Kaleidoscope Books & Sundries, offering a variety of books and gifts, opened earlier this summer at 353 Hambley Ave. in Pikeville, Ky. The Appalachian News-Express reported that co-owners Ella Smith and Greta Heintzelman Slone "founded the business with the community in mind. Their goal was to create a space for people to learn and relax."

"We want to be inclusive and allow everyone a third space to come and be," Slone said. "We just want more of that in our region.... I think we need it in our communities, in our nation, now more than ever."

Slone pointed to a recent rise in new independent bookstores, with several opening in eastern Kentucky: "I think people are seeking truth, and I love that people are trying to find it out for themselves. The most important thing you can do is inform your own mind and form your own opinions."

After traveling the world, the owners decided to stay in Appalachia to pursue their business. "This is our love letter to our community, to our mountains," Slone noted. "We love being here. Appalachia is so rich and enriched by its people.... We are so unique and beautiful... All cultures are different, so that means there's no culture like ours."

Rainy Day Books, Fairway, Kan., plans to add a second location this fall. The store-within-a-store concept is slated to open in early October inside Made in KC's new neighborhood shop in the Kansas City Power & Light District, at 161 E. 14th St. in Kansas City, the KC Business Journal reported. Made in KC has 15 area locations, including its Outta the Blue and Front Range coffee shop brands.

The 6,332-square-foot combined store at Power & Light includes a 665-square-foot mezzanine. Nearly half the space will be dedicated to the bookstore, according to Made in KC co-founder Tyler Enders, who is also part of Rainy Day's ownership group. 

"We've known that Rainy Day Books is going to be a stronger company with a few locations," he added. "We have no ambitions of creating a chain, but one of our major goals with Rainy Day Books is to be one of the premier author destinations. When authors go on tour, they often skip over the Midwest, and we really want to make sure that we're winning those authors.... It's really helpful for the scale of our business to have another venue where we can host events." 

The new Made in KC store will feature a full-service coffee shop with pastries, sandwiches, and other baked goods. Alcohol also will be served, as well as a variety of goods from local makers. The Rainy Day location will focus on books published within the past two to three years. Enders estimates the store can carry at least 10,000 titles.

Enders added that the Power & Light location is ideal because it can attract customers in town for a nearby convention or show: "Having a coffee shop combined with a bookstore is really exciting for us. There's just a lot of complementary reasons to share a space."

The Pleasant Pheasant Bookstore in Woodland, Calif., moved to a new, larger location late last month, KMAX31 reported. The bookstore, which sells general-interest titles for all ages, has moved from 1059 Court St. to 606 Main St. The new space is roughly three times larger than the bookstore's previous home and features a new kids' nook as well as space for customers to read, work, and do puzzles. Event plans in the new space include bookmark making and bedazzling workshops, children's storytimes, parties, and more. In addition to books, the store carries stationery, socks, games and other gifts.

Co-owner Erik Daniells, who bought the store with his wife, Sara Shelley, last fall, told KMAX31 it was very important to them to make the new location "community-first." When the store's original owners, Elliott and Emily Reinhart, put the Pleasant Pheasant on the market, Daniells and Shelley decided to buy it because they "couldn't imagine living in a town without a bookstore."

"I'm so grateful for everything Elliott and Emily have built," Daniells said last November, when he and Shelley first took over. "I'm honored to continue to nurture and grow what they've created, a welcoming and warm place where stories bring people together."

The bookstore's last day of business on Court St. was July 11; it reopened in its new location July 26. Looking ahead to the holidays, the store will host some additional events and may expand hours.

Liz Carrasco has been named chief technology officer of OverDrive, where she will lead the company's global technology strategy and engineering organization as it continues to expand and evolve its digital content platforms.

Liz Carrasco

Carrasco spent more than a decade in senior technology leadership at CBS Interactive, ViacomCBS, and Paramount. Carrasco most recently served as director of architecture at Rotary International and earlier in her career held technology leadership roles at Yahoo!, Monster, and United Online, and served on the Google Multi-Cloud Advisory Board.

Marc DeBevoise, CEO of OverDrive, who worked with Carrasco for nearly a decade at CBS Interactive, ViacomCBS, and Paramount, said, "Liz is an incredibly thoughtful team builder and a strong, empathetic leader of large and talented teams. Her deep technical expertise, combined with her genuine passion for content, libraries, learning, and our mission, will be a tremendous asset as we continue to evolve and grow our platforms for the libraries, schools, and communities we serve."

Carrasco said, "The mission of maximizing access to knowledge and content for everyone is something I care about deeply, and I'm excited to bring my background in personalization, media, and streaming at scale to help this extraordinary team capture the global opportunities ahead. Public libraries have been a continuous part of my life since childhood. Every time our family has moved, getting a library card has been the first order of business and during the pandemic, Libby kept our family of six connected, entertained, and learning."

Helen G. Neuburg (née Helen G. Green, "Greenie"), a former co-owner of Cheshire Cat Children's Books in Washington, D.C., died on August 11. She was 98.

Helen G. Neuburg

Born in New York City and raised there and in Wellesley, Mass., Neuberg graduated from Swarthmore College in 1948. She married Ned Neuburg, and began her teaching career at the Windward School in White Plains, N.Y., and at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C.

Her husband's job with the U.S. Department of Defense eventually prompted their move to near Silver Spring, Md., where she continued teaching. Following a two-year stay in England, she earned a master's degree in elementary education from the American University, and became head of the progressive Green Acres School in Bethesda, Md. She and her husband had three children.

After retiring from teaching, Neuberg and three former colleagues from Green Acres--Jewell Stoddard, Pam Sacks, and Charlotte Berman--founded the innovative and much-loved Cheshire Cat Children's Bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C.

In a tribute, Roger Williams, managing director of the Roger Williams Agency, recalled: "Told by industry experts that a children's-only bookstore would never work, the Cheshire Cat was renowned for launching the careers of many bestselling children's authors. Forces to be reckoned with, Greenie and Jewell were the mavens of the children's book world. Publishers would consult the duo at the Cheshire Cat on introducing new authors and books. Their endorsement could mean the difference in calculating print runs. Their business model was the template for other well-known children's-only bookstores." (The bookstore closed in 1999.)

In 1989, the Neubergs moved permanently to Princeton, N.J., where Helen Neuberg was the children's book buyer for Wit & Wisdom Booksellers in Lawrenceville. She also volunteered as a Master Gardener; at the public library, where she sorted children's books and taught English conversation; and for a variety of political causes. 

Her obituary noted: "Greenie was a life-long learner. Her wide range of interests included art and music, history, travel, gardening, hiking, and birdwatching. She was an avid reader right up until the very end of her life."

Green Apple Books on the Park, San Francisco, Calif., hosted Chang-rae Lee (r.) in conversation with R.O. Kwon about Lee's new novel, A Tender Age (Riverhead). You can view the conversation here.

"It's a beautiful day... to hit up your local bookstore! Check out the signed books display underneath this gorgeous branch light fixture! OH, and be on the look out for a post later today for this Saturday's pop up event!" the Underground Bookshop in Carrollton, Ga., noted. 

"I solve the majority of my problems by ignoring them & then reading about the conflicts of fictional characters instead." That was the message on the sidewalk chalkboard in front of Highland Books in Brevard, N.C.

Katie Mitchell has joined Bookshop.org as manager of bookstore partnerships. She has more than a decade of experience in technology and the literary world and is the author of Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores (Clarkson Potter). She received the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's 2026 Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Award and is a 2026 Georgia Author of the Year nominee.

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Courtney Payne has joined Microcosm's sales team as a senior sales specialist. She has more than 20 years of publishing and bookselling experience, including at Sasquatch Books, Chronicle Books, and most recently Sourcebooks.

Today:
Fresh Air: Joby Warrick, author of The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-Terrorist (Scribner, $30, 9781668070550).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Dr. Sasha Hamdani, author of Too Sensitive: Rejection, Resilience, and the Science of Feeling Deeply (Flatiron, $29.99, 9781250423764).

Animation studio Laika (Coraline, Kubo & the Two Strings) has released a trailer for Wildwood, adapted from the 2011 children's fantasy novel by Colin Meloy--best known as the frontman of the band the Decemberists--with illustrations by Carson Ellis. IndieWire reported that Laika "has spent years innovating and refining the famously meticulous, time-consuming art of stop-motion animation. And after six years of production, it's ready to release perhaps its most gorgeous-looking film, Wildwood."

Set in Portland, Ore., the fantasy adventure movie "follows Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), two 12-year-olds who are drawn into a magical world hidden in a forest outside of the city where talking animals and humans exist side-by-side."

The project is directed by Travis Knight, lead animator and CEO of Laika, from a screenplay written by Chris Butler. The ensemble voice cast includes Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant, Len Cariou, Marc Evan Jackson, and Rob Delaney. Caleb Deschanel serves as the film's cinematographer, while Dario Marianelli composed the score. Fathom Entertainment will release Wildwood in theaters nationwide October 23. 

Finalists have been selected for the 2026 Golden Poppy Awards, sponsored by the California Independent Booksellers Alliance and representing "the best of the best from California creators."

For the first time, CALIBA will celebrate the Golden Poppy Award finalists and committee members during an in-person award ceremony at its Fall Fest. That will take place on September 15 in San Diego, and the winners in each category will be announced.

The 2026 categories include Fiction, Nonfiction, Mystery, Octavia E. Butler Award (Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror), Poetry, Romance, Glenn Goldman: California Lifestyle and Cooking, and the Martin Cruz Smith Award for Emerging Diverse Voices. In Children's Literature, the committees read for the following categories: Picture Book, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Children's Nonfiction, and the Mirrors & Windows Award for Excellence in Children's Literature.

To see all the finalists, click here.

Castles have long occupied a singular place in the human imagination. In Castles: A Fortified History of the World, British historian and journalist Dan Jones, host of the documentary series Secrets of Great British Castles, brings impressive breadth and depth to the project of explaining the role these structures have played in shaping events across more than three millennia and the reasons they continue to be such sources of fascination.

Jones (The Plantagenets) begins his account with the fall of Troy, sometime near the end of the 12th century B.C.E. Apart from the real-life Troy's "vital place in the history of fortifications," Jones argues, its story has become iconic "because of the web of fantasy, legend, and half-truth that has been spun around it over hundreds of years," making it one "meant to be enjoyed as myth as well as history. The same is true to some degree of every castle in this book."

Adopting a "broad view on what a castle was--and is," Jones leads readers on a highly personal tour of the history of these structures that spans large portions of the globe. He devotes considerable attention to the castles of Western Europe in the Middle Ages (his area of specialty), beginning with the Iron Age hill forts of the British Isles and concluding with American castles, including one fantasy edifice--Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. He also surveys the shifting positions castles have occupied throughout the ages in military, political, and cultural terms.

For that reason, Castles is more interesting and certainly more entertaining than an account focused purely on the evolution of the technology of fortifications, although Jones doesn't omit pertinent detail about walls, towers, and moats where appropriate. Instead, the chapter on chivalric castles, for example--what he calls "temples to a group consciousness"--offers insights into the "hopes, fears, ambitions, and dreams of an entire social class." Similarly, his discussion of samurai castles provides a glimpse of the culture that played such a central role in Japanese life for hundreds of years.

Whether he is profiling King Ludwig II and his Neuschwanstein Castle in 19th-century Bavaria, or describing the roles Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo played in the design and construction of fortifications in Renaissance Italy, Jones has the ability to make his work ultimately about people, not merely buildings. He provides copious endnotes and an extensive bibliography for anyone who wants to pursue this subject in more depth, but even those with only a casual interest in the topic will find the journey he leads them on instructive and above all enjoyable. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Shelf Talker: Dan Jones takes readers on a trip that spans the globe and more than 3,000 years to explore the roles castles have played in shaping human history.