In Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, Valerie Plame Wilson settles "scores with the Bush administration, Republican lawmakers and the journalists involved in the White House leak scandal," according to the AP, which purchased a copy of the book, whose pub date is next Monday.

She has "kind words" for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who led the leak investigation, the AP said. She also often "casts herself as a spectator to the scandal."

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The organizers of the Man Booker Prize are negotiating to make the six shortlisted titles this year available in their entirety and for free online, the Times of London reported. The idea is to reach areas, particularly in Africa and Asia, where the books might not be available. "The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought," the paper wrote. "If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book."

The publisher of the Man Booker winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright, said he prefers "a partial reproduction."

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Later this month, Borders Group is opening its first free-standing Paperchase store in the U.S. The 1,525-sq.-ft. stationery store will be at 172 Newbury Street in Boston, Mass. Borders plans to open another five to eight stand-alone Paperchase stores in the U.S. over the next year and into 2009.

There are Paperchase sections in more than 300 Borders stores in the U.S. Founded more than 30 years ago, Paperchase has headquarters in London and more than 100 stores in the U.K., including some in Borders stores there. Borders bought Paperchase in 2004.

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Nine new booksellers who opened for business in September have joined the American Booksellers Association. Check them out here.

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Bookselling This Week profiles Mrs. Dalloway's, the 2,000-sq.-ft. bookstore and garden shop founded three years ago by Marion Abbott and Ann Leyhe in Berkeley, Calif.

Besides general titles, "Mrs. Dalloway's sells and displays works of original art; paintings, photography, weavings, and sculpture inspired by gardens; a collection of 19th-century European botanical and insect prints; and cards with nature themes. Many small plants and decorative pots are also for sale."

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BTW also details the ways that Books & Books, Coral Gables, Fla., will celebrate its 25th anniversary. One event: a block party. As owner Mitchell Kaplan described it: "We're having an open house as a way of giving back to our customers. We'll be closing down the street and setting up a stage for 10 different musical groups. We'll also be giving away food from our cafes all night, and the next day we're having a big book club mixer." 

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Congratulations to Suzanna Hermans, co-owner of Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck, N.Y., who successfully encouraged the blog PostSecret to include a link to Book Sense for customers who want to buy the several PostSecret books. Previously the site had linked only to Amazon.

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The Nobel Prize has been golden for titles by Doris Lessing, according to yesterday's New York Times. For example, last week in the U.S., sales of The Golden Notebook rose to 1,100 copies from fewer than 50 the week before, according to Nielsen BookScan. (That most current week of data included only two days of sales after the Nobel announcement.) Sales of The Cleft, published in July, climbed to 500 from 100 the week earlier. HarperCollins and Harper Perennial are going back to press on their Lessing titles, and Harper plans to publish a hardcover edition of Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech, which she will give in Stockholm on December 10.

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Reading Group Choices, which provides material for members of reading groups online and in print, has published Reading Group Choices 2008, the guide's 14th edition. Included are more than 60 new titles for recommended reading and book group discussion. The publication is being released in time to be distributed at the gala held October 29 in New York City to celebrate the first National Reading Group Month, which is sponsored by the Women's National Book Association.

To order a copy of Reading Group Choices 2008, call 866-643-6883 or visit readinggroupchoices.com.

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Norfolk Children's Book Centre, Norwich, U.K., a bookshop that began in Marilyn and Simon Brocklehurst's front room in 1985, has won the 2007 Walker Books Best Independent Children's Bookshop award. Evening News 24, which profiled the award-winning owners, reported that the "judges recognised the range and excellence of services offered by the centre . . . and the innovative website designed by Mr. Brocklehurst."

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The Odyssey Bookshop, Novato, Calif., will close its bricks-and-mortar operation by December, according to the Novato Advance. "My regular customers are upset, but they understand," said Peter McMillan, owner of the used bookstore. He blamed the Internet for a "precipitous" decline in business, but added that he planned to continue his business online: "I'll sell books on [used book] search engines, but I'll also have my own Web site too. I don't know a lot about selling online, because I haven't done too much of it."

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To give you a head start on your presidential campaign research, Salon.com offered a concise guide to "All the candidates' books."

A major topic of conversation among attendees at the NAIBA Fall Conference, held October 13-15 at the Sheraton City Center in Baltimore, Md., was the change to a conference format. "I think the new format is great," said Len Vlahos of the American Booksellers Association. "NAIBA is being creative and serving its members in the best way they can. It's to be applauded." The conference drew 295 booksellers and 250 publishers and featured nearly 100 authors.

Exhibit space was deliberately downsized for two reasons, according to NAIBA executive director Eileen Dengler: to make it possible to hold the conference at a wider range of venues and to encourage publishers to streamline the number of books they chose to promote. The focus of the show this year was on what Dengler described as "the here and now," titles that are currently available as well as picks for the fast approaching holiday season. Publishers were asked to provide booksellers with marketing, event and display ideas, particularly ones pertaining to NAIBA Holiday Catalog titles.

At the Early Bird dinner, held Saturday evening, more than 70 booksellers gathered. The mood was light and many were eager to see how the new format and smaller space would work out. Authors Joshilyn Jackson (The Girl Who Stopped Swimming) and Laura Lippman (What the Dead Know) took the stage and spoke eloquently and with humor about their work and their appreciation of NAIBA. Baltimore resident Lippman pointed out that she decided to wear the same shirt she wore 10 years ago when she attended her first ever NAIBA event in Philadelphia. It was such a memorable moment for her, she said, to be a first-time author and to be treated so beautifully by the independent booksellers that she never forgot what she wore and decided to don the garment again for this occasion.

After dinner, the now-traditional Quiz Bowl was held. NAIBA president and Chester County Book & Music Co. bookseller Joe Drabyak created a Jeopardy-like game full of literary references both obscure and hysterical. About 25 people participated, and many spectators cheered them on.

Sunday morning kicked off with a walk around the cultural heart of Baltimore, Mt. Vernon. Some 25 booksellers braved the early morning chill for an invigorating and informative walk around this beautiful area, which was built in the 1800s and where many literary figures have lived. It's surrounded by parks, fountains, the Peabody Music Conservatory, the Walters Art Museum and the home of the Baltimore Book Festival.

At the expanded Pick of the Lists session, after sales reps presented their company highlights, an impromptu sharing of titles by booksellers took place. Politics & Prose's Carla Cohen suggested the idea and started things off by praising The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, which she described as "absolutely riveting," and the debut novel The Spanish Bow. Joe Drabyak touted the nonfiction tomes The Year of Living Biblically and Foreskin's Lament, along with the "very funny and insightful" novel Breakfast with Buddha. Spotty Dogs Books & Ale proprietor Kelley Drahushuk suggested the memoir The Hypocrisy of Disco, "an easy sell to anyone who likes The Glass Castle." McNally Robinson bookseller Jessica Stockton Bagnulo encouraged her colleagues to check out a trio of tomes--the story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway, the novel The Great Man ("fun and suspenseful with feminist undertones") and the young adult book The Arrival ("the crossover graphic novel of the season").

Another format change this year was the timing of the Moveable Feast, which went from being a dinner event to a luncheon. The gathering featured Sunshine O’Donnell (Open Me), Jeff Yeager (The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches), Lisa Tucker (The Cure for Modern Life), Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss) and 16 other authors.

Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament, spoke about his road to becoming an author, which included being a presenter on Ira Glass's radio show, This American Life. "I knew that Jews controlled the media, but I didn't know they controlled the listeners too," he said in response to how well the book is selling. At book signings, Auslander, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, said he meets many others who have "fallen"--Jews, Mormans, etc. who have had similar experiences.

Deborah Norville said that her new self-help book, Thank You Power, was written in "television style" in order to reach the most people.

Sunday evening, before its official opening the next day, the exhibit floor was the site of a pre-dinner cocktail reception. Show-goers sipped drinks and got an early look at publishers' wares. "When they opened the hall [that] night, there was a real buzz," commented Dick Hermans of Oblong Books & Music. "The energy had built up during the day, which was good for exhibitors, too." Among the 132 table tops in the exhibit hall were a number of vendors making their debut at NAIBA, including inspirational and self-help publisher Hay House and sidelines purveyor Beaded Bungee Bookmark.

Rob Dougherty of the Clinton Book Shop found this year's venue "easy to navigate. Plus there are no gun shows," he quipped in reference to an event held in the same facility as last year's NAIBA show in Valley Forge, Pa. The accessible Baltimore location, Dougherty noted, "gave us the opportunity to meet booksellers who might not have made it to other shows." Sharing ideas was "the most exciting thing," he said, although there was a close second--meeting Jon Jefferson, co-author of Beyond the Body Farm, one of Dougherty's top hand sells for the fall.

First-time NAIBA attendee Christine Onorati, who last year closed up shop in suburban Long Island, N.Y., and opened WORD in Brooklyn, noticed an absence of younger store owners from urban areas. Nonetheless, said Onorati, "it was great to network and talk" with fellow booksellers and foster the "we're in this together" spirit. Added Onorati, "They know where I'm coming from."

This year NAIBA encouraged authors to mix and mingle with booksellers as much as possible. Many authors attended the educational programming and roamed the conference floor. Some came away with ideas on how better to reach both their audience as well as booksellers. First-time author Mort Zachter of Princeton, N.J., whose new memoir, Dough, is receiving great reviews, came away from the conference with a renewed belief in independent bookstores. He said he saw vigor, energy and commitment he didn't know existed.

Education sessions ranged from handselling techniques to developing PR plans.

The Awards Banquet featured perhaps the highlight of the conference--an acceptance speech by NAIBA Non-Fiction Book of the Year winner Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. In a moving, thoughtful and eloquent talk, Beah told the group that he worried people might be afraid to read his story because of what he had seen and experienced. He wanted to make a human connection that he believes was translated to the booksellers who have hand-sold his memoir, a horrific but touching story about being a child soldier in Sierra Leone. "We have a strong oral tradition," he said. "Which is why I came unprepared tonight," he joked. "When you share a story, it becomes everyone's story. It's no longer just mine. It's everyone's and I'm just the facilitator, and now you are co-facilitators. Thank you so much for doing this for me."

Michele Knudsen won the Picture Book award for her book Library Lion (illustrated by Kevin Hawkes), which grew out of her wonderful experiences being a junior high school library monitor.

The NAIBA Legacy Award was presented by Carla Cohen of Politics & Prose to her long-time friend Anne Tyler. Tyler, well-known for not attending public events, sent her agent Tim Seldes to accept the award. He noted that Tyler writes about "a small group of people in a particular place, giving the reader insight into the profound lives we all lead."

Later in the evening the Dashiell Hammet Award nominees were announced: the winner was Baltimore's own Dan Fesperman for his novel The Prisoner of Guantánamo. The evening ended with a clever Noir Bar reception with mystery authors and crime novelists mingling with unsuspecting booksellers. Not a single dead body turned up in the middle of the night!--Susan L. Weis and Shannon McKenna Schmidt

This morning on the Today Show: Julianne Moore, whose new picture book is Freckleface Strawberry (Bloomsbury USA, $16.95, 9781599901077/1599901072).
 
Also on Today: Mark Halperin, author of The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose (Harper Perennial, $14.95, 9780061537301/0061537306).

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This morning on Good Morning America: Bill O'Reilly, author of Culture Warrior (Broadway, $14.95, 9780767920933/0767920937). He will also appear today on Live with Regis and Kelly.

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Today on Oprah: Sarah J. Symonds, author of Having an Affair?: A Handbook for the 'Other Woman' (Red Brick/Hatherleigh, $14.95, 9781578262793/1578262798).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: Stephen Colbert, host of the Colbert Report and author of I Am America (And So Can You!) (Grand Central, $26.99, 9780446580502/0446580503).

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Tomorrow on NPR's Weekend Edition: James Lipton, host of Inside the Actor's Studio and author of Inside Inside (Dutton, $27.95, 9780525950356/0525950354).

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Tomorrow on Larry King Live, Eric Clapton discusses his new book, Clapton: The Autobiography (Broadway, $26, 9780385518512/038551851X).

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Sunday on Larry King Live: Donald Trump, author of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (Collins, $26.95, 9780061547836/0061547832).

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On Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: Tommy Lasorda, whose new book is I Live for This!: Baseball's Last True Believer (Houghton Mifflin, $25, 9780618653874/0618653872).

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Sunday night on 60 Minutes: Valerie Plame Wilson, author of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (S&S, $26, 9781416537618/1416537619).

The holiday season has started early for Mauro DiPreta, an editor at HarperCollins and author of the new children's picture book Fartsy Claus. Penned under the pseudonym Mitch Chivus and illustrated by Mike Reed, the tome is a humorous re-telling of The Night Before Christmas.

Each year on Christmas Eve, DiPreta entertains his four children with a rendition of the classic tale. After countless readings over the years, he began to "ad lib," he said, "and injecting gas into the story for some reason was hilarious to the kids." [Editor's note: "for some reason?" Based on our parental experience, "gas" is fuel enough for a giggle. See next paragraph.] The idea for Fartsy Claus "evolved from there," DiPreta added, and the result is an account of an especially memorable Christmas Eve. After sampling a plate of franks and beans at one household while delivering presents, Santa is overcome with a gastric calamity that nearly ruins Christmas.

"It's irreverent, it's goofy, and it's not meant in any way to be blasphemous or distasteful," said DiPreta of his literary debut. Judging by the popularity of such books as Walter the Farting Dog, The Day My Butt Went Psycho and the Captain Underpants series, bathroom humor holds a particular appeal for young readers. In a blog post about Fartsy Claus, Marley & Me scribe John Grogan--one of DiPreta's authors and who has promoted his own children's books--noted on the subject, "I have learned that nothing makes kids giggle and squeal more than bodily functions. The holy trinity of children's literature, I've concluded, is poop, pee, and underpants," he continued. "Use them in any combination and you are sure to get loads of laughs."

To ensure that Fartsy Claus generates laughs from attendees at his author events, DiPreta will don a costume and appear as "mischievous elf" Mitch Chivus. "I love the idea of an alter ego," said DiPreta, even if it means that he'll "look like Will Ferrell" in the movie Elf. Santa Claus will be showing up at the events, too, although presumably not having eaten franks and beans first. Ultimately, DiPreta said, writing Fartsy Claus "was about making kids laugh. If I can make kids laugh, I feel like that's a good day."

Besides being entertained, readers can learn something from the book, DiPreta believes. "It teaches you that you can make lemonade from lemons and can always turn a bad situation into good," he said. His doppelganger, though, has more pragmatic advice to impart. "I think the lessons that Mitch would draw from this," said DiPreta, "would be one, never leave franks and beans for Santa and two, never stand downwind from Santa."

When it came to choosing a publisher for the unconventional Christmas tale, DiPreta opted to sign with a familiar one--HarperCollins' children's division. An agent sent the book to several editors using a different name for DiPreta, and it was only after HarperCollins Children's Publishers expressed interest in the project that his affiliation with the company was revealed. Dabbling in the other side of the editorial process has earned DiPreta a bit of fame among his colleagues. "They call me a renaissance elf," he said, "for having masterfully written a story."

As for future books, "It's really up to Mitch," remarked DiPreta. "If he feels motivated I'm going to help him. But if he's not, I don't want to force it on him. It has to be inspired." Readers will be able to learn more about Mitch on a forthcoming website that explores the elf's background and reveals why he decided to share the story of Santa's embarrassing escapade in Fartsy Claus.

By the way, when Santa stops by the DiPretas on Christmas Eve, he won't find franks and beans but rather a more traditional treat: a fresh batch of homemade cookies.--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

Ann Pancake is a native of West Virginia. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless Prize. Her latest book is a novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Shoemaker & Hoard, $15.95, 9781593761660/1593761660, September), an account of a family struggling to survive mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia. She lives in Seattle and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. Here she answers questions we put to people in the book business:

On your nightstand now:  

The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry and Bringing Down the Mountains by Shirley Stewart Burns.  
 
Favorite book when you were a child:  

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh and The Empty Schoolhouse by Natalie Savage Carlson.

Your top five authors:  

Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Breece D'J Pancake.

Book you've faked reading:  

Many essays by Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud assigned to me in graduate school.  
 
Book you are an evangelist for:  

At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill and The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
 
Book you've bought for the cover:  

A book with a photograph of a "real ghost" on the cover that I ordered from Weekly Reader in fourth grade.

Book that changed your life:  

The Empty Schoolhouse by Natalie Savage Carlson, Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Favorite line from a book:  

"It is a long haul, but what do I care? It will be done all the rest of my life."--John Steinbeck in Working Days, the journal he kept while he wrote The Grapes of Wrath.  (I had to keep repeating this line during the seven years I worked on my own novel.)  
 
Book you most want to read again for the first time:  

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.  

On Monday afternoon, during my Amtrak trip north from Baltimore after NAIBA's Fall Conference, I found myself making--as I tend to do--a mildly absurd connection. Maybe it was the endless parade of telephone poles flicking past my window, but something caused me to equate the NAIBA Internet marketing panel I was part of last Sunday with a scene from the HBO-TV Western series Deadwood.

Al Swearengen, the irresistibly sleazy owner of the Gem Saloon, stands on the second-story porch of his establishment. Whiskey bottle in hand, he watches a group of men raise a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town.

"Messages from invisible sources," Al says scornfully, "or what some people think of as progress."  
   
One of his henchmen, the dim but lethal Dan Dority, suggests that the telegraph is just another form of communication, like smoke signals or letters. Al asks him when the last time was that he received a letter and Dan replies, "Bad news about Pa."

Al's case is made. Bad news, indeed. "So by all means, let's plant poles all across the country," he sneers. "Festoon the (expletive) with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive. Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough (expletive) imponderables?"

Dan thinks about this for a moment, then replies, "Well, by god, Al, you give the word and them poles'll be kindling."

Kindling they did not become. In fact, almost 140 years later, telephone poles are still with us, flashing by my train window, carrying "messages from invisible sources."

Time was on my mind during the train ride Monday: the time that has passed since telegraph poles stretched out to the western frontier; the time that seems, in every age, to be shrinking even as we discover technological breakthroughs meant to make more efficent use of time.  

Our Internet marketing panel in Baltimore was led by Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, events coordinator at McNally Robinson NYC bookshop and author of the bookseller blog, The Written Nerd. It also included Felicia Sullivan, editor and publisher of the literary journal Small Spiral Notebook, senior online marketing manager at Collins and author of The Sky Isn't Visible from Here, which will be published by Algonquin in February 2008.

Jessica and I had been on a similar panel at NEIBA in Providence, R.I., which I wrote about in an earlier column. For our part, we again showcased several favorite bookstore websites, as well as bookstore blogs like Atomic Books, Kash's Book Corner and Brookline Blogsmith.

Felicia offered a guided tour of popular social networking sites that should be of interest to booksellers, like Gather, FaceBook and MySpace. She also provided a list of book-related sites (LitMinds and Gather Essentials, for example), as well as age- and subject-specific sites such as blogher.org (women), gaiaonline.com (teens) and eons.com (boomers).

During our conversation with the audience, the subject of time came up more than once, especially time management as the key impediment to engaging more creatively with Web 2.0 opportunities.

If everyone is already working at full tilt, how can they incorporate online marketing into the mix? Where in the course of their busy days will they find time to blog, to update website staff picks, to send out email newsletters, to check and fulfill online orders?

After the panel, one bookseller said that she already works a brutal schedule and cannot find good help to delegate any of these tasks to. She had no interest in establishing an online presence. Like Al Swearengen, she might have, but didn't, ask, "Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough (expletive) imponderables?"

A hundred trade show panels won't answer these questions because there will never be enough time--nor a sufficient number of qualified, motivated staff members--to do everything that needs to be done.

But there never has been enough time. When booksellers were slipping index cards between the pages of books for inventory control, there wasn't enough time. What were you doing with all your extra time before you had to answer emails and cell phone calls all day? 

We find time where we've always found time, in its mysterious expandability.

Booksellers will not gain by resisting the Internet, any more than turning a handful of telegraph poles into kindling would have stopped the future from reaching Deadwood.

In 1866, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, "I think the habit of writing by telegraph will have a happy effect on all writing by teaching condensation."

Perspective is everything in this discussion.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)