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May Day! The New England Independent Booksellers Association will hold a spring day of education at the Hilton Garden Inn in Portsmouth, N.H, on May 1. The tentative program includes a morning session with ABA, lunch, a session of NEIBA education, a presentation of the member in-store peer review program and a late afternoon-early evening reception for Emerging Leaders.
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In
recognition of their charitable efforts, Howard and Joy Gersten, owners
of the Jeffrey Amherst Bookshop, Amherst, Mass., have been honored with the Siegfried
Feller Award for Outstanding Service to the Libraries.
The Massachusetts Daily Collegian
reported that, "on Dec. 8, the bookshop held its fifth annual benefit,
where the Gerstens donated 10 percent of their proceeds to the UMass
campus libraries."
"We love the library and we wanted to do anything we could to help," said Howard.
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For more on the change in ownership of Eureka Books, Eureka, Calif., reported
here in Friday's issue (Shelf Awareness, December 7), check out this
story in the Times-Standard.
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Another holiday gift list: the Miami Herald recommends travel and adventure titles.
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The December Book of the Month from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression by Matthew Rothschild (New Press, $16.95, 9781595581648/1595581642). By the editor of the Progressive
magazine, the book contains dozens of stories from his McCarthyism
Watch, which chronicles cases since the attacks of September 11 in
which people were punished for expressing their right to protest. One
example: Todd Persche, a freelance cartoonist who "lost his job with a
weekly newspaper for drawing cartoons critical of the Bush
administration."
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Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
has acquired the rights to the Beacon Street Girls series, which was
created by B*tween Productions Inc., Lexington, Mass. According to the Boston Globe,
"The books, written by a stable of ghostwriters, feature the fictional
adventures of six girls living in Brookline. B*tween also runs a Beacon
Street Girls website and markets an array of branded accessories,
including jewelry and clothing aimed at 'tweens'--girls 9 to 12 years
old."
B*tween has published 14 books, which have sold about
500,000 copies. Addie Swartz, the company's chief executive and
founder, said, "The whole concept was to develop an integrated brand
that would reach girls across a variety of touchpoints."
Rubin Pfeffer, senior v-p and publisher
of children's books at Simon & Schuster, told the Globe that the books are "a
perfect fit for his company's line of books for girls." The paper continued, "Pfeffer was
tipped off about the Beacon Street Girls series by a B*tween board
member, Barbara Marcus, a former executive at Scholastic Inc. who
helped oversee publication of the Harry Potter books."