Yesterday morning "hundreds of people" protested the closing of a Barnes & Noble by the end of the year and its replacement by a CVS Pharmacy in Encino, Calif., according to the Encino Patch. "We want a bookstore, not another drugstore!" residents chanted. Protesters argued that the town of 42,000 in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles has no other bookstore and 20 pharmacies within two and a half miles of the B&N.
On the Facebook page created by protesters, Rick Caruso, head of the company that owns the Encino Marketplace where B&N is located, wrote: "Last year we reduced [B&N's] rent to encourage them to stay open, nonetheless, in the end they decided to close due to a lack of sales at this location. I love having bookstores on our properties. They are a great amenity for the community and a great core tenant for us, but unfortunately we must accept that Barnes & Noble recognizes the retail book landscape has changed and is examining store closings, strategic alternatives and even a possible sale."
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Books and Crannies, Middleburg, Va., is closing on October 27, according to Leesburg Today. Co-owner Genie Ford said that besides online and e-book competition, the store had been hurt by heavy snowstorms in December and February.
Ford has a printing, editing and graphic design company that is on stable footing. The paper wrote: "Ford says she hopes to build on that success and perhaps translate some of those ideas into finding another model by which to return to an independent bookstore. Although she decries the impersonality of online book publishing and sales, she accepts the inevitability of the Internet.
"I'll make it my friend. Maybe it will lead me to another book shop, but it will be different."
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Belva Plain died last Tuesday at her home in Short Hills, N.J. She was 95.
Plain became a bestselling novelist at age 59 when her first novel, Evergreen, was published. In an obituary, the New York Times wrote that Evergreen "follows Anna, a feisty, redheaded Jewish immigrant girl from Poland in turn-of-the-century New York, whose family story continues through several decades and three more books. Strong-willed women, many of them Jewish and red-haired as well, appear again and again in Ms. Plain's fiction."
The Times quoted Plain: "I got sick of reading the same old story, told by Jewish writers, of the same old stereotypes--the possessive mothers, the worn-out fathers, all the rest of the neurotic rebellious unhappy self-hating tribe. I wanted to write a different novel about Jews--and a truer one."
More than 30 million copies of her books are in print.
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Decoded, the memoir by hip hop star Jay-Z, is being promoted in an unusual campaign in the month up to its November 16 pub date, the New York Times reported.
In part through some bartering, reproductions of pages of the book, published by Spiegel & Grau, will appear on billboards and a variety of spots related to the text so that, for example, "if in certain pages Jay-Z is talking about something related to Times Square, 
then those pages might be on billboards in Times Square," the head of the agency doing the campaign said.
One page is being reproduced on the bottom of a hotel swimming pool; another appears on the felt of pool tables in a pool hall.
The pages are the subject of a scavenger hunt that starts today. (For details go to bing.com/Jay-Z.) The grand prize is a trip to Las Vegas to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in a New Year's Eve concert.
Bing, a Google and Yahoo competitior, is paying for the campaign.
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In a response to the recent New York Times article about picture books being "no longer a staple for children," Lisa Von Drasek on EarlyWord.com noted that the story focused on bookstores; librarians report picture books are very popular.
In addition, she summed up librarians' possible responses to parents who think their children are too old for picture books. Among the points:
"The text of picture books is often written at a higher reading level. Children need to hear this higher vocabulary to acquire language before they can read it.
"The pictures give children practice in visual literacy. Excellent picture books are ones that you can go back to again and again, discovering something new every time."
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In the Chicagoist, Laura M. Browning has an amusing eulogy for the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago, Ill., which is moving to larger quarters in a year or so (Shelf Awareness, October 11, 2010). Noting that the new store will have, as manager Jack Cella put it, "operational temperature and air circulation controls," she wrote: "To anybody who has nearly fainted from the heat, buried deep in the Sem Co-op's labyrinthine basement, wondering if their body will ever be found under the pile of books from the Critical Social Theory & Marxism section, those temperature and air circulation controls do sound pretty great. So why are we prematurely mourning its death?
"The short answer to this is: go visit. It's at 5757 S. University, and you'll have to check your bag with a guard in the outer lobby or with a clerk inside. Trust us, there's not room for both you and it, anyway. Walk down a short but steep staircase and wipe the first bead of sweat from your brow. And then we strongly recommend embracing your inner nerd--after all, this is a bookstore where the clerks have probably read the entire philosophy section or are experts in French political theory. If you're claustrophobic, take a deep breath before you plunge into the labyrinth of crudely built bookshelves stocked floor to ceiling. Some of the narrow passages open into large, sunken rooms, and you'll start to feel like you'll never make it out of this place. But in a good way. Sure, there aren't big comfy chairs like at the nearby Borders, but we don't think you'll mind. It's a bookstore of yesteryear, the kind you didn't know still existed."
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Book trailer of the day: Star in the Middle by Carol Larese Millward (WestSide Books), about two teen parents.
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A "visual timeline" of American Library Association's READ campaign posters with musicians was featured by Flavorwire,
which noted: "As lifelong bookworms, we've never needed a poster to
inspire us to want to read--and if we did, we're not sure that Phil
Collins or the Indigo Girls would be the right celebrities to motivate
us. That said, we truly enjoy their efforts in the American Library
Association's READ campaign, which is now in its 25th year."
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A "verminous Dickens cake" was banned from a cake show in Melbourne, Australia. Boing Boing reported that " 'Great Expectations, the Miss Havisham Cake,' a remarkable, vermin-infested entry from the Hotham Street Ladies art collective was excluded from the Melbourne Cake Show on grounds of 'bad taste.' Boo!"
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The business of business books. Bloomberg featured "an updated roster of 50 top titles published since June 30, 2009."