Dorothea von Moltke and Clifford Simms, co-owners of Labyrinth Books, confirmed that they will close the New Haven, Conn., store May 31, Yale Daily News reported. In a press release, they cited the challenge of managing the New Haven location while living in Princeton, N.J., site of another Labyrinth bookstore.
"Despite the many changes in the book industry in the last decade, our basic belief in the model of academic and community bookselling, which we have been developing since the early 1990s, remains unchanged," the co-owners observed.
Yale Daily News noted that Moltke and Simms "are finalizing plans for a different independent book retailer to move into the New Haven space that will be left by the current store."
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"Seven survival secrets for independent bookstores." At last weekend's L.A. Times Festival of Books, "some of the best booksellers on the West Coast shared strategies that helped them survive during these challenging times for local bookstores," GalleyCat reported. Panelists included Allison Hill of Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena, Calif.; Emily Powell and Michael Powell of Powell’s Books, Portland, Ore., and Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Books, San Francisco, Calif.
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It cost a bit less to protect Jeff Bezos last year. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Amazon's proxy statement revealed that last year the company paid its CEO "a paltry salary of $81,840, but his security detail came to $1.6 million for the year," a $100,000 drop from 2009.
"We believe that the amount of the reported security expenses is especially reasonable in light of Mr. Bezos' low salary and the fact that he has never received any stock-based compensation," the filing explained, though, as the Chronicle noted, he "owns 20% of Amazon, so he doesn't need small sums of stock, and he doesn't really need a big salary."
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A Chicago Sun-Times editorial argued in favor of making online sales taxes uniform nationwide, concluding: "No one likes taxes, and tax laws are time-consuming and burdensome for any business. But at a time when so many others are being asked to make major sacrifices to offset state revenue losses, this loophole must be closed."
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In response to Harper Lee's assertion that she did not cooperate with Marja Mills, author of a recently acquired memoir The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee (Shelf Awareness, April 28, 2011), Penguin released a letter from Mills to the author's sister, Alice Lee (dated March 20, 2011), the Associated Press reported. The letter said, in part: "This is to confirm, should anyone want such a confirmation, that you and Nelle (Harper Lee) cooperated with me and, I would add, were invaluable guides in the effort to learn about your remarkable lives, past and present, in the context of your friendships and family, your work, your recollections and personal reflections, your ancestors and the history of this area.... By signing below, you confirm this participation and cooperation, and that I moved into the house next door to yours only after I had the blessing of both of you." It is signed by Alice Lee.
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Cool idea of the Bloomsday. The Doylestown Bookshop, Doylestown, Penn., is sponsoring the Odyssey-Ulysses Challenge. Brave participants are asked to read Homer's The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses before Bloomsday, June 16.
Joining the bookshop in this challenge is Chris Collier of the County Theater, "who, while in a hyper-caffeinated state in response to my own hyper-caffeinated suggestion of 2011 being the summer of David Foster Wallace, suggested the undertaking of this epic journey worthy of both Odysseus and Leopold Bloom. Also, be sure to keep an eye out as we schedule more Bloomsday events. For example, did you know that there are multiple film versions of Ulysses? We just may have to screen one of them. And at some point, there will be Guinness or some other delectable Irish beer."
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With the death of Osama bin Laden dominating headlines this morning, the New York Times featured an annotated list of books about bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
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In the New York Times, author Tony Perrottet explored how writers build their brand, beginning weeks before pub date when "we are compelled to bombard every friend, relative and vague acquaintance with creative e-mails and Facebook alerts, polish up our websites with suspiciously youthful author photos, and, in an orgy of blogs, tweets and YouTube trailers, attempt to inform an already inundated world of our every reading, signing, review, interview and (well, one can dream!) TV appearance."
Perrottet looked to history for perspective, noting it is "always comforting to be reminded that literary whoring--I mean, self-marketing--has been practiced by the greats."
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The Huffington Post's reporters and editors shared the books "they're reading and loving now, hoping that it might give you a great reading list to choose from if you're at a loss for what to read next."
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I follow dead people. The Atlantic showcased "the best dead author Twitter accounts," noting that "generations of legendary writers missed out on the chance to broadcast their witty thoughts to the world in 140 characters. What would Flannery O'Connor have sounded like if she'd had a Twitter feed? Or Charles Dickens? Or Shakespeare?"
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Reading the world. According to a new study by the Danish Booksellers Association, between 25% and 30% of Danish readers read English books," the Copenhagen Post reported.
"In countries like Italy and Germany, you can study to be a doctor without ever having to open a book in a foreign language," said the association's director Olaf Winsløw. "But in Denmark you cannot get an education without bumping into books in English."
Urik Mølgaard, a book buyer for the chain Arnold Busck Booksellers, observed: "In general, we are seeing rising demand for English literature. And it is particularly fiction that more people want to read in English."
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Obituary note: Joan Peyser, "a prolific and lively writer about classical music whose biographies of Pierre Boulez, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin generated debate in music circles," has died, the New York Times reported. She was 80.