Sad news: Jim Mitchell, co-owner with his sister, Catherine Nevins, of MainStreet BookEnds, Warner, N.H., died suddenly yesterday, according to the Union-Leader. He was 58 and for the last 10 years had also been a weekend news anchor for WBZ 1030.
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In a joint partnership, Ballantine Books and ESPN Books will publish 10-12 sports titles a year that will range from celebrity titles to narrative nonfiction to reference. The first joint title is one that warms our hearts: A Team to Believe in: Our Journey to the Super Bowl Championship by New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin with Brian Curtis. The book goes on sale September 2, two days before the start of the Giants' next Super Bowl Championship season.
Select titles previously published under the ESPN Books imprint will continue to be available and will be distributed by the Random House sales force.
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Changes at one of our favorite bookstores in Australia, Abbey's in Sydney:
Bookseller & Publisher Online reported that managing director Jack Winning will retire next year and be replaced by Alan Abbey. The always-charming Peter Milne is retiring as deputy managing director, although he will remain a shareholder of the company and continue to work in the business. Also, this month Adrian Hardingham becomes general manager, retail. He is a former manager of Abbey's and most recently worked at Readings in Melbourne, another wonderful bookstore.
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Sarah Kimmel, project coordinator at the Peninsula Library System in California, noted that our item yesterday about a question put to Senator John McCain--"Who is the poet laureate of the state of Arizona, or the U.S. poet laureate, which is a position appointed by the president?"--contained an erroneous assumption. As she put it, "The Poet Laureate is not appointed by the President, but by the Librarian of Congress."
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Effective July 1, Mike Spring, who joined John Wiley & Sons when Hungry Minds was acquired in 2001, is retiring as travel publisher but will become director of special projects and work closely with Wiley's travel publishing team.
Ensley Eikenburg has been promoted to associate publisher/associate marketing director of the travel program at Wiley. She has been associate marketing director of travel and reference publishing. She will manage Wiley's travel publishing program in the U.S. and coordinate global editorial planning in travel.
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Despite being caught in the act on a security camera, a man stole
nearly $1,000 from Empire Books, Huntington, W.Va. According to WSAZ-TV, "Nobody saw the Empire Books thief sneak in the back room and commit his crime in the middle of a Monday afternoon."
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A Vegas bookseller shared her "favorite" customer interactions with readers of the Rebel Yell,
the student newspaper at University of Nevada, Las Vegas: "I applied to
Barnes and Noble after having worked in a library because, while I
still wanted to work with books, I wanted to have more contact with
human beings (a naïve desire). Libraries, despite their delectable
bookishness, could be very lonely when I was alphabetizing books. Call
numbers have no soul. I ended up getting more human than I anticipated."
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Recently opened used bookstore Volumes, Hampton, N.H., was profiled by Seacoastonline.com,
which noted that owner Gordon Lane, a Hampton resident for almost 10
years, had previously operated Volumes bookstores in Maine and in
Reading, Mass.