Rites of Passage: Reading, Eating and Potty-Training
"I know I'm a Luddite on this, but there's something very personal about a book and not one of one thousand files on an iPad, something that's connected and emotional, something I grew up with and that I want them to grow up with.... I feel that learning with books is as important a rite of passage as learning to eat with utensils and being potty-trained."
--Ari Wallach, "a tech-obsessed entrepreneur" and parent in a New York Times article on parents' preferences for printed books for their children
Good news from Bartleby's Books. The Wilmington, Vt., store, which was severely damaged in Hurricane Irene, is reopening this week. The store said that with the help of volunteers and "the tireless efforts" of its carpenter (owner Lisa Sullivan's husband, Philip Taylor), Bartleby's is "newly refurbished." Sullivan has taken advantage of the situation to make some changes at the store, including an expanded second floor. BINC.1118.T2.2024YEARENDCAMPAIGN.jpg)
Atlantic Books is closing its remaining stores because of "the rapidly changing landscape of retail bookselling," president Mark I. Simon and v-p Ross Laufgraben wrote on the company's website. The company will have going out of business sales through December.
McNally Jackson Books in New York City got into the spirit of Occupy Wall Street with this window display. Among the titles: Germinal by Emile Zola, Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class by Chris Lehmann, CHAVS: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones, Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, The 'S' Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism by John Nichols, Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer by Eric Mann, Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America by Joe Burns, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad by Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim and Tariq Ali.
Seven months after acquiring the Davis-Kidd location in Memphis, Tenn., part of the bankrupt Joseph Beth stores (
He chose the name the Booksellers at Laurelwood to emphasize the store's biggest strengths--experienced staff and customer service. In addition to making substantial upgrades in the restaurant, which had become "very tired," Van Uum expanded the children's section substantially. "It's now 50% larger, and much more active with programming," he said. "It's almost like an independent children's store.''
To help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Tantallon Public Library in Nova Scotia, youth librarian Lucas Maxwell wrote to authors "asking them to write a letter back, addressed to the youth of this area outlining the benefits of reading and libraries in general." 
The Radisson Edwardian chain, which has hotels in London, Manchester and Guildford, England, is milking the literary connection of its Bloomsbury hotel, which has a wall of art tied to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and has had a book club for the past year. 
The intrigue in the graphic novel 
In Mangaman, sci-fi adventure meets love story when manga character Ryoko falls through a Rip into the "real" world--and straight into the role of the ultimate outsider at an American high school, where he deals with the unfamiliar culture, clashes with other kids and falls for popular, quirky Marissa Montaigne. Especially appealing to Lyga about combining Eastern and Western comic book styles was the notion of having these "two radically different things co-existing and seeing how they play off of each other."
Another blast from Lyga's past happened when teaming up with an artist for Mangaman. His first choice to illustrate the story was Colleen Doran, who has worked on iconic comic book characters like Superman, Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, but he didn't think the popular artist would have time to take on the project. She did sign on and, what's more, even remembered Lyga from a comic book fanzine they had both belonged to more than two decades ago.
Mangaman is Lyga's first foray into graphic novels. (He did pen some "really terrible" single issue comic books in the 1990s and encourages people "not to seek them out.") The biggest challenge he encountered between writing prose and graphic novels was the need for a change in mindset. "It's a whole different way of thinking," he said. The common advice for writers to "show, don't tell" doesn't apply when writing a graphic novel. "You have to think in terms of tell, don't show because it's not your job to show. It's the artist's job to show. You're telling one story to the artist so the artist can tell a story to the reader."
Baron Lamberto is 93 years old, owns 24 banks and suffers from 24 maladies. He lives in a villa on the island of San Giulio, in the middle of Lake Orta (a real lake near the birthplace of famed Italian children's author Gianni Rodari). Lamberto is served by his faithful butler who always carries an umbrella, and when the two of them visit Egypt, an Arab fakir in the shadow of the Sphinx confides to them a secret of the pharaohs: "The man whose name is spoken remains alive."