Soaring gas prices in 2008 and the subsequent recession have had a positive effect on business for Half Price Books, Records, Magazines, the national chain based in Dallas, Tex. According to the San Antonio Express-News, sales began to rise at Half Price stores "as Americans latched on to thriftier habits and didn't let go.... Half Price racked up a 5% jump in same-store sales, those at stores open at least a year, in fiscal 2010 at its 110 stores. Its four stores in San Antonio posted a 5.6% jump in same-store sales."
"Where Borders and Barnes & Noble are flat to down, just the opposite is happening to us," said Kathy Doyle Thomas, the company's executive v-p for marketing and development.
Thomas added that Half Price is also examining the threat posed by e-readers and by the Internet's effect on the music business because "we don't want to be another Tower Records or Sound Warehouse.... We're looking to see if we can buy used Kindles to sell and if there's a market for that."
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"There used to be a real glamour thing about having a reading. It felt really special. Now it's like an industry," Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, told the Wall Street Journal in a piece exploring the competition for "prestigious" author event sites in New York City.
Where authors end up signing "is a tricky gavotte involving publishers, chain bookstores and other venues. In fact, independent bookstores or locales like the 92nd Street Y are sometimes more appropriate perches," the Journal wrote, though it did not mention any specific indies.
"Within Manhattan it's always been competitive, and it's more so now because a lot of outlets have gone," said Evan Boorstyn, deputy director of publicity at Grand Central Publishing. The Union Square Barnes & Noble, with an event space for up to 1,100 people, is considered the "get."
"To be there is the equivalent of getting your name up in lights on Broadway," said Boorstyn.
Literary agent Laurence Kirschbaum noted that matching the venue to the author plays a key role. "There are definitely uptown authors and subjects and downtown authors and subjects," he said. "A lot of it has to do with where a writer has most of his posse. Thus, you're not going to put the latest Tea Party author at the B&N at 82nd and Broadway."
Author Susan Isaacs questioned the impact of signings in general. "Say you sell 75 books. It's all to the good, but I don't know how much it matters in the scheme of things. I'm more concerned about the size of the advertising budget. So if you start carrying on about whether you're at Lincoln Center or the Upper East Side, you're making your publicist even more crazy than you're already making her. You should be using that energy to write books."
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Calling it a "last hurrah," the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported on Saturday's bittersweet final act for Acres of Books, which closed in 2008. The ArtExchange now owns the building and reopened it "for a fundraiser involving the 
bookstore's leftover inventory of 30,000 books and 1,500 vintage fruit crates. For $25, visitors were able to choose a crate and fill it to the brim with books. Alex Salto, executive director of the ArtExchange estimated the crowd to be between 600 and 700 people."
The crates, "some dating back to 1900, were used to haul books to their Long Beach Boulevard location when Acres of Books moved in 1960. The crates served as shelving in the store until it closed," the Press-Telegram wrote.
In addition, the Los Angeles Times reported that "workers are using hammers to knock down and harvest an estimated 6½ miles of wooden shelving. Most of the 1930s-era building will be demolished this fall to make way for an art center.... Once the shelves are dismantled, the wood will be given to the public and provide much-needed building materials for community gardens, bike shelters, city planters and art projects."
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Beach reading in New Jersey. "We love our indie bookstores," Baristanet.com declared, "and now that we've picked up coverage of Maplewood, we've got a new bookstore to browse in, Words. We went there last week, and also to Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, to see what the natives are reading."
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How did you celebrate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird? For Kathy Patrick, owner of Beauty and the Book, Jefferson, Tex., yesterday was a very special day, as she chronicled on her blog:
"I read To Kill a Mockingbird every year and every year the story reveals to me something different.... I sell the book in my shop, and if you truly know me, you know that this is my book that I treasure the most. But today, I have decided that I am going to pull a 'Harper Nell Lee' and go to my very private reading chair for my own personal experience. Sometimes it's when we get really quiet that we learn the most and this coming from what you think is the noisiest person on the planet!"
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"The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium," wrote David Brooks in his New York Times Op-Ed column examining a recent study in which researchers "gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years."
Subsequent test scores indicated that "students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the 'summer slide'--the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school," Brooks noted.
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Literature as art... literally. Inspired by Richard Price's Lush Life, a nine-gallery art exhibition is currently paying homage to the novel as well as to New York's Lower East Side. The New York Times reported that the shows "correspond to the nine chapters of the novel, and work in each refers, sometimes specifically, to the book’s plot."
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Obituary note: Patricia Hoefling, director of sales and marketing at
Indiana University Press since 2005, died last Wednesday, July 7, after a
five-month battle with cancer.
She had earlier held the same
positions at Illinois University Press and Louisiana State University
Press and was sales manager at Indiana from 2003 to 2003.
Indiana
director Janet Rabinowitch wrote that Hoefling was "a warm and caring
mentor to her staff, a spirited and creative leader of our marketing and
sales efforts, and a generous colleague and friend." The press has a
memorial on its website.
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Although he was not
exactly a book person, he sounded like one and had great taste in
literature, so we want to note the death of Bob Sheppard, longtime
public-address announcer for the New York Yankees and New York Giants,
who died yesterday at age 99.
As the New York Times put it: "In an era of
blaring stadium music, of public-address announcers styling themselves
as entertainers and cheerleaders, Sheppard, a man with a passion for
poetry and Shakespeare, shunned hyperbole. 'A public-address announcer
should be clear, concise, correct,' he said. 'He should not be colorful,
cute or comic.' "
We. Can. Hear. Him. Say. That.
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Sebastian Horsley, the "dandy, writer and artist," died last month from a heroin overdose "days after a play adapted from his memoirs--Dandy in the Underworld--opened at the Soho theatre," the Guardian reported. He was 47.
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This month the Southern Independent
Booksellers Alliance is holding four "indie booksellers revivals" at
SIBA booksellers that are "designed for the day-tripper." Programs
include education sessions, lunch with a writer and an "indie inquiry"
session about "how to go forward successfully in this ever-changing
industry."
For more information about locations, dates and full
programs, go to SIBA's website.
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New England booksellers and librarians are encouraged contribute
2,500-word essays about their states for The New England Reader,
which will be sold exclusively in regional stores next spring and
summer. Essays should address what the authors love about their states
and their experience of it.
The book will have one or two essays
per state, including New York, will appear as a paperback original and
list all New England Independent Booksellers Association member stores. A
percentage of sales will be donated to the American Booksellers
Foundation for Free Expression.
Carl Lennertz at HarperCollins is
editor of the book. For anyone needing examples, he will send pieces
from The Great Lakes Reader and The Pacific Northwest
Reader and may be reached at Carl@harpercollins.com.
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The
Bookstore Training and Consulting Group of Paz & Associates has
launched a blog for people interested in starting an
independent bookstore.
"This is actually a great time for
entrepreneurs to think seriously about the current window of
opportunity," Donna Paz Kaufman said. "The closing of hundreds of
corporate-owned mall bookstores early in 2010, the number of retail
vacancies across the country with landlords looking for tenants, and the
research conducted by Verso Advertising that identifies a huge gap
between market share and mind share, all indicate that now is the time
to claim a market."
She continued: "Over the last three decades,
the mass media has loved to beat up on indie bookstores and proclaim
their demise, but even the research into the habits of e-book users
indicates that most still buy and read printed books as well, and some
discover they don't like to read on gadgets at all."