"[Independent booksellers are] our ideal client. That's where the likeminded spirits who might be interested in our books are apt to shop, and that's the best place we have for any chance of discoverability. And luckily in the States there are still a couple of thousand indie bookstores, many that are thriving and growing; they're having a good moment. It's a diverse marketplace amongst those indies, too. It's our best chance to reach the unconverted. It's nice to preach to the converted, but we also want to take the message to others, and that's the best way for us to do that....

"I wish it was just a world of indie bookstores, but it isn't, although it does seem like we do spend most of our time working them. I travel a lot; I visit a lot of bookstores; I do a lot of regional indie retail conventions and just try to remind those people that we are in it together. Our true partnership is with indie booksellers."

Ruppel

Phaidon Press announced that Philip Ruppel has joined the company as its chief operating officer. Most recently, Ruppel was president of McGraw-Hill Education's Professional Division. He has also held senior positions at McGraw-Hill Education as president, international division and v-p & group publisher of the professional division. Prior to that, he was associate publisher for the New York Institute of Finance/Prentice Hall. Ruppel will be based in Phaidon's New York office.

"I am delighted that Philip has joined our team," said Phaidon CEO Keith Fox. "His proven track record of delivering growth through profitable innovation and enhanced digital offerings fits brilliantly with Phaidon's commitment to enhancing our brand as the world's premier fine arts publisher."

Dalkey Archive Press will move its publishing operations this summer from Champaign, Ill., to the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Tex. On April 27, the publisher's board of directors voted unanimously to approve the decision.

Jeffrey Di Leo, dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences, said Dalkey Archive "will play a key role in academic programs, international initiatives and campus life at UHV. It will afford our students terrific internship and fellowship opportunities, and the press will be used in the growth and development of existing and new academic programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels."

John O'Brien, founder and publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, called the UHV School of Arts & Sciences "a leader in creating publishing programs for students and will expand that to include this unique translation program. We expect that UHV will be a major force in international publishing and translation, accomplishing things that are possible only with a school that has a vision for the future and the flexibility to act quickly."

Amazon plans to open a one million-square-foot distribution center in an existing building on Industrial Avenue in Carteret, N.J., the Record reported. It will be the second large fulfillment center in the state, joining one in Robbinsville that became operational last summer. Warehouse facilities in Woodbridge are also being used to deliver Amazon Fresh grocery orders in New York City and parts of New Jersey.
 
"We have not announced a timeline for opening, but we expect construction to move quickly, and we're excited to bring jobs and investment to Carteret," an Amazon spokesman told the Record.

Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno said Amazon "is doubling down its investment in New Jersey, showing other companies the value of growing their business in the Garden State.... it's a win for Amazon and the state."

Kobo is partnering with Global Eagle Entertainment, a media and connectivity provider to the travel industry, and Bauer Communications to provide Southwest Airlines customers with complimentary access to hundreds of digital publications from Kobo's digital reading platform via the airline's inflight entertainment portal. The reading platform, which launched on May 6, includes full books and extended previews of top titles and new releases across all genres from numerous publishers.

Historian Peter Gay, a refugee from Nazi Germany "whose sense of intellectual adventure led him to write groundbreaking books on the Enlightenment, the Victorian middle classes, Sigmund Freud, Weimar culture and the cultural situation of Jews in Germany," died yesterday, the New York Times reported. He was 91.

Gay's books include The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, the first volume of which won the National Book Award in 1967; My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin; Voltaire's Politics; Sigmund Freud: A Life for Our Time; and Why the Romantics Matter.

"He is one of the major American historians of European thought, period," said Sander L. Gilman, a cultural and literary historian at Emory University.

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William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher whose 1976 book On Writing Well has sold more than 1.5 million copies, died yesterday, the New York Times reported, adding that even though he wrote 19 books, "it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply." Zinsser was 92. On Writing Well "became a book that editors and teachers encouraged writers to reread annually in the manner of another classic on the craft of writing, The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White," the Times noted.

Representatives from nearly 200 small businesses from across the country are in Washington, D.C., for the 2015 Small Business Leadership Summit, held at the National Press Club. They are meeting with Small Business Administration administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar, and others about access to capital and other small business issues. Among the attendees are (l.-r.) Bradley Graham of Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C.; Betsy Burton of the King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah; Christin Evans of Booksmith, San Francisco, & Kepler's, Menlo Park, Calif.; Kris Kleindienst of Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Mo.

On Saturday, May 16, Little Free Library will celebrate its third birthday as a nonprofit with a Worldwide Little Free Library Book Drive. To participate, fans of LFL can:
 

• Bring new or gently used children's and young adult books to your friendly neighborhood Little Free Libraries.
• Snap a photo of yourself dropping off books and post it in social media using the hashtag #givebooks.
• LFL will comb Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and select random participants to receive Little Free Library swag.

There are currently more than 25,000 Little Free Libraries in every U.S. state, Canadian province and in 75 other countries. LFL is in the midst of a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign "to double and deepen our impact and build 50,000 Little Free Libraries by 2017." The campaign's goals also include:

• Install hundreds more Little Free Libraries that 'kick start" brighter futures for thousands of children through the power of literacy.
• Water book deserts--rural or urban areas where books are difficult to access or afford.
• Help teachers provide books to their students that they can take home to enjoy and build their reading skills during summer and year-round.
• Provide police departments with Libraries of Understanding that will help them engage with youths and encourage them to read.
• Positively impact at least 100 communities through the power of reading.

In the Penguin Random House Children's sales group:
 
Jacqueline Engel has been named v-p, group sales director, and director, field sales and business development, Penguin Young Readers.
 
Mark Santella has been promoted to v-p, group sales director, and director, mass merchandise sales, Random House Children's Books.

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At Simon & Schuster Children's Division:

Carolyn Swerdloff is being promoted to associate marketing director from assistant marketing director and will oversee the Aladdin Books, Simon Pulse, Simon Spotlight and Little Simon Imprints. She joined the company in 2010.

Teresa Ronquillo is being promoted to assistant marketing manager from marketing coordinator and will work on the Aladdin Books, Simon Pulse, Simon Spotlight and Little Simon Imprints. She joined the company in 2012.

Ksenia Winnicki has joined Simon & Schuster Children's as publicist. She was previously publicist Macmillan Children's and has also worked in digital marketing.

No trip to New York City would be complete without a trip to Brooklyn, home to a thriving literary scene. Today DK Eyewitness Travel Guides is taking you on a tour from Greenpoint to Park Slope, stopping to talk with three local bookshops along the way.

Bookshop: WORD bookstore; Molly Templeton, events director
Neighborhood: 126 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

What's the number one thing people should do when in New York City for BEA?
Explore! Don't get trapped in the space between wherever you're staying and the Javits Center. I used to have a job for which I traveled, and my main regret is that I didn't find or make time to get out and see more of the city. Visit other bookstores, sit in the park and read, go to a musical, ride the Staten Island Ferry. Whatever it is you like best to do--be it museum-going, concerts, trying new restaurants, finding the best latte--give yourself a few hours to do it.

What's the best thing to do in your shop's neighborhood?
Visit Transmitter Park. It's a small park, but has a long, long pier that juts out into the East River. It's so far into the river that it almost feels like you're not in the city anymore but in some strange boundary-land. Get a coffee at one of our many excellent coffee shops and mosey out there with a book. Just don't forget your sunglasses.

What's the best thing to do in New York City?
Walk. Everywhere. The best way to see this city is to be in it, and the best way to do that is by walking, whether you're wandering down Hudson River Park in Manhattan or crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, or walking from Dumbo to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, or all the way down Fifth Avenue from Central Park to Washington Square. There's just so much to see.

Do you have a "local's-only" tip to share with visitors?
People often think that the only way to get to WORD is to take several trains, ending on the G. But you can walk here from the L! Just take it to Bedford, walk over to the river, and take Kent all the way up until it turns into Franklin. It's about a 20-minute walk, and the view is nothing to shake a stick at.

For more stops on your Brooklyn tour, walk south to window-shop and people-watch on your way to Williamsburg.

Bookshop: Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers; Miles Bellamy and Jonas Kyle, owners
Neighborhood: 218 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

What's the number one thing people should do when in New York City for BEA?
Go see "Sculpture in the Age of Donatello" at the Museum of Biblical Art (Manhattan).

What's the best thing to do in your shop's neighborhood?
Drink at the Ides Bar in the Wythe Hotel (Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

What's the best thing to do in New York City?
Visit Governors Island.

Do you have a "local's-only" tip to share with visitors?
La Goulette serves excellent Tunisian food in a casual atmosphere, and it's cheap (159 Grand Street, Williamsburg)!

Keep walking, or take the G train down to the historic residential district of Park Slope.

Bookshop: Community Bookstore; Ezra Goldstein, co-owner
Neighborhood: 143 7th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn

What's the number one thing people should do when in New York City for BEA?
Go to Russ & Daughters on Houston Street (in Manhattan). It's one small, fine bit of surviving, non-corporate New York City; the foodie equivalent of independent bookstores.

What's the best thing to do in your shop's neighborhood?
Wander through Prospect Park. See why Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux thought it far superior to that other park they designed over in Manhattan.

What's the best thing to do in New York City?
Walk. It's a great walker's city. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge: despite the crowds, there's nothing like it.

Do you have a "local's-only" tip to share with visitors?
Even in Manhattan's most expensive neighborhoods, any bar with "Irish" in its name will offer fare that at least approaches affordable.

Getting there: You can take the advice of booksellers and walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, but you'll want to budget time (about two hours) and wear comfy shoes. To conserve your energy for the borough itself, pick up the L train at 8th Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan, exit at Bedford Avenue.

The Familiar: Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon Books), from the author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions.

Today on Fresh Air: Tom Brokaw, author of A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope (Random House, $27, 9781400069699).

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Tomorrow morning on the Today Show: Karen Kingsbury, author of Chasing Sunsets: A Novel (Howard, $22.99, 9781451687507).

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Tomorrow on Diane Rehm: James McPherson, author of The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (Oxford University Press, $27.95, 9780199375776).

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Tomorrow night on the Tonight Show: Bill O'Reilly, co-author of Legends and Lies: The Real West (Holt, $32, 9781627795074).

Charlize Theron will star in the "elevated spy thriller" The Coldest City, adapted by Kurt Johnstad from the graphic novel by Antony Johnston, Deadline.com reported. David Leitch & Chad Stahelski (John Wick) are directing the project, which will shoot in October in Germany.

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Ronald De Feo's 2013 novel Solo Pass has been optioned by the Gotham Group and Steve Buscemi's Olive Productions for Buscemi to direct, Deadline.com reported. The film will be produced by Gotham's Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Lee Stollman, along with Olive's principals Buscemi and Wren Arthur.

Eleven authors have been longlisted for the Crime Writers Association's Dagger in the Library award, which honors an author’s whole body of work to date, rather than a single title. The longlist was compiled by readers, who voted online for their favorites. The shortlist, chosen by a panel of judges, will be revealed June 8, with the winner announced at the CWA Annual Awards dinner June 30. The CWA Dagger in the Library longlisted authors (in alphabetical order) are:

Mark Billingham
Ann Cleeves
Christopher Fowler
Elly Griffiths
Elizabeth Haynes
Susan Hill
Peter James
Simon Kernick
Peter May
Phil Rickman
Tim Weaver

photo: George Mcluskie

Andrea Gillies lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her debut book was the memoir Keeper: One House, Three Generations and a Journey into Alzheimer's (Broadway, 2010), which won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and the Orwell Book Prize. The inspiration for her first novel, The White Lie (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner), about three generations of a family, came to her while she was on a bus in the middle of the Highlands, traveling along a long stone estate wall, and she glimpsed a dilapidated old manor house through an overgrown garden. The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (Other Press, May 5, 2015) is her second novel, written in the aftermath of her own separation and divorce.

On your nightstand now:

My nightstand is always overflowing. It gets to the point that I can't bear to remove books I know I'll never finish, or even start: the situation becomes almost superstitious. I've had to buy really big nightstands, and I've developed a sort of hierarchy in which the urgency of the need to read something is indicated by the title's position in the various piles. Currently in the pile at the front: Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist, Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread, Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a battered 19th-century copy of Keats's poetry, Martin Gayford's A Bigger Message (about David Hockney) and a book about Barbara Hepworth, the subject of my novel after next.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I was a reading child, the kind with a book glued to her face at all possible times. I'd try to read at mealtimes, surreptitiously on my lap, and would be chastised. I'd read on the way to school, a 10-minute walk to the other side of the Yorkshire village where I grew up, and would walk into things. My first love was Enid Blyton's the Secret Seven series, after which I moved on to pony books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. I read Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, probably a dozen times. By 11, I was starting on Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. It was a very English introduction to reading. My dad bought me hardbacks of books he'd loved.

Your top five authors:

This is as impossible a list as the Top Five Films/Tracks/Pictures, but off the top of my head, the five people who come to mind, whose books I might grab in a fire, are George Eliot (Middlemarch), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Charles Dickens (especially for Great Expectations), Jane Austen (especially for Persuasion) and Edith Wharton, for everything. I'd have to place Henry James at #6, and then a whole load of modern American writers from #7 onwards. Can we do a top 25? I didn't get chance to mention Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster. If I'm given a top five, I don't seem to be able to get out of the 19th century, and the writers I read and re-read when I was 16, 17. These people have a way of staying with you.

Book you've faked reading:

I don't think I've ever read a book by one of the great and revered Russians. I have editions on my shelves somewhere, waiting for me, and I've got to page 5 on several occasions, but I think I'm probably never going to read Anna Karenina. I've seen the movie, though, so I can fake it if I have to.

Book you're an evangelist for:

In terms of the one I'd urge anyone to read, suspecting they might not have done, Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte). No-one had done anything like this before: it was revolutionary in the development of the inner life of the novel. Bronte rejected the idea of the beautiful heroine, saying "I will show you a heroine as plain and small as myself." She was brave in using the voice of Jane to express how stifled women were by convention: "Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags."

The story has very pleasing wish-fulfillment aspects: Rochester sees Jane's inner beauty and falls for her, despite her plainness and lowly social status. "He was the first to recognise me, and to love what he saw."

For me, it's probably the most flawless novel, in terms of its shape, development, language, its thoroughly imagined world, that was ever written. That's my pitch.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Alasdair Gray's Lanark, because he'd drawn all over it.

Book that changed your life:

Books have been milestones in my life since I was four years old, and I could tell you about a dozen turning points that books have signalled and embodied, but the one that made me have a go at writing fiction was Carol Shields's Republic of Love, which is a straightforward romantic novel made spectacular by beautiful phrases, by cadence and style. I wrote some of her wonderful metaphors down in a notebook. It made me realise that I could write in my own voice, and take an ordinary story and make it something memorable.

Favorite line from a book:

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little lives are ended with a sleep." It's from Shakespeare's The Tempest. No-one's ever written a better line.

Which character you most relate to:

In general I don't relate to characters in books, or seek to relate to them, or expect to. I'm not disappointed if I can't relate. I have this conversation with other people a lot. It seems to me a very modern expectation, to "relate" to people in books. Amazon is full of reader-critics complaining that they couldn't relate to anyone in the novel they're criticizing. I find that a strange way of reading. I don't relate to anyone in King Lear or David Copperfield and it doesn't stop them being consummate works of art.

But if forced to pick someone in a book to relate to, it would have to be Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. She speaks out, and has integrity, but is also deeply lovable. She was tremendously influential when I was an insecure teen.

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

It would have to be The Secret Seven (Enid Blyton) which was written in 1949 and which I was given for my ninth birthday in 1970. I got the whole set, and read them one after another, and then again, and again and again. I was absolutely transported. I longed to be in a secret society and do detective work and fight crime. I started keeping a notebook, noting down the characters in the neighbourhood and what they might be up to, and what their secret identities might be. I probably started being a novelist then. That's part of it, but the main reason I'd want to reread The Secret Seven again for the first time is so that I could be nine again, with my whole life ahead.

For the first time since 1993, all 60 panels of The Migration of the Negro series by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) are reunited at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Lawrence created the series in 1941 at the age of 23; the odd-numbered panels are in the Phillips Collection's permanent holdings, and the even-numbered panels are part of the MoMA's permanent collection.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Harlem Is Nowhere), in her first book for young people, commemorates the occasion by describing the awakening of the young artist at 13, when he moves to Harlem from Philadelphia, with illustrations by Caldecott Honor artist Christopher Myers (Harlem, written by his father, Walter Dean Myers, to whom this book is dedicated). "In the morning Jake watches the sun wake up," Rhodes-Pitts writes. "He makes a big stretch, and the sun stretches, too." In Myers's accompanying painting, Jake's arms dance above his head; the colors of the sunrise appear in the striped quilt on his bed.

The author's lyrical words reflect an artist's view of the world. Jake's feet sink deep into a thick blue rug: "When his toes touch the ground, it's like a sky upside down." Myers skillfully pays homage to Lawrence while retaining his own style. A preacher in a bright blue suit stands in front of row houses bathed in sunlight, recalling Lawrence's Brownstones (1958). Jake reaches toward Utopia Children's House, where he first met artist and teacher Charles Henry Alston. In one of Jake's paintings, "all the faces" he sees on the street "become one face," and after his teacher shows him an African mask, Jake fashions his own from brown paper bags, glue and paint.

Author and artist draw a direct correlation between the people and the places that shaped Jake and how they find their way onto his canvas. As Jake re-creates his street (in the image featured on the cover), Myers invents a glorious mash-up of Lawrence's foreground figure from Carpenters (1977) and images from the Migration Series: the center girl from Panel 58, and a barred grate that evokes a ticket counter [Panel 12] or jail cell [from Panel 22]. In the closing image, Myers depicts Jake deep in thought, as if imagining what's to come, in a kind of elaborate collage composed of reproductions from the Migration Series and 1938's Dust to Dust (The Funeral).

Rhodes-Pitts and Myers imagine a young artist called to his vocation, who honors his city and history as subjects worth capturing for posterity. A fine introduction to a boy who would grow up to immortalize his era.

Shelf Talker: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Christopher Myers capture the childhood of artist Jacob Lawrence, who would grow up to immortalize his era.