Congratulations to Bookshop Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, Calif., which is celebrating its 40th birthday!
This coming Friday, the store will hold its annual Bookshop Birthday
party and sale, although Casey Coonerty Protti said it will be "bigger
and better than ever" because of the milestone. The event includes some
traditional fare--cake servings while the "Hot Damn String Band" plays
and the sale--as well as a video montage of the store's history that
includes some footage of the inside of the old Bookshop Santa Cruz shot
weeks before it was destroyed in the 1989 earthquake.
The store has also been celebrating with an events schedule over the
past two months that has included Amy Sedaris, Senator Barbara Boxer,
John Robbins, Jonathan Franzen, James McGreevey and David Sedaris (an
outside event co-sponsored by the store)--with Charles Frazier to come.
The store has collected memories of the store from these and other
authors, which have included Franzen's comment: "Bookshop is the alert,
bright eye of downtown Santa Cruz. Long may it shine." And Jim
Hightower wrote, "If books have souls (and I believe they do), Bookshop
Santa Cruz is their heaven. Happy 40th."
Last but not least, the store will hold a party for Neal Coonerty "to
honor my dad for all his years as a bookseller," as his daughter put
it, before he is sworn in as County Supervisor, a position he won
earlier this year (Shelf Awareness, June 7, 2006).
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Congratulations,
too, to the ABA, which has sold out the second annual Winter Institute,
which will be held in Portland, Ore., February 1-2. The association had
space only for 500 bookseller attendees, a level it reached yesterday.
The ABA is keeping a waiting list in case of cancellations.
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ISBN-13 countdown: in eight weeks, the International Standard
Book Number becomes a 13-digit number. For more information about the change, go to the
Book Industry Study Group's Web site.
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One non-Penguin sales rep asks us plaintively whether anyone else is interested in the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day (Penguin Press, $35, 159420120X), which comes out November 21. So we pass the question along.
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Barnes & Noble College, which has managed Liberty
University's bookstore for some 10 years, is proposing to build a $2
million, 20,000-sq.-ft. bookstore on the school's Lynchburg, Va.,
campus, according to the Lynchburg News & Advance. The current B&N store, which has less than 10,000 square feet of space, would be converted to classrooms.
Liberty University vice chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., told the paper
that sales would likely double because the current store "is
not out where everybody can see it, so we're losing a lot of business."
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The Winona Daily News
recounts the eight weeks that Chris Livingston, owner of the Book
Shelf, Winona, Minn., spent quickly putting together Common Good Books,
the St. Paul store owned by Garrison Keillor that opened last week (Shelf Awareness,
November 1, 2006). Serving as project manager, Livingston had all of
eight days to install fixtures, receive inventory and open for
business! He said he also had to learn fast how to communicate with Keillor "to
understand what he really wanted."