's Medal. He served in the Balkans, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Falkland Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan. Hennessey, now living in London, is studying law and hopes to specialize in conflict and international humanitarian law.

 

On your nightstand now:

I'm afraid I'm a bit greedy and tend to have lots of books on the go at once. I'm currently reading William Langewiesche's Aloft, which I'm hugely enjoying for the brilliant, spare prose as much as the fascinating way it deals with flying, something so conventional and yet so wonderful. Also on the go I've got George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here, a brilliant memoir of a soldier in Burma in the Second World War, and Roberto Bolano's 2666, which I'm finally getting round to after much hype and recommendation. They're all being propped up (literally) by Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, which just arrived and which I can't wait to get stuck into.

 

Favorite book when you were a child:

I'm reliably informed I wouldn't go to sleep without a reading from the Reverend W. Awdrey's Thomas the Tank Engine books. I've kept them all, they're brilliant.

 

Your top five authors:

I'm hopeless at these sort of lists so I've taken the coward's option and refined this to my top five "war" authors; Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Heller (Catch 22) are both definitely there, as are Robert Graves for his First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That, and probably Michael Herr for Dispatches. Evelyn Waugh gets the last slot for his Sword of Honour trilogy and because he's probably one of my "top fives" generally as well but that leaves out so many brilliant writers of conflict--Homer, Tolstoy, Swofford, etc.--that I already feel bad.

 

Book you've faked reading:

I got away for most of university without having read any Jane Austen (always helps when there are lavish BBC adaptations to help you bluff it) and once wrote an essay on Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater based on the blurb on the back. As a former British officer who spent time in the Middle East, I'm ashamed to say I still haven't read T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom; maybe now I'm out of the army I'll have the time, although it may not be so useful.

 

Book you're an evangelist for:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. Like Ulysses, this is often unfairly dubbed a difficult book to read, but it's well worth the effort. One of the most humorous and human novels ever written. I've also been talking up Ayn Rand, who is barely read in the U.K. You don't have to agree with The Fountainhead, but I think it's a pretty energizing read.

 

Book you've bought for the cover:

In the U.K., Hamish Hamilton recently reissued a set of five Raymond Chandlers with the original hardback covers. I fell straight for the smoking revolver of The Big Sleep and am thankful that I did as it finally got me into Chandler, and I haven't looked back.

 

Book that changed your life:

It's more a whole bunch of books by the writers loosely termed "the Brideshead Generation." At school it was devouring the works of Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and their contemporaries that made me want to study English at Oxford and Balliol (my college) in particular. If I had to pick one book, it would be Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint, which seemed to me at 17 so perfect that the only option was to try and follow in Huxley's footsteps, which I did.

 

Favorite line from a book:

Sticking with the military theme, it's difficult to look beyond the devastatingly effective "So it goes" from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. On a lighter note, I think there's something wonderfully optimistic about the climactic "yes I said yes I will Yes" that triumphantly finishes James Joyce's Ulysses.

 

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

A toss-up between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies--both darker than you think but for some reason I find them both very comforting.

 

Author photo: Sebastian Meyer/Polaris Images

Dating may be hard, but it pales in comparison to the implications and complications of merging two book collections. Now that's really taking a relationship to a new level.

There's been a flurry of media attention recently surrounding the online book-dating site alikewise (Shelf Awareness, August 20, 2010), but it has a successful bricks-and-mortar predecessor in Between the Covers: A Matchmaking Service for Book Lovers, which was started more than a year ago by indie bookstore WORD, Brooklyn, N.Y. Positive response to the idea has since inspired WORD-sponsored singles mixers for readers and even a literary "prom."

Apparently, not everyone is a fan. "Bookshelves Give Daters Yet Another Way to Be Judgmental" was the headline of a recent Jezebel.com post that took a potshot at the notion of literary matchmaking in general and Between the Covers in particular.

For WORD manager Stephanie Anderson, however, the concept is simply a logical extension of the Greenpoint bookstore's community outreach efforts. The matchmaking board, like WORD's ambitious events schedule (which, effective today, will be headed by occasional Shelf Awareness contributor Jenn Northington as the new events manager), is simply another way to bring readers together in an increasingly unbookish world.

"If you've lived in New York for three days, you know that meeting people here is not easy," said Anderson, adding that the original idea for Between the Covers came to her and WORD's owner Christine Onorati one day when they realized that they "knew all of our customers, but we forget that they don't know each other."

Anderson said that on the board, "people seem to represent extremes of themselves, but it seems to me that the 'likes' are just as--if not more--important than the 'dislikes.' And since conversations are the best way to get to know people, I think the point of our board is to help people find those conversations. We've already hosted two singles mixers this year in an attempt to foster them."

Two enthusiastic supporters of the board's matchmaking potential, as well as the way it reflects what indie bookstores can mean to communities, are Russ Marshalek and Marley Magaziner, who met "on the board" and now live together.

Marshalek praised the bookstore's "massive community work," and called Between the Covers "a brilliant idea, and a move that is only enhanced by sites like alikewise, which fail (in my opinion) to instigate the real-world interaction that WORD does with its quarterly events. Judging someone based on what they read is brilliant--you're going to judge anyway--why not judge someone on a book they've put 14 hours of their life into? I love the fact that Marley and I both read Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms back-to-back within a few weeks of one another. I found them incredible. She found them cold and empty. We discussed it over dinner. That's what a good relationship is, no? But, again, I think the only real story here is the work WORD Brooklyn is doing, continuing to remind us why independent bookstores are vital community centers."

Magaziner likes "the idea that my--now our--local bookstore was a catalyst in our relationship. By the time of WORD's first in-real-life mixer, we were officially boyfriend and girlfriend, which meant I was breaking it off with the kids I met on the Internet to be with the guy who found me through the WORD board. Real life trumps the Internet! When Russ and I moved in together and merged our libraries, we found that we had exactly three of the same books. For two people who consider themselves big readers, and who were drawn to each other based on literary taste, having just three crossovers is pretty striking. The point is, together we have a serious library. We're readers.
 
"While everyone seems to be whining about the death of the local independent bookstore, WORD has managed to appeal to that facet of our personalities to engage us in a greater community. WORD has managed to latch onto the hyper-local marketing trend--match up people who like books and who visit at the same local bookstore frequently enough to keep an eye on a singles board. To me, it's less important what a person likes, but that a person likes reading. What a person does in his or her free time is a huge window into personality and the specifics of that are important."
 
For Anderson, the matchmaking board and singles mixers are a natural part of the bookshop's overall effort to bring the community together to talk books, meet one other and maybe even buy a tome or three. It's just what an indie bookstore does. Oh, and then there's WORD's summer basketball league for book lovers, but for that you'll have to pass a test. Question #4: "Name a poet. Any poet."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)