Graphic novels are booming in the U.K., according to today's New York Times. Following the lead of Random House's Jonathan Cape imprint, more publishers have taken the plunge, and the graphic novel buyer at Waterstone's reported that sales of the category had risen 41% in the past year.

Why now? Paul Gravett, author of Great British Comics, told the Times that the growth of the Internet and graphic multimedia have been important influences. "I don't think that it is a coincidence that graphic novels are coming into their own in an era where people are becoming acclimatized to taking in words and images together," he said.

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Sadly for health reasons, Tom Simon has closed 7th Avenue Books, his used bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., but will continue to do business online from home. We wish him best of luck!

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How do you treat your books? The Chicago Tribune explored "the ethics of handling--and manhandling--a book" in an article that included a bookseller's perspective: "Mary Yockey, the book buyer for Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove, says she enjoys reading her father-in-law's marginal notes in American history books he lends to her and her husband. 'It puts us inside his mind and tells us what he was thinking,' she says. 'He is like our guide.'" 

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Under the headline "Pore and pour," the Boston Phoenix offered "a reader’s guide to intoxicating literature" for campus "misanthropes and wallflowers." The Phoenix was not, however, suggesting "teetotalitarianism or holing yourself up in the library all semester." Instead, it showcased bookstores near civilized watering holes "for the bookish types who like to booze in more peaceful pubs." Recommended Cambridge book stops included the Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books and Lorem Ipsum Books; while Boston biblio-imbibers were advised to check out Trident Booksellers and Commonwealth Books.

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Stephen Sparks, a new bookseller at Green Apple Books, San Francisco, Calif., was interviewed by the Chronicle for its "Faces of Labor" column. Sparks, 29, has been on the job four months after moving west from New Jersey.

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Business Week called the Sony Reader "hardly a game changer" and said that Sony "has consistently declined to release sales figures, which just might tell you something." Business Week also cautioned that "Sony will need to gain some kind of traction with Readers, especially if Amazon, which bought e-book service mobipocket.com two years ago, moves forward with its own reader."

The focus of Powell's Books's next Out of the Book film will be the late David Halberstam and his The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion, $35, 9781401300524/1401300529), which is being published September 25. The 28-minute film will be produced by series creator Dave Weich of Powell's Books. The director is Doug Biro of Hudson River Films, who directed the first Out of the Book film, about Ian McEwan and his recent novel, On Chesil Beach (Shelf Awareness, June 9, 2007).

Like the book tour on behalf of Halberstam's book (Shelf Awareness, August 28, 2007), the film will rely on some of Halberstam's friends and feature commentary from Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Robert Caro and Bob Woodward.

The movie will premier on November 11, when McNally Robinson Booksellers, New York City, shows it at Two Boots Pioneer Theater. Between November 12 and December 15, the film will be shown across the country at events hosted by independent booksellers that, as with the Ian McEwan film, will include panel discussions, live music, special guests, etc.

The original film was shown at 54 events. This time Powell's aims to have at least 75 stores participate and is inviting interested booksellers to contact April Placencia, who handles Powell's event support program, at april@powells.com.

Here's an unusual bookseller tour: with the help of GerriTrips (an Italian tour specialist), Bill Palizzolo of billbooks & associates--an independent publisher's rep in New England for 22 years and a bookseller before that--is leading a group to Italy April 1-11 on a trip that will take place in conjunction with the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The group, which will be limited to 48, will also visit Florence, Tuscany and Rome. The trip has been designed for booksellers but is open to anyone.

The price is $3,499 per person for double occupancy (single supplement of $445), and much of the trip is tax deductible for book industry people. The price includes round-trip air transportation via Air France, admission to the fair, tours of such attractions as the Duomo, the Uffizi Gallery, the Coliseum, the Pantheon and Vatican and bookstore visits in Florence and Rome.

Palizollo wrote that he came up with the idea for the tour after he took a trip to Italy with his wife. "I was reading the Shelf Awareness article regarding Carla Cohen's literary trips to Mexico [Shelf Awareness, November 4, 2006]. I thought, 'Why not Italy for booksellers?' "

For more information, go to billbooksandassociates.com and click on Bologna Trip or e-mail Palizzolo at billbooks@comcast.net or call 866-408-0639.

Besides wandering through crop circles, catching sunrise at Stonehenge, visiting the stone circles at Avebury and exploring other parts of heart chakra territory in England during a tour this summer with a co-leader and seven customers of her store, Susan L. Weis, owner of breathe books, Baltimore, Md., spent some time in bookstores. (Check out her blog to see pictures and notes from the trip.) A columnist for Shelf Awareness on New Age books, the woman we agreed to stop calling the most enthusiastic bookseller in the country was enthusiastic about the bookstores she had seen in that realm of England.

"Glastonbury is a hotbed of New Age stores," she said, and one of her favorites there is Labyrinth Books, which Sue Render opened in 2004 and expanded earlier this year. The store originally focused on used books but is starting to carry new titles, too, including many by Hay House. "It's a little shop, and on every shelf, you find a gem," Weis commented. "Some titles are really esoteric and you never see them in the U.S. I've been there twice and bought 15 books."

Another Glastonbury favorite is the Speaking Tree, a remainder store owned by Gareth Mills. (Labyrinth's Sue Render used to work for him.) With about 1,500 square feet of space, the Speaking Tree is full of metaphysical titles, and wandering around inside is like "being in a candy shop," Weis said. The Speaking Tree stocks books on shamanism, magic, reincarnation, Buddhism, kabbalah, yoga, holistic living and sustainable living. "The most fun section is books on building your own yurt," she added.

Weis called the store "gorgeous, with high ceilings, lots of charm and creaks in the floor. The staff is delightful and seem to love their job." The Speaking Tree also has a wholesale warehouse. (Incidentally Weis wrote a story in the August issue of New Age Retailer extolling the virtues of bargain books called "Remains of the Day: Bargain Remainders Offer Profitable Margins.")

Like Labyrinth and the Speaking Tree, Glastonbury's many other bookstores feature titles on ley lines and crop circles as well as many books from Counter Culture Book Distributors. Counter Culture is both a publisher and distributor owned by Peter Gott that offers "fantastic little books on esoteric subjects like sacred numbers, ley lines, Stonehenge and more," Weis said. Counter Culture's Wooden Books line is printed on recycled paper.

The Henge Shop in Avebury is "my favorite favorite bookstore in England," Weis said. The store, in a building with sloping floors and ceiling, features crystals, gemstones, jewelry, books, calendars as well as gift items based on celtic and druid culture. The owners are Philippe and Dominique Ullens, who had a gallery in Brussels, visited Avebury, fell in love with the place and bought the store two years ago. A photographer, Philippe Ullens has taken many pictures of crop circles from planes that hang in the store; in the summer, the store posts information daily about crop circles. The Henge's manager is John Wilding.

The Bookstore at Chalice Well (with lush gardens and where people can put their feet in healing water) is only about four feet wide and 25 feet long, but "they know how to merchandise," Weis said. One wall is all books, including Doreen Virtue books and books on angels and pendulums. Other products include jewelry, greeting cards. "It's a fascinating, beautiful little shop."--John Mutter

Columbia University Press and Columbia Business School are creating Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint that will focus on material of "practical importance in finance, economics, and other areas of business scholarship."

The imprint makes its debut in October with the publication of Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, the latest work by William Duggan, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. Other titles appearing during the fall semester: More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places by Michael J. Mauboussin (in an updated and expanded edition); Sustaining India's Growth Miracle edited by Charles W. Calomiris; The Economists' Voice edited by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Aaron Edlin and Bradford DeLong; and Corporate Risk Management edited by Donald H. Chew.

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Inc. Magazine and Greenleaf Book Group are creating the Inc. 500 Press and Inc. 5000 Press. The new imprints will make their debuts at the 26th annual Inc. 500 Conference and Awards Ceremony in Chicago, which starts tomorrow and runs through September 8.

 

This morning on Good Morning America: Mark Penn, author of Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes (Twelve, $25.99, 9780446580960/0446580961). He will also appear today on NPR's Marketplace.

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This morning on the Today Show: Dina Matos McGreevey, estranged wife of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey and author of Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (Hyperion, $23.95, 9781401303648/1401303641).

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This morning's Book Report, the weekly AM radio book-related show organized by Windows a bookshop, Monroe, La., has the theme "small towns, big dreams" and features two interviews:

• Jacques Couvillon, author of The Chicken Dance (Bloomsbury, $16.95, 9781599900438/1599900432)
• Deborah Wiles, author of The Aurora County All-Stars (Harcourt, $16, 9780152060688/0152060685)

The show airs at 8 a.m. Central Time and can be heard live at thebookreport.net; the archived edition will be posted this afternoon.

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Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Robert Kaplan, author of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (Random House, $27.95, 9781400061334/1400061334).

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Today on NPR's Fresh Air: Charlie Savage, author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown, $25.99, 9780316118040/0316118044).

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Today on the Leonard Lopate Show: Daisuke Miyao, author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke University Press, $23.95, 9780822339694/0822339692) and introducer of the Museum of Modern Art retrospective of Hayakawa (who played the Japanese prison camp director in The Bridge on the River Kwai), which starts today and runs through September 16.

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Tonight on Larry King Live, Bill Clinton, whose new book is Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (Knopf, $24.95, 9780307266743/0307266745).

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Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a repeat: presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, whose latest book is The Audacity of Hope (Crown, $25, 9780307237699/0307237699).

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Tonight on the Tonight Show With Jay Leno: Jerome Bettis, author of The Bus: My Life In and Out of a Helmet (Doubleday, $23.95, 9780385520614/0385520611).

Selected new titles appearing next Monday and Tuesday, September 10 and 11:

You've Been Warned by James Patterson and Howard Roughan (Little, Brown, $27.99, 9780316014502/0316014508) begins with Kristin Burns on the brink of happiness, but a recurring nightmare threatens to destroy her plans.

The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter (S&S, $26, 9780743238090/0743238095) follows a retired marine as he attempts to recover an ancient Japanese sword lost on Iwo Jima in 1945.

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (Viking, $25.95, 9780670063567/0670063568) chronicles the fallout of a grandmother's death and the revelation of her secret romantic adventures.

Tomorrow by Graham Swift (Knopf, $23.95, 9780307266903/0307266907) condenses 50 years of events into one night as a mother lies sleepless with worry about the next day.

The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, $50, 9780307262837/0307262839) provides a detailed companion to the PBS series that begins airing this month. Includes hundreds of photographs and maps.

Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches by John W. Dean (Viking, $25.95, 9780670018208/0670018201). The Nixon White House counsel explains how the many fumbles of the Bush administration have harmed the federal government.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Viking, $29.95, 9780670063277/0670063274) examines the links between human linguistic behaviors and the brain.

 
It has been almost 20 years since Jane Bernstein wrote Loving Rachel: A Family's Journey from Grief, her first memoir about Rachel, her developmentally disabled daughter. Published in 1988, that book was a relatively early entry into what is now a crowded subgenre of memoirs written by parents of young children with disabilities and focused on the impact Rachel's diagnosis had on her family. Love, acceptance and a restructuring of parental expectations are all hallmarks of Bernstein's previous memoir (as they are in similar stories), but now, in Rachel in the World, Bernstein documents what happens when those qualities are no longer enough to satisfy the myriad needs and demands of an adult child with disabilities.
 
Bernstein begins her book with the startling revelation on how she came to write it. In 2003, faced with funding cutbacks and diminishing hopes that she would find housing for her then 20-year-old daughter, Bernstein ended a conversation with an administrator at the county Office of Developmental Disabilities and Mental Retardation by threatening to leave her daughter on their doorstep if placement wasn't found by 2005. How, Bernstein wondered, had it come to this? How had a loving, devoted mother gotten to the point where she would even threaten to abandon her daughter? The answers, of course, are anything but simple.
 
In infancy, Rachel was diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia, a rare disorder that impairs vision, causes seizures and affects cognitive development. No doctor could tell Bernstein the extent to which Rachel would be affected or what the nature of her disability would be. Indeed, throughout her childhood and into her teens, Rachel's problems proved to be diffuse and often opaque. She was extremely verbal and articulate but could not have meaningful conversations. She was fiercely independent but could not walk unaided down a street or through a store. She was very friendly and talked almost constantly but was unable to socialize on even a basic level. She loved books and music but could not read or write, and her self-care skills were minimal and required constant prompting to achieve. By the time Rachel approached her 20th birthday, Bernstein (who had since divorced) knew that she would no longer be able to provide the kind of care her daughter needed, but more importantly, the kind of independence Rachel herself craved. So began her frustrating, often despairing search to find housing and supported employment for her daughter.
 
Rachel in the World is not always an easy book to read. Bernstein's account is unflinchingly candid and often wrenching. And while her deep love for Rachel is never in doubt, the relentless weight of caring for her is painful even at this remove. But it is this very quality that makes this book so important. Recently there has been a huge increase in the number of young children being diagnosed with developmental disabilities. And while elementary and middle schools are becoming more adept at accommodating the needs of these children, there is an utter lack of programs, funding and social awareness for young adults with developmental disabilities. Of course, Bernstein, who has shouldered her load with grace that few could muster, would never abandon her daughter. But, as she points out, others have. Her experiences and her search to find Rachel a place in the world are both valuable and prescient. We all should take note.--Debra Ginsberg