Late last week, Perseus Books Group, which includes such imprints as Basic Books, PublicAffairs and Running Press as well as wholesalers PGW and Consortium, let go approximately 20 employees and initiated a range of cost savings. In a letter to staff, president and CEO David Steinberger said that "consumers have been buying less and retailers have been cutting back on inventory for almost a year. We are all working hard to save money and generate new sales, but it has become clear that we need to take additional steps now in order to be financially prudent and pursue opportunities to grow."
The company is implementing a summer furlough program, and "the senior leaders of the company have accepted a more significant compensation reduction to help protect the company and our people from greater cuts."
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Hastily organized after BookExpo Canada's cancellation earlier this year (Shelf Awareness, February 3, 2009), the Canadian Booksellers Association Summer Conference last weekend "was deemed an improvement by many of those who attended," according to Quill & Quire, which reported that more than 80 booksellers gathered "at Toronto's lakefront Radisson Admiral Hotel for seminars, meetings with publishers and authors, and the annual Libris Awards ceremony."
"I went to be supportive [of the CBA]," said Vancouver Kidsbooks co-owner Kelly McKinnon, "but to be honest . . . I thought [the conference] really worked."
Quill & Quire reported that the "only sour note for many attendees was the absence of widespread publisher support. Of the big four multinational firms, only Penguin Canada rented a table during a two-hour 'publisher tour' on Saturday, in which publishers could display upcoming titles and hold author signings. (The remaining multinationals--Random House of Canada, HarperCollins Canada, and Simon & Schuster Canada--supported the event financially, via the Canadian Publishers' Council, which was listed as the sole platinum-level sponsor.)"
Yvonne Hunter, Penguin's director of marketing and publicity, said there was "a nice energy in the room." Chris Houston, Tourmaline Editions marketing director, praised the civility of attendees. "People were actually asking if they could take books [and advance galleys]," he said, "as opposed to the grab-and-run tactic that was learned from BookExpo Canada." Houston added that nearly half of the booksellers visiting his booth took advantage of the company's 50%-off show special: "People were standing on top of each other trying to write orders."
CBA executive director Susan Dayus observed that the conference "really set the tone for what we can do next year," adding that the response to training seminars was encouraging: "I think that speaks to what booksellers are looking for right now. They want the interaction with publishers, but they really value the interaction with each other."
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"What can we as Vermonters do to strengthen our local economies and support the stores and businesses that make our state strong and unique?" asked Claire Benedict, co-owner of Bear Pond Books and Rivendell Books, Montpelier, Vt., in the Sunday Times Argus. "We can use our consumer purchasing power to buy from locally-owned businesses and strengthen Vermont companies. Local First Vermont, now a program of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, is celebrating Independents Week from July 1-7 this year by taking 'The 10-Percent Shift Pledge.'"
Benedict explained that the 10-Percent Shift "is a group of New England's local business people and citizens who have pledged to shift 10% of their existing purchases from non-local businesses to locally owned and independent businesses. If the 5 million households in New England take 'The 10-Percent Shift Pledge' we can create thousands of new jobs and keep billions of dollars of economic activity in the region."
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"We always had a dream to open our own book store," Renee Knoblauch, co-owner with daughter Reagan of Berries and Books, Parowan, Utah, told the Spectrum in a profile about her recently opened bookshop. Berries and Books also sells "vintage clothing, accessories and furniture, hand-made jewelry and food items like wraps and smoothies"--what Renee called "a very eclectic selection."
The mother/daughter team's decision to launch a bookshop despite the economic downturn came when they realized that "now is as good of a time as any to open their business," the Spectrum reported.
"We had some trepidation in the beginning but the response to us being open has been great," said Renee. Her mother agreed: "We couldn't just stick our head in the sand. If everyone in America does that, this country will be a very sad place."
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, San Francisco, Calif., "reversed a lower court decision that had exonerated Simon & Schuster of breaking federal telecommunications law when it sent cellphone text messages to promote the novel Cell [by Stephen King] three years ago. . . . Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, said the company would continue to defend the case," the New York Times reported.
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Three years after Andrew MacDonald and Irene Coray moved KULTURAs Books from Washington, D.C. to Santa Monica, Calif., they "are preparing to head back to where it all started, a result of a more than anticipated dramatic decline in revenue," the Santa Monica Times reported. "Last week a sign was posted on the window of the bookstore, informing customers that it was moving back to Washington D.C., hoping to recapture the success it experienced in past years."
"We never thought it would be this bad," said Coray, who hopes to reopen in the vicinity of their previous location near Dupont Circle. "We expected less but it turned out to be a quarter, if (that much). . . . On one level, we feel extremely at home here but I think we kind of worked our way into a perfect storm in that in 2007, the economy started to tank."
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Glenn Dromgoole, co-owner of Texas Star Trading Company, Abilene, has launched Texas Reads, a new blog about Texas books and authors.
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In a Financial Times article headlined, "The author as performer," James Harkin, director of talks at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, observed that recently he has "seen a shift away from the traditional model of book readings and for-and-against Oxford Union-style debates and towards a showier kind of speaking event, in which bookish ideas and themes are lifted off the page and into the stuff of rhetoric and performance."
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On Wednesday, Edith Wharton's letters documenting her 42-year relationship with Anna Catherine Bahlmann--originally Wharton's language tutor and governess, and later her secretary and literary assistant--will be auctioned by Christie's. The New Yorker's Book Bench blog reported that "Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann's family ignored her wishes and, for the past ninety years, their correspondence sat in storage."
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John Berger, described by the Guardian as "a novelist, thinker, artist and art critic still very much working at the age of 82," will donate his archives to the British Library. The author's generosity, described as "a coup for the British Library in a competitive field," does comes with a small price, however:
"The British Library will have to come to Berger's remote farm high in the French Alps to sort through and retrieve the boxes of papers, drafts and correspondence from his stables," according to the Guardian. "And since the library's Jamie Andrews is coming during harvest time, he can help with the haymaking."
"I'm hoping it will be fun," said Andrews. "Nice way to spend the weekend, haymaking with John Berger. As long as he's not expecting some brawny farmer type to turn up, because that's really not me."
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In a different kind of author event, last week at McNally Jackson Bookstore in New York City, one Unbridled Books author interviewed another. From l. to r.: Juliet Grames of Overlook Press; Emily St. John Mandel, author of Last Night in Montreal (published this month), who was interviewed by Masha Hamilton, whose 31 Hours appears in September; and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo of McNally Jackson, and co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore, which opens later this year in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Informers is a new novel from Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and no one could say it was effortless reading. The writing style is complex. The sentences can be long, Proustian affairs with lots of semi-colons. The paragraphs sometimes go on for pages. 