Monday's issue will be send from the U.K., where John and Jenn will be taking in the London Book Fair. If you're there, too, look for us strolling down the aisles and madly taking notes. If not, look for a few reports here. Cheerio!

 

"He has seen the same errors made over and over and that humanity never seems to learn from their mistakes, and that's a pretty powerful message."--Jim Rosinus, general manager at Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah, quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune, discussing the late Kurt Vonnegut. The store has made a special display of the author's books.

Talk about bad timing. Next week Deirdre Imus, wife of shock-jock-without-a-show Don Imus, was to begin promoting her new book, Green This! Volume 1: Greening Your Cleaning, published last Tuesday, but the tour has been postponed, according to yesterday's USA Today.

S&S's Kristan Fletcher told the paper the tour "was postponed because of the enormous pressure she and her family are under, and their first priority right now is family." 

Incidentally, lost in the Imus drama is that despite his nasty side, he has been a reliable bookseller. We'll miss that part of his morning shtick. 

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Marking 100 days until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows appears, Barnes & Noble noted that more than 500,000 people have ordered the book, and the company expects fully one million orders by pub date. The book has been No. 1 on B&N.com since it could be ordered on February 1.

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Bookselling This Week profiles the BookMark Shoppe, Brooklyn, N.Y., which opened in 2002 and moved last year from Dyker Heights to an 1,800-sq.-ft. space in Bay Ridge. Owners Christine Freglette and Bina Valenzano have a strong events program and are planning a Harry Potter block party, with closed street, from 8 p.m. until midnight.

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The dream of opening your own cozy bookstore has morphed into a cautionary tale in recent years, according to an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Although the causes are familiar--"Online book sellers offer quick, cheap service. Big-box outlets and national chains cut best-seller prices to the bone. People eyeball the books in stores before buying them at Costco or Amazon."--the tongue-in-cheek recommendations break new ground: "Is it possible to offer subsidies to book-sellers such as cotton farmers collect? What about Homeland Security money to protect the nation against an attack of bookstore sameness as evil as any terrorist plot?"

The editorial concludes more realistically by challenging concerned readers to consider that one answer to the crisis "might be a long look in the mirror and a few moments spent thinking about what's at stake. Then head to your local bookstore to savor its distinctiveness."

Perseus Book Group has unveiled its plans for PGW, outlined yesterday in letters to Perseus employees and PGW publishers from, respectively, CEO David Steinberger and COO Joe Mangan. (Perseus signed up 124 PGW publishers after PGW's parent company, AMS, filed for bankruptcy.) Among the main changes:

• A majority of PGW's sales staff is being offered jobs and will become part of a larger, reorganized sales force that will represent Perseus, Perseus Distribution clients and PGW clients.
• A majority of people in PGW's business development, sales, marketing, marketing information, catalogue management and publisher services departments have been offered employment.
• Altogether Perseus is offering employment to 68 PGW staffers.
• Warehouse, customer service, order management, accounting and IT operations will be moved to Perseus Distribution facilities in Jackson, Tenn., and few if any PGW employees in those areas will be offered jobs. Perseus is hiring more than 100 people in Jackson for these and other positions.
• Perseus has yet to decide its international sales strategy and organization but intends to announce a plan "shortly."
• Beginning August 1, all of Perseus's PGW publishers will be distributed from Jackson, from a third warehouse.
• PGW president Rich Freese will leave the company after July 31.
• PGW's Berkeley, Calif., office will remain open.
• The PGW name is being used throughout the transition period, which ends July 31, and Perseus hopes to obtain rights to the PGW name from AMS after that date.
• Perseus's Consortium subsidiary is "unaffected by these changes."
• Some of the people who are being offered employment are: Kim Wylie, Elise Cannon, Eric Green, Sue Ostfield, Susan McConnell, Kevin Votel, Eric Kettunen, Sarah Rosenberg, Heather Cameron, Karla Simmons, Sean Shoemaker, Matthew Chilcott and Roxanne Schwartz.

Among sales force changes:

• Perseus's and PGW's field sales forces will be combined to create one organization of 16 people that will be headed by Elise Cannon, field sales director for PGW.
• Dave Tripp, head of field sales at Perseus, will move to national accounts.
• Kim Wylie continues to be responsible for all PGW client publisher sales and reports to Matty Goldberg.
• Rick Monteith will head a single ID/mass merchandisers group.
• Sarah Wolf of Perseus and Eric Green of PGW will direct a bi-coastal special sales team.
• Liz Tzetzo remains national accounts director for Perseus and Perseus Distribution clients, reporting to Matty Goldberg.

In his letter, Steinberger thanked Rich Freese for his "outstanding contributions." For his part, Mangan called Freese "nothing short of heroic," adding, "We cannot thank Rich enough for all of his efforts, and will continue to rely on his good judgment and sound business sense to help guide us throughout the transition period."

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In related news, AMS is selling some of its foreign properties, which were not part of its December bankruptcy filing and not part of the sale to Baker & Taylor. AMS expects to close on the deals by May 1.

In the U.K., Publishers Group UK and H.I. Marketing are being bought by Cathy Parson and Medwyn Hughes, who are the commercial director and divisional director of Publishers Group UK. They are also the founders of H.I. Marketing, which they sold to AMS in 2002.

In Australia, Bookwise International and Bookwise Asia are being sold to Brumby Books, which has headquarters in Melbourne.

General retail sales in March were so strong that Wal-Mart's 4% gain at stores open at least a year looked sad. Still, most observers seemed happy to slough off the good news and predicted difficult months ahead.

Aided by warm weather, an early Easter and "pent-up demand for spring fashions," as the Wall Street Journal put it, luxury stores generally had the best results in March. Comp-store sales at Nordstrom rose 15%, 10.2% at Neiman Marcus and 10.1% at Saks. Sales at discounters and mass merchandisers were mixed. Strong sellers were Kohl's whose comp-store sales rose 16.8% and Target, up 12%. Costco rose 6% and J.C. Penney was up 10.6%. Dollar General comp-store sales were up 5.5%.

Retail Metrics said comp-store sales at 51 major chains rose 6%, way ahead of the 4.2% gain expected by analysts, the Journal reported. The International Council of Shopping Centers-UBS comp-store sales index rose 5.9%, also higher than expected, according to the New York Times.

But observers told the papers that rising gasoline prices, rising debt, a declining housing market, possible higher interest rates and shopping "fatigue" will likely make for soft sales in April and the next few months.

Retail Metrics president Ken Perkins said: "My sense is that the overall growth rate is slowing, and we're going to see some pretty negative numbers in April."

In testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, George Christian, the executive director of the Library Connection and one of the four "John Doe" librarians in Connecticut who successfully challenged an FBI national security letter last year, called on Congress to reconsider the USA Patriot Act and restore reader privacy safeguards and other civil liberties damaged by the Act.

"Our saga should raise a big patriotic American flag of caution about how our civil liberties are being sorely tested by law enforcement abuses of national security letters," Christian said. "We want you to take special note of the uses and abuses of NSLs in libraries and bookstores, and other places where higher First Amendment standards should be considered."

The complete text of his testimony is available online.

Chaired by Senator Russ Feingold (D.-Wis.), the hearings were held following the report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department that the FBI had improperly used national security letters.

In a statement, AAP president Pat Schroeder said: "Thanks to the personal and professional courage of four Connecticut librarians, Congress and the American people now understand what it's like to live under an NSL gag order--to literally have your right to free speech taken away. Finally, George Christian has been able to tell Congress their story. Now it's time for the 110th Congress to do what the 109th failed to do: restore reader privacy protections and civil liberties safeguards to the Patriot Act."

For his part, Oren Teicher, COO of the ABA, commented: "Booksellers everywhere join in celebrating the ungagging of George Christian and his brave colleagues at Library Connection who protected the privacy of their patrons reading records by challenging the NSL."

 

This morning on the Today Show: an enticing appearance by chef Govind Armstrong, author of Small Bites, Big Nights: Seductive Little Plates for Intimate Occasions and Lavish Parties (Clarkson Potter, $30, 9780307337931/0307337936).

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Today on the Martha Stewart Show: Gene Wilder, author of My French Whore (St. Martin's, $18.95, 9780312360573/0312360576).

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Today Oprah talks with Sid Kirchheimer, author of Scam Proof Your Life: 377 Smart Ways to Protect You and Your Family From Ripoffs, Bogus Deals and Other Consumer Headaches (Sterling, $12.95, 9781402745058/1402745052).

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Tomorrow Weekend Today shapes up with Jillian Michaels, author of Making the Cut: The 30-Day Diet and Fitness Plan for the Strongest, Sexiest You (Crown, $24.95, 9780307382504/0307382508).

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On Sunday the CBS Evening News leads off with Jonathan Eig, author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season (S&S, $26, 9780743294607/0743294602). Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball 60 years ago this week.

The nominees for the second Man Booker International Prize, given every two years to recognize a writer for "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage," are:

Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Peter Carey, Don DeLillo, Carlos Fuentes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Harry Mulisch, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Amos Oz, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Michel Tournier.

The winner of the $118,000 award will be announced in June.

As I made my broomstick flight in search of Harry Potter #7 promotional activity last week, I gradually became aware that something was missing from many of the bookstore websites I visited.

National Poetry Month.

That realization has bothered me, so this week I traded in my HP7 broomstick for muse wings (not made of wax, I hope) and set off on a new bookstore websiteseeing quest.

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away," Auden writes in "Musee des Beaux Arts." He explores a painting in which the everyday world grinds along, oblivious to a tiny splash in the ocean that is the only evidence of "Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky." It is easy to be oblivious; easier than flying; easier than poetry. In financially-strapped bookstores, where shelf space and inventory turns are eternal subjects of heated debate, April reminds us just how difficult some merchandising choices can be.

For many readers--and all poets--poetry is a necessity. For most bookstores, a serious commitment to poetry is optional. A comprehensive poetry section in a general interest bookstore is a conscious and costly statement. The section is not likely to earn its keep and will have to be subsidized by increased sales in other categories. It's not an economic loss leader in the classic Harry Potter sense. Perhaps another term is needed. Cultural loss leader?

Poetry Month reminds us that poetry is still a retail labor of love. Over the years, I've met Poetry Month evangelists and detractors among booksellers, readers and writers. Even some poets I know have expressed mixed feelings about the concept, wondering why poetry has to be trotted out like an orphan up for adoption once a year. Why isn't it irresistible? The answer is that it is an orphan for most readers. 

At one end of the April celebration spectrum is the Academy of American Poets, which spearheaded the original concept more than a decade ago. Somewhere in the middle you'll find the ABA and its 2007 Book Sense Picks Top 10 Poetry list. At the other end of the spectrum are the cynics--represented here by a classic Onion article--and the vast number of people who simply don't care. 

Booksellers fall into place at various points along the spectrum, which prompts certain questions. Is promoting Poetry Month with events and displays a bookstore's option or responsibility? Does it take a devoted poetry reader on staff to drive creative, energetic participation? When, where and how often will art trump inventory turns, even if only for 30 days?

During this week's website exploration, I looked for bookstores that were showing signs of Poetry Month life. Most were not. Fortunately, I did find some that were and here's a selection: 

Schuler Books sponsored a Poetry Month haiku contest that drew nearly 300 entries. John Shupe composed the winning entry: Crisp paper pages, / Stiff-spined binding slowly yields, / New book, old pleasure.

McNally Robinson NYC is offering an impressive and ambitious April poetry events schedule. Books Inc. also has an intriguing Thursdays in Verse event, "The Most Powerful Thing in the World." Jack Hirschman moderates a discussion with poets W.S. Di Piero, Wanda Coleman and Daphne Gottlieb.

As would be expected, poetry readings are the most popular bookstore option for Poetry Month, though I found fewer of them on event schedules nationwide than I thought I might. Looking Glass Bookstore features a strong schedule, as does Tattered Cover, Amherst Books, Bear Pond Books and Big Blue Marble.

Customer interaction is encouraged at Galaxy Bookshop, where patrons who are willing to stop in and give a dramatic reading of a poem receive 20% off the purchase of any book. At Olsson's Books & Records, one night a week this month has been set aside for customer readings of their favorite poems. Bookends will hold a poetry writing workshop.

Some Booksense.com stores took advantage of the option to link to the Top 10 Poetry Picks, but Milestone Books found a creative way to blend Book Sense Picks with the Academy of American Poets offerings to create a Poetry Month page.

Perhaps many bookstores are participating in ways that their websites do not reflect, and it's unfair to invoke the myth of Icarus. You have to wonder, though.  

On the other hand, in his poem "Failing and Flying," Jack Gilbert reminds us, "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew." Maybe the wonder is that Poetry Month still flies.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)