This spring, Libby Reilly and her family are launching Buster's Bookhouse, which they call "Massachusetts's first mobile bookstore." They'll be based in the South Coast area of the state, focusing on Somerset, Fall River, Taunton and other nearby towns.

Buster's, a "tiny shop with big ideas," launched officially in March, and has been selling books online via Bookshop.org. In June, Reilly and her husband, Shane, purchased a 1975 Shasta Starflyte camper trailer that they are remaking as a bookmobile, the Herald News reported.

Libby Reilly told the paper that there is no bookstore near Somerset, so she saw a need. "I'm hoping to bring some of that old-fashioned nostalgia back to life in a new, unconventional way," she said. "There are a lot of challenges with brick and mortar and in this post-Covid world I think people are looking for something a little bit out of the box....

"The experience of talking to someone about a book choice or the latest reads, you're not going to get that on Amazon. I think people now more than ever have a desire to support local businesses and to have that personal shopping experience."

Shane Reilly has been doing most of the work on the trailer, gutting it and then rebuilding it, with the help of Libby and their two children. The trailer will have a reading nook section and shelving with a changing selection of titles as well as gifts and accessories, particularly items from local businesses. There will also be a small outdoor section.

Libby Reilly commented: "I love that I'm able to show that to my kids--starting something from the ground up and taking a dream and making it a reality and putting in the hard work to see something through."

Righton Books, the St. Simons Island, Ga., bookstore that opened in 2019, has expanded its Jittery Joe's coffee shop, which is connected to the store. The addition doubles the amount of square footage for Righton Books to 3,200, and triples the amount of seating in the coffee shop.

The store, owned by Darryl and Anne Peck, was recently mentioned in Southern Living magazine. In the article "A Lowcountry Christmas: Celebrate the Season on St. Simons Island and Sea Island," the magazine wrote:

"When it comes to gift giving, St. Simons Island's Redfern Village is shopping central. It's home to Righton Books, an independent bookstore that opened in 2019 and provides a great selection, including new releases, children's stories, and wonderfully curated offerings in the realms of art, architecture, design, and photography."

The U.S. Postal Service has revealed seven new stamp subjects for 2023, including stamps honoring the late civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, as well as beloved children's book author and illustrator Tomie dePaola.

The John Lewis stamp celebrates his life and legacy, the USPS noted, adding: "Devoted to equality and justice for all Americans, Lewis spent more than 30 years in Congress steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s. Even in the face of hatred and violence, as well as some 45 arrests, Lewis remained resolute in his commitment to what he liked to call 'good trouble.' "

Lewis was also the author of several books, including the powerful, award-winning series March, created in graphic novel form with Andrew Aydin, illustrated by Nate Powell; Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change; Wake Up America 1960-1963 (with Andrew Aydin); Civil Rights and the Promise of Equality; and Run: Book One (with Andrew Aydin).

The stamp features a photograph of Lewis taken by Marco Grob on assignment for Time magazine. The selvage showcases a photograph of Lewis taken by Steve Schapiro in 1963 outside a workshop about nonviolent protest in Clarksdale, Miss. Derry Noyes served as art director for this project. 

Aydin tweeted: "Every time a new stamp would come out with someone he knew or someone he admired, he would buy sheets of them and give them to some of us. His favorite was the Romare Bearden stamps. I still have them all. I know he would love this. Can't wait to buy some and give some away."

The Tomie dePaola stamp honors the prolific children's book author and illustrator, "whose extraordinarily varied body of work encompasses folktales and legends, informational books, religious and holiday stories, and touching autobiographical tales," the USPS wrote.

The stamp art features a detail from the cover of Strega Nona (1975), the Caldecott Honor winning first book in the series. Set in southern Italy, the gently humorous story focuses on Strega Nona, "Grandma Witch," who uses magic to help with matters of the heart and to cure her neighbors' ills. Art director Derry Noyes designed the stamp with Tomie dePaola's original art.

Waterstones recently opened a bookshop in High Holborn in London, its 13th new store of 2022, the Bookseller reported, noting that the company has also opened a Hatchards bookshop in Cheltenham and four new bookshops that are relocations as old shops closed.

"We have had 12 highly successful openings so far this year and are delighted to have managed to open a 13th new bookshop just in time for Christmas," said COO Kate Skipper. "Those with a long memory will remember the Waterstones on High Holborn, a fantastically busy bookshop. We are now pleased to return to this very fast paced location."

Jade Rose, manager of the new store, added: "Our new bookshop will be a wonderful addition to this bustling central London neighborhood. We have had to work really hard to get it open so quickly and could not be more pleased to have such a beautiful space in which to welcome our customers."

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Drag queen Amanda Villa and Book Keeper owner Susan Chamberlain.

Canadian bookseller Susan Chamberlain, owner of Book Keeper in Sarnia, Ont., told CBC News that when she had hosted the bookstore's first Drag Queen Story Time, "I felt like, 'This is why I do what I do. This is why the store is here for things like this,' because you could see the kids just soaking it up." 

But during the fourth such event on November 26, there were protesters. "About 10 to 12 men dressed completely in black, their faces were masked, some of them had balaclavas," she recalled. "They were carrying a flag. They marched across the parking lot toward us, so it was quite a spectacle to behold."

She added that although most of the protesters were peaceful, some tried to engage, so she asked if they wanted to come inside and see the event. No one took her up on her offer. "I learned quickly that there is no reasoning with them and that it's best just to be quiet and ignore them."

Chamberlain's next Drag Queen Story Time is scheduled for January, and despite some pushback, support has grown, according to Chamberlain. The group Sarnia Lambton Alliance Against Hate posted on social media that it supports the bookstore, "against the hate and harmful messages they have received for their attempts to encourage diversity and acceptance in our community." 

Chamberlain is planning to turn the next Drag Queen Story Time into a "Love wins" party: "We hope to fill the exterior of the store with supporters, which I think will not be difficult. I think we'll have lots of supporters and then when it's time for the story, time to start, we can all just pile into the store.... And if the protesters come, I don't think there's going to be any room for them, to be honest."

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Wanted in Rome took a "post-pandemic trip" around the Italian capital city to dispel the "doom and gloom predictions for the future of bookstores in general" by local newspapers. An exploration of Rome's indie English-language bookshops uncovered "a less gloomy picture.... The four stores in our investigation, all run by dedicated women, revealed that owners were not only determined to carry on, but that they were also reasonably optimistic as regards the future."

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Wedding bells & books: "We had a really happy occasion here recently," Kennys Books, Galway, Ireland, posted on Facebook."This lovely couple, Martina and Daniel, together with their close friends and family came into the shop for photographs on their wedding day. We were all so privileged to be a part of their big day, sonas mór agus gach dea-ghuí orthu!" --Robert Gray

Valley Bookseller, Stillwater, Minn., hosted a Minnesota welcome for Rachel Kapelke-Dale, whose novel The Ingenue was recently published by St. Martin's Press. While she was visiting family in the Midwest from her home in Paris, a group of authors and other book folk came to celebrate. Pictured: (l.-r., front row) Kim McCormick (Excelsior Bay Books), Mindy Mejia, Nigar Alam, Pamela Klinger-Horn (Valley Bookseller), Tucker the Labrador, Nina Hamza, (second row) Ann Bauer (holding The Squirrel), Gretchen Anthony, Toni Halleen, Ellie Temple (Excelsior Bay Books), Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Priscilla Paton, Nicole Kronzer, Lorna Landvik, (third row) Carolyn Porter, Liz Hovland (Valley Bookseller), Heather Bouwman, David Enyeart (Next Chapter Books), Loretta Ellsworth, Laurie Sigal, Shannon Donnelly (Diversion Books), (fourth row) Sarah Stonich, Sheila O'Connor, Ann Woodbeck (Excelsior Bay Books).
(photo: Michael Horn)

"Today’s a great day for some Argentinian literature," Malaprop's Bookstore//Café, Asheville, N.C., advised while sharing a photo on Facebook of the bookshop's soccer-themed sales floor display, just as Argentina's national team was winning the World Cup over France. 

"We are definitely ready for the last full Saturday before Xmas & Hanukkah. Which is, you know, tomorrow. Yep. Ready is what we are. So ready. The readiest," Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass., posted on Instagram Friday along with a TikTok video as evidence.

Schiffer Publishing is now represented to the indie gift/specialty market by the Harper Group in the South, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest.

Today:
CBS Mornings: Amy Herman, co-author of smART: Use Your Eyes to Boost Your Brain (Simon & Schuster, $17.99, 9781665901215).

Fresh Air: Kevin Hazzard, author of American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics (Hachette Books, $30, 9780306926075).

Rachael Ray: Will Guidara, author of Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect (Optimism Press, $29, 9780593418574).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert repeat: Mariah Carey, co-author of The Christmas Princess (Holt, $18.99, 9781250837110).

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Sohla El-Waylly, co-editor of The Best American Food Writing 2022 (Mariner, $17.99, 9780063254411).

Tomorrow:
CBS Mornings: Pattie Boyd, author of Pattie Boyd: My Life in Pictures (Reel Art Press, $49.95, 9781909526907).

Good Morning America: Megan Alexander, author of The Magic of a Small Town Christmas (Aladdin, $19.99, 9781665929806).

Today Show: Niro Feliciano, author of This Book Won't Make You Happy (Broadleaf Books, $26.99, 9781506480411).

The View repeat: Steve Martin and Harry Bliss, author and illustrator of Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon, $30, 9781250815293).

Late Night with Seth Meyers repeat: Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar, authors of The World Record Book of Racist Stories (Grand Central, $29, 9781538724552).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert repeat: Michelle Obama, author of The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (Crown, $32.50, 9780593237465).

Nathan Newman's upcoming novel How to Leave the House has been optioned by This England executive producer Richard Brown's Passenger production company, along with Chernobyl director Johan Rencks/Spaceman producer Michael Parets' new company, Sinestra. Deadline reported that the TV rights were acquired following a "competitive auction" for the book, which has a spring 2024 pub date.

Brown, Renck and Parets said the book could be an "instant classic.... Bracingly original, profoundly insightful and extremely funny to boot, we feel tremendously fortunate to work alongside Nathan as they shepherd How to Leave the House into its next life as a television series." 

Deadline added that Fremantle "had acquired Passenger earlier this month and Brown's shingle is also working on an adaptation of Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch. Sinestra, meanwhile, was launched in September and is adapting Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth."

The winners of the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards for Nonfiction are:

£10,000 (about $12,150) to Nuzha Nuseibeh for Namesake. Judges wrote: "What is it to be a feminist, a mother, a warrior? What does bravery look like in the context of interminable conflict? By seeking to understand her namesake in the context of her own 21st century concerns, Nuseibeh connects our current ideas of Muslims and Arabs with their origins, looking at myth-making and identity, religion and nationhood, feminism and race, early Muslim history and contemporary Britain.

"As intimate as they are thoughtful, these linked essays offer a dazzling exploration of heritage, gender and the idea of home, whilst also posing the larger question of how connecting with our history can help us understand ourselves and others today."

£5,000 ($6,075) to Ellen Atlanta for Pixel Flesh: Modern Beauty Culture and the Women It Harms. Judges wrote: "Pixel Flesh is the first non-fiction book to explore Millennial and Gen-Z women's relationship to beauty, and the systems and industries that seek to commodify and control our appearance. From 'Love Island' to lip filler, mixed-fishing to the male gaze, Ellen holds digital beauty culture to account and highlights the unbelievable impact it has on women's lives. Pixel Flesh provides an exploration of digital feminism through conversation and intimate observation, and represents a refusal to brush the issues facing young women under the carpet."

£2,500 ($3,040) to Malachi McIntosh for A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Britain, Black Power, and the Caribbean Artists Movement. Judges wrote: "A Revolutionary Consciousness tells the story of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM)--a vanguard organisation that united a community of novelists, poets, artists, dancers, and activists in the face of growing hostility to Caribbean emigrants in 1960s and '70s Britain. At the book's heart are CAM's three founders: the publisher and activist John La Rose; the poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite; and the writer, thinker, and impresario Andrew Salkey--a trio of pioneers who, through CAM, would radically transform the perceptions of their people."

To observers reassured about the health of American democracy after the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, Jared Yates Sexton's blunt and provocative The Midnight Kingdom may come as an unwelcome splash of cold water. In this survey of the history of Western civilization that begins in first-century Rome and spans nearly 2,000 years, Sexton, a political analyst and podcaster, explores "the means by which power shields and hides itself." He argues that it does so chiefly through deceit and paranoia-inducing conspiracy theories that have remained remarkably consistent across cultures and historical eras, and that those tactics are flourishing with particular virulence today. 

Sexton, who chronicled the rise of Donald Trump in The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore, takes the title of this book from the work of Russian neofascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin envisions a world in which liberal democracy and globalism will be overthrown and supplanted by the authoritarian nationalism promoted by men like Vladimir Putin, Hungary's Viktor Orbàn and, in the United States, Steve Bannon. In Sexton's eyes, the history of the West, for all its surface gleam, at its heart is largely one of "pure, unvarnished white patriarchal supremacy," a dominance that would be explicitly elevated in the world Dugin and his intellectual and political allies covet.

In the 20th century, Sexton's principal bogeyman is neoliberalism, a philosophy that in the United States has been "eating away at the authority of the state, systematically transferring power from the federal government to the domain of the market and corporations." The consequence of its dominance, he contends, has been to create a permanent underclass whose rage can be deflected from its true oppressors while providing the political support necessary to maintain those oppressors in power.

As evidenced by more than 1,000 endnotes, Sexton's research in both primary and secondary sources is prodigious. In crisp and efficient prose, he discourses on subjects as diverse as the power of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, the age of colonialism, or 20th-century American politics. His opinions will elicit enthusiastic assent from some readers and vigorous disagreement from others.

Sexton ends his story with a somber catalogue of recent events in the United States, including the murder of George Floyd, the Covid-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection. No one reading this book would ever accuse him of unwarranted optimism, but even as he recognizes the rise of the forces that are "hard at work to try to rewind time and reinstall theocratic, authoritarian rule based on weaponized faiths that once ruled the world," he does envision "a new faith that transcends the divisions of old and centers on a belief and trust in one another." The outcome of this clash will shape the next turn of history's wheel. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Jared Yates Sexton offers a sobering historical perspective on the forces pushing the West toward authoritarianism.

As a former bookseller, I still share new books with my world of writers, educators, editors, artists and fellow readers--via conversations, texts, tweets and often with a crisp copy, either hand-delivered or sent by mail.

This habit of buying multiple copies of favorite new books began on a summer day after I found the paperback edition of In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage, $17) at the wonderful indie This Is a Bookstore (the store also has a children's arm, BookBug, and a fun café called Table of Contents) in Kalamazoo, Mich.

I was drawn to In Other Words because it's written in a fascinating way--with the text in Italian on the left page, and in English on the right. I don't know Italian, but as a traveler, I found Lahiri's memoir and her observations on the craft of writing and learning another language fascinating. I've read the book several times. Over the next year, I handed or sent a copy to more than a dozen people: a yoga teacher whose second language is English; a friend who speaks Italian; a fifth-grade teacher headed to Italy for a family reunion; a children's book author who was flying to Rome to launch one of her titles; a few of my editors; my closest writer friends. Each time I held a new copy of In Other Words in my hands and then passed it along, sharing words I loved and was inspired by, I was filled with happiness.

In 2020, the book I bought multiple copies of--singly, then in twos or threes--was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf (Abrams, $16.99) by Grant Snider, a book given to me by my husband, Pete, after he saw a review in a corporate newsletter. With bright illustrations full of hilarity and truth about book love, this is a totally different book from In Other Words. Off at various times went the gift of a copy to an illustrator, two editors, a former bookseller, two school librarians, five educators, a grandchild, my circle of writers and three other good friends. I'm still suffering from multiple copies-addiction with this title.

The newest book that I've been sharing in 2022 is Things to Look Forward To (Chronicle, $22.95) by two-time Caldecott Medalist and author Sophie Blackall. I first saw this beautiful and inspiring book at the Chronicle Books booth at the American Library Association convention in Washington, D.C., this past June. My Chronicle editor, Melissa Manlove, offered to give me a copy from the booth. Since then, I've wrapped this book with a white ribbon and handed or mailed it to friends. The cover of Blackall's book is so gleaming and so tactile that it needs no wrapping paper. Two summer neighbors. One of my sisters. A college roommate. Several avid reader friends. My sister-in-law. The rector at my church (who then shared Sophie's book in a newsletter of reflections). A high school friend (a week later she told me she bought five more as gifts!). My two daughters. A 94-year-old reader and pianist.

This is how a book is often found: in a lovely bookstore on a summer day of travels, because of mention in a review, at a publisher's exhibit of new books... OR, in the case of my multiple-copies syndrome, if a former bookseller loved it enough to give you one. Because the love of a book is free.

The sharing of loved books--that's what booksellers, past and present, do. Now instead of selling them across a store counter, I give them as gifts. And then those books are carried by my own constellation of friends who will spread their light into other constellations.

If only Jhumpa Lahiri, Grant Snider and Sophie Blackall knew about my multiple copies addiction! I thank them--and all artists working at their desks--for creating works that are now part of me and part of the lives of my friends and the world of readers beyond.

The magic and the love of books. May you find such brilliant pages in your own life, buy multiple copies and give them away with joy. --Louise Borden

Louise Borden is a former bookseller and the author of 30 books for children, among them The Little Ships: The Heroic Rescue at Dunkirk in World War II (Margaret K. McElderry), illustrated by Michael Foreman, and The Journey that Saved Curious George (Clarion), illustrated by Allan Drummond. Her most recent book is a biography of David Glasgow Farragut, Full Speed Ahead!: America's First Admiral (Calkins Creek).